Echoes of the Forgotten Throne

[Valanya – Queen of the Nocturne]

The chamber pulsed with crimson light.

The Highbloods stood in a semi-circle, their pallid faces etched in stillness as Valanya lowered her hand from the summoning circle. The blood had long dried on her palm, but her fingers still trembled. The Devourer had failed—again. A creature of ancient terror, and yet it had been driven back by a lich whose aura pulsed like rotted stars.

"A lich," she murmured, breaking the silence.

Whispers erupted like crackling fire through the Highbloods. Drenedh of the Black Fold stepped forward, his long jaw clenched. "You summoned us for this? A failed mutation? A corpse caster skulking through the fringe like some half-born necromancer?"

Valanya did not flinch. Her gaze was cold, resolute. "That corpse caster just turned the Devourer into ash-rain."

Even the walls of the obsidian sanctum seemed to draw breath at her words. The Devourer—ancient, hungering, a godling of corrosion—had been bested. That shouldn't have been possible. Not now. Not yet.

"Then it's him," came a rasp from behind the pillar of bone. Lord Vasquell. His voice was older than the wind, brittle as old parchment. "The Dead King returns. His soul did not break as we hoped—it endured."

Valanya's red eyes narrowed.

"You don't believe that," she said. "That the soul of Xerces endured through annihilation and time? That the one who imprisoned the Devourer once now walks again as a lich?"

"Look into the fire of his aura and tell me otherwise," Vasquell whispered.

The Queen was silent. Her thoughts spun—fragments of an age long past, of kingdoms wreathed in flame, of a man who once ruled with mercy and wrath in equal measure. The mortal king who had sacrificed everything to seal away the ancient hunger they had unleashed.

And now he had returned, bone-clad and crowned in shadow.

"Then we kill him before he remembers who he was," she said coldly.

"But if he does remember," Vasquell said, smiling with cracked lips, "then what he becomes may be far worse than the man he once was."

Valanya said nothing more. Her eyes glowed with cold promise. The blood moon hung low. The game was shifting.

[Xerces]

Pain came first.

Like a thousand icy needles driven into his skull, like a memory refusing to remain buried, it tore through the veil of forgetfulness and clawed its way into the light. Xerces collapsed to one knee in the forest clearing, his skeletal hands clutching the side of his head as Mira's scream echoed faintly behind him.

"Xerces?!"

He couldn't hear her. Not fully. Not anymore.

The world had cracked open inside him.

A throne—made of blackstone and silverbone.

A blade—etched with a name long forgotten to history, but once his.

A child's laugh.

A woman's scream.

The burning of a kingdom.

He saw himself—once a man of flesh and soul. Crowned not with bones but with hope. A king who stood at the edge of the world, defying the endless void. Who summoned every ounce of his life to bind the Devourer and cast it beneath the earth.

And he saw who betrayed him.

A vampire with crimson eyes. A pact signed in cursed ink. The betrayal that shattered his crown and cast him into death.

"No…" Xerces rasped, the word a rattle in his hollow throat.

He fell forward. The pain surged again—like a storm crashing through his mind. And then… the system ignited.

[SYSTEM UPDATE – LEGACY RESONANCE TRIGGERED]

> New Memory Fragment Unlocked

> Title Acquired: "The Shackled King"

> +20 INT, +15 CHA, +25 NEC

> Passive Buff Gained: Aura of the Dread Crown – All undead within a 50-meter radius gain increased resistance to radiant damage and +10% attack efficiency.

Mira's hand found his shoulder. "Xerces, speak to me! Please!"

His voice came slowly, hollow but deeper. Wiser.

"I remember… flames," he whispered. "Flames and thrones."

He turned toward her, and for a moment, the flicker in his sockets was not just necrotic fire—but sorrow.

"I was a king once, Mira."

The wind blew soft over the trees, but it sounded now like mourning. Somewhere beyond the veil of the forest, something stirred—watching.

And within Xerces, the weight of a destiny long abandoned began to take root again.

But now, it pulsed with vengeance