The final meeting flickered across my vision with the clarity of fresh blood on snow. No battlefield, no spells—just a stone-walled chamber lit by a single brazier. We sat across a table that stank of embalming salts. The quest's last layer had not been a fight but a conversation, and that alone should have warned me how important it was.
He wore youth like a borrowed cloak: lean shoulders, unlined skin, eyes too sharp for someone who looked barely twenty. Time had not forgiven him; it had simply looped him backward for one last monologue.
"Be careful, Draven. Search for my corpse."
Eight words, delivered in the tone of a scholar noting a footnote. Yet each word was a weight, and I felt them settling in the marrow of my bones.
His old body—some mythical grail stuffed with necromantic runes even I hadn't predicted—was out there. A vault of techniques. A trap for fools. Perhaps both.
