The wizard soared high above the landscape of Andalus, his robes billowing in the wind as he glided over its vast expanse. The royal capital sprawled beneath him, a testament to centuries of power and tradition. Its spires like small skyscrapers, and its grand stone walls encircled the city as if keeping its riches—and its secrets—trapped within.

  Once, this sight might have filled him with awe. Now, it evoked only cold calculation.

  It had been four weeks since his return from the hellish prison that had bound him for thirty years. The world he had once known, a land of beauty and promise, had changed in his absence—radically so. Yet none of it truly surprised him. Time had moved on, as it always did. He held no illusions about the place he once occupied in its history. He wasn’t the man the people of Andalus remembered—if they even remembered him at all. His name had been reduced to whispers, a fading legend lost to the winds of time.

  In his place, another had risen.

  Radley.

  The name twisted in his mind like a dagger. The so-called hero. The conqueror. The man who had defeated the demonlord, only to drown the continent in war and submission. The man who took everything from him.

  Memories of betrayal stabbed at his mind like burning needles. He could still see their faces: Radley and the Queen, standing above him as they condemned him to his fate. Their verdict had been silent, their judgment merciless. He had been cast into the abyss, sent to a realm of unending torment, a place where time warped and suffering was eternal. Thirty years he had endured in that hellscape, his soul stretched and reforged in the fires of despair.

  But he had survived.

  Now, he was free. And freedom meant one thing: vengeance.

  A wicked smile stretched across his face, a dark promise of the reckoning to come.

  * * *

  The wizard exhaled, taking in the crisp highland air, steadying the storm of thoughts raging within him. Below, the land stretched in a deceptive serenity—rivers shimmering in the sunlight, forests swaying gently with the wind, villages unaware of the darkness looming just beyond their borders. The people lived in ignorant peace, blind to the tempest that was about to befall them.

  His fingers tightened around his staff. He had spent the last month studying the kingdom, gathering intelligence. His name—if it held any meaning—had all but faded into oblivion. The wizard, the hero, the cleric who had once saved this kingdom from ruin had been erased, his deeds buried beneath Radley’s iron fist.

  It was an insult. A final betrayal in a lifetime of them.

  But it wasn’t just Radley who stoked the fire in his chest—it was the Queen. The woman who had orchestrated his downfall. The one who had ensured he would suffer. But why? That question had tormented him for years, rattling endlessly within his mind. What had he done to deserve such treachery? What had he failed to see? The answers remained elusive, but he would find them. He would force them from her lips. And when he did, he would make her suffer as he had.

  As for Radley... he would get his just desserts.

  Yet revenge was not an act of reckless impulse—it was a discipline, an art. He had learned patience in that wretched dimension, honed it like a blade. His retribution would not be swift; it would be methodical. Calculated. A plan had already been set in motion, a series of precise steps leading to a singular, inevitable conclusion.

  There were four bullet points to his strategy, each more intricate than the last. The first was already in play. Posing as a rogue wizard, he had begun his campaign of deception—harassing villages on the outskirts of the kingdom, stirring unrest without drawing too much attention. He destroyed crops, set fires, and raided homes, but never in excess. Just enough to be noticed. Just enough to lure out Radley.

  And he had taken the bait.

  The so-called hero has led his warband into the highlands, eager to hunt down the phantom menace threatening his borders. It was a perfect distraction. The trap had been laid, and soon, Radley would walk straight into it.

  The wizard watched the kingdom’s response carefully, his mind ever-calculating, anticipating every move. The pieces were falling into place, and soon, the board would be set.

  Yet even as he plotted, the hatred within him burned, a constant reminder of his purpose. He could not allow himself to falter. There would be obstacles. Pawns to manipulate. Alliances to forge. Enemies to eliminate. But this was the path he had chosen—the only path left to him. He would not be reckless. He would not be careless. He would play the long game, remaining in the shadows until the moment was right.

  For now, he allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction. His return to this other world had already begun to bear fruit. It was only a matter of time before his enemies felt the full weight of his vengeance.

  And when they did, they would know the truth.

  The mage—the banished, the forgotten—had come back.

  Not to be remembered.

  But to rule.

  The throne of Andalus.

  He smiled. The wizard would be its King.

  * * *

  The rogue wizard, cloaked in the shadows of his new identity, had already begun his subtle campaign of chaos. Far from the bustling streets of the royal capital, the highlands offered the perfect canvas for his plans. The towns and villages scattered across the rugged landscape were isolated, their inhabitants unsuspecting and easy to manipulate. There, he could work undisturbed, a phantom haunting the edges of their peaceful lives.

  The wizard had no desire for bloodshed—at least, not yet. His aim was simple: to cause just enough disruption to attract attention, but not so much that it would draw too many questions. He started small, sowing disorder with precision.

  One of his favorite tricks was the crop circles. In the dead of night, he’d teleport into the middle of a field, the moonlight glinting off his dark robes as he stood over the rows of grain. With a subtle gesture, he would bend the land to his will with the use of simple cantrips. The crops would twist, the earth would move, creating intricate patterns that no farmer would ever believe came from natural forces. By morning, when the sun rose, the crops would lie in odd symmetrical designs—strange symbols that could only be explained as the work of some otherworldly force. The farmers would gawk, whispering about spirits or witches, their superstitions feeding into the growing fear that something unnatural was at work.

  But the wizard didn’t stop there. His mischief grew more elaborate. Hovels, abandoned and crumbling, large oaks, scarecrows, they would suddenly catch fire in the dead of night, their wood crackling with strange flames that seemed to burn not-burn. Yet when the villagers came to investigate the blaze, there would be nothing left but charred remains and the smell of sulfur. No one saw him. No one could. He always made sure his movements were swift, his form hidden by the flickering of shadows or the cover of dense fog that seemed to roll in just when he needed it.

  On occasion, he’d play a far darker game. People would vanish without a trace—disappear in the blink of an eye, swallowed by some unnatural force. The locals would say they’d seen a ray of light, bright and blinding, high above shining down. A spotlight that whisked them away. And when the disappeared returned, they were always naked. No clothes, no memory of where they’d been, and an unshakable fear in their bones. They would find themselves waking up in the middle of a field with no explanation for their ordeal. The wizard had ensured it was a different person each time, their stories combining to spread like wildfire, adding to the rising panic.

  He was careful to keep his movements hidden, always working in the cover of nighttime, ensuring no one ever saw him directly. No one could trace the disturbances back to a single, identifiable source. His image remained a blur, a flickering shape at the edge of darkness. Those who spoke of the strange events could only say it was the work of a phantom—of a wizard, perhaps, or some mad hermit with strange powers. But he was never seen clearly enough for any tale to stick. Three weeks in and the rogue wizard was a myth already in the making, a name whispered in fearful reverence, but always just beyond reach.

  Then he scaled up his antics, teleporting objects—trinkets, baubles, even a house—to other locations in the highlands. Prized livestock would suddenly find themselves far from their pens, and sometimes poor saps waking up in beds far from their home. There was no pattern to it, no logic anyone could follow. Just a strange, subtle magic that seemed to warp the very fabric of reality in the quietest ways. It was an art, one he’d perfected over the years in his prison. Now, he applied it with cold precision here, ensuring that no one could predict where the next event would happen.

  None of it was too violent. Not yet. But all of it was enough to stir up the rumor mills, enough to make the people of the highlands nervous. Fear was the goal. Fear and confusion. And as expected, word spread, carried by the whispers of the terrified and the desperate. By the fourth week, word had spread to the capital city of a rogue wizard causing trouble in the northern hills, casting strange spells and tormenting their villages. It was enough to catch the attention of the Queen who dispatched Radley’s warband to hunt down the rogue magic happening in that area.

  Even then the rogue wizard’s presence was barely noticeable in the week to follow—nothing more than a shadow on the edge of sight. But that was enough. It was enough to set the trap in motion. Radley’s forces had mobilized. The hunt had begun. And with it, the first step of the wizard’s plan was in place. The highlands were alive with the promise of something greater to come, and the fools who thought they were hunting him would soon realize they were the prey.

  The wizard smiled to himself as he observed the chaos he’d set into motion. His plans were unfolding, every thread falling into place. Radley, the hero turned tyrant, would soon come to understand what it meant to face a true threat. He had already fallen into the first part of the trap. It would be the perfect distraction—one that would allow the rogue wizard to work from the shadows, far from the watchful eyes of the royal capital. And far from his home base.

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  Radley’s warband was on the move, chasing a phantom they could never catch. The wizard would be waiting for them, always one step ahead.

  * * *

  The banished hero flew high above the sprawling landscape of this world, his dark robes billowing in the wind, the air crisp and fresh against his face. For the first time in thirty years, he tasted the true air of the world once more, and it was sweet with the promise of revenge. He had spent the first few days traveling the land, his mind racing as he processed the information he had gathered. His Disguise spell had proven invaluable—allowing him to blend seamlessly into any village or town he passed through, undetected and unremarkable.

  The borders of the Andalus kingdom now stretched farther than he remembered, marred by the consequences of Radley’s unchecked conquest. But it was more than that—Edo had learned something during his travels that twisted his gut with bitter realization. His name, once spoken with honors, now was little more than a forgotten whisper, erased from the annals of history. Even the soldiers who once served with in the Liberation army, the ones he fought side-by-side, don't speak of him.

  It wasn’t just that his name had faded from memory—it had been erased with purpose. No one spoke it. To utter it felt taboo. Even in the far corners of the kingdom, where the shadow of Radley had not yet reached, the mere mention of the wizard who had once stood as hero seemed to be met with fear. A name unspoken, and a history buried beneath the weight of Radley’s fabricated legend.

  The wizard’s fist clenched around the hilt of his staff, his thoughts turning darker. The Queen had erased me, replaced me with the myth Radley—a puppet hero for the people, a false savior. His heart burned with the sting of it. How could he have been forgotten so thoroughly, so deliberately?

  He stopped at a crumbling inn, an old watering hole he had once visited during his time as a summoned hero. The village seemed even more abandoned now—its people scattered, or likely moved on to better pastures. Yet the air here still held memories of his former self. A slight tremor gripped his heart as he wandered the empty hall, looking for traces of who he had once been. The walls, covered in faded marks, seemed to mock him with their silence. Not a single whisper of his name remained in the corners.

  Disguised as a common traveler, he took a seat at the bar, ordering a meal—a rare treat after so long in the hell world. The food was little more than stale bread and overcooked meat, the smell of it so far removed from the strange, ashen-tasting meals of his past. But his mouth watered despite the unappetizing sight, his stomach growling with hunger. Thirty years had warped his senses. The thought of food, of something real and tangible, felt like a distant pleasure. The wizard devoured the meal in a matter of moments, savoring it in the way only one who had endured hellish, conjured sustenance could. Even water tasted strange, after the foul concoctions he had been forced to drink in the hellscape. The pure, clear taste of the river he’d stopped to drink from felt foreign, but it was also a welcome relief. The familiar warmth of the earth beneath his boots reminded him he was truly back, and that feeling only spurred him forward.

  While his hunger got sated, his mind turned to darker matters. He had been moving fast, taking to the skies whenever possible, teleporting across the kingdom in an effort to learn all he could about the world that had changed in his absence. It was a world where Radley had decimated the once-proud territories of the Bosco Federation. Small city-states that had once held a peaceful coalition were now in ruin. The wizard had seen the smoking remnants of castle towns where no one was left alive—just ash and empty streets. Radley had seized many of their lands with an iron fist, leaving little to survive in his wake.

  To the south, the grasslands stretched before him, home to the many beastkin demihuman tribes that had roamed freely there for centuries. Now, they were little more than ghosts. Radley’s warband had swept through their lands with brutal efficiency, steamrolling over them with no regard for their way of life. Entire tribes had been wiped from existence, their people slaughtered or driven into submission. A people who had once been untouched by the hellmouth had been ravaged by the new threat: the Warduke. The wizard’s thoughts grew darker still: Radley became as much a threat to this continent as the hellmouth ever was. Maybe more.

  His heart twisted as he flew over the Great Elf Forest. It looks like Radley had tried to enter the sacred havens of the elves, but his attempts got thwarted by its very fabric. The dimensional boundary that shielded their sanctuaries had proved enough a buffer to prevent an outright invasion, but much of their forest burned as a consequence. The wizard could still feel the faintest pang of a lost connection to the forest, to a memory of fantastical wonder, and it stoked another ember of anger within him.

  Radley’s failure here, however, was really nothing to celebrate. The elf resistance would eventually fall, too, judging by the damages seen from ahigh. They would have no choice.

  The wizard allowed himself a moment of contemplation as he drifted higher into the sky, the sprawling continent beneath him a patchwork of suffering and conquest. Radley had conquered it all. In his own twisted way, he had become the biggest threat this world had ever known.

  But the wizard wasn’t concerned with Radley’s power or conquests. No. His focus had shifted to something more personal. His gaze turned westward, toward the royal capital—the seat of the Queen’s power. She and her daughter were his next targets. He would tie their fates to his own.

  Radley had betrayed the queen, not as he had been betrayed—but it was enough. And the wizard knew something they didn’t. That brokenness was a doorway, opening up a path leading for him to seize control in a way he didn't think possible. A chink in the armor to render the royal house apart. And when the time was right, when everything was in place, he would be the one to ascend, to take back what should be his.

  He would rewrite history—his history. A history where he was no longer the forgotten name, the face hidden in the shadows. He would take everything from Radley, and in the end, the world would remember him again. Not as a savior or a hero this time—but as a liberator, the one who freed Andalus from Radley’s iron grip.

  * * *

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  The rogue wizard moved like a shadow beneath the southern moon, his steps precise, his mission absolute. The fortress-state loomed before him, a towering relic of war now repurposed into something far more vile—a gilded cage for Radley’s pleasures. The once-imposing prison ward had been stripped of its original purpose. No longer a place for criminals and traitors, it now held a different kind of captive: Radley’s discarded lovers, his favored playthings, and the children born of his infidelity.

  It disgusted him.

  Not for any reason of morality—he had long since cast aside the burden of virtue—but because it was Radley’s. Every room, every stolen moment of pleasure within these walls, was another stain of the man who had taken everything from him. The first whispers of court gossip had confirmed what should have been obvious: the Queen had never been anything more than a political fixture, a convenient alliance. Radley’s true appetites lay elsewhere, scattered across his empire in the form of bastard children and women who had long outlived their usefulness to him.

  Tonight, that legacy would burn.

  For weeks, the rogue wizard had planned his assault. He had studied the fortress layout through careful reconnaissance and divination, his scrying spells revealing faces, schedules, habits. His personal map, enchanted and precise, bore the markings of each target: the sleeping chambers of Radley’s bastards, the lavish quarters of his discarded consorts. He moved through the stronghold like an unseen force of nature, striking with surgical precision. Each name crossed off his mental ledger was another thread of Radley’s legacy cut before it could weave a future.

  ...

  The first to die was a girl, no older than ten.

  She lay curled beneath silken sheets, unaware of the specter that emerged from the darkness. A whisper of arcane power, and her breath ceased. No struggle. No sound. Just the silence of a life snuffed out. A flick of the wrist sent her body into the void, vanishing before the scent of death could settle in the air. By dawn, there would be nothing left of her. No corpse to bury. No spirit to call upon.

  He moved swiftly, cutting through the fortress like a phantom.

  A boy—perhaps thirteen—met the same fate. He was strong for his age, his body already marked by the early rigors of swordplay. No doubt a son of the so-called hero, Radley’s blood pulsed in his veins, gifting him an inherent strength that would have served him well in the years to come. But strength meant nothing against inevitability. The wizard spoke the words, ancient and absolute.

  Power Word: Death.

  The boy collapsed before his mind could register the danger. Another flick of the hand, another body vanished into the void. Another erasure of Radley’s bloodline.

  There was no joy in the killings, no pleasure in the act. Only necessity. Radley’s bastards were too many. Each one a potential claimant, a rival, a loose end that could unravel everything the rogue wizard had planned. He was pruning a tree before it could bear its poisoned fruit.

  By the time the first hour ended, nearly a dozen were gone. Each strike was precise, undetectable. The fortress slumbered as its inhabitants quietly disappeared.

  But his work was not yet done.

  ...

  Deeper within the fortress, beyond the sleeping chambers of children, lay the quarters of Radley’s favored women. Some still clung to hope, believing their offspring might one day be acknowledged. Others had resigned themselves to a lifetime of gilded captivity, indulged but never truly free. It did not matter.

  They, too, were loose ends.

  He stepped into one of the chambers, where a woman lay in wait. Perhaps she had sensed the disturbance, some primal instinct warning her that death had come. Her eyes widened in recognition—or perhaps in horror—before the word left his lips.

  Death.

  She collapsed, her final breath stolen before she could even scream.

  The others followed. Some ran, but where would they go? A few wept, pleading for mercy. But there was none to give. Mercy was for those who had a place in the future. These women did not.

  One by one, they were erased.

  Outside, the fortress remained undisturbed. His magic ensured that each death was swift and unnoticed. The bodies—nearly fifty by the end—were transported elsewhere, incinerated in a pit that would leave no remains, no trace. No possibility of resurrection. Not even necromancy would reclaim them.

  Radley’s empire had been built on blood, but tonight, that same blood was being drained away.

  The rogue wizard stood at the heart of his enemy's stronghold, his task this night nearly complete. But there were more nights to go.

  In the end, only one would remain.

  One child.

  One piece of Radley’s legacy that he would keep.

  Not out of mercy. Not out of sentiment.

  But because he alone would decide what remained of that world.

  And soon, even that would belong to him.

  * * *

  The world below stretched wide, bathed in the deep orange glow of a dying sun. The spires of the royal palace rose like jagged teeth from the heart of Andalus, its white stone walls shimmering in the fading light.

  For the first time in thirty years, he felt something other than hatred. Excitement. A long-forgotten sensation burned in his veins, coiling tight in his chest like an ember catching flame. This was the moment. The final act. The culmination of a vengeance carefully woven into a new saga of the kingdom itself.

  He had taken everything from Radley. Every last bastard. Every poor concubine. Every seed of his legacy, uprooted, incinerated, reduced to dust. Aiden had been the last. His first son, the crown prince who had held the Bosco Federation under her mother's shaky banner now lay cold, his severed head packed neatly in a sack, a final memento of the bloodline's eradication. The second prince, Eann—the youngest of the Queen's—was next, but his fate could wait after the palace fell.

  And the Queen herself.

  His lips curled at the thought. How she would tremble. How she would weep. Perhaps she would be relieved to be freed from Radley’s shadow, or perhaps she would rage at what had been stolen from her. It did not matter. Only one of them would walk away from this night with their pride intact.

  And then there was the princess. A necessary piece. The final, untouched remnant of the Queen's royal line, her purpose still undecided in his grand design. Would she kneel, or would she break? Either way, she should watch what was to unfold.

  The city below was unaware. They still believed their palace, their home, their monarchs were untouchable. That belief would be shattered before the moon reached its peak. He had spent weeks moving unseen in their midst, but tonight there was no more hiding. This night, he would make them all remember him again.

  Shock and awe. Power beyond reckoning. A force not of conquest, but of retribution.

  The memories flickered in his mind, unbidden. The weight of every meticulous step taken to bring him here. Every death, every deception, every stroke of his will that bent the world to his purpose. It had all fallen into place, as if ordained by a divine hand. Or perhaps, he mused with a twisted grin, it was simply his own.

  The sky darkened.

  His hands flexed, arcane energy rippling across his fingers. The city below had already begun lighting their torches, blissfully unaware of the storm descending upon them.

  No more waiting. No more planning.

  It was time.

  With a breath that tasted of triumph, he fell toward the palace, a shadow cast long against the twilight.

  Their forgotten hero has returned.