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The Field of the Fallen, Cannia - 12th day of the Sardonyx Moon, Year 4 AH
Every battlefield sang with a different song. Some pulsed like beating drums, endlessly driving forward with the march of feet through mud and grime. Others possessed a more frantic rhythm, their discordant notes in time to the frenzy of clashing blades and roaring war cries. Still others were quieter in nature, requiems to the past and future dead.
This song was all of them and none of them at once. It was harmony, it was cacophony. It was loud and soft. It was the hoarse screams of vengeance yelled across the battlefield and the whispered prayers of watchers waiting for their return.
It was the song of a world waiting for salvation.
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The air was tinged with the scent of iron. Regis breathed in the cool wind, crisp and sizzling with magic. It was an overcast day. Only a few stray rays of light managed to penetrate the thick shroud of clouds, but the sky was continuously lit by the glow of fired spells soaring across the battlefield.
Below him, masses of bodies clashed, their weapons locked in an endless chain. The otherworlder had managed to rally together an impressive assortment of species, but the demon supposed it was easier to put aside differences when fighting a common foe.
Dragons and harpies took to the skies, elven warriors ran side by side with human troops, and centaurs let loose barrages of arrows from the backlines. He caught a glimpse of Belphor surging towards them, the other demon’s wings beating furiously. Regis turned away. Belphor was among the weakest of his generals, but he would be able to handle the centaurs alone. His own attention was better used elsewhere.
The atmosphere rippled. Regis turned, following the stream of magic to its source. At the edge of the fighting, a group of mages stood gathered around a large ritual circle, hands clasped together as they chanted. The runes glowed brighter and brighter as they channeled more of the Pulse’s power, draining the nearby veins of their magic.
Regis flared his wings and dove down, weaving between fired spells and arrows. One of the mages looked up mid chant, eyes widening when they saw him, but it was too late.
The demon slammed down into the center of the circle. The earth quaked beneath his feet as he rose, deep fissures blooming outwards from the impact.
Several mages stumbled and fell backwards. Some of the braver ones began chanting, but in spontaneous combat, ritual mages were always at a disadvantage. Regis reached for the steady warmth of the Ark, drawing from the magic of creation itself.
In a flash of violet light, spears of ice burst forth from the ground, impaling the mages. They choked, gasping for breath. Regis squeezed his fingers, and the ice rose higher. It stretched towards the sky like a tidal wave, crashing down and encasing the area around him in a massive glacier that gleamed in the faint light. The mages hung suspended in that clear prison, even the blood from their wounds frozen.
Cries of fury sounded from behind him. Regis turned to see a squadron of soldiers running towards him, their weapons raised. He could hear their quickened heartbeats and swallowed fear, but they continued to charge at him. He could respect their determination. It was a shame their loyalty was to the otherworlder.
The demon pulled another strand of magic from the Ark and flicked his finger. An invisible force flung the soldiers into the air, where they soon plunged back down to the earth under the weight of gravity. Bones crunched and necks snapped. A few nearby troops cowered back, but Regis didn’t pay them attention.
Where was the otherworlder? He could destroy as much of the army as he wished, but none of it would matter if the otherworlder survived.
The demon closed his eyes, focusing his senses on the mix of magic signatures clashing on the field. There were spells cast from all three possible sources: the Pulse, the Wild, and the Ark. Within that whirlwind, he searched for one particular presence.
Footsteps approached as more soldiers charged. Regis didn’t move, simply putting up a barrier of rot around him that disintegrated anything that crossed it.
There. On the other side of the battlefield, deep within the old crumbling ruins, was the otherworlder. And that wasn’t the only aura he recognized—Hal was there as well.
His eyes snapped open. One powerful beat of his wings blew away any foes in the vicinity. After a moment of consideration, he shifted to his diminished form.
His body vanished, dissipating away until it had been replaced by a cloud of black smoke that undulated and twisted at his will. In this form, he easily soared across the sky, a weightless mist traversing the battlefield.
He passed by angels and dragons clashing in the heavens, waves of troops continuing to battle below. High above, the heaps of dead bodies looked like scattered stones. The field was scorched and eroded. By the time the fighting finished, this land would be unrecognizable.
Regis frowned. War was such an ugly thing. It dug its claws into all things beautiful and tore them apart. It left piled bodies and destruction in its wake. This was not the world he loved, but a bastardized mockery of his desires.
Still, he wouldn’t abandon it. Nothing could cause him to.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Up ahead, a few stone structures jutted out from the barren earth. Half broken pillars and crumbled stone formed a jagged silhouette. It was quieter here, the sounds of war muffled by distance, but not silent. Further within, Regis could hear the clear ringing of metal against metal as two figures fought deeper inside the ruins.
The demon slowed his pace. The smoke twisted, coiling and wrapping around itself until it had formed the silhouette of the demon’s body. In another burst of light, he had returned to his true form.
This area had once been a castle, the heart of an ancient empire long since vanished. Cracked stone covered the ground, old worn sigils etched across their surface. Tall pillars stretched towards the sky without a roof to cover them, and a few lingering walls and stained glass windows had survived the destruction. The dim light that filtered through them cast the area in a spattering of dancing hues that almost seemed to mimic the sounds of fighting.
Regis surged forward towards the source of the noise, passing under archways and chunks of debris. Finally, he reached the center of the ruins, where once had stood the castle’s throne room.
Here, two figures fought, moving so quickly that most wouldn’t have been able to see them. Only brief flashes of gleaming blades, pure white feathers, black mist, and blinking eyes. Puddles of crimson dripped down from above, pooling into the cracks in the floor. Neither one stopped.
Regis, however, could follow every movement, and as he entered the space, his eyes traced the path of a shadow-cloaked sword as it impaled the angel beneath it.
Silence fell.
He waited for a familiar silver glow, for bloody wounds and shredded feathers to mend themselves together. They did not. Hal did not get up and continue fighting as he always did. He instead remained motionless, sprawled in blooming red at the otherworlder’s feet.
The otherworlder yanked his blade out. His breaths came in heavy pants. Much of his armor had been shattered, and his face was smeared with blood, grime, and sweat. Despite his clear exhaustion, when he turned to face the demon, pure hatred burned blazing hot in his eyes.
Regis stared at Hal’s unmoving body one final time before steadily meeting the boy’s gaze. Boy, for that was all he would ever be to the demon. A boy summoned to this world who did not and could not understand it, yet saw fit to determine what was right and what should be. A child given too much power now carelessly wielding it, too naive to understand the destruction he left in his wake.
The otherworlder—the so-called Hero—raised his sword. The shadows around them flickered.
Neither one spoke. Both had already said what they wanted to say and knew what needed to be known. This wasn’t the time for talk. In that field of thousands, with the weight of the world hanging in the balance, they did not hold back.
In the future, historians and poets would write of the moment with awe. They would speak of the way the sky darkened, how the winds picked up and swirled around the ruins, blowing with enough force to crack stone. Surviving soldiers would describe the way the atmosphere grew heavier, how the hairs on their skin rose as the air became visibly tinged with the two’s magic signatures. People living outside the field would claim that they felt the ground quake, that buildings and trees miles away collapsed from the impact.
The Hero and the demon king collided, every ounce of their power condensed into a single strike.
Blinding light lit up the heavens, and then it was done.
The Hero from another world had slain the demon king.
His reign was over.
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Dying felt in many ways like being born.
There was the haziness of it, the occasional flashes of sensations that held no real meaning. He was drifting—floating and falling at the same time. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was the world; he was nothing.
Above it all, Regis felt his soul, torn and carved into a shadow of itself, as it instinctively reached for the comforting warmth of the Ark. From there it had come, and to there it wished to return.
He didn’t let it. Some of his consciousness remained, and with every last ounce of strength he had, he resisted the pull.
He refused to disappear.
Regis didn’t know how much time passed, how long he drifted in that in-between state. Each time his consciousness grew stronger, he focused his effort on avoiding the call of the Ark. And slowly, piece by piece, some of the scattered bits of himself managed to find his damaged soul and latch on.
When Regis fully awakened, it was to an unfamiliar world.
Soft moonlight beamed down from a hazy moon. It illuminated the earth in front of him, highlighting stray dust particles rising towards the sky in clouds. It was quiet, the rustling of leaves and the whistling wind the only sounds breaking the silence of the night.
The stars were different than he remembered. The demon could recognize a few of the constellations—and the ones he could suggested that he was in the southern hemisphere—but there were enough changes that a fair amount of time must have passed since the battle. Several years at least.
He tried to move. In his peripheral vision, a wisp of smoke unfurled. He looked down.
He was in his diminished form. Stream of black smoke formed his body, hovering slightly above the ground. Regis attempted to shift back into his true form, but nothing happened. It wasn’t that he was unable to—the smoke still rippled and contorted as commanded—but rather that nothing formed at all.
That wasn’t the only change. If he focused intensely, he could just barely make out the warmth of the Ark, but it was faint. His connection hadn’t been entirely severed, but it was too weak to draw magic from it. The other two magic sources were even weaker; he couldn’t feel the Pulse or the Wild at all.
He made a few more attempts, but to no avail. The reality of his situation quickly became clear.
Somehow, during that final attack, the otherworlder had managed to completely destroy his true form and cut him off from the vast majority of his power. In his current state, he was no more dangerous than a passing cloud of fog.
But he’d survived.
There had been a brief moment, in that instant before their magic collided, that Regis had thought it was the end. He’d pursued his ambitions to the edge of the road, and from there he would fall.
But he’d survived, and that meant it wasn’t over. He would rebuild his strength; Regis knew how to be patient. He’d survived a millenia in the Flesh Fields, had spent centuries growing his influence. You never know when to quit, Hal had once said, and both then and now it rang true.
It didn’t matter how long it took.
The world would not forget him so easily.
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