The world burned.

  William didn’t know when it had started or if it had always been burning. The air was thick with the stench of scorched burnt iron and molten steel, the very battlefield reshaped by the inferno pulsing from within him. His veins felt like rivers of va, and his skin barely held together over the writhing heat inside. His breaths came in ragged, smoke-filled gasps, yet each inhale made him stronger. Each heartbeat pumped fire through his body, feeding the insatiable hunger gnawing at his soul.

  Creatures that rushed forward as William devoured their comrades until nothing but a core was left were Ashborn Warforms called Rage Burners.

  Towering between six and eight feet, each was covered in fractured obsidian pting, with molten veins. As they grew closer, they began glowing brighter. The ground around them hissed as the frozen world melted from the intensifying heat caused by their growing rage. It was like they were walking infernos capable of incinerating anything in their path.

  Unlike others, they cannot wield Warforged Weapons—their bodies are their weapons. With every wound, they would burn hotter, their strength multiplying with their anger. A fully enraged Rage Burner could radiate so much heat that the ground beneath them melts into va, turning battlefields into smoldering wastends.

  The problem was that one of their kind had just been not only killed, but consumed before they could take any damage. The core of their fighting style were drawn out fights, not something that was over in a moment.

  William ignored the on coming horde. His focus was on the deep red swirling energy of the globe size core he held in his hands. The energy was being drawn into William's burning body, and with it, strange foreign visions started to repce the old haunting one.

  Burn them all.

  The voice sounded like his own, but when William looked up from the core, his entire world shifted. He was back in his house, reading the paper, just like he had always done before...

  "I thought we were going to go out today?"

  The voice nearly made him jump out of his skin as he looked up to see his dead wife smiling back at him. William froze, his breath hitching.

  The battlefield was gone.

  The acrid stench of burning iron and flesh had vanished, repced by the comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee and buttered toast. Sunlight streamed in through the window, casting warm golden hues across the wooden floors of their modest home. The air was clean, free of smoke and blood, filled instead with the faint hum of the radio in the background.

  And there she was. His wife.

  Cd in a loose sweater and pajama shorts, her hair still damp from a morning shower, she tilted her head at him, amused by his startled reaction. So real. So impossibly real.

  “William?” Her voice was light, teasing, just like he remembered. “Did I scare you?”

  His throat tightened.

  This wasn’t real.

  He knew that.

  But his fingers trembled as he set down the newspaper, the coarse paper crinkling beneath his touch. He tried to steady himself, to push away the encroaching dread crawling up his spine.

  “How…?” His voice was barely a whisper.

  She just ughed. “How what? You’ve been spacing out a lot tely.”

  His breath came shallow. He could feel the warmth of the room, the soft creak of the chair beneath him. The sensation of the polished wooden table against his palm. The smell of her shampoo as she leaned forward, pcing a hand against his forehead.

  “You’re not running a fever,” she mused. “But you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  A ghost.

  Yes.

  That’s exactly what this was.

  His heart pounded against his ribs, his body refusing to move, paralyzed between the warmth of the illusion and the cold, crushing reality cwing at the back of his mind.

  Then, soft fingers cupped his face, tilting his chin up until he was forced to meet her gaze.

  Her eyes were so familiar.

  So perfect.

  And yet—wrong.

  He couldn’t pce it at first, but as he looked closer, the warmth in her gaze was just a fraction too still. Like the embers of a dying fire, flickering on the edge of extinction.

  “William.” Her voice was softer now, almost pleading. “I want you to stay with me, and never leave."

  The words sent a shiver down William’s spine.

  He wanted to believe them.

  He wanted to give in, to sink into the warmth of this illusion and never leave. The battlefield, the war, the fire—all of it could disappear if he just let go.

  His wife’s touch was gentle, her fingers brushing against his cheek, so impossibly real. The scent of her skin, the slight callouses on her fingertips from years of working with her hands, the way her breath warmed his face as she leaned closer—his heart ached with the overwhelming need to hold her.

  But something was wrong.

  The warmth wasn't natural. It didn’t radiate from her like it should have. It was seeping from him, bleeding into the air like a dying sun struggling to keep the world lit.

  And her eyes.

  That eerie, flickering stillness in her gaze—it was like staring into an echo rather than a person.

  The walls of their home suddenly wavered, rippling like disturbed water. The radio’s faint hum looped, repeating the same few distorted notes over and over.

  This is only a taste of the reality that I can offer you.

  Before William could react, he was suddenly running in the cold, but this wasn't the frozen earth he now knew. No, there was a child screaming for help in what should have been a frozen river.

  A memory of the same child's frozen and lifeless face fshed in his mind, but William pushed it aside. His body moved into action, and within moments, William had pulled the shaking child out of the water. The boy started to thank William, but the world blurred again around him.

  Outside of the dream world William's Blessing of Immotion, the core in his hands had turned bck. It was now falling apart as the first of the Rage Burner Warforms was less than thirty feet from him, but the burning pear shaped man still didn't move.

  Then William's head tipped back and he let out a soundless roar that radiated so much heat that the ground around him became a molten puddle. Even the Ashborn, born in fire, slowed as they could feel the waves rolling off him, but it was too te for them.

  William's head came down, but his eyes had become a starry cosmic bck. It strongly contrasted with the rest of his burning body, but this wasn't William, this was something else.

  Like a fat glowing demon with burning hair and beard, William's body blurred forward. The moment William moved, the battlefield shifted.

  Heat and force erupted in tandem, the frozen wastend cracking as his foot pushed off the molten earth. The air split with the raw power behind his charge, sending out a shockwave that blew back the nearest Rage Burners like brittle kindling before a storm.

  The first Warform, standing at nearly eight feet, barely had time to react before William's fist caved in its obsidian-pted chest. The force of the impact didn’t just crack its body—it shattered it. Fractured, glowing pieces of molten armor exploded outward, and the warform’s body was obliterated from the sheer pressure of the blow. Its core, an unstable mass of seething rage, flickered weakly in the center of the destruction before it too was consumed by the inferno.

  William didn’t stop.

  The second and third Rage Burners lunged in unison, their bodies now a blinding white-hot glow, fueled by the fury of their fallen kin. They moved with terrifying speed, molten cws swinging toward William in a coordinated strike meant to bisect him where he stood.

  But William was faster.

  He twisted mid-step, his burning form bending unnaturally as he ducked low, dodging the twin strikes with an eerie, liquid-like grace. The very air around him shimmered and warped as the sheer heat radiating from his body distorted reality itself.

  Then he struck.