When the sky forgets your name, the earth remembers your blood.
Lowend held its breath.
Ash could feel it — not just in the silent streets or shuttered windows, but deep in the stone beneath their feet. Something was coming. A reckoning. Not just from the outside… but within.
Rumors had already begun to spread. That the slums would be purged. That a hidden army was forming. That ghosts of a long-dead war had returned to finish what they started.
Ash stood in the center of it.
And the city watched.
Velron's decree arrived at noon.
A blood-red banner unfurled over the east tower of Ravenmark's inner gate. It flapped like a wound in the wind.
"By dawn in three days, the slums will be cleansed. All resistance will be extinguished. Any harboring insurgents will be executed."
Three days.
Ash read it once, then burned the parchment in silence.
That night, he gathered them — not just Kael, Silna, and Darius, but the growing number of rebels, outcasts, and survivors who had come to believe in something impossible.
They met in the Catacombs — old forgotten tunnels beneath the streets, filled with moss, bones, and quiet prayers carved into the walls.
Ash stepped into the flickering torchlight.
"There will be no cavalry," he said. "No mercy. No heroes coming to save us."
They stared, wide-eyed, waiting.
Ash unsheathed his sword. It shimmered with black metal etched with faded runes — the last relic of a forgotten legion.
"But that's fine," he continued. "Because what we build here, in the dirt and the dark… it's not meant to be saved."
He looked at them.
"It's meant to rise."
Kael moved like a shadow through the alleys, marking ambush points and chokeholds. Each step etched his resolve deeper. He had followed Ash out of instinct at first. But now, he followed out of belief.
"I used to run from fights," he muttered, "Now I run toward them."
Silna broke into one of the Fang's hidden weapon vaults, alone. When she returned, her arm was slashed open, but she smiled.
"I brought us gifts," she said, dropping crates of stolen crossbows and smoke charges onto the floor.
Darius, meanwhile, worked tirelessly, organizing drills, setting up fallback positions, watching Ash as one soldier watches another — not with doubt, but with the understanding that war makes or unmakes everything.
"You've led before," he said to Ash. "But this time, they don't fear you. They believe in you."
Ash didn't smile.
"I'd rather they do both."
On the second night, it rained.
Ash stood alone in the Catacombs, listening to the drops echo off stone. He traced his fingers over an old carving — a sigil of his former life. The Wraith Legion's crest. Half-erased.
Footsteps approached.
It was Kael.
"Can't sleep either?" Kael asked.
"No."
Kael paused. "You think we'll make it?"
Ash didn't answer immediately.
Then, softly: "I don't know. But if we fall… the city will remember that we stood."
Kael nodded. And for the first time, he felt what Ash had always carried.
Not rage.
Not ambition.
But a wound so deep, it had become a cause.
As the final day loomed, the city above moved like a predator.
Velron's soldiers closed the gates. Smoke curled from torches lining the outer walls. And somewhere in the highest tower, a man smiled, sipping wine over a war he believed already won.
But he had forgotten something.
Lowend doesn't break. It burns.