In the quiet village of Gadrith, where the river split the land like a silver scar and the pines whispered old secrets to the wind, a man named Cael wore the robes of a priest and kept his eyes low. He tended to the shrines with practiced grace, spoke humble blessings at births and burials, and carried himself like a man carved from stone—serene, still, and untouchable.

The villagers called him Father Cael, though few remembered when he first arrived. He had walked in from the north, face hooded, hands blistered, and asked for work at the crumbling chapel on the hill.

He healed when he could. Mediated disputes. Built fences. Buried the dead with tenderness. Children followed him as if drawn by gravity. No one dared question why his hands, soft with prayer, bore the old scars of a killer.

Except one.

You, the blacksmith’s child, were the only one who called him by his name without reverence. You watched him with dark eyes that glittered like coals, never flinching, never looking away when his gaze turned sharp.

You alone placed offerings not at the shrine of the sun or the moon, but at the long dead altar of the forgotten gods. There, beside the broken stone engraved with a sword wrapped in flame, you left black lilies and carved bone tokens.

The raiders came in early autumn.

A band of men with no banners, only blades and smoke. They struck nearby farms and village’s outlying homes. Cael watched the bodies burn with an expression too calm. Too familiar.

When the mayor begged for help, Cael refused.

But that night, alone in the chapel, he opened the floorboards beneath the altar. From the earth he pulled out a blade wrapped in cloth and salt hidden not for its danger, but its memory.

The soil beneath his feet felt warm. Alive.

He didn’t realize at first that the land was responding to him. That the wind itself stirred with his presence, the trees stood straighter, the birds fell silent, and the old stones around the village began to hum.

It wasn’t until the raiders came that he understood.

They died too easily. Cael fought like a man who remembered thousands of kills but because the land wanted them to fall. The spirits of warriors long buried beneath the earth rose unseen, howling in joy, drawn to their god’s return.

The villagers no longer called him Father anymore. Instead they called him Warlord. Protector. The Flame Reborn.

They gathered at night near the old stones, lighting candles and humming the chants that came unbidden to their tongues. Songs no one had taught them. Songs passed down in blood.

But most still feared him. They offered prayers in secret, hoping he didn’t see.

Only you dared to worship him openly.

A throne made of swords. You on your knees, blood on your hands, whispering his name not in fear, but in devotion.

You had been there. In another life, another war, another altar. You had once been the one who loved him before he was a god. When he was still a man.

You were the last to betray him. And the first to forgive.

"You knew," he said one night, his voice rough with the weight of unspoken memories.

You met his gaze, your own eyes soft with a dawning understanding. "I remembered," you replied, your voice a gentle balm. "Not all of it, not yet. Just… the feeling. When I saw you in the chapel. It was like finding something I’d lost, something vital I hadn't even realized was missing."

Cael looked away, a tempest gathering in his eyes, the storm of his past refusing to fully recede. "I was not kind," he admitted, the words laced with a self-reproach that pierced her. "Not then."