Dawn in the Blight-lands was a mockery of the word. The sun didn't rise so much as the world lightened from pitch black to a dull, pervasive gray. There was no warmth, no color, only a gradual unveiling of the desolation.
Ronan stood at the edge of the designated departure point, a reinforced gate in Bastion Kraken's western wall. The air tasted of metal and old ashes. Kaelen had given him a pack filled with standard rations, a waterskin, a coil of rope, and a knife. These were the tools for a journey, not a rescue. The Warden himself stood nearby, silent and imposing, watching as Ronan prepared to leave.
"Follow the compass," Kaelen said, his voice cutting through the grim morning. The compass was no ordinary navigational tool. Its needle, forged from a shard of crystal, didn't point north. Instead, it glowed with a faint, sickly amber light and trembled, pointing insistently westward, into the deepest gray. "It's attuned to her power. Don't stray from it. And don't die before you finish your task."
The gates creaked open, revealing a landscape that was more memory than reality. Ronan didn't look back. He adjusted the strap of his pack and stepped outside. The heavy gates boomed shut behind him, marking the end of his old life.
The first mile was nothing but silence and dust. By the second mile, whispers began.
It started as a pressure in the back of his mind, a faint, psychic static. By the third mile, the static resolved into sounds. Not quite voices, but echoes: the distant, metallic clink of a sword striking armor, a choked battle cry, the crackle of spellwork. They were memories trapped in the Blight like flies in amber, replaying the moments of the world's death.
He kept his eyes on the compass, his hand tightening around the locket in his pocket. The landscape around him was a study in decay. Trees stood bare, like petrified skeletons, their branches clawing at the gray sky. The ground was a brittle crust that cracked under his boots. But it was the echo-memory that was the real enemy. It gnawed at his sanity.
He crested a rise and froze.
The landscape below was not empty. Two ghostly armies clashed in a silent, horrific dance. Knights in shimmering armor fought against hulking shadows from the Demon King's legions. Spells of light and blasts of dark energy erupted, their visual fury a stark contrast to the utter silence. They were insubstantial, mere echoes of the past, but the air around them warped and shimmered with leftover power.
Ronan's heart raced. This was no mere memory. This was a wound in the world, still bleeding psychic energy. He watched as a phantom knight fell, struck down by a demon's claw. The knight's form dissolved not into blood, but into a wisp of gray mist that sank into the ground. This was how the Blight fed. It consumed the past over and over.
He had to get through it.
Taking a shuddering breath, he began to descend the slope. The compass needle vibrated wildly, pointing straight into the heart of the spectral battle. As he got closer, the silence shattered. The echoes found their voice.
The sound hit him like a wave—the roar of beasts, the screams of men, the world-shattering explosion of combined magics. It was deafening. He saw a flash of light—the very flash that had birthed the Blight—and for a terrifying second, he was back there, on that field, the heat on his face, the smell of ozone and blood, the overwhelming triumph that turned to ash in his mouth.
He stumbled, clutching his head. The memories weren't just around him; they were inside him, scratching at the doors he'd locked long ago. He saw the face of a soldier whose leg he'd amputated, only to watch the man consumed by the gray tide moments later. He saw Lyra, a beacon of golden light, striking the final blow against the Demon King, her face set in grim determination.
Then he saw the gray bloom from the point of impact.
It was not a wave but an exhalation. A sigh of release that carried the weight of two destroyed souls—the Demon King and the concentrated hope of the heroes who had slain him. It was born in that moment, a confused, terrified child of cataclysmic power.
The vision changed. He was no longer in the memory of the battle. He was in a memory of the aftermath. The gray mist receding, leaving behind silence. He was there, on his knees, surrounded by the dissolved forms of the great and the powerful. He was coughing, his eyes stinging, but alive. Strangely, inexplicably alive. The Blight had washed over him and moved on, uninterested.
Why? The question screamed in his mind, one he had asked himself a thousand times. The vision offered no answer.
The psychic barrage lessened as he pushed through the center of the echo-field. He was sweating, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The sounds faded back to whispers, then to static, and finally to the crushing silence once more.
He walked for another hour, the terrain twisting further. Strange, crystalline formations jutted from the earth, pulsing with a weak, internal light. The compass needle was glowing brighter now, the amber light almost warm in the pervasive gloom. He was getting close.
He found her in a place that had once been a valley. Now it was just a bowl of dust, dominated by a single, massive, petrified tree. Its branches spread out like a canopy of bones.
And there, slumped against the trunk, was a figure in armor.
It was Lyra.
But it was not the Lyra from the locket. The golden plate was tarnished to a dull gray, scarred and pitted as if by countless tiny claws. The brilliant crimson cloak was a faded rag, draped over shoulders that seemed too thin to carry the weight of the metal. Her helmet lay in the dust beside her. Her hair, once vibrant gold, was the color of old straw and ash. Her head was bowed, her eyes open but unseeing, fixed on nothing.
She was perfectly still. Not a statue, but a thing abandoned. A shell.
Ronan approached slowly, each footfall echoing in the dead silence. The compass in his hand was blazing now, the needle pointing directly at her as if accusing her. He stopped a few feet away, his heart thudding in his chest. This was what Kaelen wanted so desperately? This broken remnant?
"Lyra?" he said, his voice a rough croak.
There was no response. Not a twitch, not a flicker of recognition. The fierce light in her portrait was utterly extinguished. She was here, but she was gone. Consumed by the Grey.
This was the Sun-Knight. The hope of a world. Reduced to a catatonic ghost in a tomb of her own making.
The mission was a fool's errand. Kaelen was chasing a memory. A wave of despair threatened to overwhelm him. He had walked into hell for a corpse.
He took a final step forward, kneeling before her. He reached out, uncertain of what he intended to do—shake her shoulder, check for a pulse? His fingers, calloused and dirty, brushed against the cold, gray metal of her gauntlet.
The moment he made contact, the world exploded.
Not in sound and light, but in pure, agonizing sensation. This time, it wasn't a memory; it was an open nerve of reality.
–the pressure of the final blow, the shockwave of two conflicting powers annihilating each other, the scream of the demon, and the triumphant roar of her own spirit turning to terror as something else was born, something hungry and vast and cold–
–the feeling of her own light being twisted, inverted, the golden warmth turning to a gray chill that started in her heart and spread outwards, freezing her from the inside–
–the endless, silent scream trapped in a body that was no longer hers, a prison of her own power, feeling the Blight feed on her, siphoning her essence, year after year, until nothing was left but this hollow core and the memory of the light–
Ronan jerked his hand back with a gasp, stumbling away from her. He fell to the dust, clutching his head. The psychic feedback had been a white-hot brand against his soul. He had felt her death. Not a quick death, but a slow, five-year erosion of everything she was.
She wasn't corrupted. She was the core. The Blight was a parasite, and she was its first and most prized host. It hadn't killed her because it was still feeding.
He looked at her, truly looked, and the horror of it threatened to break him. The great Lyra, the Sun-Knight, was a larder.
And he was supposed to bring this back? Drag this tormented soul into a world that had already failed her?
The compass lay in the dust where he'd dropped it, its needle still pointing faithfully at its broken prize. Ronan stared at the catatonic woman, then back the way he had come. He had found her.
Now, he had to decide if saving her was mercy or a cruelty beyond measure.