Author's Preface
Death everywhere.
Corpses littered the streets, spared from prolonged agony by a swift end under the black rain, these were the lucky ones. The rest, citizens and soldiers alike, writhed in the ruined thoroughfares, trapped between dissolving skin and crushed limbs.
The Wanderer walked through the carnage, the shrieks of agony and the hollow wails of the mourning beating against his ears.
His mind flashed back to the ashes of Draemir.
‘I am a plague to this world,’ he thought to himself. ‘Avaris itself rejects my very existence.’
He picked his way through the rubble. ‘The Spiral amplifies and twists my desires to reach its end goal... but in the end, they are still my desires.’
From the edge of a collapsed roof, a man with half his face dissolved crawled toward him, dragging his body. "Save... me..." the man rasped.
The Wanderer knelt beside him. The man's flesh was already rotting in real-time, his exposed organs scraping against the ground as he clawed at the earth.
Placing a gentle hand over the man's unburned cheek, the Wanderer spoke softly. "Don't worry. Everything will be alright."
The man began to seize, trembling beneath the Wanderer's palm.
"Hush now," the Wanderer whispered calmly. "You'll be alright."
With a swift twist of the man's neck, the man went limp, the agony leaving his features.
The Wanderer gently closed the man's eyes, then stood up, staring into the rising smoke. "Or maybe... this world's rot is beyond saving."
He turned his back on the ashes of Valoria and began his long walk toward Hosar. "I'll make sure there is no more suffering. The world forged by 604 and the Beyonder... it cannot be allowed to endure."
He marched forward with nothing to his name. He had wrapped a crude strip of cloth around his left socket and over his new arm, binding the ghost-like limb that refused to vanish despite losing his magic.
Without a horse and devoid of the magic that once sped his stride, the journey was long. Even the Spiral within his chest lay still, he could feel its presence in his soul, but it was dormant maybe, exhausted maybe, satisfied?… he was sure of the latter.
By noon of the following day, he reached the crest of the overlook.
Below him lay Hosar, or what was left of it.
Hosar was no different from Valoria, both drowned beneath the black rain. Strangely enough, the beast hadn't completely obliterated either of the cities. As if the creature intentionally left it standing so its people could marinate in their own agony; it certainly didn't lack the power to tear the realm to splinters if it wished.
By the time the Wanderer reached the ruined Red Citadel, scavengers were already picking the carcass clean. Looters swarmed the broken vaults of the Red Crown's treasury, stuffing their sacks with gold and relics. Among the thieving crowd were the Citadel's own guards.
He spotted one of them sprinting from the shattered arches, clutching an armful of gold artifacts, tucked beneath his arm was Judgment.
The Wanderer stepped into his path, seizing the guard by his shoulder.
The guard spun, whipping out a dagger with his free hand while hugging the stolen treasure to his chest. "Back off or I'll gut you! Go find your own vault to rob!"
The Wanderer smiled. "Aren't you supposed to be protecting those?"
The guard shoved his arm away. "Can't you see?! The damn world is ending! Wait... I know you-"
Before the man could finish, the Wanderer trapped the guard's elbow beneath his forearm and drove a fist straight into the joint, breaking his arm.
The guard collapsed onto the rubble, shrieking in agony as his broken arm folded backwards.
The Wanderer calmly reached down, lifted Judgment from the pile, and slung it over his back. "You can keep the rest."
"You promised us a new dawn!" the guard wept from the dirt, clutching his shattered arm. "You promised to free this kingdom, but you only brought death and havoc! And now you rob a man just trying to feed his family?!"
The Wanderer turned to the fallen soldier. "Blame me all you want. Curse my name in your final prayers. But remember what was the first thing you did the moment your kingdom fell."
He turned his back on the crying man. "You are all guilty," he muttered to the wind.
Haunted days bled into another; sleepless nights blurred one into the next.
He stole a horse from the dying stables of Hosar and set off across the ruined continent, hunting for any whisper or map leading to the Murak tribe of Mount Rashven. But everywhere his boots landed, he was met by the same familiar scene.
Blackened fields, melted towns, and the rotting legacy the beast left in its wake.
With every dead end, hope began to wither. Frustrated, he finally turned his exhausted mount around, deciding to ride back toward Valoria to comb through the grand archives for any mention of Rashven.
As if summoned by fate, as he arrived near the capital, the sky darkened once more.
Hovering high above the melted spires of Valoria, its colossal wings blotting out the horizon, was the mountain-sized beast, returned to the graveyard it had created.
The Wanderer stared up at the towering shadow of the titan. "Came back to finish the job?"
He paused as realization hit him. "Or did you leave something behind?"
Digging his heels into his mount's flanks, he galloped toward the gates of Valoria. Suddenly, the horse shrieked in terror, rearing up and throwing the Wanderer onto the hard earth.
He didn't bother watching the frightened animal bolt. Scrambling to his feet, he sprinted into the ruined city, cutting through the surging tide of the remaining Valorians fleeing for their lives.
He finally reached the edge of the massive crater where the entity had slept.
He stared down into the bottomless abyss for a fleeting moment, until an earth-shattering roar echoed from the clouds above.
The Wanderer snapped his head up as the titan plummeted from the sky, its massive weight slamming into the earth right beside the pit.
The shockwave ripped through the bedrock, throwing the Wanderer onto his back.
He froze in the dirt, staring up at the terrifying scale of the beast. From where he lay, he couldn't even see its face.
He began to push himself backward over the rubble, his eye locked onto the monster.
Suddenly, the sky above tore wide open.
Three radiant, golden light beams pierced the dark clouds as colossal humanoid figures descended from the rift, each standing as tall as the titan itself.
Though they possessed towering, human-like limbs, their faces were monstrous aquatic. Their bulbous heads were hairless, their chins dangling with squirming tentacles that framed rows of triangled sharp teeth and glowing crimson eyes.
The three glowing behemoths surrounded the trapped titan. In sync, they raised their hands, summoning massive spears of condensed golden light out of thin air.
In unison, they plunged their golden spears into the beast's torso. The titan roared in pain, but strangely it didn't resist.
Before the Wanderer's disbelieving eye, the beast began to wither.
Golden light spread through the titan's body.
Its black flesh hardened. Cracks raced across its hide, glowing from within. Layer by layer, the monstrous form calcified until the creature was no longer black acid anymore.
It had become a mountain of Nullstones
The three golden figures dissolved their spears into light. Slowly, one of them turned toward the open crater and stepped into the abyss, curling its massive limbs into a fetus position.
The remaining two entities raised their hands, pulling tons of fallen stone and earth over the pit, sealing their third beneath the ruins of Valoria once more.
"What the hell is going on?!" the Wanderer screamed into the storm.
Slowly, one of the two remaining titans turned its octopus-like head down toward the speck of a man standing amidst the rubble.
"Are you the one who unsealed our brother?" The entity's voice echoed like a raging storm.
The Wanderer took a step back, his eye fixated on the glowing titan.
The golden horror peeled back its tentacles, baring rows of razor teeth in what seemed to be a smile.
"Well done, child."