“When the body breaks, the soul starts asking questions.”
The event at Eryndor Bulwark remains unclassified.
Investigations ongoing.
All records sealed by Order of the Magisterium.
Darkness, again. But not the peaceful kind.
Aldric’s thoughts flickered like a candle in the wind.
He remembered a scream. His own, maybe?
He remembered the sky turning inside out.
And he remembered the letter.
That damned letter.
He stirred. Cold air bit his skin. His body ached in places he couldn’t name. Something stiff held his torso. Bandages, soaked and sour. He tried to move. His shoulder groaned. His ribs hissed. The world above him spun in spirals of grey.
He blinked, and realized he was alive.
But he couldn’t remember how.
He was lying on a thin bedroll inside what looked like a collapsed chapel, its roof long gone and walls half-covered in moss. The wood around him creaked in the wind. Rain tapped lightly on the stone outside. The air smelled of smoke, mud, and bitter herbs.
Stone shattered into dust. Scorched bones embedded in melted walls. The outlines of people frozen in time, only their shadows remained.
He tried to sit up. Pain shot through his body like shards of glass. His throat burned, his arms were wrapped in bandages that reeked of herbal poultices and blood. His hands were blistered and shaking, a brand new scar split his forearm.
He didn’t recognize the place.
This wasn’t Eryndor.
He wasn’t wearing his academy uniform anymore. Instead: a plain wool tunic, patched at the elbows. Too big. Not his.
Someone had saved him.
Then he saw him.
A figure stood beside a dead fire. Towering, silent, armored head to toe in battered plate mail that gleamed a dull iron-blue. A cloak draped over his shoulders, a greatsword rested against a tree trunk. The man turned, slowly, like rust creaking.
His voice was low, distorted slightly from within the helmet.
“You’re awake.”
Aldric stared, throat dry. He tried to speak, but it came out as a breathless wheeze.
The armored man didn’t move. Just reached over and rolled a waterskin across the stone floor.
“Drink. Slowly. You’ll bleed again if you force yourself.”
Aldric obeyed. The water tasted of copper. His throat screamed with each gulp.
Finally, voice hoarse:
“Where am I?”
“Far. Safe for now.”
“What happened… to Eryndor?”
The armored man was silent.
Aldric tried to push himself upright, but pain ripped through his ribs like fire. He gritted his teeth, falling back down.
“I shouldn’t be alive,” he whispered.
“You aren’t,” the man replied.
That earned a look. Aldric's brow furrowed, half in confusion, half in fear.
Silence again. The wind howled outside.
Only when the man took a step closer, Aldric noticed. He was tall, taller than any man Aldric had ever seen, easily seven feet with the armor.
“You should’ve burned. You cast a barrier that outpaced every recorded Aegis output in a generation. You held it. You watched everything behind it die. And you survived.” He crouched. “You shouldn’t have. But you did.”
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“Why?” Aldric asked.
“Because you’re not allowed to die yet.”
Aldric looked at him in confusion again
The armored man turned and walked to a nearby crate, dragging something wrapped in cloth. When he unwrapped it, Aldric recognized the pieces of his Academy crest, half-melted.
“I found this pinned to your chest. Still warm. Still intact.
That should’ve been impossible.”
He set the broken crest down, gently, like an offering.
“What did you see?” the man asked suddenly, voice sharper.
Aldric blinked.
“What?”
“In the light.”
Aldric said nothing. He looked at his hands, still trembling.
The man finally gave him a name.
“Veylor.”
“Is that your real name?”
“It’s the only one you should remember.”
Veylor moved to the doorway, watching the gray sky turn darker. Rain began falling in earnest. In the distance rang the faint sound of bells.
“There's a town if you head East,” he muttered. “And few churches.”
Aldric turned toward him.
“What… what are they saying?”
Veylor looked back.
“That Eryndor was destroyed by the Divine.
That it was judgment for heresy. For unlicensed infusions and academic blasphemy.”
“So they’re blaming us.”
“Yes.” Veylor said flatly.
Aldric’s breath caught.
Veylor stepped closer.
“You need to listen carefully, Aldric Valen.
They’ll come for you eventually. Not to punish. Not to question.
Just to finish the story.”
Aldric stared at the cracked crest in his lap.
It was warped. Warped like his memories.
Like the truth.
He felt something fracture in his chest.
“Why me…?” he whispered again.
Veylor didn’t answer this time.
Instead, he sat down again, facing the dying fire.
“Sleep. You’ll need the strength.”
“For what?”
“Surviving the world’s correction.”
Aldric lay back down.
He didn’t sleep.
He just stared at the charred ceiling of a broken chapel,
Listening to the rain,
And waiting for his name to disappear.
The next morning, Veylor hoisted Aldric onto a battered horse, kicked the embers dead and hefted his sword onto his waist.
Veylor said little. “East. Two days. You walk when the horse can’t.”
Aldric didn't argue.
He was too broken to resist. His body moved like wet paper. His thoughts buzzed with static.
The countryside was a blur of blackened trees and scorched soil. The rain never stopped. Thin, miserable mist that soaked him to the bone.
They passed wreckage.
Crumbling farmhouses.
Charred fields.
Sometimes, Aldric thought he saw something — a figure in the fog — but Veylor never stopped.
At night, Aldric stared into the ashes of their campfire and wondered if the stars overhead were fake, too.
Two days later, they reached it. Floralines.
A small village tucked between hills, untouched by the calamity. The houses were rough stone and timber, roofs heavy with moss. Lanterns swung from iron posts. The smell of bread and woodsmoke filled the streets.
Children played.
Merchants haggled.
A woman argued with a blacksmith over the price of nails.
Life.
Ordinary, stubborn life.
Aldric dismounted clumsily, feet nearly giving out under him.
He stared at them.
How could they laugh?
How could they barter and live and bicker, while Eryndor burned in his memory?
How could they exist at all?
His stomach twisted.
The weight of the past week pressed against his chest like a lead chain.
He barely remembered the moment he fell to his knees.
The sickening lurch in his gut.
A dry heave, violently empty. Again. Again.
The looks from the villagers. First confusion, then pity.
He hated that look.
He hated them all.
Veylor knelt beside him, voice low. “You know it’s not their fault.”
Aldric said without looking up:
“How can they live like nothing happened?
They should be mourning.
They should be on their knees.”
His voice cracked. He sounded like a child, raging against inanimate objects that wouldn’t hear him.
Veylor said nothing.
He simply helped him stand.
They found lodging at the village tavern—barely more than a few cots behind a kitchen.
The innkeeper, a broad-shouldered woman named Mirla, didn’t ask questions.
“Runaways from the West?” she guessed, not unkindly. “Plenty of you these days.”
Veylor simply nodded.
Aldric said nothing.
That night, Aldric lay awake, staring at the wooden beams overhead.
He could still hear it.
The screaming.
The shattering.
The hymn.
He pressed the pillow against his ears until morning.
The days passed, slow and bitter.
At first, Aldric avoided the townsfolk.
He ate when Veylor forced him to.
He slept when exhaustion won.
But the people of Floralines were persistent in their own quiet way.
Mirla left extra bread on their table, “by mistake.”
The blacksmith’s son, a boy no older than ten, shoved a whittling knife into Aldric's hand, demanding he carve the wrong end of the stick.
A farmer's daughter dumped a grain sack at Aldric's feet. “You look useless. Lift this.”
They didn’t pity him.
They didn’t ask about the hollow look in his eyes.
They just treated him like he was alive.
And somehow, that made it worse.
One evening, Aldric helped dig a grave.
A stranger had died on the outskirts—a man too old and sick to travel after fleeing the western fires. No family. No friends.
Just a body, and a name none of them knew.
The villagers still gathered.
Still dug.
Still whispered prayers.
Aldric, numb, helped lower the body into the earth. His hands shook as the rope slid through them.
A life, reduced to this weight.
“He won't be forgotten,” Mirla said, setting a hand on Aldric’s shoulder.
He flinched.
But he didn’t pull away.
That night, Aldric sat on the tavern’s back porch, watching the stars.
He still hated them, a little.
But he hated the silence more.
“If the world refuses to remember... then I’ll force it to.”
Something in him shifted.
Not healed.
Not forgiven.
But cracked open, bleeding light.
Just enough.
And somewhere, the embers of a broken world began to stir again.
