The Crucible had never known silence.
It was a living thing—a beast of stone and blood and steel that fed on screams and coin. But today, on the morning of the blood match, it did not roar.
It churned. It waited. It hungered.
In ways it hadn't done before.
Not until today.
Before the sun had kissed the spires of Esgard, the streets were already swelling.
Thousands pressed through the colonnades and merchant alleys like veins flooding toward a beating heart. Some came to cheer. Others to gamble.
Most simply to witness the return of a myth.
To say they had seen him.
To say they had been there.
To say they had watched him return.
Ian. The Demon of House Elarin.
By midmorning, every gate into the Crucible was clogged with bodies. Vendors bellowed over one another, slinging meat skewers, forged sigils, and bone tokens etched with Ian's name. Blood-paint stained the air with iron and spice.
Children sprinted between legs, laughing through crude skull-shaped masks.
