1. For the Lost God

Beneath the grandeur of the coliseum hung the scent of death: blood, sweat, and low tide. 

Wind seeped through the stonework, brushing her cheeks. She steeled herself against it and against the whispers of the dead.

The Velatrix did not attend public spectacles lightly. As spiritual sovereign of Pax Akaedia, her presence alone could turn a crowd into pilgrims. But she could not refuse when the Consular High Prince promised her a true champion. If the gods were waking again, she intended to witness it herself.

His Majesty stood waiting at the top of the wooden steps, his angular face haloed in pale sunlight, left eye scarred the faintest blue.

“Your Holiness,” he said, bowing low.

She returned his gesture with a measured nod, then took her seat in the imperial box overlooking the arena. After a deferential pause, the High Prince sat, followed by the retinue of advisors and senators.

The sacred veil spilled around her, a full-body shadow spun of silk and light. Under the veil, she wore a bone mask that pulled at her mouth with cruel gold hooks. Forbidden to speak, her gaze drifted across the stands. 

 Cheers climbed the domed ceiling and rattled through the frost and stone. Just outside the coliseum walls, jagged waves churned on the eastern sea.

She made an impatient sign with her hands: Who? But the prince shook his head, refusing to answer.

The northern gate crashed open. From the archway emerged a fighter clad in the leather armor of a centurion. As he stepped from the dark, something ancient tugged behind her ribs and a shadow flickered at the edge of her memory.

Tall and lean, the gladiator carried himself with uncanny confidence. He commanded attention. Even the prince stared. Clearing his throat, His Majesty said: “Asirayya. Former Colonial soldier, now a Paxan slave.” His mouth curved faintly. “Exceptionally skilled with a sword.”

The prince’s gaze lingered on her veil as though trying to read the face beneath. Finally, he leaned close, voice pitched low for her alone. “Fear not, Holiness. It isn’t just bloodsport the people demand; they’ve come to witness survival too.”

She shivered under her fur cloak. His Majesty’s commentary only reminded her of what she despised about the gladiator games. Survival justifies nothing.

From the southern gate another figure emerged, taller still and broader. A warrior hewn from the northern highlands. Bound in scars and sinew, he came out bare-chested and without armor, despite the snow. Breath and sweat steamed off him in an angry cloud.

The audience surged for him, even as his contempt radiated across the freezing sand. It bored into her marrow, demanding acknowledgement—demanding to be witnessed by the gods.

And she could not deny him.

She opened her senses, for just a moment, and held it all: not just his contempt, but his righteous fury and a torrent of grief.

Wave after wave of grief...

Her eyes burned, and her vision blurred. Trembling, she clenched her fists.

“The Bastard of Rodinia,” the prince said, interrupting her. “A trophy from the Savagelands.” His tone sharpened, “They say it took ten men to break him.”

No man could break this warrior. But a girl did. She filtered through his memories, finding one carved so deep it scarred his fateline. Fresh snow, black with blood. A child screamed once—then silence. She shuddered. 

Shaking her head, she closed the connection between herself and the Highlander. 

The prince’s language was crass, true, but also politic. She understood two things instantly. First, the Highlander was not a bastard—he was a king. Second, he did not submit easily.

The rest was obvious: for all he might have been, the Highlander now wore a slave’s collar and entertained his own captors in mock combat.

She turned back to the prince as her hands moved faintly under the silk, signing acknowledgement. It was the only response she gave. He signed back: Patience, and smirked when she scoffed and turned away.

A bright horn split the air, and the game began.

The Paxan struck; the Highlander parried with a hard bind. Their swords locked with a scream, sending sparks into the air, and the crowd erupted in surprise.

The Highlander wrenched free with a violent twist and surged forward. His blade carved down in a brutal arc.

The Paxan sidestepped, landing a shallow cut to his opponent’s ribs. 

First blood.

Every strike narrowed the space between them. The Highlander feinted left, then struck high, but the Paxan lurched back just in time.

Cheers turned to groans.

With a subtle flex in his grip, his breath controlled, the Paxan’s gaze drifted, searching for something in the distance.

An ominous weight pressed in against the air of the coliseum; the earth complaining of tensions too long ignored. Her fingers twitched to press against her temples—to ward against the pressure. She grimaced, and the golden mouthpiece bit into her lips until she tasted blood, metallic and hot on her tongue. Her vision blurred. Her pulse beat in her throat too fast, too loud, and wrong. The Paxan gladiator’s aura dimmed rapidly and his fateline fractured.

His was a soul marked for death. 

Asirayya, the Paxan slave, was doomed.

The Highlander’s sword crashed down. The Paxan faltered, landing on one knee. Even as the crowd cheered, the gladiator’s focus drifted, scanning the stands for something, or someone, only he could see. 

In that one breathless heartbeat, his fateline pulled tight and snapped.

His eyes met hers across the arena. For a moment, time stopped and the roar of the crowd fell away. A buried instinct answered the pull in her chest, and her body moved.

Across the arena, a voice spoke—no mortal voice, and not her own. It rose from somewhere older than the arena, older than the city itself.

“Rise, Asirayya.”

Stone shuddered. Outside the walls, the ocean surged in answer, waves battering against the coliseum.

She was already on her feet when the world lurched back into motion. The roar of the crowd returned, and her surroundings crashed back into focus.

“Holiness! Are you unwell?” asked the prince, half-standing. He had turned toward her, arms outstretched—but not touching, never touching. The retinue, the guards, the crowds in the stands, all had risen out of protocol, or shock, and waited, watching her. 

The moment stretched until a flick of her wrist dismissed them all, and she returned to her seat. The High Prince followed her lead, his stare pressing against the veil. “What did you see?” he asked, breathless.

Overwhelmed and impatient, she dismissed him with a silent gesture. The Paxan gladiator still lived. But how?

With her signal, the battle below resumed and quickly broke, becoming something raw and reckless.

The Highlander brought his blade down, only to be met with a high guard. The clash of steel rang out as they collided, and this time it was the Highlander who stumbled. He rallied and roared—swinging his blade in an arc that whipped up sand in its wake.

The Paxan evaded, his form blurring, his sword flashing. The Highlander reeled back, blood running down his arm.

Precision gave way to rage as the Highlander lost the discipline that made his strength so exceptional. The Paxan found his rhythm, dancing through his opponent’s fury.

Behind her eyes, time stretched thin. Pressure built inside her skull, cold and insistent. 

The arena shimmered. She blinked, and then her vision fractured like a prism in the sun, revealing a garden stripped to bone. Something vast moving through it—locked in a war that never ended, only stalled.

The roar of the crowd warped in the wind. Her stomach lurched, caught between two worlds. In her ears, a buzzing like bees. The vision evaporated as quickly as it arrived, sound rushing back to her all at once.

The crowd chanted: “Sir-ay-yah! Sir-ay-yah!”

The Paxan’s eyes locked onto her from across the stadium. That pull in the hollow of her ribs sang of recognition. Did he see it too? The possibility shook her, terrifying—but impossible to deny.

The next blow severed their connection, but not before the pain reached her. The impact of the blade only half-blunted by leather armor, she gasped, hooks tearing at her mouth. She reached instinctively for her shoulder—for a wound that was not hers. The Paxan wheeled around to face the Highlander, each bloodied and bruised. Their labored exhales curling into the cold seaside air.

Asirayya lowered his sword.

Not in surrender. In refusal.

A ripple of confusion stirred through the crowd. The Highlander hesitated, his chest heaving as he stepped back. He nodded a curt, wary acknowledgment, and Asirayya drove his blade into the sand.

The arena gasped. 

For one impossible heartbeat, no one moved.

And the earth groaned—

The prince lunged toward her, bracing one hand against the stone wall, the other shielding her head. She flinched, but her scream died behind the mask as the ground rumbled beneath their feet—dust pouring down from the dome above. 

The quaking stilled almost as quickly as it began, followed by an unnatural quiet.

Stunned silence crested into screams of terror. 

Across the stands, bodies pressed toward exits while others fell to their knees, praying for deliverance. The gladiators stood still.

Above her, the prince relaxed, and debris fell off him as he straightened. No mortal touched the Velatrix and lived. Yet, he had shielded her with his own body—had risked pains of deaths unspeakable to do it. Still, that was not what disturbed her. 

The prince had moved before the world shook, before his own guards could react.

She glared at him.

He gave her a knowing look. Then, glancing at the gladiators below, he tapped the jagged scar at his temple. “Did I not promise you a champion?” 

His Majesty’s left eye cut through the chaos and her veil, searing into her soul. He spoke low enough that only she would hear, a whisper heavy with exhaustion.

“For the lost god,” he said.

She froze. Even her heart faltered, skipping a beat in her chest. The veil stirred in the wind as though it too had heard the name.

A champion who refuses to fight? she signed.

The prince ignored her, dust swirling around his sleeves as he moved. The last of the quaking tremors still shivered through the sand. His Majesty turned to the audience and raised his arms in a gesture of peace. Somewhere below, a horn sounded.

Something in him shifted, and any trace of fear or concern left him. He became the Consular High Prince once more, expression unreadable, posture stoic. 

The crowd quieted, but did not go silent. 

“Primus has spoken!” His Majesty’s voice boomed with practiced authority. “The Quakeborn Paxan and the Highland Giant are equally matched.” He paused as chants of Quakeborn carried on the wind. Then, louder, he said: “The gods grant freedom—for both!”

Excitement rolled through the coliseum as rustles of confusion swelled into cheers.

She faced the arena again. Below, the gladiators stood brow to brow, locked in a soldier’s embrace. Their jaws set, refusing to revel in the spectacle. Between them passed something harder than triumph—an oath forged in blood and salt.

Both gladiators were supposedly free, yet armed guards escorted them through the arena gates. Asirayya turned back one last time, and the tension between them went taut and then snapped. It was a strange feeling, like walking into a room only to forget why.

How did a soul claimed by the God of Death walk away not just alive, but free? Death had marked him. Death did not miss. 

She should send the necromancer to weigh his soul…

Even as the thought formed, somewhere in the dark beneath the city, the dead already listened. And her bones whispered the truth she dared not speak aloud: 

After all this time… 

The war was beginning again.

Champion of a forgotten god—the Godslayer had returned.