All I Do Is Conquer

Every Reaper raises the dead. Kai's Pale Legion are something else. Survive the Lorefather's pool and a furnace awakens inside you — the power to raise corpses as weapons. It's what the White Spire makes you for. It's what you owe them in return for surviving. Kai survives. No furnace. What he gets instead is a fog-covered world growing in the dark behind his eyes. Vast and ruined. And somewhere inside it, a palace that shouldn't exist, with a throne that has been sitting empty for a very long time. Then the corpses start rising as something other. Pale and cold and organized, they form ranks without orders and hold ground without commands. They watch him with the patience of soldiers who have spent centuries waiting for exactly this moment. They don't follow him because he commands them. They follow him because something inside that fog-covered world decided he was their Imperator long before he was born. When the White Spire assigns Kai to lead a war party into the Wilds — cull the monsters, come back useful — he has one option: go deeper into that inner world, past the ruins, past the fog, toward the throne at the center of a palace built by something that has been planning longer than Kai has been alive. Because the Pale Legion is only the beginning. He wanted power enough to survive. What answered is building an empire, whether he's ready or not.