The world was quiet.
Almost too quiet.
Ash fell from the sky in slow, drifting spirals-as soft as snow, as Grey as mourning. The Ash had coated everything in sight. Ruins of once-proud towers, mangled steel and blackened bones. It had blurred the line between the earth and the sky, as if even the heavens had lowered themselves to grieve.
Aethon stood alone, ankle-deep in the stillness, his breath shallow and heart silent. His sword hung loosely in his grip, it's edge had red with something dry and flaking. He looked at it confused as he didn't remember drawing it.
He didn't remember anything clearly anymore.
Only her screams.
Only the moment he hesitated.
Mai. That was her name. Aethon had begun to remember the warmth of her fingers gripping his wrist, begging him not to leave her behind. He remembered the blood-too much of it. The sound of demon's claws splitting her open like paper. But most of all, he remembers standing there, frozen. Watching. Thinking.
Only one think raced through his head.
"Why didn't I move?" he whispered in a low and calm voice. "Why didn't I do something to save her?"
There was no answer. Just the wind that sounded like breathing and silence that pressed like an anvil on his chest.
Aethon dropped down to his knees, the ash puffing up around him. It clinged to his coat and skin, as if it was trying to bury him with everything else, while at the same time something inside him began to crack very slow and sharp, like old ice.
He didn't cry or scream. He felt a sense of satisfaction, as if a weight had been lifted off his chest.
Tears felt too human for what he was becoming.
As Aethon looked up everything started to become hazy, and has he blinked he awoke in his room, confused and covered in sweat. He had repeatedly been having the same dream again and again, but with different events taking place but having the same outcome. Not the exact battlefield, but the shape of it. The feel of it. It was too realistic. This ending had already played out in fragments of broken sleep. Walls burning. The moon weeping red. Whenever Aethon passed the tall obsidian mirror that was kept in the Mirror Chamber it reflected a version of himself who whispered words in a voice not his own.
"None of this is real, not yet." Whispered the reflection. Aethon always ignored it as he thought it was due to sleep deprivation or from training and burying his head in the books for too long, but each time he went to sleep and had that specific dream he awoke, the memory faded like smoke but the dread remained. It clung onto the back of his skull, lodged behind his eyes, crawling deeper with every night,and whenever he closed his eyes, when he tried going back to sleep, the same mental image was painted onto his eyes, him covered in blood that was not his, and his home reduced to ash and rubble.
But lately the dreams began to speak to him and started calling him names he didn't know.
The Ashen Architect
The Forgotten Spark
Fateweaver
Legacy Holder
The Nameless
As Aethon began to remember more of his dream he began to remember more about the girl named Mai. A moment of his dream he remembers and recalls so vividly, it had started to become the only thing he wanted to remember as it was the only part that made him feel safe but at the same time filled him with regret for reasons he didn't understand has it was just a dream. This specific part been of a girl from the village who was barefooted, muddy cheeked, and wide eyed. She had been staring at him for too long. He had offered here a weak smile.
She never smiled back.
"You feel like a dream I forgot," she said.
"Like you're going to go away soon."
At that moment in his dream he had laughed. Now, that moment haunts him like a curse.
As Aethon tried to understand and process this dream, he looked up and back down but when he did instead of been in his room he was covered in blood and his body was bruised and he didn't understand what was going on. He couldn't remember what he was doing.
He rose slowly, body aching,mind fractured. The ruins of house Lunaris sprawled around him like a corpse with its ribs open to the sky. Banners in tatters. The ancient moon sigil smudged into nothing.
All of it was gone.
He continued to walk, just following the pull in his chest. Past scorched archways and blood stained halls. Eventually reaching the Mirror Chamber.
The tall obsidian mirror loomed, at the center, untouched by fire. It's frame still pulsed faintly with the familys old gylphs, which was dying magic clinging to purpose.
Aethons reflection stared back, but there was something with it.
There was no light in his eyes. Not a trace of warmth. No recognition. It was him, but older. Sharper. A stranger who had been forged by choices he had not made yet. The reflections mouth moved even though Aethon said nothing.
"You will save them... But they will never know it was you."
The mirror shattered. No sound, just fragments falling and then disappearing mid-air, as if it never existed.
He fell to his knees.
Hands on the floor.
Breathing hard.
And then something inside him began to blink, like a presence hiding beneath the skin of the world had opened a single eye..
And saw him. Then all of a sudden a voice whispered in his head. He couldn't make out what the voice was trying to say.
That voice came to him unbidden.
He didn't understand it but it stayed.
He couldn't place the feeling, but something in him pulsed with absence, like a missing name on a gravestone he'd never seen.
He dreamt of this place before. Not this battlefield, but the feeling, it was like been pulled backwards through time that was unraveling thread by thread. His own memories were starting to feel foreign. It felt has if someone else's pain and eyes had replaced his own.
For a second he felt like a shadow, of someone yet to exist. At that moment he understood something he didn't have words for yet, something that the silence said, :"some legacies aren't written to be remembered. Some are made to be forgotten so that the world can keep going."
He stared at the ashes coating his fingers. His shadow had no longer reached behind him.
He wasn't sure if he was real.
He looked up and thought to himself in confusion," What am I going to become?"
A breeze hit his face and said with a whisper
"The Fateweaver of Destiny."
As Aethon looked up with confusion, and the overwhelming feeling of guilt for some reason, rested the moon which was hidden behind the layers of smoke and ruin.
Cracked.
Bleeding light.
Just like him.