Ashes and Thrones

Three reads, then four, and the numbers refused to change.

They never did—just as the Progenitors had warned in their final records. A civilization that raised the Wurm Lords from primordial darkness to serve as weapons, then lost control of them and spent ten thousand years engineering a solution before it vanished. Humanity inherited the mess. The texts were precise about that.

Cael read the last line a fifth time anyway. The number was the same.

"Five years."

Damien shifted uncomfortably and ran his thumb along the burn scar on his wrist—the one from the night the Karthian capital fell, when he had pulled his research from the flames and lost everything else, his wife and his two young sons and his parents. The scar had healed crooked. "Maybe less. The seal degradation is accelerating, and I don't know why. Maybe the Unmaking Engine strained the seals more than we thought, or maybe the Wurm Lords are actively working to break free. But the timeline is clear: five years until catastrophic failure."

Cael set the report down, his hands steady.

That was the part he couldn't get used to. Twenty years since the seal ritual claimed nine thousand volunteers and the survivors founded New Haven from the ashes, nineteen years since Tomas died. A man ought to shake, reading that the world had five years left, and once he would have. In the founding years Cael had shaken constantly—nightmares every night, the volunteers walking into the seal chambers, Tomas's face gaunt and gray at the end, the old wound gone to fever.

His hands were steady now. Nothing but numbness, and he suspected that was worse.

He had been a man who felt things once. Loudly, Tomas used to say—Cael Morevan, who couldn't hide a mood if his life depended on the hiding. The deep wore that down over the years and grief finished the work. Somewhere between the infirmary and the burial and the two decades of grinding meetings since, he stopped being able to locate his own heart. He missed the man who could still feel the pain, because the numbness made every hard choice look clean when it wasn't.

"You're certain?" Cael kept his eyes on the last line when he asked.

"I've checked fifty times. Different methods, different assumptions. It always—" Damien stopped, then finished it. "Five years. Maybe four if the acceleration continues."

He didn't give the number another pass. "What do we do?"

Damien pulled another stack of papers from his satchel and set them crooked on the desk. "Resources. Scholars. I've got references in the Progenitor texts to something called the Unmaking Engine—a permanent sealing mechanism, deep in the Forge complex. If we can find it and power it with artifacts—power cores—we might fix the seals for good."

Cael's stomach turned. Nine thousand volunteers had walked into the seal chambers knowing they wouldn't come back. And Tomas, who had survived the ritual itself, died of fever weeks later while Cael sat beside him for nine days.

Now the seals were failing anyway.

"How long before we need to tell the Council?" He left the report where it lay and went to the window.

New Haven sprawled below—the largest settlement in a valley two hundred miles across, ringed by volcanic peaks and corrupted wasteland. Three thousand people here. The morning market was already stirring: vendors setting up stalls, children chasing each other around the central fountain. Twenty settlements across the Confederation, scattered through the habitable pockets the green corruption didn't yet reach.

People who had finally found peace. A chance to rebuild, and he was about to put a clock on it.

"We have time," Damien said carefully. "Months. But we need to start preparing now. When we announce it—when panic inevitably spreads—we need to present solutions alongside the problem."

"Artifacts first, then."

"Artifacts, and the people who can read them. The rest follows."

Cael understood. If they announced *five years until demons return* without a plan, the Confederation would fracture. People would flee, and the cooperation they built would come apart.