There is a discord for this fic. It has Live Updates about chapter progress and when they are completed, among other things. I'm also very active there and am likely to respond to any message sent there. Join at discord.gg/aWZ9qX9mAW
Glory to my Proofreader: Solare. For he is one who points out mistakes and acts as my favourite wall to bounce ideas off of.
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Fia's embrace was comforting, more than John dared to admit even to himself. Her arms folded around him like a veil, cool and steady, a perfect counterpoint to the furnace that beat inside his chest. She was colder than any other living thing, though not unpleasantly so; his body always ran too hot, and for once it was soothing to feel something that calmed instead of stoked the fire.
He did not flinch when he felt it, that tug at the marrow of his being, the subtle pull of her nature as a Deathbed Companion. Vitality leeched away from him in an invisible siphon, faint but undeniable. Five percent gone, maybe a little more. In return, the familiar aura of a Baldachin's Blessing settled into him like a weight and a comfort both, bracing his soul even as it drained his strength.
Marika frowned within his mind, the sound of her voice measured but laced with quiet disapproval. "That drain is unbecoming, mine Champion. Though," she added after a pause, "I cannot deny thy need for solace."
John rested a hand on Fia's shoulder and shifted slightly, lowering himself onto one knee so that she could hold him more securely.
'She can't help it…' he murmured inwardly, his tone gentle rather than defensive. 'It's simply who she is. And… it helps.'
Marika let out a long, helpless sigh. "Very well." Her tone lost its bite, turning to resignation. She knew how much he needed this; she could feel the tension unraveling in him like knots pulled loose. Still, she muttered to herself, distant and half-amused. "At the least, thy vitality shall return in time."
John let his eyes close, just for a moment, allowing himself to rest in Fia's embrace. It was not passion, it was not lust. It was peace, the first true fragment of it he had felt since before the Leonine's bloodfire claws ripped through him.
And before he saw the mountain of bodies. The body of that child he could have-
The quiet lasted only a little while before soft footsteps drew near.
John opened his eyes in time to see Melina approaching from the forge's glow. Her steps were steady, her presence like a hearth-fire, golden light faintly shimmering about her in answer to the torchlight. She stopped just before them, her arms loose at her sides, her expression unreadable.
Fia lifted her gaze, meeting Melina's with a look that was not challenging but understanding, almost serene. She smiled faintly, like a woman who already knew the answer to a question unasked. Her lips parted, her voice little more than a whisper.
"You must be the one he spoke of before."
Melina's eyes widened, a rare flicker of color rising in her pale cheeks.
"He… What?" Her tone wavered between offense and surprise, her composure rattled thoroughly, not that she'd admit so. "He spoke of me… to you?"
Fia only smiled, her hand still resting gently against John's black-and-white streaked hair. She gave no further explanation, letting her words hang in the air like incense.
John stiffened slightly, blinking as his brain lurched to catch up, remembering the time he rejected Fia's advances by giving his affection for Melina as an excuse. Though he never said it by name, he supposed Fia was smart enough to link the dots within seconds. By just one look as well, as it seems.
"It just… Came up." He said quickly, the heat that usually rested in his chest seemed to leak to his cheeks. He slowly, almost reluctantly, pulled away from Fia's embrace as he lifted a hand to wave the matter away. Though, his words lacked conviction, and even he knew it.
Melina's brows knit as she turned her gaze to him, her voice dry but tinged with something else. "Without my knowing."
She did not push further, but her eyes lingered on him in a way that made his stomach twist. Jealousy? Hurt? Whatever it was, he couldn't meet her gaze for long.
Fia, ever calm, tilted her head in faint amusement and let the moment hang.
The silence was broken by Millicent, who could not resist the opportunity.
"Wow!" She barked, loud enough that even Hewg's hammer paused mid-swing. "Johnny's out here gossiping about his lady friends? Bold."
John groaned and covered his face with one hand. "Not helping."
Roderika muffled a giggle behind her fingers, cheeks flushed pink. "Oh, I'm sure he meant it kindly…" she offered, trying to soothe Melina while looking thoroughly entertained.
Irina tilted her head, her expression gentle. "If he speaks of you at all, it must be because you matter to him. That much is clear."
Melina's lips pressed into a thin line. She said nothing, though the faintest shade of red remained on her cheeks.
From the forge, Hewg growled, hammer striking the anvil again with a shower of sparks. "Less gossip, more food. Lad's skin and bones as it is. Go eat before you fall over."
Millicent pounced on the command. She bounded forward, grabbed John's wrist with her gore-streaked hand, and yanked him forward with surprising strength.
"C'mon, hero~" she grinned, tugging him toward the corridor. "Food time. You need meat and ale before you keel over again."
"Millicent, I can walk on my-" John stumbled as she pulled him along anyway, her grip like iron despite being one-handed.
"Too slow~" She teased. "That tired face needs cheering up, and I know exactly how to fix it. Feast and banter."
He muttered under his breath, "You're relentless…" but there was no real bite in it.
As the group began moving toward the dining hall, the chatter swelled in waves around him. Millicent teased mercilessly. "So, Johnny, what else have you been saying about us behind our backs, huh? Do I get a chapter of flattering poetry, or do I just get called your chaos partner?"
Roderika giggled again, her hand pressed to her chest. "I think chaos partner suits you well, Millicent."
Irina smiled softly. "I'm just glad he speaks of anyone at all. It means he trusts you."
John groaned, dragging his free hand down his face. "Fantastic. Now the whole Roundtable is in on this."
Millicent leaned closer as she tugged him along, her grin wide and mischievous. "Oh, don't worry, Johnny. We'll keep it between friends. And maybe Hewg, and Roderika, and… well, everyone."
"Have mercy on me, will ya?." John muttered, though the corner of his mouth tugged upward despite himself.
The further they went down the corridor, the more the weight lifted. The forge faded behind them, the laughter ahead swelled, and the warmth of the torches seemed less suffocating, more alive. By the time they reached the dining hall, with its long tables and flickering candles, John's steps had lost their heaviness.
Millicent still had him by the hand, dragging him to the nearest seat with all the energy of someone twice her size. His lips curved into a small, genuine smile. It wasn't cheerful, nor was it triumphant.
But it was there.
…
The trio returned to Castle Morne a few hours later, the soft glow of the grace fading from their skin as their boots carried them across the threshold of the outer courtyard. The air was different now. The acrid stink of gore and smoke had lifted, replaced with the clean tang of salt and the woodsmoke of cookfires.
The mountain of corpses that had loomed in the center was gone, reduced to ash-piles and dragged remains. Only a few bodies lingered, mangled limbs jutting from covered stretchers as workmen carried them toward the sea.
And yet, despite the ruin, the place breathed with life again.
Children darted between wounded soldiers. Men and women sat on barrels and broken stones, wrapping bandages, sharing bread, and speaking in voices that carried a fragile but undeniable hope. Laughter, thin and trembling, still managed to echo under the stone walls. They were alive, and that was enough.
The moment John, Melina, and Millicent stepped forward, heads turned. Some rose to bow, some to clap, others simply stared in awe. They greeted the three with gratitude, hands clasped, smiles cracked through tears. One boy even raised a wooden sword and swung it clumsily in mimicry of John's Zweihander.
John gave him the faintest nod and kept walking, his mouth twitching into the ghost of a smile.
"Where's Edgar?" he asked one of the men hauling timber across the yard. His voice was low but steady. "We've got business with him."
The man straightened, sweat dripping down his brow. "Inside, ser. I can take you." His voice carried pride rather than weariness, as though being their guide was itself an honor.
"Lead on," John said, and the man all but hurried to the keep.
They passed through the inner halls, torchlight flickering against stone scarred by war. Rubble filled corners where walls had crumbled. Tapestries were shredded, beams blackened by fire.
Yet here too the work had already begun, with soldiers dragging stone into piles, masons patching cracks, women sweeping blood away from the flagstones.
The guide pushed open a heavy door, leading them into what had once been a dining hall. Long tables remained, though the feast was gone. In its place stood a massive oak slab, its surface dominated by a sprawling map of the Weeping Peninsula. Pins, banners, and wax marks crowded its surface, turning parchment into a battlefield of its own.
Edgar was already there, helm laid aside, his eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion but sharpened with purpose. He rose as they entered, gesturing them closer.
"Welcome, honored friends," he said, voice heavy but earnest. "You return to us not only as victors but as saviors. Morne stands once more."
John gave a short shrug. "Happy to help. But I figure we're not done yet."
Edgar inclined his head gravely and gestured to the map. "You speak true. See here, the Peninsula in its breadth."
John stepped closer. The parchment stretched nearly the length of the table. Every major landmark was marked in careful ink: The Wandering Mausoleum drifting along the cliffs, the three churches (each inked with symbols of Grace), a forest to the east labeled as neutral demihuman domain.
And then towers, ruins, and a small scattering of towns and villages.
He tried to not think about how half a dozen of those villages were crossed out with red wax.
Edgar's hand rested over one circle marked with a jagged sigil. "Here lies our most dire blight. The village by the southern cliffs. What was once a fishing hamlet has been seized by Frenzied Flame. Madness consumes them entirely. They howl like beasts in the night, and those few scouts who returned speak of eyes burned golden and minds lost to screaming."
The room dimmed at his words.
Millicent leaned forward, her scimitars still strapped to her back, expression pinched. "Is there really no other way? We've been killing Misbegotten all week, fine, but these are villagers. Farmers. They didn't choose this. Cutting them down like cattle feels wrong."
John exhaled through his nose. Slowly, deliberately, he reached inward. Marika. What's the truth here?
Her voice answered, low and solemn. "Alas, mine Champion, Frenzy is unlike other blights. Once it seizes a soul, it mars the very root of being. Nothing of Grace can cleanse it. Not thyself, nor I, nor aught else in this realm. All that is touched by Frenzy is lost."
Her pause lingered before she added, quieter still: "Even thee, mine Champion."
John's eyes darkened with resignation, he had figured this would be the case, even if he hoped otherwise. "…Even me."
He relayed it aloud. "Once Frenzy burns you, that's it. There's no possible recovery. Not by Grace, not by anything. You're done."
Millicent went pale. Melina's lips tightened, her face drawn. Edgar lowered his gaze, as though he'd already known the truth but prayed to hear otherwise.
The table buzzed with subdued whispers, but John wasn't listening anymore. His mind replayed the image from earlier, the little boy clutched in her father's arms, teddy bear still gripped in tiny fingers even as blood painted his face.
He slammed his palm against the oak table, silencing the room with the crack of wood. "Enough," he said sharply. "I'll handle it. Alone."
The outrage was immediate.
Millicent shot upright, slamming her good hand down beside his. "Like hell you will!"
Melina stepped closer, golden light flickering at her fingertips. "You cannot mean this. To go alone into such madness, you will not return."
Edgar shook his head, voice booming. "Madness spreads, but so does courage. If the village must be purged, it should be done together, as one people. We will not leave you to such fate."
John straightened, his jaw tight. "You don't get it. Frenzied Flame doesn't just kill. It erases. Flesh, spirit, soul. Even Torrent would be gone forever if it touched him. No spirit ash survives it. Nothing does."
Marika's voice chimed in, firm but sorrowful. "This includes thee. Shouldst thou fall, I cannot restore thee. Thy Immortal Heart would not avail thee then."
"Don't act like you're exempt! Even Marika's Grace would struggle to bring you back, and I cannot allow that!" Melina agreed with her mother even without hearing her, her voice trembling despite her steady tone. "We cannot afford to lose you. I… I will not."
John set his shoulders. "It has to be me. I'm not letting anyone else risk it. Not Millicent. Not Edgar's soldiers. Not even you. If someone has to do the ugly work, it'll be me."
The room fell into silence.
Edgar studied him, the lines of his face taut with emotion. At last, he whispered, "You owe these people nothing. I owe them everything. Why go this far?"
John's reply came without hesitation. His voice was iron.
"Because I plan on being Elden Lord. And that means every villager, every farmer, every soldier in the Lands Between is my responsibility. They're all my people. I've seen leaders who throw their own into the fire, calling it the 'greater good'."
His mind flew back to the so-called 'Leaders' of his old world. Nothing but greedy old bastards throwing the younger generations under their boot heel for money.
He refused to be the same.
"You know what that really is? Cowardice, plain and simple. Cowards sacrificing their own so they don't have to pay the cost themselves. I'm not going to be that kind of lord. Not now, not ever. If someone has to burn, it'll be me. Not them."
The words rang out across the chamber. No one spoke. Even the scribes had gone still, pens frozen over parchment.
Edgar's lips pressed tight. Slowly, reverently, he bowed his head. "Then I will not stop you. But know this, you carry more honor than most kings I've served. I will pray for your return."
Millicent muttered under her breath, voice cracking, "I hate how much sense you make when you're being a reckless idiot."
Melina said nothing, but her gaze never left him, equal parts fury and something softer.
Marika's voice returned, quieter than usual. "Thou tread a path most perilous. But mayhap… a lord's path was never safe."
John set both hands on the table and stared down at the marked map. The jagged sigil over the frenzied village seemed to glow in the torchlight. His jaw clenched as his hand balled into a fist.
"No more dead children," he whispered to himself. "Not while I can still fight."
And that was that.
…
By the time the stakes were driven, the ropes set, and the last ward stitched across the ridge, dusk had already taken the Weeping Peninsula in both hands and pressed it flat. The sky poured gold along the cliff edge and then bled into bruised purple, and the wind that came off the sea arrived quiet, as if it did not wish to be heard by what waited on the hill.
The plan was not clever. It did not need to be. The ailing village sat atop a hump of earth with valleys cupping it on both sides. Fortunate geography, cruel design.
Edgar's people had thrown up blockades where the slopes softened, lines of spears and bows behind low walls of salvaged timber, barrels of oil set back and tarps damped down against stray embers.
Wards were etched into stone and hammered into dirt. A ring of eyes with orders to put down anything that tried to stumble free.
Millicent took a flank with ten sharpshooters and a habit of pointing at rocks and naming them hers. Melina anchored the center, her Grace stretched thin as a tether that ran from her chest to John's, a bright, taut line that would pluck his soul if it began to slide.
He would go alone. That was the part no one liked. He would go up the hill and do the worst work himself, blade by blade, house by house, ending what could not be healed. The compromise was ugly but necessary. Every ten minutes, he would pulse the link to Melina.
A signal through Grace that meant still here, still me, still fighting. If the signal did not come, she had sworn with that strange quiet violence of hers that she would rush the hill with a battalion and drag him out of the fire by the scruff or burn the village to black dust. He had tried to argue. She had not been moved.
At the base of the hill, the three stood together for a last look. Melina lifted her hands and the world went warmer.
The Blessing of the Erdtree washed over him like noon through leaves. It left a smell of pollen and open fields under the salt. Flame protection followed, a thin sheen across his armor that felt like a cool breath on hot mail. Golden Vow last, the words like a line drawn through his spine, a promise that held him upright and drew his shoulders back.
Millicent whistled and cocked her head. "You look like a candle walking into a hurricane."
"Good thing I brought a big wick." John said, setting his jaw around the grin. "Every ten minutes. I will poke the string."
Melina met his gaze, her eyes seemed far softer than they usually did. "Do not be clever about the signal," she said softly. "Just send it."
"No mixtape, got it." He tapped his breastplate where the Grace sat under bone. "Every ten."
She did not answer. She watched him for a heartbeat longer than necessary, then stepped aside. Millicent thumped his arm with the hilt of her scimitar.
"Bring me back a souvenir that is not cursed," She said, trying her best to raise the morale, as if he wasn't about to walk into a slaughter house alone. "Like a nice rock."
"I will get you the finest non-haunted pebble in the village." He joked, allowing a small smile to tug at his lip, then turned to the slope.
He began to climb. The first stretch cut through scrub that once pretended to be forest. The trees had lost most of their leaves out of season and the black forks of their branches wrote letters in the dim air. Birds had abandoned the place.
No chitter, no wingbeat, only wind moving through dead needles and the soft, sick sound of someone muttering where no one should be. The path was thin, only a pair of ruts where carts used to carry potatoes and gossip. He placed his feet in the ruts and moved.
He found the first of them where the trees gave him a glimpse of the village fence. A man in rags that had not been rags when he put them on. He shambled along the path with his hands out like a sleepwalker, his lips moving. When he lifted his face, his eyes showed no color at all, only a jaundiced shine that flickered like candles under oily water.
"Bright light…" The man whispered. "Bright light, bright light, no more sleep, never sleep, the eyes are everywhere, the eyes are behind the eyes."
"Steel thy will." Marika said, the words crisp as cold water. They sounded rehearsed, as if she told them to herself enough times for it to blend together. "Close thy heart to their suffering. The only mercy left is the end thou bringest."
John did not speak as he drew his Zweihander and let the weight of it settle his shoulders. One step and one swing later, the whisper stopped. He did not watch the body fall as he sent a small pulse down the Grace-thread, like plucking a harp string. Melina's answering tug came back at once, a silent nod in his ribs.
The forest thinned into fences broken by hoof and fear. The village on the hill looked like someone had taken a painting and rubbed it with an angry hand. Doors hung loose and windows gaped. Symbols had been scrawled in soot and blood, circles and jagged lines that made his teeth ache to see.
He passed a woman kneeling upright in front of a house with her hands folded, her head thrown back so far her throat looked like a strip of old leather. Her mouth hung open. No sound. He closed the distance and gave her the mercy he carried.
He went house to house. Some had men who came at him low and silent with knives. Some had girls with glass in their hands who did not seem to know they were holding glass. Some had nothing living at all, only the smell of eyes burned where no fire had been.
He kept moving, kept swinging. His breath came steady. It had to. There was no room here for tears. He could count those later when he had two hands free.
Once, a blast of frenzy snapped from a shutter like a struck snake. He threw himself sideways and felt the heat brush his face without warmth. The red sheen of protection crawled and hissed where it met it, then died back down.
He tasted copper, and under it, something like sour milk. He sent the second signal. Melina's tug replied. He imagined her lips pressed into that line she wore when she was angry with him for existing too close to death.
The roll of houses ended and the slope opened into a wide yard of trampled dirt and broken benches. The Baptismal Church sat at the crown like a widow's tooth. Its roof had collapsed in places and the bell had melted and slid down its own rope like a candle that forgot how to be a bell.
The ground near the door was painted in that same sick gold, little sigils blooming and fading in the dust like fungi that had learned the alphabet.
He slowed until he was standing still, the villagers at the church did not scream or charge. They stood still, a few rocked, but most stared. Their eyes burned that steady fever-yellow, not bright, but present, like a candle that had been lit for a month and refused to gutter. He lifted the Zweihander and kept walking.
One was standing ahead of the rest, a man without half his shirt and too much writing carved into his skin. He smiled with his lips and nowhere else.
"So much blood…" He said. The voice trembled in a way that lacked weakness, its pure mockery laced every syllable. "So much ash. Are you proud of yourself, butcher?"
"Proud is not the word I'd choose." He muttered, stopping just a few steps away from the frenzied group. "'Necessary' is doing the heavy lifting today."
The man tilted his head. "How many times have you said that, I wonder? Necessary. The word tastes like a bandage."
John's mouth went thin. The sentences came too straight. They fit together. They had teeth where these poor ruined mouths should not have had teeth.
"Just be quiet." John said, and he stepped in and cut him in half.
The torso hit the dirt and the legs folded in on themselves.
Then the woman to the dead man's left, with hair stuck to her face and an apron black with old stew, smiled the same wrong smile and spoke without moving her eyes from John.
"I imagine you say it often." She continued, not missing a beat. "It must help. A small prayer you give yourself, so your hands do not shake when you eat after the slaughter."
John felt his pulse rise and a little part of him step back inside his own chest to look at this from a distance.
"Marika…" He said under his breath, while his eyes stayed on the woman's empty stare. "We have a problem."
Marika cut across his thought with a thread of alarm he was not used to hearing in her voice.
"It is almost as if the same tongue speaks through them all." She said. "The cadence is the same. The malice is the same. Someone rides these minds and wears them one by one. But how? When? And to what end? Is this tied to the maiden, Irina, and the fate that could have claimed her?"
John's fingers closed so hard on the leather wrap of the hilt that the seams bit his skin. There were few things in the Lands Between that could make a chorus out of the maddened. Only one name rose in him like a curse he had memorized.
"Who are you?" He asked anyways, not expecting an answer.
Another figure, a teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood that was stolen from him, this time with a little whistle on a cord at his throat, lifted his chin. The mouth that was not his own smiled.
"I have been called by many names." the boy crooned, the sound soft and delighted. "The Frenzied Jester. The Herald of Madness. Oh, and there was a particularly cruel little epithet about hearts and honesty that always made me laugh. But you, my dear, dear friend, can call me-"
"Shabriri." John growled, completing what he knew would be the answer.
The grin widened. It stretched the boy's cheeks too far and made the corners tear a little. The light behind his eyes flared without warmth.
"Ah." The voice said through the whistle, through the boy, through the woman, through the man cut in two as if the lungs did not know they were lungs anymore. "So you do know a name. Names are curious little cages. One wonders if yours will rattle as sweetly."
John kept the blade up. He glanced once at the church door. No movement inside. The congregation outside did not surge. They only stared and swayed as if the wind were on a timer he could not see.
"You do not know me." John said. "I can tell. You are sniffing around the edges and making it up as you go."
"A fresh face~!" Shabriri sighed, delighted. The sound rippled and answered itself across five throats. "What a luxury. What a rare confection. Tell me, candle-man, what compels you to climb into a song you cannot hear? Duty? Love? …Some silly crown the wind promised you?"
"Little of column A, little of column go fuck yourself." John said, his hand clenching around the hilt of his blade. "You're not funny. And you are trespassing in bodies that don't belong to you."
"Trespassing~…" Shabriri trilled, and clapped with the boy's hands while the woman's hands remained still. "The butcher speaks of property. How quaint. How lordly. Did the blade sign a deed when it bought these bodies their rest?"
Marika's presence pressed at the back of his eyes.
"Be wary. He seeks to bait thee. Thy wrath is a door he would gladly walk through."
"Noted." John muttered, and he took another step.
The light in the churchyard thickened. It gathered not in a beam, but in a smear, like the air itself had been buttered with a sick glow. The frenzy sigils in the dust warmed and cooled as if breathing. Shabriri hummed through the mouths that waited for instruction.
"Tell me your joke." Shabriri murmured, very soft now. The boy's head tilted. The woman's eyes did not blink. "You have one. You always have one, little candle in the wind. The jest is the helmet you wear when all the other armor has fallen off. Tell it, and let us see if laughter can drown a choir."
John let out a breath he did not know he had been holding.
"All right… Here is one. Knock knock."
There was a moment of confusion that would have been funny in any other yard. The chorus paused. The wrong smiles flattened, then tugged back up as if on strings.
"…Who is there~?" Shabriri's chorus whispered from every mouth in the courtyard, playful, curious, trembling with false innocence. Their many throats tremored with his voice, like wind blowing through a graveyard full of flutes.
John's teeth clicked together. He could feel the furnace building behind them, heat pooling in his lungs, under his ribs, pressing against the seams of his throat.
"A Dead Man."
And then he exhaled.
Flame erupted from his mouth in a torrent of molten gold and red, dragonfire blooming across the courtyard in a wide, sweeping arc. The breath hit like a storm, the pressure alone shaking the nearest walls.
The frenzy-light sputtered in defiance, then screamed as it met something older, purer, more deliberate. The blaze carried his wrath, his disgust, and his sorrow. All of it condensed into fire that ate the world before it.
The frenzied villagers didn't even run. They laughed. They applauded.
"Oh! Oh bravo! Magnificent!" Shabriri shrieked gleefully through their cracking voices, clapping with blackened hands as their flesh peeled from the bone. "Look at him burn, look at him purge! The Lord of Cinder reborn! Majestic~! Marvelous~! Magnificent~!"
Their laughter choked on itself as the heat tore through them. One by one, their cheers turned to shrieks, then wheezing silence, until all that was left were cinders spinning in the wind.
The flame guttered out. Smoke hung heavy in the air. Ash drifted down in slow spirals like black snow.
Only one figure remained, a single villager on his knees, body burned almost to coal, ribs showing through his skin. He looked up at John, lips split into a smile that shouldn't have been possible anymore.
"I had… Strings…" The man rasped, his throat crackling like burnt wood. "But now… I am free~"
He coughed, laughed once more, the sound thin and hollow. "Shabriri… shall never… die…"
John stepped forward and stomped his armoured boot down on the man's skull. Bone cracked, ash sprayed, and silence took the hill again.
For a moment, there was only the sound of his own breath. He looked down at his hands. They were covered in soot, blood, melted skin, everything that used to be human. His reflection in the blade showed a face too tired to be angry, too heavy to be proud. Just a man with a task that needed doing and a soul that hated the price.
He wanted to throw up, but he didn't. He swallowed it down and forced himself to breathe.
"Thou hast done well, mine Champion." Marika whispered softly, her voice a thread of gold in the ruin. "The worst is behind thee. Only this last act remains. Then thou shalt return to thine comrades and rest. Hold steady just a little longer."
John nodded slowly. "Yeah... A little longer."
He turned toward the church doors. The hinges screamed when he pushed them open.
The inside was as broken as the outside, but strangely untouched by blood. The light that filtered through the cracked ceiling was orange, painting everything in tired sunset hues. The air smelled faintly of wax and dust. Beneath the altar, a small sacred tear had spilled from its vessel and rolled into a shallow crack in the stone.
And somewhere in that hollow quiet, a child's humming carried.
John's heart stopped.
He followed the sound to the altar, and there she was. It was a little girl, no older than six or seven, sitting in front of the melted statue of Marika. The Goddess's face was a sagging mask of gold, eyes and crown fused into one featureless lump. The girl didn't look up. She was playing, small hands moving three dolls through the dust.
Marika. Maliketh. And, unmistakably, Radagon.
Something in the back of his head immediately told him that something was wrong, that this child couldn't have possibly been able to make or find toys of this shape. But it was all rather hard to care about at the moment, everything that day had been wrong from beginning to end.
The girl hummed tunelessly, the melody wobbling between nursery rhyme and lament. She was speaking softly to herself, something about queens and wolves and kings. John stepped closer until he was two paces behind her and let his Zweihander fall into the ground with a soft thud.
The sound made her pause. She turned her head slightly, not enough for him to see her face. Her skin was pale, her hair matted.
"They're all dead, aren't they? Like Mommy was. A few days ago."
John froze. His throat tightened. He knew what he was supposed to do. He'd done it to dozens already. But something about the way she said it, the blunt, childlike acceptance, made his heart stumble.
"Yeah." He said quietly. "Yeah, kid. They're all dead."
"...Are you going to kill me too?" She asked. Her voice didn't tremble. It was a question asked out of curiosity, not fear.
"...Yes."
The little girl let her dolls drop to the ground. They landed in the dust with soft, hollow thumps.
'I am not a Hero.' he thought unconsciously, as if the denial would make what he was about to do any better. 'But… I am a good person, or so I used to think I was… Now… I'm not so sure.'
"Okay…" She whispered, seemingly unaware of his inner plight.
John swallowed hard and wrapped his hand around the Zweihander's hilt. He pulled it from the floor, lined the point with her back, and inhaled deeply. His fingers tightened on the grip.
"My Champion…" Marika's voice cracked slightly.
"I know."
He drove the sword forward, clean through her chest. There was no sound or struggle. It was a merciful death, or as close to one as he could offer.
He exhaled shakily and stared at the hilt, waiting to feel something – relief, grief, anything.
Nothing came.
Then the girl twitched.
At first, he thought it was a spasm, nerves firing their last. Then he heard the whisper, a haunting melody that ran shivers down his spine.
"...Grant us eyes… Grant us eyes… Plant eyes on our brains so that we may comprehend the fall… Of the Higher Beings beyond us all…"
John froze. The child's voice had changed. It was still hers, but layered beneath it were others. Hundreds, maybe thousands, all whispering the same prayer.
The girl's head turned. Slowly. Too slowly. Bone cracked, sinew stretched. She turned all the way around, 180 degrees, until her face was staring up at him, her mouth curling into a smile that wasn't human.
Her eyes were gone, they had been gone. Presumably by whatever ungodly force had taken the rest of the village.
And in their place burned embers. Bright, golden-red, searing with madness.
The Flame of Frenzy.
It exploded outward like a tidal wave of incandescent heat and insanity that swallowed him whole. He barely had time to scream before it consumed everything whether it was air, sight, sound, thought.
The last thing he heard before the world dissolved into yellow fire was Marika's voice, it was frantic and terrified in a way he had never heard from her before.
"Johnathan!"
Then there was nothing.
…
And then there was everything.
When his vision returned, it wasn't to the church. It wasn't even to the Weeping Peninsula. It was the Lands Between, but ruined, scorched, and unmade.
The sky was black and gold, roiling like molten glass. The Erdtree was no longer whole; it was split open from root to crown, burning as a pyre of frenzied flame. Its branches reached out like skeletal arms, dripping molten sap into a sky blotted by madness.
Rivers of gold had turned to rivers of ash. The sun was gone, replaced by a boiling sphere of flame that screamed rather than shone. The land below was fractured, endless, crawling with light that devoured everything it touched.
He heard sobbing, and laughing, and prayers that had no words. He heard the sound of people clawing at their own skulls, begging to see, to understand, to burn.
It was the End of the Lands Between.
Or rather, the End of Creation.
"Before there was time." A voice murmured, echoing across the wasteland. "Before there was anything… there was nothing. And before there was nothing… there was the One Great."
John turned (if turning meant anything here) and saw the sky open wide, as if a gaping hole in reality was formed before his nonexistent eyes.
A singularity hung in the void, vast beyond measure, pulsing like a wound in the fabric of creation. Around it swirled stars still forming and unforming, gas clouds of unbirthed worlds. And before it, like a shadow given voice, a shape stood.
It was Shabriri, not the borrowed voices, not the puppets, but the real one. His form was a horror made of every human mistake. Skin peeled back into constant smiles, eyes erupting and collapsing across his face in waves, his mouth stretching, splitting, reforming with each syllable.
"The Higher Being you sheep call the Greater Will sought to undo the threads of creation." Shabriri intoned, his voice both distant and inside John's skull. "To take the reins of reality into its trembling hands."
The singularity fractured. The stars scattered. From the shards of nothing, galaxies bloomed like flowers that couldn't stop screaming. The world took shape, trembling and bleeding into existence.
"All that there is came from the One Great." Shabriri continued, spreading his arms wide. "Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will… Oh, the blundering Child… Made a Mistake."
The stars burned brighter. Then dimmed. Then began to weep.
"Torment. Despair. Affliction. Every sin, every curse. Every one born of that mistake came as well. And now…" His grin widened, splitting his head nearly in half. "I shall see that mistake undone."
The last of the light behind him shattered. The Erdtree's pyre flared brighter, its flame screaming like a dying God.
"No matter the cost." Shabriri whispered, the last word rolling like a sigh across the void.
And the world of Gold fell into fire.
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Author's Note:
Shabriri has a lot to say, Johnny Boy has no choice but to listen.
I wonder if Melina has anything to say about this?
Speaking of Melina, she's enjoying herself in the Patreon. As the first smut scene has finally been written, only… *reads word count* 370k words in.
…Atleast we finally got there, right?
…
Next Chapter Title: (Interlude) My Companion is an Odd One.
…
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