Silence.
That was all that remained.
No whispers.No cries.No songs of the once-proud court.
Only silence… and the sound of my footsteps dragging across stone soaked in blood.
My throat was raw. My tears had long since dried. There were no more screams left in me.
I stepped away from the throne room—not out of strength, but necessity. I could not bear to look at them anymore… Father, bound in light. Mother, shamed by moonlight.
So I walked.
Not to flee.
But to see.
What happened here… what they did to us—I needed to witness it. All of it. Not out of courage, but out of debt.
They were my kin.
And I was the only one left to remember them.
The east wing had collapsed.
Marble walls shattered into heaps of stone and bone. Crushed beneath them were the lower servants, their bodies fused with rubble, as if the castle itself had tried to swallow them. A child's shoe peeked from beneath the wreckage, small and blood-stained.
I didn't cry.
I just kept walking.
The library was next.
Our greatest legacy. Shelves of ancient tomes—histories of the old bloodlines, songs of war and peace—burned to ash. Flames had devoured the knowledge of centuries in a single, merciless breath. Pages drifted in the air like blackened snow, some still glowing at the edges.
In the center of the room, the scholars who once taught me sat slumped over desks, throats slit, their robes soaked in ink and blood. One of them still held a quill.
They died writing their final words.
The garden…
The roses had bloomed early.
But not from care.
They drank deeply of what stained the soil.
Petals red as flesh. Thorns laced with blood. Among them lay bodies—guards and nobles alike—arranged like dolls beneath the weeping moon trees. Some still held hands. Some wore expressions of peace. Others… frozen terror.
There was a corpse nailed to the tree trunk—his wings torn from his back.
He was a cherub-blooded hybrid. A boy I once danced with during the Harvest Festival.
His eyes had been gouged out and replaced with silver coins.
A message, perhaps.
Or just a game.
I stood there, amid the ruins of my people. My body numb, my mind raw.
Not even the wind dared to sing anymore.
Only silence.
And the ghosts that would forever haunt these halls.
The gates loomed ahead.
Once guarded by watchmen in silver and obsidian, adorned with the crest of my bloodline—now rusted, bent, and drenched in the same red that followed me through every corridor.
The castle had become a tomb.
But the city…
The city was worse.
I pushed the gates open. The old iron shrieked in protest, its hinges bleeding rust. And when I stepped beyond—
My breath caught.
The streets were painted in nightmares.
The city of Nivellan, once a sanctuary for our kind, where children played under dusk-lit lamplight and merchants sang beneath moonlit stalls—was now a grotesque canvas of torment.
Children hung from the lamp posts by their necks, their small bodies swaying in the breeze, some still clutching dolls… some missing limbs.
Women were scattered through the cobbled roads, defiled and discarded like broken porcelain. Some were carved with crude symbols. Others were left in twisted poses—mockery painted on their lifeless faces.
The men—
They had been used.
Bodies lined the market square, displayed like theater props. Torture not done for interrogation—but for sport. Tongues removed. Eyes gouged. Limbs rearranged like puppets in a madman's show. One man's chest was flayed open, organs arranged into the sigil of an enemy house.
I couldn't scream anymore.
I couldn't cry.
I could only see.
I wandered further into the ruins.
The bakery where I used to sneak pastries… reduced to ash and bones. The blacksmith's forge—cold and soaked in blood. Even the bell tower had fallen, its chimes silenced under a pile of corpses.
Then, I saw the lake.
Once the heart of our city. Where festivals were held, where lovers carved their names into the birch trees that ringed the water.
Now—
Red.
The lake had turned red.
Corpses floated, swollen and discolored. Faces twisted in agony. Some were bound. Others had their mouths stitched shut. One still clutched a music box in their arms, waterlogged and silent.
A lullaby trapped in death.
I fell to my knees on the shore.
There were no words.
No prayers.
No salvation.
Only silence.
Only ruin.
Only me.
As I wandered deeper through the desolated ruins, the silence grew heavier… not with peace, but with a creeping sense of knowing.
The more I looked, the more the truth began to unravel.
This was no mere siege.
It was annihilation.
Claw marks tore through stone walls and towers like parchment. Great talon gouges stretched across the streets, wide and deep—far beyond anything a man or beast could ever make.
Entire homes had been crushed under unseen weight, their wooden frames splintered and scattered. Blood had splashed not just on the ground, but on the rooftops—painted like a storm had rained it down.
Burn marks.
Everywhere.
Not just scorched wood or smoldering debris—vaporized stone, turned black and brittle. Fire had swept through the kingdom, not wild… but aimed. Controlled. Cruel.
These were not the acts of an army.
Not of man. Not even of spirit.
But of something far older.
Far greater.
And in the center of it all—
I found it.
The plaza where we once gathered for festivals… now cracked and torn. Statues of our ancestors had been toppled, shattered into headless remains.
There, amidst the rubble, lay a mountain of flesh and scale.
A corpse.
But not just any corpse.
A dragon.
Its massive body sprawled across the broken courtyard—grey scales dull and lifeless, some torn open as if rent by another monster's claws. One wing had been burned entirely, now nothing but charred bone. Its neck was twisted unnaturally, jaw cracked open in a silent final roar.
And yet… even in death, it radiated power.
A legend made flesh.
Now fallen.
I stepped toward it, slowly.
The closer I drew, the more I could feel it—the residue.
The air around its body was thick with something ancient. Not heat. Not magic.
Malice.
Its eyes were still open.
Glassy. Empty.
But I felt it.
Whatever this beast had been… it was not the enemy.
It had been used.
Bent. Broken.
Like the rest of us.
Who had done this?
Who had turned a dragon into a weapon of extinction?
And why—why us?
The dragon's body loomed above me like a monument to forgotten terror.
Scales the size of shields, now dulled and cracked, reflected the dying light of the blood-stained sky. I approached cautiously, each step echoing against the stone like a question. The wind had stilled—no birds, no crows, no whispers.
Just me.
And the corpse of a legend.
Its jaw had been forced open unnaturally, its tongue split and charred. I stepped closer to the broken base of its neck, where torn sinew exposed the inner layers of its flesh.
That's when I saw them.
Carved deep into the base of its skull.
Runes.
Old.
Older than even the language my bloodline taught me.
The markings were etched in circular patterns—burnt into bone, not painted. The flesh around them had been seared away, revealing blackened glyphs that pulsed faintly, like embers refusing to die.
They reeked of domination.
Of forced obedience.
I reached toward them, hesitant, but compelled. My fingers hovered just above the runes, and even without contact—I felt it.
A thrum beneath the skin of the world.
Power.
Twisted, ancient power.
Whoever had carved these… they didn't just summon a dragon. They enslaved it. Bent it to their will. Used it as a vessel of ruin.
I pressed my hand gently to the dragon's cold neck.
A sharp chill raced up my arm—visions flickering like fire behind my eyes.
Fire raining from above.
Screams swallowed by flame.
Wings blotting out the sun.
Chains made of light and ash coiling around the beast's mind—
A voice.
Not the dragon's.
"Burn it all. Leave none."
Then nothing.
I stumbled back, gasping.
The runes still glowed faintly, as if mocking me.
Someone with knowledge of the ancient scripts had done this.
Someone with intent.
Not for war. Not for conquest.
But erasure.
They wanted us wiped from history.
They used the dragon as their blade.
And whoever they were… they were no mere mage.
They were something far more dangerous.
My fingers trembled as I pulled away from the scorched runes.
Their glow faded… but the memory of that voice, that command, echoed in my skull like a curse.
"Burn it all. Leave none."
Who could wield such control over something so ancient?
Who could command a dragon with just language and will?
I looked once more at the runes carved into bone, and the question surfaced—cold, bitter, and demanding:
"Who could do this?"
Not a warlord.
Not a king.
This was ritual. This was scripture turned into violence. Someone who had mastered not just magic—but the old languages, the tongues buried beneath layers of forgotten eras.
"Runes…" I whispered.
Ancient. Forbidden.
Barely understood even in the age of my ancestors.
And then—like dust shaken from a sealed book—a name came to me.
A name wrapped in myth and silence.
Jhenna Ferez.
The Great Sage of the Silent Age.
The last known rune-weaver.
Said to have lived through four monarchs and vanished without a trace after sealing the great Rift of Hollowing Stars. Some called her a ghost. Others, a myth.
But the stories agreed on one thing—
She knew the runes.
If anyone still lived who could interpret what was carved into that dragon's skull—it would be her.
And if anyone could help me uncover the truth behind this massacre… it was her.
I rose to my feet, wind brushing ash against my cloak.
The air shifted slightly. The silence remained.
But within me, something stirred.
Purpose.
Not vengeance. Not yet.
But a question that demanded an answer.
"Jhenna Ferez… if you still live…"
"I will find you."
"And you will tell me who did this."