Rebirth: Necromancer's Ascenscion
Chapter 201: Blood, Once More.

Chapter 201: Blood, Once More.

The council adjourned not long after. Plans reshuffled. Eyes watched him leave the chamber.

His path was set.

The Crucible would open.

And beneath it, a fire older than vengeance rose once more.

—–—

The city howled.

From the lowest gutters of the Sunk District to the rich balconies of High districts, Esgard rose with fire. Banners snapped in the wind — black, crimson, and bone-white — each bearing the mark of the Sovereign: a flame wrapped in thorns.

Merchants shouted over the roar of foot traffic, selling roasted meats, betting slips, carved totems of past champions.

Children painted their faces like arena beasts. Drunks stumbled through the crowd with hollow helms on their heads and marks carved into their forearms.

The Crucible had returned.

And with it, the old, terrible rhythm.

A rhythm of flesh.

Of flame.

Of blood.

No one spoke of the squads that vanished near Blackblood. No one asked where the Sovereign had gone for nearly ten days. That silence — heavy and unspoken — hung like fog in the air, replaced by a singular truth:

He had come back.

And when the Sovereign came back, the world bent to make room.

Blackrat stood atop one of the merchant towers overlooking the Crucible gates, a rare cigar given to him by Ian clamped between his teeth and a betting roster tucked under his arm.

He wore his nobleman’s jacket again — red velvet, tacky gold chain — and his bandaged hand scratched at his cheek like a nervous tick.

He muttered to himself, watching the line of fighters parade toward the arena.

"Meat, meat, meat... oh, that one might last a bout or two—but he’d die anyway."

Eli stood beside him, arms folded, face unreadable.

"He’s really gonna do it, isn’t he?" Blackrat asked.

Eli didn’t answer.

Below them, drums thundered. Great braziers roared. And from within the ancient gate of the Crucible, the sands quivered.

---

The arena was nearly full.

More than sixty thousand souls packed the seats, a flood of humanity that had craved blood like a drug over the past year. The Crucible, carved into the very bones of Esgard, had not sung in months.

It had only been mimicked. And now, like a dragon waking from slumber, it opened its maw again.

Nobles filled their high towers.

Coin flowed like wine. The seats of House Vallis, Lugard, and Volmir — all emptied by the purge — now remained bare, symbolic reminders of the Sovereign’s rule. But those of House Elarin and the New Hollow Council filled with steel and ceremony.

And above all...

A silence took hold.

One by one, the crowds quieted.

The flame at the center of the arena burst alive.

Then—

A gate opened.

He stepped into the sand.

---

Ian stood where he had once bled.

Where chains had once held him.

Where the crowd had named him demon, and yet, in that same breath, made him their obsession.

The sun above Esgard bled a deep amber, washing the Crucible in a cruel kind of warmth. His coat, dark as pitch, moved with the wind like smoke. No weapons hung at his side — they were stored away in the space between flesh and shadow — but he needed none to make the city still.

Ian let the silence stretch.

He turned his gaze around the Crucible — not to the nobles, not to the council, but to the ones cheering from the stands, from the half-broken stone rows, from the rusted cages and sunburned walls.

To the fighters.

The ones who bled and bet and survived.

His people.

He stepped forward once, boots sinking into the same sand that had swallowed his blood.

And then he spoke.

No arcane amplification.

Just voice.

Rough. Measured. Quiet.

But it rang through the bones of the arena like thunder beneath stone.

"This is the sand I bled in."

He let the words hang.

"I was dragged into the pit in chains. Given no name. No choice. I was told I would die for their entertainment."

He looked up to the highest row.

"I didn’t."

"I took names. I burned choices. I made entertainment out of the undefeated."

A murmur rose from the arena’s edge — not of fear, but of awe.

He kept going.

"They call me Sovereign now. Whisperer of Death. Lord of the Hollow Flame. And yet..."

He glanced at the blood-darkened sand.

"...I remember this sand."

"I remember crawling through it. Bleeding in it. Becoming something else in it."

He stepped to the center of the arena.

The flame behind him flared as if in recognition.

"This city thinks the Crucible is a spectacle. A game. A place for the powerful to bet on who dies the prettiest."

His gaze sharpened.

"But the Crucible is more than that. The Crucible is truth."

"And truth..." He raised a single finger. "Is forged."

The flames sparked behind him as he spoke the next words.

"There is nothing in this world that is gotten without blood."

"Not freedom. Not strength. Not vengeance."

"Everything you own — every breath you take — was paid for by someone else’s suffering."

He let the crowd feel it. Let them sit with the weight of it.

Then his tone shifted.

Harder now.

Sharper.

Like a sword unsheathing.

"A war is coming."

A hush.

"Not an invasion. Not politics. Not another noble squabble."

"A war against the things that live in the dark. Against the things that remember what we were before fire."

"Against those that have slept for centuries and now rise to unmake us."

His voice lowered again, but it echoed still.

"They will come to our gates. To our homes. To our families."

"And they will come believing this city is weak."

He stepped back.

Lifted his chin.

"But I have seen what this Crucible makes, you all have."

"And I swear — by my name, for there is no higher authority —"

He drew his finger across the air, and fire trailed behind it, carving a line of light into the sky.

"We. Will. Be. Ready."

The silence shattered.

The Crucible roared.

Not in applause.

In reverence.

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