Chapter Thirty-Six: The Last Student of the Oathbreaker
Before he ever trained Caedren, before he buried his true name beneath the mountain winds, Lorien had stood in the shadow of the man who broke the world to save it—Ivan the Oathbreaker.
It had been a hundred years since Kael vanished into legend, a thousand since kings first lost their divine right. In that strange quiet after apocalypse, Ivan did not rebuild thrones. He built sanctuaries. Places where those who survived might learn not to repeat the sins of power. Crumbled cities became classrooms. The foundations of palaces repurposed as hearths and libraries. Where others dreamed of dominion, Ivan dreamed of remembrance. Not of glory, but of warning.
Lorien was just a child then, no more than seven winters old, taken from the ruins of a city whose name no one remembered, saved by Ivan's own hand. The boy had wandered alone through the ash-swept remains, skin blistered by sun and sorrow, until Ivan knelt before him with arms open, not like a conqueror, but like a father who had lost many sons.
"I do not raise warriors," Ivan had told him on the first night, beside a fire built from the broken doors of a fallen temple. "I raise keepers. Because someday, some fool will try to crown himself again. And you will remember what it cost."
Ivan's teachings were brutal, but never cruel. He taught Lorien to read the bones of fallen empires—not just their histories, but their patterns, their sicknesses. How greed grew like ivy, how peace was a thing that must be chosen, not inherited. He taught him to fight, yes, but to fight without joy, and to mourn each victory as if it were a failure. He made him walk battlefields after the crows had left and name every broken body.
"That is the price of forgetting," Ivan would say, pointing to the rusted blades and sun-bleached skulls. "You must remember them all. Even those who deserved to die."
And he did. Lorien remembered. Even when his muscles ached and his fingers bled from days of copying lost languages by candlelight, even when Ivan left him alone in the wilds for weeks with only a riddle and a knife. He remembered because Ivan never asked him to follow—only to witness. To understand. To choose.
He taught him that peace was not the absence of war. It was the war that never needed to be fought.
Lorien never forgot.
He was seventeen when Ivan disappeared. No farewell, no grave, no message left behind—only the soft imprint of his footsteps fading into the eastern snows. Some said he had grown old and weary. Others whispered that he had gone to stop another rising throne before it could solidify into tyranny. Lorien searched for years. He climbed the cliffs of Varnak, walked the salt-flats of Nahar, wandered the silent libraries of the Cinderguard. But Ivan was gone.
Without his teacher, Lorien did not seek command or glory. He did not become a leader or general. He became a pilgrim of memory. A ghost that drifted from war-torn village to refugee camp, from scorched temple to rebel campfires, always asking questions, always planting seeds.
Only in rare moments did he take a student. And even then, only those he saw the shadow of the old fire in. The flame that burned not for conquest, but for understanding.
Most of them died. The world was cruel, and the wise were often the first to perish. But Lorien never stopped searching.
And then, in the ruins of a mountain village smothered in black glass and frost, he found one child.
One boy born not of noble line, but of fire and ruin.
Caedren.
He was too young to know the names of the old gods. Too angry to kneel. Too wild to be taught by sermons or scrolls. But Lorien saw something else—not submission, but refusal. Not ignorance, but a hunger that could not be corrupted.
So he made a choice:
To pass the last flame of that old world into Caedren's hands.
He did not tell the boy who Ivan was, not at first. He let the teachings speak instead. The quiet code of the keepers. The practice of mourning those who fought, even those who fought for them. The refusal to take power as a right. The choosing of silence, not as cowardice, but as strength.
Caedren struggled. He fought the lessons. Argued. Failed. But he returned each time with eyes more open, more scarred. Until one day, he sat in silence beside a grave he had dug with his own hands, a grave for a nameless enemy, and he wept.
Then, Lorien told him.
Told him of Ivan.
Of the first oath broken not out of betrayal, but to save a world that no longer understood its gods.
Of a man who gave up thrones, who taught peace like a weapon sharper than any blade.
And Caedren listened.
Now, in the heart of that boy grown into a man, Ivan's legacy lived on—not as dogma, but as defiance.
Not as memory, but as prophecy.
For Caedren stood not as king, but as a keeper. A warrior who chose not to wield power, but to bear its weight so no tyrant could. In his footsteps, people did not kneel. They walked beside him. And in their unity, not in their fear, they began to dream of a new world.
And Lorien, wherever he now wandered in his twilight years, alone beneath the stars or in whispered tales told in hidden sanctuaries, would know that the oath was not broken in vain.
Because Caedren still remembered.
He remembered the price of crowns.
And he remembered the man who taught him to walk away from one.