Chapter 47:Echoes...
His sister clung to him like the last anchor in a storm, her small form pressed desperately against his chest. The blonde knight materialized from the swirling mist like a ghost answering a summons, his armor catching the dying light in dull, sorrowful gleams. The knight's gauntleted hand formed a white-knuckled fist, his head bowing as if bearing the weight of a collapsing sky.
Where was Lady Auria? Alwyn's eyes darted around the knight, searching for her familiar crimson hair and steady presence. Why wasn't she with him? What could have happened to make this knight seem so... broken?
The knight's voice cut through the thick air, stripped of all but essential meaning. "We have to leave." The words fell like stones, final and unyielding.
Leave? Alwyn's mind recoiled. Leave her behind? The protest died in his throat when his eyes met the knight's.
Through the fog that softened the sharp lines of the knight's face and turned his blonde hair to faded gold, those eyes stared back - hollowed, yet holding a treacherous glimmer of reflected sunset. At their edges, unshed tears gathered like morning dew on a grave.
The truth struck Alwyn with the force of a physical blow, and his own eyes burned in terrible sympathy.
---
Auria exhaled a controlled stream of air from her shadowed refuge, her breath crystallizing in the chill. Through the oppressive dark, jagged silhouettes congealed - milky-eyed figures advancing with the inevitability of tide, their hungry growls forming a chorus from nightmares. Her heart hammered against her ribs; the numbers were impossible. But this was the bargain she had made - a diversion to buy Mennyx time, a beacon to draw the Condemnation's hellish gaze. Only then could she earn her rest in the halls of Eternity. The rest was on Mennyx's shoulders now.
Rasping footsteps tore the silence, swift and desperate. Her eyes narrowed, tracking forms lunging at impossible speeds. The Condemnation's influence? Her thoughts shattered as bolt-lightning pain exploded behind her left eye. In the disorienting flash, she saw him - Lysander, his eyes bulging madly, teeth filed to iron spikes, his familiar features twisted into a feral rictus. Her vision swam crimson, her body stumbling back on pure instinct... Lysander...
Then...
Reality reasserted itself as a ripple of displaced air. Her focus snapped back to a skeletal guardsman in rusting chainmail, thrusting a corroded pike. She didn't meet the blow. She flowed with it, sidestepping as her left hand slapped the haft downward, her reverse-gripped blade flashing upward to find the sweet spot where jaw met skull. A twist, a pull, and she was already pivoting into the next motion.
She moved as a dancer in a field of death, her footwork a study in minimalism. A rotting corpse staggered into her space, arms grasping. She dropped, her leg sweeping its ankles from beneath it. As it fell forward, her sword - now in a standard grip - described a tight, vertical arc that severed its spine with surgical precision.
No energy wasted. No theatrical sweeps. Every motion was a vector of pure efficiency. She couldn't afford flair, not with one arm numb and useless. She needed an edge - something to counter the impossible equation of her situation. Her breaths came in ragged pulls. What would the old drillmaster, Bors, do?
Think.
Then it crystallized: their own mass and momentum. She could weaponize physics itself. A bead of cold sweat traced a path through the grime on her temple. There it was - her leverage. A grim, fleeting smile touched her lips.
A hulking abomination - a former blacksmith by the sheer bulk of it - charged with a mindless roar. She pivoted on her back foot, letting its momentum carry it past her, her sword-tip etching a swift, precise line across the backs of its knees. As it crashed down, a final, economical thrust to the base of its skull provided the punctuation.
Her breathing maintained its rhythm, a steady metronome against the guttural chaos. The cold fire of the bite was a spreading numbness she compartmentalized, shoving it into a locked room in her mind. This was her final performance. Pain would not be granted a standing ovation.
Two attackers converged from flanking positions. She feinted high at the left, forcing its guard up. In that stolen heartbeat, she dropped and spun, her blade sweeping horizontally to shear through the right one's legs. Completing the rotation, she drove the point through the first's eye socket before its arms could lower.
But they were a hydra - for every head removed, two grew. A clawed hand, missing fingers, raked for her face. She arched back, the filthy nails whispering past her chin, and her counterstroke removed the arm at the elbow. Her gaze never lingered, already finding the next target - a young woman in a tattered dress, jaw unhinged in a silent scream, closing with terrifying speed.
Auria met the charge not with a killing blow but a deflection, using the flat of her blade to redirect the creature's momentum harmlessly past. As it stumbled, she slammed her pommel down on its occipital bone. It collapsed, twitching - a moment of mercy, a stolen breath before it would inevitably rise.
A brutal impact hammered her backplate, driving the air from her lungs in a whoosh and sending her stumbling forward. She caught herself on one knee, twisting as a bloated corpse - a gravedigger, perhaps - swung a meaty fist where her head had been. From the crouch, she became a piston, surging upward to drive her sword through its rot-swollen belly. The blade erupted from its back in a geyser of black ichor.
She wrenched it free, arms screaming, the numbness in her bitten limb now a throbbing ice crawling toward her shoulder. She stood, panting, her silver blade now a fouled, dripping thing. The circle had tightened. Dozens of milky, vacant eyes fixed on her. The arithmetic was simple, brutal: one more second, one more kill.
The ground trembled, a subtle vibration. The Condemnation remained rooted, but its blazing suns of eyes had shifted - no longer fixed on her. The soul-crushing pressure of its attention eased, which could only mean... Her mind went cold with terror. It had found another target. The only one worth its gaze besides her was...
Adrenaline, cold and sharp, flooded her system. No. She had to pull its attention back. She had to.
But first...
Her blade whipped in a silver arc, cleaving through the neck of an undead soldier whose milky eyes held only void. Black ichor sprayed in thick, pooling ropes. She leaned on her sword, a crutch now, her left hand clutching at her chest - her lung burned like she'd inhaled embers, each breath a ragged, constricted fight. Her legs wavered, her vision tunneling.
Then a memory, distant and sun-warmed, surfaced through the pain: the dappled courtyard of their old training grounds. Nyra stood there, her short black hair ruffled by the breeze, eyes sparkling with familiar defiance. "You know what I think," Nyra's voice, light and teasing, echoed. "The true heroism isn't in the valiant lives we live, but in the ones we die to protect. I mean..." A cherry-sweet smile flashed as she toyed with her quiver's strap. "Not only do we cement a legacy here, but we get to become legends in the halls of Eternity."
Then Lysander's voice, faint and laced with mockery from the memory's shadows where he lounged against a pillar, sharpening his blade. "Don't go dying lamely just for honor... it'll be a pain..."
She smiled through the haze, the memory dissolving like smoke. They had both died as they lived - heroes. Now it was her turn to inscribe her name. Gritting her teeth against the fire in her lung and the dead weight of her arm, she forced herself upright. She looked forward to telling them, with quiet pride, that she had held the line.
Propping herself on her sword, her posture a testament to endured agony, her left eye flickering with disorientation yet stubbornly tracking the faint light - she was alive, and where there was breath, there was a thread of hope.
Her mind, through the pounding in her skull, calculated. She needed elevation. Her eyes, squinting, pierced the fog beyond the waiting horde. There, a silhouette emerged - the warped outline of a dilapidated house, its steep, towering roof a jagged promise against the gloom. The perfect vantage.
That was the objective. But the path was a solid wall of milky-eyed horrors, their decayed forms packed tight, a growling, living barricade. She would have to carve a canyon through them. An impossible task, unless...
Her grip tightened on the sword's hilt. Unless she used it. The ancient Sword art...the last legacy of the House of Vernys...
She settled into the foundational stance, her body a coiled spring of final defiance, and exhaled the world away.
---
Moments Earlier
His form coalesced atop the spire of a gargantuan cathedral, its weathered stone pinnacle a stark finger pointing at an indifferent sky, leering gargoyles his only companions. And still, he felt nothing - no bite from the wind that plucked at his white hair, no solidity beneath his feet. Before him, Eden sprawled, a wound upon the world, drowned in a despair so profound it swallowed light and hope whole.
Then he felt it - a golden glare, fierce as a sun, pinning him in its focus. He exhaled sharply. No explanation needed. It was his colossal executioner, the architect of his near-oblivion. Well, he had died, but at least he hadn't been rendered into abstract art like Lucien. A bitter, cold knot tightened in his chest at the memory.
He crushed the feeling. These were echoes, not people. He clung to the distinction, a vital lie in a sea of unsettling realities. So why did the colossal fiend stare with such singular intensity? Could it perceive him? He waved a hand, then another. No reaction - its gaze remained, burning. Not that he was frightened. Perhaps a little. He was a ghost here, intangible, untouchable.
The staccato rhythm of hooves shattered his contemplation. His eyes tracked a white horse erupting from the fog, charging toward a distant, monolithic black gate. Its rider: a blonde knight in gleaming plate, sword sheathed at his hip.
he identified internally. The knight's name... it was... Men... Mennyx...his hands on his chin.., A jolt went through him - the second time he'd successfully retrieved a name from this tangled memory-scape.the unpredicted result of his Hypothesis....he was gambling with the course of history..
His scrutiny moved to the horse's other passengers: two children. The dark-haired boy in front, holding his sister with a protective fierceness.., was clearly Alwyn..The one existing with a Fragment of him..,The girl's auburn hair caught the feeble light.
His eyes snapped wide, his body jerking backward so violently he windmilled his arms for balance. His jaw went slack.
Amber eyes, touched with hints of green...
A single name escaped his lips, fractured and disbelieving.
"Tiffany..."