El Jefe

Orval Moldoon's realm didn't die all at once. That was the Chaos Legion's way, not a single catastrophic blow but a long diminishment, mana leeched out of the earth and the air until magic simply ceased to be. Most of the realm's denizens spent those early months in denial or panic. Orval spent them watching. And when the legions appeared on the horizon, he didn't flee. He plodded toward them.

A tortisian walking alone toward an invading army was either a spy or a fool, but he didn't move fast enough to be dangerous either way. The legionnaires threw him in with the other conscripts and put him to work.

It didn't last. Orval knew things about the land and the people in it, and he was not shy about saying so. With his knowledge, the legion moved through the region faster than anyone had planned. Then through the next region. Then the next. Someone among the conscripts started calling him El Jefe which, in the language of his home world, meant "The Nimble." It was meant as a joke. But by the time his realm was spent, the commanders were using it too, and the joke had gone out of it.

What followed was centuries of campaigns across numerous realms, each one feeding the dark god that most of the legion believed was their patron and their purpose. Orval watched Uul feed. Watched the mana of conquered realms get consumed by its endless gluttony. And he began to understand something he kept carefully to himself.

Uul was not the endgame. Uul was just another pawn.

He was with the Chaos Legion when the rifts finally opened on the Splinterlands. He was there when the armada fell and the kingdoms crumbled and the thirteen provinces of the Chaos Empire rose from the wreckage. He watched the rebellion take root and spread the way he had watched resistance movements spread before, noting where it would hold and where it would break.

When the Chaos Empire was pushed back to Tovingor, El Jefe went with it. He has been there since, patient in the way of someone who has outlasted many other worlds and expects to outlast this one too.

What none of the legionnaires know, what even the Ascendency does not fully grasp, is that El Jefe has spent centuries studying Silus of the Rift the way Silus studies everything else.

Mount Praetorous is not a destination. It is the end of a very long sentence, one Orval Moldoon began reading in the ruins of his own world centuries ago. He knows exactly how it ends. He intends to be there when it does.