Chapter 2: The Weight of a Spark
The silence after the battle was louder than the fighting had been.
Leander stood in the town square, now a makeshift triage and rallying point. The air, once thick with the stench of fear and demonic rot, now crackled with a new, unfamiliar energy. It tasted of ozone and hot stone. All around him, people were staring at their hands, at the faint, shimmering auras that clung to them, at the small, impossible miracles they had performed.
Their eyes, however, kept drifting back to him.
He was the still point in the turning world. The epicenter. The unawakened—the majority who had hidden and survived—looked at him with a mixture of reverence and terror. The awakened looked at him with a dawning, desperate hope.
"You."
The voice was gruff, belonging to Captain Vorlik, his armor scarred and smeared with black demon blood. He marched up to Leander, his jaw tight. "What did you do?"
"I... I don't know," Leander answered, his own voice hoarse. It was the truth.
"You don't know?" Vorlik gestured wildly at Elpis, who was being fussed over by her mother, a small, controlled flame still dancing over her fingertips. "You turned my city into a carnival of sorcery! We fight with steel and discipline! Not this chaos!"
"But Captain," Roric, the guard who had summoned the shield of light, interjected. He looked exhausted but exhilarated. "It worked. We held the line. We won."
"Did we?" Vorlik shot back, his eyes boring into Leander. "Or did we just paint a bigger target on our walls? That thing in the shadows... it spoke to you. What did it say?"
Before Kaelen could answer, a commotion came from the gate. A scout, his face pale, stumbled into the square. "The western patrol... they're gone. Not just dead. Their minds... they turned on each other. It was the work of a Dream Weaver, a powerful one."
All eyes swung back to Leander. The unspoken demand hung in the air, heavier than any weapon.
He had saved them. Now, he was responsible for them.
Later, in the relative quiet of the old archives-turned-command center, Elpis found him. "They're scared," she said softly. "They don't understand. But I do. You gave us a chance."
"I opened a door," Leander corrected, staring at a map of the region littered with markers of demonic incursions. "I don't know what's on the other side, or what else might walk through."
"The prophecy..." she began.
"What prophecy?" Leander asked, turning to her. "The elders whisper about a Child of Dawn, a Unifier. Is that supposed to be me? A boy who didn't even know his own parents?"
As the words left his mouth, a sharp, searing pain lanced through his temple. He gasped, vision blurring. For a fleeting second, he didn't see the dusty archives.
He saw a throne of obsidian, wreathed in celestial fire. He felt a pride so immense it could shatter stars, and a greed so profound it would consume worlds. And he felt the searing, universe-spanning rage of being cast down.
...couldn't win... all must burn...
The vision vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him swaying on his feet. Elpis caught his arm, her touch warm, steadying.
"Leander? What is it?"
He looked at her, his grey eyes wide with a new, horrifying understanding. The knowledge wasn't coming from some ancient text. It was in his blood, in his soul. The barrier he broke wasn't just around humanity. It was around himself.
"I think," he whispered, the words tasting like ash, "I just heard an echo from the one who started all this. And I think he just recognized my spark in the dark."
Outside, the sun finally set, plunging Last-Hope into a night that felt more watchful, more dangerous than any before. The war for survival was over. The war for the very soul of creation had begun. And Leander, the Catalyst, stood at its heart, a single ember against an ocean of night, feeling the weight of every awakened soul like a brand on his own.
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Author's Note:
Thank you for reading. The echoes are getting louder for Leander. Where do you think they come from?
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