Rebirth: Necromancer's Ascenscion
Chapter 188: Ian, The Terrible.

Renner Voss*

---

They named it the Year of Ash.

But to Renner Voss, it was the year a god bled.

Esgard didn't fall in a single night. It rotted. Slowly.

A city dying from the inside out, weeks after the Demon Blade fell to his knees in the outskirts of the city, cradling a corpse that all said would rise as a great force in this city.

Ian and Eli's defeat didn't merely echo — it reverberated, like a curse scrawled across the city's bones.

Renner remembered the sky the next morning.

Gray. Silent.

The kind of silence that lingered even over screams. Fires still burned. Not with the heat of battle — but the indifference of afterthought. And beneath the acrid smoke, nobles clawed at one another like rats from a sinking ship, pawing for favors, forgiveness, or an exit.

He watched from the ledge of a ruined balcony, cloak heavy with blood. Not his own.

"I thought gods didn't bleed," he murmured to the wind.

But Ian had.

He had broken.

And Renner felt it. Something inside the world had tilted. The axis shifted.

The man he once called unreachable—the mountain, the storm, the beast that had stirred envy from Renner's marrow—had cracked open like any other man.

No. Not any man.

The world did not mourn like this for men.

---

The purge began days later.

They didn't call it that at first. They never do. At first, it was restoration. A tribunal of broken lords. Remnants of the Council, half-mad, half-vanished, trying to fill a void that wanted nothing to be filled.

But order was a lie, and the people smelled blood.

Mark was gone. Vanished into myth the moment Velrosa's heart stopped.

And the Demon Blade?

He rose three days later.

With fury and anguish.

Eli by his side he gave a command to this city—submit or die.

Ian had never been a political strategist as Velrosa was, he knew only two things: Blood and battle, and when it came to that, none in Esgard could stand against the two.

Renner was there on the day.

Not by choice.

He had come to confirm the body of the exiled princess like most— to see the end with his own eyes. To stand over Ian's mourning figure and whisper the vow one more time, as if it would mean something:

"I'll walk out with your blood on my hands."

But when he reached the hall where they'd laid her, the body was gone.

And the man—

The man was awake.

Not alive. Alive implies something soft. Something hopeful.

Ian was awake like a grave was awake.

Eyes dark. Void-lit.

Blood dried in streaks across his face, his skin bruised with the memory of godlight.

He didn't speak. Not to the priest who recoiled. Not to the guards who dropped their spears. Not even to the servants who trembled as he passed.

He just walked.

And the main hall of the council split beneath his feet.

Renner remembered the stone warping — bending to something deeper than magic. Something hateful.

Then came the voice.

Not Ian's.

Not human.

A sound like a blade dragged across bone and sorrow.

"All kings are crowned with loss."

And when Ian stood atop the dais the first chair once used for quiet judgments and political executions, he looked out across the ruined court and said nothing.

Not a speech. Not a threat.

Just that silence again.

Until someone knelt.

Then another.

And another.

Renner didn't.

He stood at the edge of the hall, watching as Ian became what none of them had wanted him to become.

A king.

---

They burned House Volmir within the week.

Not all of it. Just the living parts.

Lady Morravel was dragged from her tower in a silk nightdress, still wearing the perfume she'd applied before the feast two weeks prior. Her screams rang like bells across the Riverwalk.

They didn't kill her. Not at first. Not until her house sigil was peeled from the gates and cast into the fire.

Then came House Vallis.

House Durnhal.

House Yvain.

Each time, the same pattern: no declarations, no trials, no pageantry. Just fire. Steel. Ash.

Ian didn't lead the purges himself.

He didn't need to.

The city had seen him on his knees. Seen him rise. The air around him bent, thick with something darker than revenge. Even the Inquisitors of the Sanctum fled. Grand Priest Eltharion's tower burned with silver flame for seven days before the walls finally collapsed.

They begged the Imperial City for help—yet no one ever came.

Renner remembered watching from the roofs. His demon mark pulsed beneath his armor, hot and eager. It whispered in his bones with every noble that fell.

Climb. Kill. Win.

And yet, he didn't.

Not yet.

He didn't challenge the man who once haunted his dreams.

Didn't crawl from the wreckage of the Crucible to confront the broken king.

Why?

Because envy had rotted into something else.

Curiosity.

Because what crawled out of that fire wasn't just Ian.

It was something beyond him.

Something terrible.

---

Renner lived in the ruins now. The noble estates no longer mattered. Their sigils had been torn down or blackened. What survived became currency—servants, weapons, whispers.

He trained. Fought. Killed.

The Crucible was closed, so now they dueled in alleyways. On bridges. In the remains of collapsed towers.

Glory was smaller now. But no less sharp.

And the mark—his demon's gift—fed on it.

Every victory refined him. Rewrote him.

He moved differently now. Faster. Cleaner. There were no wasted strikes. No hesitation.

He could see through opponents.

See the end of them before they even began.

And still—

He wasn't ready.

Not yet.

He'd watched Ian walk the streets again. Once. Only once.

A funeral pyre was being lit in the Plaza of Teeth. One of the last loyal houses, House Carrow, had finally been gutted. Ian passed the burning bodies without pause. Soulbound shadows lingered at his back — not many, but enough to keep the crowd distant.

And on his shoulder?

The crown.

Not gold. Not silver. Not a circlet of forged lineage.

But bone.

Carved. Cracked. Ancient.

Velrosa's.

Worn like a scar he refused to heal.

---

That night, Renner stood atop the east watchtower, looking down over the broken city. His breath steamed in the cold. Below him, wind howled through the spines of fallen towers. The moon hung above Esgard like a wound that never closed.

And in his chest—

The mark pulsed.

A spiral of blood and shadow and blinking eyes, carved beneath his ribs.

The voice came again.

"He remembers."

"Good," Renner muttered.

"He bleeds."

"I saw."

"You are not yet what you will become."

"I know."

"But soon."

Renner exhaled and gripped the stone. It was cold. Real.

He stared west, toward the palace.

Toward the throne room no one called a throne room anymore.

Because it wasn't.

Not truly.

It was a grave.

A place where something holy had died.

And something else had risen.

Renner's hands trembled, not from fear, but from the nearness of it all. The proximity to that power.

The kind that rewrites worlds.

He still heard the chosen's voice. Not from memory, but from truth—spoken through Ian's failure.

"He couldn't protect anything. Couldn't achieve anything."

And yet—

He stood.

Crowned not by victory.

But by survival.

And Renner wondered—

For the first time in his life—

Was that power?

Not triumph.

Not dominance.

But to rise again.

Bleeding. Broken.

And still rise?

The envy in his spine flared again.

The mark beneath his skin opened its unseen eyes.

And the whisper returned—no longer cold.

But hungry.

"Soon."