The world should've been waking to birdsong and basking in divine golden light.
But dawn rose blind and ashen, the sky bleached gray like the belly of something dead. No sun broke through the clouds.
Only smoke. And silence.
The road beneath the horse's hooves was brittle. Every step echoed like bones cracking under weight they were never meant to bear.
Joselyn pressed his cheek against Lucia's back. Leaning onto her slightly. Still injured from the wounds he suffered during the fights at the tournament.
Lucia's breath hitched in bursts, warm and wet, soaking into the fabric of his coat. Neither of them spoke. Words would only make it real.
In their minds, the Ironclad Tournament still lingered. Still dancing with firelight and screams and metal breaking against bone. But now, even that seemed small.
The smell was the first thing that struck them.
The wind shifted, and something vile clung to it. A smell of tar and rust. Then blood. Then something worse.
A line of smoke tore through the skyline ahead. Thick, coiling, blacker than stormclouds. It did not rise like chimney smoke. It oozed upward, slow and deliberate, like something alive. Something celebrating.
Lucia leaned up after holding the reins too long. Her voice was hoarse, no louder than a dying breath."…That's not from chimneys," she said. "Joselyn… that smoke is too large."
The horse pawed the earth, refusing to move. Joselyn's hands trembled on the reins. He didn't even realize it.
They crested the ridge.
And Paradise died.
The capital of flowers, the city of color and music and mercy, lay in ruins below them. Fire bloomed like inverted blossoms, twisted and blackened. The buildings Joselyn had known since infancy. Tea stalls, glass gardens, painted towers were skeletal now. Bones on fire. Smoke choked the sky, climbing so high it blotted out the sun itself. Wind carried the screams away, but the silence it left behind was worse.
"No…" Joselyn whispered. "No…"
He leaned forward. Jumping off the horse and running towards the fallen gates and the unfinished wall that encompassed Paradise.
As he finally entered Paradise, he screamed.
Ash blanketed the road like gray snow. Charred wood snapped beneath hooves. The air burned to breathe. And beneath the smoke, beneath the reek of burning cloth and oil and wood, was a stench that obliterated memory.
Burnt flesh.
Cooked hair.
Blood. Piss. Offal. Ruin.
Joselyn didn't remember jumping off the horse. One moment he was on horseback, the next he was walking on broken earth, stepping over rubble and viscera and things that had once been people.
He looked down.
The body was small.
A boy. Six, maybe seven. Half his skull was caved in. His eyes were still open.
Joselyn's breathing sped up. He gripped his shirt where his heart would be and silently… began to cry.
Lucia dropped beside him. Her hands clamped over her mouth. She made no sound. Only a quivering, high-pitched wheeze, like a dying bird caught in a snare.
They walked like ghosts through the remains. Charred bodies were draped over benches. Over fences. Over each other. Some frozen mid-run. Some missing limbs. One was still clutching a child so tightly that their skin had fused together in death.
Was this really Paradise? Was this really the Land of Flowers? The land that was fought for peace and freedom? Why would anyone attack a peaceful land? Why? Why? Why?
What was the reason? Who could it benefit? Why would they do this?
Lucia collapsed beside a crumpled figure near the bakery. The same bakery where they'd bought honeyed bread just days ago. A woman lay there, alive. Barely.
Her skin was gone from the back. Her spine exposed. Her lips cracked as she tried to speak.
"M-my baby…" she rasped. "They burned… they—"Blood bubbled from her throat.
Lucia took her hand. "You're safe now… it's okay… no one is going to hurt you…"
"They… laughed…" the woman wheezed. "Said… said flowers should die… in field… not behind the walls of a kingdom…"
Then she exhaled. Her chest caved in. Her soul left quietly, like it had been ashamed to stay.
Lucia kept holding her hand. Only a few feet from there was a burnt baby.
A soldier leaned against the ruined statue of Queen Felmirah. Joselyn's late mother who died a few years ago, now missing her stone head. The guard's armor was cracked open like a shell. Steam hissed from the gaps.
"Mother…" Joselyn muttered. His gaze soon slowly landed upon the guard.
Joselyn knew him.
"…Prince Jo…" the man murmured. "They… they knew… every tunnel. Every guard post. Every schedule. Gods forgive us…"
His eyes rolled back.
He never finished the thought.
A line of blackened knights sat against the crumbled wall, some still clutching their swords. One, a Flower Knight, was murmuring to himself.
"…Five… only five of them… they were not human… I refuse to believe it… monsters in skin…"
He didn't speak again. His last breath was released only to not be seen among the heavy smoke and ash.
Joselyn fell to his knees. Vomit burned his throat but nothing came. He clutched his chest, as if trying to hold his heart in place. Like it was going to fall out any second.
Lucia gently closed the eyes of a dead child just ten feet away. Her hands shook violently, but she did it anyway.
When she looked up, she saw him kneeling. She ran to him. She wrapped her arms around him.
"I'm sorry," she said, over and over, as if those words could reverse time.
They passed a familiar garden.
Yesterday, it had been full of color. Hibiscus, amaranth, tiger lilies.
Now? Nothing but ash.
Joselyn reached for one stem. It disintegrated in his hand. He said nothing. How could he?
***
"Do you know why flowers bloom, Joselyn?"
His father's voice returned, uninvited. Seven years old. A rose in his lap.
"They bloom to remind us that beauty is temporary," Azralyn had said. "Even peace fades."
"Then why bother blooming?" young Joselyn had asked.
"Because knowing it ends is what makes it beautiful," his father told him. "Hold life gently, my son. Never too tightly. But never let it slip through your hands."
"Then why not just… not change? Would it not stay beautiful?"
At the time, Joselyn hadn't understood the flawed logic of his words.
Now he did. He ran.
***
His legs moved on their own. He sprinted past the dead. Over collapsed buildings. Over blood-slick stone. His hands bled from climbing shattered walls, but he didn't care. He didn't care for anything but one thing.
"FATHER!"
Smoke stung his eyes and ash gripped his lungs, but he knew the way. Through the ravaged market. Past the orphanage. Past the library, still faintly smoldering.
"FATHER, PLEASE! WHERE ARE YOU!"
He reached the palace gates. Or what was left of them.
They were blown open. The gold plating had melted down like wax. The royal fountain was cracked and filled with charred body parts. Some were still bubbling.
The courtyard was a slaughterhouse.
Flower Knights had been crucified to the palace walls with their own swords. Children were left in heaps. One girl who confessed her feelings to Joselyn a week ago had been hanged upside down, her hands missing.
He couldn't breathe.
The world tilted.
And then he saw it.
The tower.
The highest point of Paradise.
There, strung between two iron poles like a grotesque standard, was the body of his father.
Azralyn Alveretta. Leader of countless slave rebellions.
The First King of Flowers and Paradise.
Chains held his arms apart like a broken-winged angel. His skin was peeled back from his chest. His fingers had been flayed. His mouth sewn shut with black wire. His throat gaped open, as if someone had carved it just to see what nobility looked like inside.
His crown lay in the mud below snapped, dented, half-buried in blood.
He had died in battle. Joselyn could sense the lingering aura of his father's magic.
He had been butchered like a trophy.
Joselyn dropped. His legs failed him. His breath was ragged, wheezing.
He crawled.
Lucia arrived behind him. She saw what he saw.
She didn't scream. She didn't move.
She just fell beside him. One hand found his. Fingers locked.
Together, they stared up at the ruin of the man who once taught Joselyn kindness above conquest. Who told bedtime stories about mercy. Who had planted lilies with his bare hands on Joselyn's birthday.
Now he was nothing but meat on a hook.
A warning.
A mockery.
A martyr.
Paradise hadn't been conquered at all. It was burned along with its people in the fires of a horrifying battle.
And in that moment, surrounded by rot and smoke and silence, Joselyn's heart broke in a way it would never repair.
From that day on, the sight of blood would make him sick.
From that day on, he would never yearn for the thrill of battle with anything or anyone. No matter the grief or anger he harbored.