The Ritual

Nobody knows when Severin Falkenrath finds the Ravana Ruins. He is careful about that from the beginning.

What is known is that he goes alone, and that whatever is there is older than anything he has a name for. The ruins suggest it has been reached before. By whom is not recorded, and was not recorded then either.

He tries to take it by himself.

It nearly kills him.

He survives with scarring he will carry for the rest of a life that turns out to have no natural end, and with one piece of knowledge: it will not go into one person. It has to be spread before it can be gathered.

So he needs four other people, and he needs them to want it.

He tells no one. Not that year, not for the next several decades, not ever. Four men will spend the rest of their lives in his company and die without learning he came here first.

Consider that he then waits.

Whatever number of years lies between that attempt and 1277 is time he spends running a trade empire beside three men he has already decided to kill. He negotiates with them. He eats with them. The friendship at Glaceus Arena was not a lie when it was made, and he keeps it in good repair afterward, because a thing kept in good repair is more useful.

The plan is not a moment of greed. It is a career.

In 1277 he is sixty-eight and he raises the subject of dying.

It is an easy subject to raise. They are all old now. Leopold von Lachsenhausen can feel the campaigns in his joints, Victor von Lachsenhausen has outlived most of the men whose signatures he collected, and Lucien Alvaro de Castillon has built something that will pass out of his hands the moment his hands stop.

Then he mentions a place he has heard of.

In 1282 five people stand in the Ravana Ruins.

Four of them are The Avari. The fifth is Elias Castillon, thirty-three years old, present because his father brought him and for no other reason. Nobody proposed him. Nobody counted.

The energy distributes itself. One share each, to everyone standing there, which is five and not four.

Severin Falkenrath has planned this for decades and has been wrong about it since the moment he walked in with a son he did not account for. He now needs to kill four people instead of three, and one of them is the only one who never wanted any of it.

He begins that day.