It was night, but the sky held no stars. No moons. Instead, a thousand gashes peered down over the crumbling mountains and wilted Ancestor Trees. Rifts. Portals. They covered every inch of the darkness above, and they seemed like countless eyes—each one a door to a different realm. Some were dark and grey, filled with deserts of ash and poisonous earth. Others were red, pulsating. They writhed with pus-bloated monstrosities that flew out of the gaps like twisted, many-armed serpents. Some rifts led to the eternal frost, desolate whitelands. Others led to the darkest depths of Ilbithar, where darkness stirred with the movements of unspoken things. And others…

Others led to darkness. Not shadow, but void. Nothingness. They frayed the edges of the world, creeping onward. Eating. Devouring. Alien, hungry titans gorged on what slipped through the cracks.

They ravaged the world he loved.

And it was all his doing.

Khelios limped through the savaged Heartlands, his body leaking precious blood with every step. Dark purple seeped into the barren soil. Above him, lights flashed and battle raged. Immortals fought to save the world.

They were failing.

Because they would never close the rifts. Not while he still existed. Even now, half-dead, reduced to a fraction of what he once was, Khelios felt himself press against the world. The shadow under his feet was heavy. It held a weight that few things did, denting the fabric of reality with every movement. His mere presence was like gravity—pushing, pressing. Tearing the thin planar boundaries with the weight of his existence alone.

That was what his kind did. Eat. Destroy. To enjoy happiness only to be the one to take it all away. It was the fate they were cursed to.

Khelios’s leg faltered underneath him, and he fell face-first into the blood-drenched soil. His breaths were a shallow rasp. Pain was all he felt. He crawled forward, as far as he could go. He crawled to the base of a tree; one of the few remaining. It had a thick trunk and a broad, sweeping canopy. Khelios leaned against the protruding roots, where the bark was dry and dead. The tree’s shadow held him under its cold embrace.

Dying, Khelios looked up and watched the Pale Man fly down from the sky.

His ravenfeather cloak fluttered behind him like giant, crow’s wings. And when he landed, they draped over his shoulders, dragging over the soil as he approached. The Pale Man held his twin-bladed scimitar at his side. The curve of it reminded Khelios of a sickle. A reaper’s scythe.

Its name was Sangerin. The Singing Scithar.

“You did this,” the Pale Man said, his voice low and quiet. “Why?”

The Pale Man stopped in front of him, his silver eyes burning with anger. Khelios laughed at his dumb fucking face, “Do I really have to answer that? I did it ‘cause you’re a rotting traitor, chief. I did it ‘cause you left me no choice.”

“I gave you a choice. You had so many.”

“And yet, none of them truly helped me.”

“I was going to save you. I would have if you’d just trusted me.”

“You’re a terrible liar, chief. Always were. But good old Secretseeker did you dirty, didn’t he? He told me all about your treacherous little plans, you dirty traitor. This is my answer. Shit luck for you when your enemy’s got a friend that deals in secrets, eh?”

The Pale Man raised his blade. Khelios felt the cold edge against his neck, sharp and cruel, “You were never my enemy.”

Khelios sneered.

“Ratshit. I know that look on your face, chief. That calmness? That soft voice? I’ve seen it all. You’re getting ready to kill someone,” he said, raising a lacerated arm to grasp the blade. The edge cut into him—drank his blood. Khelios bared his bloodied teeth, “You’re getting ready to kill me.”

The Pale Man closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they were distant. Cold and unfeeling as deep winter. The wind began to stir.

“You were my best friend, Khel.”

Khelios’s eyes turned bloodshot. Heat like magma pooled in his chest and crushed his black heart, cooling, encasing it in jagged obsidian. Ready to cut. Thirsting for a traitor’s blood. He gripped the Pale Man’s blade tight—tight enough that it began to shear into the bones of his fingers. His flesh began to tremble and turn black and shapeless. Khelios’s face writhed, twisted, and a hundred hateful eyes opened over his skin.

Their stares burned into the Pale Man’s eyes, “You were mine too, chief.”

And that changed now, in that moment. He lunged for the Pale Man’s throat. A tide of darkness, teeth, and claw.

But it wasn’t enough. It never was.

The Pale Man swept his blade to the side, and the patterns carved into the metal caught the wind. It sang as it cut the air—sharp and deadly. A beautiful sound. That same sound tore Khelios apart, slicing him with a million little blades. It tore at him. It slashed and rent and shredded until he was reduced to a speck. The very core of his existence.

All that he was, condensed into a single, black gem. The Pale Man plucked it from the air, taking the obsidian core into his hand.

Underneath a tree, the Pale Man said something Khelios couldn't understand.

An idea. A shape. A concept. A form. A language formless, unspoken, unheard. The Pale Man’s shadow deepened into the blackest darkness and expanded. It swallowed the tree and rose like a dome around them, covering the sky, taking it away. Light faded. Time slipped away. The broken world disappeared under the blanket of void.

In the endless abyss, the Pale Man moved.

And he walked in silence.

Traveler opened his eyes.

Darkness.

The empty desolation of Avnlasce stretched out before him without end. In the darkness, gargantuan things waited. Watched. They were curious about him in the fearful way that children viewed fire and jagged glass. It was almost innocent, in a way. But they shied away from his gaze, afraid of the gravity of his presence. They were the titans that lived under his shadow. Parasites. Kin. Silent, he stood up and turned to face the tree.

It looked the same as it did back then. Thick-trunked and broad-canopied, holding him in its vast shadow, reaching for him with its dead roots. It burned and lived and died all at once, fractured, yet whole in a way few things were. It was his anchor. His reminder.

His grave.

Traveler closed his eyes and turned away from it, clenching his fists. The darkness around him roiled and churned, twisting. It spun into a black whorl on the tree’s trunk, centered on the dark hollow. It formed a door. A gate.

He commanded Avnlasce, and the abyss acquiesced. Traveler stepped through.

The abyss drained away from him as he split. He left his body behind and emerged through the other side, forming into a glamour construct in the Pale Man’s image. He opened his eyes, a shadow, peering up. He stared at chief’s back. The kid was angry. He argued with his mother and destroyed his weave even as the woman paled.

He was distracted. And that was fine with Traveler. It only made things easier for him.

He slipped away from Rowan’s shadow. Traveler blurred over the floor like a pool of darkness, flowing under one table to the next. Hiding from sight. He reached the door and slipped through the gap.

Traveler emerged on the other side, and the pool of darkness stood.

He rose and formed into a dark figure—a faceless man with silver eyes and a sharktooth grin, hiding under the hood of a ravenfeather cloak. It was the guise he was stuck with. The visage of the thing he hated the most. Traveler walked down the halls of the druidcrafted facility, passing supply rooms and amarid guardsmen who couldn’t see him. He walked past the alchemists in coats and magitech engineers tinkering with weapons to destroy the blight.

And when he left the building, Traveler looked up at the sun.

So bright and warm. Pretty and pleasant and loved, poking fingers of light through the thunderheads above. He almost felt tempted to stay there standing, just gazing up at the sky. The clouds were gray, still. Dark. Rain fell and slid off the force dome suspended over the camp.

He opened his arms, spreading them wide as if to hug the sky. In the past, he would have felt the wind brush against him. He would have tasted the scent of wet loam in the air and the feeling of mud squelching against his feet.

But that was a faraway memory, now. That was something he could do with a body. His real body.

The glamour construct he was reduced to wasn’t enough.

Traveler lowered his arms, and for a moment, the smile on his face fell away. He forced it back on—a grin, sharp and wry. Even he had rules he had to play by. This was one of them. He walked away from the laboratory and through the camp. He passed the outdoor kitchens, where a group of Shissavi laughed and ate with one of his kind. She took the form of a girl, bright and happy. Laughing. Soaking in the memories.

He pitied her so very much.

With a shake of his head, Traveler moved away. He entered a section of the camp that was quieter than the last. He entered a tree home and walked up the stairs, up to the room above. The room that mattered.

Inside, Ildrex Soothson sat alone in front of a dinner table. A bottle of ale sat half-empty in front of him, and he held a bone between his fingers. It was white, fresh. Cleaned of all meat and polished to a shine. Likely from his last meal. He stared at it, frowning. Muttering under his breath. Traveler stopped behind him, right at the edge of the door.

“He ain’t gonna answer you with just that, boss.”

There was a flash of movement. Then a low, threatening hum.

Traveler stared into the barrel of a magitech gun. The runes on the weapon glowed an icy blue, building power, getting ready to shoot. Ildrex held his rifle to Traveler’s face, finger on the trigger, pale-faced and short of breath. His eyes were wide with fear. Almost frantic. But he didn’t shoot. Traveler raised a hand and pushed the gun down with a finger, before giving Ildrex his usual grin.

“Scared you, did I? Sorry ‘bout that, boss. I just wanted to visit.”

Ildrex lowed the gun, “What did you hear?”

“Nothing. But I don’t gotta hear anything to know what you’re trying to do.”

Traveler walked past the startled riftwalker. He approached the table, where the polished bone lay discarded next to the bottle of ale. He plucked it. Held it between his fingers. Over the ivory surface, hundreds of tiny, flowing characters were carved into the bone. Unreadable to most. Traveler tossed it into the air and caught it, turning to face Ildrex with a grin.

“Fresh bone, carved and prepared with lines of demonic text. And with a big-name recipient in mind, no less. I’m surprised you’ve already gotten this far.”

Ildrex stared at him with a dark gaze. Underneath his look, Traveler saw the thoughts warring in his mind. Thinking. Perhaps deciding whether he should be killed. If Traveler could be killed.

Ildrex wouldn’t be able to do it. No one here was.

And it seemed the riftwalker understood that. Ildrex flicked a switch on the side of his weapon, and the glowing runes died down. He set the rifle against the wall.

“So that’s how it is, then?” Ildrex asked, turning to face him. “I knew you had an agenda when you saved me. You knew. Right from the start. What now, Traveler? Is it blackmail you want to do, or do you just want to turn me in?”

“Blackmail?” Traveler raised an eyebrow. He threw the bone towards Ildrex and the man caught it. “I ain’t so heartless, boss. And I ain’t the one who saved you—not entirely. I’m just that guy’s shadow. Doing things in the background. No, he only wants to hear stories from you. Me? I’m here to help.”

Traveler raised the bottle of ale from the table and walked to the kitchen, feeling Ildrex’s gaze on him the entire time. He grabbed a glass and poured the amber inside.

“Fresh bone, slaughtered from a life taken at night. An address, a message, a secret for a trade. You’ve got those right,” he said, before setting the glass down and sliding it towards Ildrex. “But you’ll need a few more things if you want him to listen to you. A place of tragedy. Death, disaster, negative energy. A piece of ashwood, thrice-charred, soaked in wrist’s blood. Then a child’s joy, a grown man’s fear, and an old man’s deepest grudge.”

With every word, Ildrex’s gaze turned warier. The riftwalker drew back, putting distance between them. Observing him from afar.

“Are you him?” he asked.

Traveler smirked, “Nah, boss. I ain’t the buyer. You’re the product, and I’m here to be your seller. Giving you a way to contact him is only the first step.”

“Why are you doing this? What is it that you want?”

“You don’t know it yet, boss, but the two of us are going to be very good friends. And I’m here to do what friends do—they help.” Traveler walked to him and offered Ildrex a hand. “I’m paying back a favor you don’t remember. All I ask for is a little trust.”

Ildrex stared at his hand until Traveler lowered it, “You’re offering me a chance to do something that would put me straight in the Red Ledger.”

“No,” Traveler replied. He shrugged, “I’m offering you a chance to set things right after your fuckup in Ooum, boss. That bounty list is an afterthought.”

“And what do you get out of it?”

“Easy. A friend. One who happens to have connections I can’t make myself. All I ask for in the future is one favor—one secret. You’ll have plenty by then. But that’s for you to give out of the kindness of your heart; this is just me doing you a favor. Just make sure you keep it secret from the other me, eh?”

Traveler grinned and stepped away, waving a hand goodbye. He headed for the door.

“Don’t dally, old friend. Archdemons don’t like to wait.”

Ildrex stared down at the glass of ale in his hands, then up. Up at Traveler’s back.

“What’s your name, Traveler? Your real one.”

“Khelios,” he replied. “Say hello to Keravathe for me, Drexxy. Tell the old monster I send my regards.”

Without waiting, Traveler clenched his fists again, and the shadows around the door deepened. They rose and gathered, swirling, opening a portal into the blackest abyss. On the other side, a grave waited. A tree of many parts. Traveler stepped through as the pieces began to move. He looked up at the Singing Tree, and all that it represented.

Traveler closed his eyes.

This time would be different.