[182 Years Before Bck Spire War]

  The White Spire had fallen. The Radiant Order—the brotherhood Gadriel Solthurion once led—had been utterly annihited.

  The world was silent, save for the rhythmic shuffling of the dead that now walked in the service of their new King. Gadriel had become a Soulfather, a heretic lich whose power was no longer a shield, but a psychic broadcast of weaponized prophetic visions that could shatter the minds of the living.

  Beside him, Maeve stood in the full bloom of eighteen years.

  She was a vision of unmatched grace, moving with the ethereal fluidity of her te mother, Velma. She carried the heavy silver mace—a relic inherited from a father who no longer needed steel to kill. Being soulless, she fought with a terrifying, hollow efficiency; she had nothing to fear, for she felt nothing at all.

  Supported by her Mirror Twin, the shadow that moved as her protector and weapon, they had become an unstoppable force. Her soulless nature meant the arcane was closed to her, for magic was a nguage of the spirit she did not possess. Yet, she was immortal.

  Gadriel maintained her life-force through the unholy tether that bound them, allowing his own power to flow through her like a subterranean river, keeping her vessel unblemished while his own foundation groaned. His quest from the ancient prophecies had truly begun, and for a century, no bde had been sharp enough to touch him.

  But as he sat upon his throne of cold iron, he noticed it.

  Across the knuckle of his right hand—the hand that had once gripped a holy mace in the name of the light—a crack had appeared.

  It was a jagged, dry fissure in his grey, lich-flesh. It did not bleed red; it seeped a faint, lightning-blue vapor that carried the sharp, electric tang of ozone. For the first time in a century, Gadriel felt a phantom itch of discomfort.

  He had long forgotten that he was once a healer who could mend mortally wounded allies. He remembered that as long as a soul lingered, he could put a man back on his feet. He remembered the warmth of the sun on his shoulders and the silk-wrapped heat of a Heal spell.

  "Heal," he whispered, the word feeling like broken gss in his throat.

  He focused on the crack, expecting the golden radiance of the Radiant Shield to knit the skin whole. Instead, the cold stone of the chamber groaned.

  The corpse of a fallen padin at the foot of his dais suddenly jerked to life, its eyes snapping open with a cold, pale blue static. He had not mended his flesh; he had accidentally pulled a pseudosoul from the void, answering a call that no longer knew how to give life, only how to animate the dead.

  He was no longer a vessel for life; he was a heretic lich. The light had not just left him—it had been repced by an echo that hungered for the very things he once protected.

  Gadriel pulled his hand back, his burning blue eyes wide with a terrifying crity. He looked at Maeve, who stood perfectly still, her skin unblemished and vibrant. He realized then that the crack was not an injury from a foe.

  It was the Stain of the Debt.

  He had to preserve Maeve’s youth until she could be made whole with a soul of her own. He wanted her to experience all the emotion life could offer, he would never know that the life ahead of her is of suffering that would one day mirror his own; the life he was building for her was the very wish he would one day wish he had never wished.

  "I have to preserve myself," Gadriel rasped into the empty hall, his voice a ghost of the man who had knelt in the blood-soaked temple.

  "For if I die, the bance is lost. The centuries will find her all at once, and she will wither into dust before she can even scream. As long as I live, as long as I endure this rot, she will remain pristine. I will be the tomb so she can be the temple—at least until she gets a soul of her own to serve as her foundation."

  He covered his hand with a heavy, dark gauntlet. He would never seek the light again. He would be the Soulfather, the silent variable in an equation of eternal suffering. To avoid the friction of direct confrontation, he would retreat into the shadows, depending solely on his drudges and his Death Gaze to keep the world at bay.