Prologue – Blood in the Sand

The desert didn’t forgive.

It swallowed the careless and buried the ambitious.

Kael Draven knew this truth better than most. His boots sank into the dune’s shifting slope, sweat stinging his eyes beneath the merciless sun. Around him, the dead lay sprawled in the sand—mercenaries, raiders, and sellswords who had wagered steel against steel and lost. The air is still hummed with the tang of iron and the buzz of flies already circling.

Kael leaned on his blade, chest heaving. The fight had been short, brutal, and as ugly as every skirmish he’d survived since selling his sword. He wasn’t the fastest. He wasn’t the strongest. But he had a talent for refusing to die, and that counted for more in the wastes than any lord’s banner.

He pulled his blade free from the last man he’d gutted, wiped it against his sleeve, and turned to leave the battlefield.

Then the ground bled.

It started as a trickle beneath his boots, black veins threading through the golden sand. The veins pulsed, alive, like roots sucking from unseen water. Kael froze, staring down as the trickle widened into a stain. Blood—dark, thick, not from any man he had slain—separated up from the desert itself.

“What in all hells…” he muttered, stumbling back.

The body he’d just killed twitched. Not in death spasms—this was different. His mouth fell open, a gurgle rattling in his throat, and the veins of black light spread into his skin like cracks in glass. Kael’s instincts screamed, but before he could move, his sword trembled in his hand.

The blade drank.

It wasn’t steel anymore, not entirely. Its edge glowed faint red, runes Kael had never seen crawling along its length like waking serpents. The man beneath it convulsed once, twice, and then stilled forever—his blood sucked clean, his flesh brittle as parchment.

Kael dropped the weapon with a curse.

It didn’t hit the sand.

The blade hung there, quivering in the air like it weighed nothing at all. The runes pulsed once, twice, then dimmed, and finally it settled to the ground.

Kael stared. His pulse hammered in his ears. Weapons didn’t do that. Steel didn’t bleed men dry, or carve light into their bones.

This wasn’t his blade.

It wasn’t any blade of this world.

---

By the time the survivors stumbled upon him—mercenaries who had fled when the tide turned—Kael had already sheathed the weapon, its weight unsettling against his hip.

“You,” one of them spat, eyes wide. “You carry it.”

Kael’s hand went instinctively to the hilt. “Carry what?”

The man pointed, trembling. “A Blade of the Forgotten. I’ve heard the tales. Buried in the sands, forged by the Empire before it fell. Cursed things.”

Kael felt the metal pulse faintly, like a heartbeat against his palm.

“I don’t believe in curses,” he said flatly.

The man laughed—bitter, broken. “You will.”

He turned and ran.

---

That night, Kael camped beneath a broken arch of stone half-buried in the dunes. He couldn’t sleep. Every time he shut his eyes, he felt the blade at his side humming, whispering—not in words, but in urges. Promises. His mind filled with visions not his own: banners of black silk snapping in desert winds, armies kneeling, a throne carved from bones.

When he finally slept, he dreamt of a hand not his own gripping the weapon, and voices chanting in a language he didn’t know. A crown of obsidian, glinting with firelight, pressed against his brow.

He woke drenched in sweat, heart pounding.

The blade lay beside him, faintly glowing, its runes breathing like coals.

---

By dawn, Kael had made up his mind. He would sell the weapon in the next city. Sellswords weren’t meant to carry legends. They were meant to survive.

But deep down, as he wrapped the blade and slung it across his back, a sliver of unease twisted in his gut.

Because a weapon that bled the ground, that whispered in his sleep, that hungered—

—wasn’t going to be sold to anyone.

It had already been chosen.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***