Saturday, July 30, 4 S.E.

  Aylar stirred when she felt arms around her.

  Her gaze moved from where it had been locked to the floor, blurred by tears and the pain of her own heart, and settled on manicured nails and sun-kissed fair skin. A slow lift of her head brought her eyes to a veil of crimson hair, and she felt her lower lip tremble at the sight of it, inhaling the scent of woodsmoke and vanilla. She shifted unconsciously to turn and look into the golden eyes of the Sorceress that held her, and her tears spilled freely once more.

  “{I’m sorry, Synthra,}” she said, feeling like a foolish idiot, and yet unable to stop the guilt, the pain, the loss that ate at her. “{I—I didn’t mean to—}”

  “{It’s okay, Aylar,}” the Sorceress assured her gently, her own eyes red from crying, but the golden orbs filled with a determined light. “{It wasn’t real.}”

  “{It felt real,}” Aylar replied bitterly, reaching up to take the other woman’s cheeks in her armored hands. “{Divines, it felt so real, and so awful. I sent you to your death. I consigned you to die, Synthra. The woman I loved. I sent you to—}”

  “{You did what a Queen had to do,}” the draconic woman informed her firmly, while bending to press her forehead to hers. The intimacy they had felt was false, Aylar knew that as well as Synthra likely did, but the shock of it—the impact of it was far, far too visceral to be so easily ignored. “{I’m proud of you, Aylar. I was proud of you in the vision, and I’m proud of you still. You made the hard choice. That me, that terribly powerful possibility, she didn’t resent you for it. She understood.}”

  Aylar closed her eyes against the woman’s comfort and took a shuddering breath, laughing through tears at the absurdity of the situation.

  “{How can something feel so real and be so false at the same time? My rational mind knows it didn’t happen, it wasn’t real, but I still feel—}”

  “{I know,}” Synthra agreed in a less certain voice, her own momentarily wavering. “{I know, Aylar. I felt it, too. I still feel it. Separate, distant, but there—like a memory I can access on a whim. An entire life, good and bad, lived within the span of a moment. I understand.}”

  “{...I loved you,}” Aylar said quietly, her voice fragile to her own enhanced hearing. “{I loved you, and I hated you at the same time. I admired you, and I envied you—so different from the first time, yet only by increments of choice.}”

  “{And I, you,}” Synthra agreed, drawing back as her hands moved to cup Aylar’s cheeks in turn. “{I do not, now, but the memory of that feeling remains. It confuses me, too, Aylar, but perhaps it isn’t evil. Perhaps it’s just—permission, possibility, I don’t know. Whatever happens between us will happen, but in this moment, I’m just glad you’re my friend.}”

  Aylar smiled at her words, and her tears fell again, this time in quiet relief.

  “{As am I, Synthra. As am I.}”

  The pair of them locked eyes for a long time after her words, and then as if by mutual agreement, broke away—gaining distance as Aylar pushed herself up.

  “{What about the others?}” the Princess asked finally as she wiped her eyes. “{Bardulf, Parnym, Leon—}”

  An explosion cut her off, and both women turned to see Bardulf struggling with Leonidas, who eventually threw the Shadowblade to the ground.

  “NO, BARDULF!” the titanic Knight said in a voice so raw, so riven with grief, that it stilled Aylar’s heart. “I don’t CARE! I’ve seen this before! I won’t do it! I won’t!”

  The half-Lycanus didn’t appear hurt, in the literal sense, by being thrown away—but there was a set to his jaw, a stubbornness that told Aylar something was happening between the men. Parnym watched them both while gripping his staff with white-knuckled fists, looking terrified and determined all at once.

  “This isn’t real, Achilles,” Bardulf said in English, his voice carrying this time. “You don’t need to carry the—”

  “Fucking real, fucking not real, who cares?” Leonidas demanded angrily. “WHO CARES?! This isn’t—you don’t understand, none of you understand!”

  A wave of Psionic and Cataclysmic force erupted from him when he spoke, and Aylar’s eyes widened as her [Radiance Core] ignited in alarm within her dantian.

  “This System, this warped fucking System…” Leonidas said, his voice hoarse, cracked with emotion and stress, cracked with volatility and grief. “It shouldn’t exist. This world is twisted. This is cruel, Bardulf. This is all… It’s too cruel…”

  Aylar looked at Synthra, and the redhead nodded to her firmly as they moved forward as one, walking steadily toward the Black Knight.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Leonidas said abruptly, and both of them froze. Aylar instinctively reached for Synthra’s hand and felt the Sorceress find hers at the same time. They squeezed as one. “I can’t—the memories, the pain, it’s not… I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Leonidas—” Aylar called, only for the man to turn to her, his blue eyes—usually so warm, so calm, so determined—veined by scarlet and violet that created an aspect of power so terrible it strangled her voice in her throat.

  That’s what you fear, something within her whispered softly, that’s the Cataclysm that haunts your dreams.

  Leonidas looked at her, looked at Synthra, and something like a song seemed to fill her heart—a dirge, a mournful cadence, a melody of destruction that originated from the Archon himself. The Black Knight looked at them, and then, without a word, he stormed toward the final archway with a snarl of aggrieved rage—vanishing within it in a blistering corona of scarlet cataclysm lightning.

  “Princess Aylar,” Primus’ voice said before any of them could react, drawing the remaining quartet’s collective attention to the mild-mannered Custodian. “You have proven yourself in the second trial. You chose the good of your nation over your own heart and prioritized its survival at the cost of personal suffering. This is a noble deed, one that shows your maturity when it comes to the judgment of Life and Death—but now, the consequences of that choice are manifest.”

  The System representative turned, and his bespoke shoes lightly echoed as he made his way calmly to the third arch, which morphed into a crackling, storming shade of red. Cataclysm red.

  “Your companion’s grief and rage have influenced the final trial. What was is no longer what will be, and now, the [Terran Cataclysm] has changed the scenario,” Primus said, his normally relaxed tone turning faintly grave. “His is a singular existence within the System Nexus, just as each Cataclysm before him. What awaits you now is a test more challenging than any other—but as a result, the System will compensate for the increased difficulty accordingly.”

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  Aylar looked at Synthra, then to Bardulf and Parnym, and finally returned her gaze to Primus.

  “Why is it like this?” she asked in English, instead of answering his tantalizing statement. “Why must there be so much pain?”

  Primus regarded her patiently as she asked, and assumed a calm, Butler-like stance of wise counsel.

  It was mildly infuriating.

  “A Monarch must be ready for the greatest of life’s tragedies, Princess Aylar. Your ancestor understood this, for his tragedies were among the worst. To be broken by these things is to allow your [Dominion] to be broken in turn, and no nation can afford a ruler absent the stomach to do what is necessary—to survive what they need to survive. You have seen but a small sample of the pain this path will lay upon you. If you wish to turn aside, there will be no shame in the act.”

  Aylar stared at Primus for a long moment, and then barked a laugh, bitter and absent mirth.

  “Turn away? After this? After—after everything we’ve seen? No, Primus. No. I will not run from this,” she declared flatly, her grief morphing instantly to anger. She felt Synthra tense at her side, felt the other woman's support in the grip on her armored hand. “We’ve come too far for that.”

  “We have,” Bardulf said immediately, stepping forward and rubbing his chest. “The Princess is right. We have come too far to shy away now, Custodian. You are offering us nothing but a fantasy. Leaving now is like throwing away everything we worked toward.”

  “And he needs us,” Synthra said, her voice strong at Aylar’s side. “He needs us—not the Cataclysm, whatever you think he is; but the man. Achilles needs us.”

  Aylar nodded along with the other two in agreement with the Sorceress.

  “If you ask me to choose self-protecting abandonment or self-destructive hardship,” the Princess declared firmly, “then I choose the latter, Primus. I wasn’t raised to shrink from a challenge. Dawnhaven cannot afford a Queen who abandons her companions.”

  “W-we won’t abandon our friend,” Parnym agreed softly, thumping his staff.

  Primus looked at them all, taking in the declaration, and simply smiled his calm smile.

  “Then the third trial awaits you, Princess Aylar. I wish you all the best of luck. I believe you are going to need it.”

  Aylar squared her shoulders once more at the custodian’s words, and with a grip of Synthra’s hand in final reassurance, released it and drew her sword where she’d sheathed it in the vision. Her eyes roved over her companions, and they nodded to her in determination, grim resolve writ large on their features.

  With a smile of thanks, she turned back to Primus.

  “We are ready to begin, Primus.”

  The Custodian bowed his head and gestured to the archway of blistering red energy.

  “The path is open.”

  Aylar took a steadying breath alongside her [Heroine’s Will] activating and marched forward at the Custodian’s words, pausing only at the edge of the archway and its forboding coruscation of scarlet energy. It felt like she was looking into the jaws of destruction itself, but she hardened herself against her instinctive trepidation and looked back to see her companions join her at the last step.

  “Together,” she said to them simply.

  “Together,” they agreed as one, readying themselves.

  Aylar set her lips into a grim line, and with a final moment of heart-hardening resolve, marched into the archway…

  …to emerge in a familiar locale.

  The Arena of Dawnhaven, though it looked far different.

  The stands had been destroyed and sundered, blown apart by immense blisters of striking lightning. The walls were hewn apart, riven across their foundations where the manastone had buckled against catastrophic power. The sky above was darkened, shrouded by an ocean of black storm clouds that metastasized across the expanse like a cancerous veil.

  “Divines…” Bardulf whispered, his voice hoarse at her side. “I never thought…”

  Scarlet lightning roared and blistered as far as the eye could see, and distant screams filled the city. Corpses, she realized with a start, were rife across the stands—broken, sundered, locked into final moments of terror as something had stolen their lives with the brutal indifference of a tectonic shift. It looked as if an earthquake had savaged the arena, and in her awareness of the moment, she knew that Dawnhaven was the same—a ruin, shattered by impossible power.

  The source of the destruction lay at the heart of the once-magnificent construction.

  “Achilles…” Synthra said, her voice raw, horrified, as they spotted him at last.

  The Black Knight, the First Archon of Terran Blood, the man who had birthed his legend upon the very manastone that Aylar and her companions now tread. Leonidas was alone, staring down at a corpse with his helmet affixed, one of the feathered wings on its side torn apart. Aylar’s eyes drifted to the corpse, and with a start, she recognized it as an older Johnathan Mattherson—lifeless and destroyed, alongside the ruined body of Ceruviel Latherian.

  Aylar’s heart broke in her breast as she spied the death of two Archons, and turned back to Leonidas, the last of them, the final Archon in all the System Nexus.

  He turned to them then, as if sensing their attention, and his Psiblade rippled with power—sheathed in a veil of scarlet energy that barely held any trace of violet Psi any longer. His body turned, and she felt a… numbness from him. A cold void of anything that clenched her [Radiance Core] in her dantian with primal, instinctive fear.

  “You came,” the man who had been King said to them all, his voice mild, calm, disturbingly serene. “At the end, you came. My friends.”

  A lance of scarlet lightning struck the city behind him, and distant screams filled the air.

  “Leonidas,” Aylar said, her voice pained to her own ears, wearied with grief, and older—but not much so. She’d only been Queen for a few years. “What have you done?”

  “I stopped it,” he replied simply, as if the answer were self-evident. The ghost of his heroism, his sacrifice, his sense of duty—it echoed in those words, and it broke her heart to hear it. “The pain, the cycle of grief. I stopped it, Aylar. I’m stopping it. For you. For Synthra. For all of us.”

  His helmet shifted, and he looked up at the clouds.

  “An ending, Aylar. Finally. After so many years of this System-enforced agony. An ending to all the noise, all the corruption, all the failings of mortality in this Divines-forsaken world. I finally realized the truth of it all: I have to liberate the world from its own suffering.”

  “Achilles…” Bardulf said in a disbelieving voice, and she felt his love and his brotherhood with the Black Knight written large in his voice. “Brother, this isn’t salvation. This—”

  “Salvation is a myth, Bardulf,” Leonidas cut in, his voice still calm, still mild. “It exists to taunt the hopeful and create an illusion of betterment. The song… Ah, that song, that is the truth.”

  Aylar could hear it as he spoke; they all could: the dirge, the melody, the soothing and sinister harmony of his [Cataclysm Core], emitting a dirge that filled her soul with existential dread. Nature itself, in its most primordial and untamed state. The Cataclysm was not power; it was annihilation. It was the energy of a thousand hurricanes, erupting volcanoes, and sundering earthquakes. It was the tsunami that would drown the land, the forest fire that would ash-blacken the world, so something new could rise in its place.

  It was, at its most primal, the steady drumbeat that heralded the End.

  And Leonidas Achilles Romulus Paendrag had become its living Harbinger.

  “All the noise,” her husband continued, “all the petty machinations, all the pointless struggle of a world bereft of sense or reason—riven by the selfish ambitions of flawed minds. That song, Bardulf, is the only thing with clarity in a reality sundered by deception and self-serving ambition.”

  Aylar shook her head as he spoke, and felt tears sting her eyes.

  Not for the words, not for what he had done, but for him.

  For the man she loved, lost to the overwhelming pain of his own demons.

  “This is madness, Leonidas,” she said finally, as Synthra tensed at her side in agreement. “This cannot come to pass. I won’t let it.”

  Leonidas sighed at her words, and her husband turned back to her.

  “So even you will resist the truth, my loves?” he asked wearily, looking between her and Synthra with a shift of his helmet. “My best friends alongside you as well? Very well,” he said, voice echoing with regret, but overlayed by calm certainty, and blood-chilling resolve. “I will not shrink from what must be done.”

  The Black Knight raised his blade, its edge hauntingly resplendent with [Cataclysm Swordforce].

  “We will not allow you to destroy the world for your grief, husband,” Synthra declared, her own golden eyes wet with tears, but narrowed in focus as she conjured her flame-forged longsword.

  “We’ll stop you, Leonidas,” Aylar agreed. “We four alone.”

  Leonidas tilted his head at their words, and he shrugged faintly.

  “You will try.”

  Lightning split the skies, thunder roared overhead, and the Cataclysm charged.

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