What is the color of retribution? Is it crimson like the blood on my hands? Onyx like the savage flames at my fingertips? Is it silver like the steel of my sword? Or is it something else entirely? A culmination of the many shades that make up my wretched form? Whatever hue, it lives in my very marrow and marks the borders of every thought.

I am a weapon twice forged. First, by the old gods as an Azkari warrior for a divine war that never came to pass. Second, by the enemy I still battle in the shadows—the Silver-Tongued Deceiver—Malevron.

But I did not come here for the spectral tyrant today. I came for a name.

Dark with blood, the mud shifts under my boots as I step over the fresh corpses, smoke rising from them in the cold morning air of the Wailing Wilds. Screaming winds sweep across the decimated camp, and from the sea of burnt and broken bodies, corruption releases outward across the plains. Like poison coursing through veins.

Such is the nature of evil; it spreads like disease.

And I will be the one to burn it out. I will be nothing if not a blight upon Morzanmyre.

Although the Reckoning ended two centuries ago, Malevron’s supporters still gather in the dark. Around me are the remains of one of these units, one I have destroyed. But if I know the Deceiver at all, there is always another layer to the plan, another strategy, an endgame behind the smoke and mirrors. Only he could design a punishment that so perfectly captured my worst fears: to be without my body, trapped in my own mind, unseen, unheard, untouched for centuries on end. Just free enough to wander the lands and witness the seasons changing, only to be wrenched back to the otherworldly torment of the prison.

Since the final battle of the war, I have been a ghost to those who matter, my body no longer my own, barely more than a shadow but for the flames that burn dark as obsidian at my fingertips . . . Decades upon decades of being invisible to the free-willed mortals and immortals alike . . . No more than a whisper in the dark. It’s only in the presence of the branded that I have a form, that I can touch things, feel things. Which means I live little more than a half life, existing only between the enemy and those imprisoned alongside me.