[Elythia]
[Eternal City]
Aelfric inhaled deeply, drawing in the air of Elythia, the Eternal City.
Yet, unlike the fresh, crisp air of Aethel, where life flourished with vibrance, the air here felt stagnant. There was something thick in it—an invisible force that clung to the skin, pressing down like the dense hammer. It was more abundant in the city, pooling between the towering buildings, lacing through the narrow alleys, creeping through the lit streets where not a single voice stirred.
And yet he felt more at ease here.
Ironically, Aethel had felt suffocating.
Not from the air, but from something deeper, something he could not grasp with mere logic. In Aethel, there had been no moment where he had not been tense, no second in which he had not been on guard, as if forces pressed against him from all sides. Here, in the Eternal City, the tension had lessened—not vanished, but dulled to a distant hum, a mere echo of what it had been.
He was home.
And soon, he would return to Calliope and Aviva.
Yet… those beings he had met.
Their words lingered.
The Dragon of the End.
The Bringer of Death.
And that… weak God.
Aelfric frowned, his brows furrowing as he shook his head, as if trying to physically shake their words loose, to dislodge their meanings from his mind.
("No, I won't falter… not now… not when I am so close.")
Aviva was still too young. That much was true. He would not offer her the choice now—not yet. But when the time came, when she reached the age where she could truly understand what it meant to be eternal, to stand beyond time itself, he would give her that choice.
And she would accept.
Of this, he held no doubt.
Once she came of age, the three of them would finally stand beyond the chains of mortality. Together. Forever.
The Dragon of the End, the Bringer of Death, and that feeble God—none of them understood. None of them knew how deep his bonds ran, how unyielding they were.
Eons could pass.
Stars could burn out, empires could crumble to dust, the very laws of the realm could shift and break—
But Aviva and Calliope would never forget their love, they would endure. He would not let mortality stand in the way of their eternity.
Even so something was off.
His thoughts—once absolute—were now plagued with the lingering remnants of their words, like echoes bouncing through the hollows of his mind. Before he could ponder about it he took note of a presence.
Aelfric stopped.
His stride halted mid-step, his senses narrowing in on something —or someone— that had entered his awareness.
A figure.
A woman.
Split-colored hair—navy blue and silver so pale it could be mistaken for white. A striking appearance, even among the Ancestors.
Even before turning his head, he knew her name.
Aurélie.
A traveler. One of the strongest among them.
("Tied with Britha as second only to Rhiannon.") She stood beneath the moon's glow, her back facing him, her form completely still. There was something unnatural about her presence—not in the way of danger, not in the way of hostility, but rather in the way the world seemed to bend around her as if she did not fully belong.
Her red eyes—empty, distant—were locked on the vast expanse of the night sky. Countless stars glittered above, distant and burning in silence.
Her lips parted.
And she spoke.
"Our stars are bad, hm…" Her voice was soft, soothing, yet carrying something that pressed against the chest like an immense force.
Aelfric's eyes narrowed. She was standing in the middle of the empty streets—no other Ancestors were near.
No one else could witness this.
Just them.
He considered walking past her. Ignoring her. Dismissing her as nothing more than an oddity, a traveler lost in her own musings.
But then she turned, her gaze snapped to his.
Aelfric stopped cold. Her red eyes pierced through him, as if they could see beyond him, as if they could see through him.
She spoke.
"No soul?" A statement rather than a question.
Aelfric blinked, his expression did not shift, but inwardly—something clicked.
How?
How could she possibly have known?
It was the same as before—that unknown God, speaking as if they had peered directly into his being. They had both seen what was missing.
His soul.
Aelfric's gaze hardened.
("The soul resides in the Ninth Plane.")
The soul did not exist within the same plane of reality as the physical body unless forcibly brought forth. To perceive the soul was an ability beyond most—even among Ancestors, even among deities.
Yet she had spoken of it so easily.
She regarded him with that same blank stare, her expression unreadable.
"I see now." Her eyes did not leave his. "You're the reason, huh?"
Aelfric's frown deepened.
Cryptic. Again.
At first glance, it seemed like nonsense. But there was a certainty in her tone, she knew. What, exactly? He could not yet say. Aurélie tilted her head slightly, she smirked. A tiny, almost imperceptible thing.
"Another dogged fellow, eh?" Her words were laced with something faint—mockery? Pity? Amusement? "In search of immortality, granted it easily, yet not yet having lived through its consequences." Her smirk faded, her eyes—void of warmth, void of emotion—bore into him. "You're a fool. What is your name?"
Aelfric felt something shift, something intangible, something weighty.
"Aelfric."
Aurélie blinked. And then, with a soft breath—she chuckled, it was a quiet sound.
"Ah, one of our lead researchers." She took a step forward. "As your senior, boy, I shall give you some much-needed advice." She met his gaze, her expression eerily calm. "Best to find your loved ones and say goodbye."
Aelfric's blood turned to ice.
"...What?"
Aurélie shook her head, her voice dropped lower.
"Foolishness," she murmured, and though her tone remained as detached as ever. "Those damned Keepers of Order have already sent our executioner."
Aelfric's pupils shrank. Executioner?
Her eyes traced the distant stars above—the same stars she had been observing when he first spotted her. "The moment you forsook your mortality, they knew," she continued, the soft lilt of her voice calm, almost tranquil, yet her words curled upon him like an invisible noose, tightening around his throat. "Those damn entities knew."
Her lips curled, but it wasn't a smile. It wasn't anything. Just a minuscule shift, a meaningless expression of something deeper—contempt? Resignation? Perhaps both. She scoffed, the sound soft yet sharp. "We are bound by their laws, Aelfric," she stated, and for the first time, she used his name, no longer speaking in riddles but delivering something irrefutable. "Even your little stunt was long preordained. Do you understand now?"
Aelfric said nothing. His mind raced, but she gave him no room to speak, no space to deny, to counter.
"I suspect our race is finished for," she added, and though the words themselves were grim, she spoke them with an indifference that unsettled him more than if she had wept. There was no sorrow, no fury—only detachment. A conclusion she had already reached long ago, long before this conversation, long before she even laid eyes on him.
She turned her back to him then, as though there was nothing more to say, nothing more to acknowledge. He opened his mouth, his voice caught between impulse and hesitation, his mind clawing for something, anything—
But before he could utter a word, she spoke once more.
"I reject my place in this realm."
Aelfric barely had time to process the meaning of those words before—
She was gone.
Not vanished in a rush of wind, not faded into shadow like the illusions of weaker beings. No, it was as if she had never been there at all, as though her presence had been nothing but a mirage, an illusion of something no longer tethered to this world.
The air where she had stood remained undisturbed. The night did not react, nor did the city around him. It was a disappearance so complete, so absolute, that even the space she occupied felt… vacant, as if reality had simply erased her existence without so much as a whisper.
Aelfric remained standing there, frozen.
A rejection of the realm.
She hadn't fled. She hadn't hidden.
She had severed herself from the world.
An executioner, his eyes narrowed as her words sank into him. He was being watched. And whatever was coming… was already here.
Aelfric's breath stilled.
And then his eyes caught the faintest anomaly in the horizon—a distant radiant figure, hovering far beyond the skyline, shrouded in the darkness yet their form was radiant but too far to make out any discernible features, yet it was there. It did not move, did not even shift. The air of Elythia seemed heavy and suffocating in this moment.
Something was wrong. The figure remained distant, yet its presence bore down on him like a hand tightening around his throat. A shiver ran down his spine, a sensation he had not felt in what felt like eternity—something primal, instinctual ane buried beneath the layers of knowledge and power he had acquired over the years. A warning.
Then it happened.
A detonation, not of flame nor of thunder, but of pure force. The space before him ruptured without warning, without buildup, without the courtesy of anticipation—one moment, Elythia stood in its eternal grandeur, its structures piercing the dark skies, its pathways carved in perfection—and the next, it broke.
A single instant. That was all it took. The air split apart, the world twisted, an unfathomable shockwave tore through the vast city, an all-consuming force that did not explode outward but collapsed inward, dragging everything into itself. Towers buckled and shattered into dust before they could even fall, their structures folding in on themselves as if space had simply decided their existence no longer held meaning. The streets rippled violently before disintegrating into countless fragmented shards. The grand edifices that had stood for millennia were reduced to nothing before they could even be mourned.
Aelfric did not have time to react.
The force struck him before his mind could process movement, before even his instincts could demand he flee. His body bound by the laws that denied him Death—even it could not resist the force that swallowed him whole. His vision blurred, warped and twisted—his form was being dragged, pulled toward the epicenter of the devastation, an unknown gravity ripping at him from every direction.
Elythia's very foundations crumbled, vast bridges and platforms that once defied conventional space and logic simply folded inward, their architecture reduced to nothing more than debri and then fragments. Structures collapsed like fragile glass sculptures, the streets, the corridors, the sky above broke.
The shockwave spread, obliterating all in its path. A vast district of the city vanished in an instant, and then the very city.
-------------------
Darkness and silence.
An empty space where sound should have been, where the concept of breath, movement, thought—all of it had been devoured by the catastrophic force that had ripped through Elythia. For a moment, Aelfric was nothing—weightless, suspended in an abyss that neither accepted nor rejected his existence.
Then—pain.
A sharp, piercing sensation lanced through his consciousness as awareness violently crashed back into him, the heaviness of reality returning like a hammer to his skull. His body, battered, broken, torn apart in ways he had never experienced, lay beneath an oppressive weight, the pressure suffocating, the cold bite of stone and dust pressing against his form.
He could not see, not immediately, only darkness.
With a sudden, furious push, his strength surged through his battered limbs as he shoved the massive slab of stone off his body. Light—what little of it remained—poured into his vision as he gasped sharply, his body instinctively pulling in breath despite the dust-choked air, his eyes snapping open to the devastation surrounding him.
The first thing he registered—his arm was gone.
Severed at the shoulder, a torn stump where his limb had once been, the wound nauseating, flesh shredded. His body bore countless gnashes, deep lacerations that carved through flesh and into bone, his black robes torn, barely clinging to him. But even as his mind acknowledged the injuries, even as the pain threatened to root itself in his consciousness—they were already gone.
Before his eyes, the wounds closed, flesh knitting together in an instant, his form mending itself without pace, the missing arm reforming as if it had never been severed. Even his attire restored itself, the fabric weaving back together.
But none of it mattered.
Because as he rose, as his now-healed hands clenched into trembling fists, as his vision fully focused upon what lay before him—his stomach dropped.
Elythia was gone.
What had once been their Eternal City, the pinnacle of their existence, a place untouched by time—it was nothing more than ruin. The expanse that had once been its streets, its endless towers, its districts had been reduced to debris, an unrecognizable place of shattered stone and collapsing structures, broken buildings falling out of the earth.
His breath came in sharp, gasps. His fingers dug into his palms, nails digging into flesh.
Where were they?
Where were Calliope and Aviva?
His heart slammed against his ribs with a force that nearly sent him to his knees, his mind already going haywire, racing through every possibility, every scenario, none of them ending in anything other than pure terror.
He turned sharply, his body already moving before his thoughts could catch up—running, sprinting through the ruined city, leaping over crumbling structures, dodging falling debris, his movement fueled by desperation.
"Calliope!" His voice tore through the silence, raw and frantic, the sound of it foreign even to himself, cracked and unrestrained, the first time in milleniums he had allowed such desperation to escape him. "Aviva!"
Nothing.
His breath stopped, his throat tightening, his vision blurring, red eyes darting across the area, searching, scanning and refusing—refusing to accept what his mind was already whispering, what the broken world before him was already screaming.
No. No, he wouldn't accept it.
He couldn't.
His pace increased, feet slamming against the fractured ground, pushing faster, faster, faster, the ruins around him blurring as he surged forward like a man possessed, driven by something far deeper than instinct, than reason.
Because this wasn't supposed to happen.
This could not be happening.
And then he saw it.
His home, destroyed.
Everything collapsed, crushed, annihilated beyond recognition, the remnants of what had once been his sanctuary, now nothing but shattered stone and scattered debris, the foundation torn apart, as if some cruel God had reached down and smote it from existence.
But none of that registered, none of that mattered, because amidst that destruction, amidst the scene—his eyes widened in horror, his breath hitched, his body froze, seized by an all-consuming, paralyzing terror.
There—mangled, broken, half-buried beneath the rubble—were Calliope and Aviva.
His mind rejected it instantly, recoiled as if burned, as if what he saw was an illusion, a cruel trick played by his own fears, his body locking up for a single, agonizing second, the world around him falling into a deafening silence.
No.
The word echoed in his skull, a desperate denial, a rejection of what lay before him, but his eyes wouldn't let him turn away, wouldn't let him escape, forcing him to drink in every gruesome detail, every unbearable reality, every twisted, lifeless limb, every blood-stained inch of flesh, every unnatural angle of their bodies.
His mouth opened, a strangled noise caught in his throat, something between a gasp and a sob, a broken, animalistic sound that barely managed to escape his lips before—
"NO!"
His scream tore through everything, agonized beyond words, his entire existence condensed into that singular cry, a wail of anguish that shattered the air around him.
His legs finally moved, his body lurching forward, rushing, stumbling and falling to his knees before their crushed forms, his hands trembling violently, reaching out—but he didn't touch them.
He couldn't.
His fingers hovered mere inches from their broken bodies, shaking so violently it felt like his existence was coming apart, his breaths shuddering, erratic and uneven, his throat tightening, choking on every breath, every sob that threatened to rip from his chest.
"Calliope… Aviva…" Their names fell from his lips in a low sound, disbelieving, as if speaking them would wake them, would pull them back, would undo this nightmare. "Please… no, no, no, please—"
They didn't move.
They didn't stir.
They were dead.
Aelfric's chest collapsed inward, as if something had reached inside him and torn out his heart, his stomach twisting so violently he thought he might vomit. His vision blurred, a stinging heat burning at his eyes, his entire body convulsing as the reality sank its claws into him—they were gone. His family, his world, his reason for everything—reduced to lifeless corpses, taken from him in an instant, crushed beneath a destruction he had been powerless to stop.
A broken, ragged sob tore itself from his throat, his hands clutching at his own chest, fingers digging into his robes, into his own skin as if trying to grasp something—anything—to ground himself, to keep himself from unraveling completely.
But it was too late.
The realization had sunk too deep.
Aelfric's mind was twisting and warping, frantically clawing for some excuse, some illusion, some answer that would make this anything but reality—this wasn't happening, it couldn't be happening, it was a nightmare, a cruel trick, something fabricated, something false, his mind reeling, the impossibility of it, this wasn't real, this wasn't real, this wasn't real—
It couldn't be.
"No, no, no, no—this—this is a lie, this is—this isn't happening—" His voice broke, shattering under the force of his own desperation, trembling hands shooting up to grasp at his own face, his fingers digging into his scalp, raking down over his skin, clawing, as if trying to rip away the reality that suffocated him, that pressed down on him like an unbearable weight, his entire existence caving in beneath it.
His mind fought violently against the truth, twisting and contorting in on itself, searching, grasping, reaching for something—anything—to make sense of this, to undo this, to reverse this unbearable, crushing horror.
"This isn't real, it's not real, it's not real, it's not real—" He muttered the words like a chant, a frantic, crazed repetition spilling from his lips, his voice soaked in desperation.
His gaze darted wildly, frantically scanning the destruction, searching for something—anything—to prove this was an illusion, some flaw, some inconsistency, a reason to believe that if he just blinked, if he just took another breath, they'd be there, smiling at him, waiting for him—
But they weren't.
Calliope's lifeless eyes stared up at nothing.
Aviva's small, fragile form lay crushed beneath the rubble.
His body lurched forward violently as if to reach for them, as if to pull them into his arms and shake them awake, but his own arms refused to move, refused to reach out, because if he touched them, if he felt the cold, lifelessness of their bodies, then that would be it. That would mean they were gone. That would mean this was real. That would mean everything was over.
"No, no, no, please—please, please, PLEASE—" his voice cracked, rising into something hysterical, a wail of grief and denial.
He sobbed violently, tears streaming down his face, a flood of anguish he had no control over, his entire body convulsing as he let out scream after scream, howls of agony that tore through the night, that shattered the silence.
He clutched at his head, shaking it, rocking himself, the horrifying, suffocating realization pressing down on him—
This was real.
This was happening.
Calliope was dead.
Aviva was dead.
His world was dead.
"This is simply the consequences."