Nightblade (Darkest night)

"We need to move."

Raven stared down at the unconscious figure stretched out across the dark floor of the cavern.

Morgan had been out cold for hours, his body rigid beneath his cloak.

Every few minutes, a violent tremor would ripple through his limbs. Morgan mumbled incoherently, his jaw clenched so tight the tendons in his neck stood out like corded steel.

Beneath his pale eyelids, his pupils darted back and forth in a frantic, rapid rhythm—it was almost as though he was drowning in the dark depths of delirium.

Valerius gave her a long, unreadable look, then slowly shook his head.

"Not yet."

Raven held the golden-eyed man’s gaze, searching his face for any sign of doubt, before letting out a long, weary sigh that misted into the frigid air.

"Our objective has not changed," Valerius said calmly.

"These ruins hold the answers to your friend’s condition and his Void abilities. I intend to get both. But first we must deal with the obstacle at hand."

Beside him, the veliscera offered her a gentle, reassuring smile, nodding slightly as if to soften the tension hanging between them.

Their calm demeanor was meant to be an anchor in the confounding depths of darkness they now found themselves in. Still, despite their quiet assurances, Raven’s uncanny instincts told a vastly different story.

Her skin pricked with persistent, cold needles. Something about the accursed mountain was shifting. The change was subtle, agonizingly slow, but undeniably real.

The air around them was souring, thick with the heavy, metallic tang of deep-earth ozone and the metallic taste of iron.

"Sye, do you feel it?" Valerius queried.

The dark figure standing in the embrace of the shadows a few feet away from Raven nodded almost imperceptibly, his dark eyes narrowing in the darkness.

"For what it’s worth, my Lord, the little one is right. There’s something off about this place."

With every passing breath, the atmosphere grew colder, denser, and more suffocating, as though the mountain itself were inhaling the sky to crush them beneath the sheer weight of its attention.

The silence of the high crags grew heavy and expectant, vibrating with a low, sub-audible hum that thrummed through the soles of her boots and rattled her teeth.

It felt less like waiting out a storm and more like sitting in the shadow of a colossal predator slowly opening its eyes.

And yet, despite the creeping dread tightening around her chest like an iron band, Morgan remained trapped in whatever harrowing nightmare held him hostage, completely oblivious to the real danger gathering in the dark above them.

******

"Nythrakar..."

Morgan’s eyes widened slightly.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

The sky above Elaris had not merely darkened; it had bled.

​Where hours before there had been ivory plazas humming with laughter, soaring crystal lanterns, and the sweet, roasted aroma of festival spiced bread, there was now only an abattoir.

Splintered marble columns lay across the avenues like snapped bones. The great aqueducts, once shimmering with enchanted water, spilled red torrents over the lower terraces.

Morgan stood amidst the ruined colonnade, his throat raw from the dust. He knew...part of his mind screamed it: that he was a traveler from a distant era, an intruder trapped within an ancient memory beneath the Zeregran Ranges.

But the grief suffocating his chest was not a stranger’s emotion. When he watched a burning canopy collapse over a market stall where he had once bought candied plums for some kids, the agonizing wrench in his gut belonged entirely to Prince Modric.

"Damn it! This again..."

He gripped his head with a pained groan, a wave of sickly nausea permeating his entire being.

"I am Morgan," he thought desperately, pressing a hand against his head.

"I am Morgan."

He desperately repeated the mantra in his head over and over again.

Yet when he looked down at his blood-stained knuckles, his fingers twitched with Modric’s memories, his deep love for his people, his childhood spent running through these white-stone halls—they were bleeding into Morgan’s soul, filling the empty spaces until he could no longer tell where the prince ended and he began.

​"Modric!"

​A soft, trembling hand clamped over his forearm, anchoring him to the chaotic present. Morgan turned to see Lysara. Her jade-green eyes, usually bright with quick wit and quiet affection, were wide with horror. A thin smudge of soot marred her high cheekbone, and her breath came in ragged, terrified hitches.

​

"Lysara?! You’re not supposed to be here!!!"

"We can’t stay in the open," she whispered, her fingers digging into his sleeve. "The eastern district has fallen. The outer guard... they were torn apart."

​Morgan’s heart hammered against his ribs— with a fierce, protective instinct that made him pull her behind the shelter of a shattered archway.

"What the hell..."

The affection he felt for her was profound, terrifyingly genuine. Whether it was his own heart pounding or Modric’s, he couldn’t tell anymore.

"Damn it ...get out of my head."

Morgan gritted his teeth, then promptly bit the inside of his cheek. The sharp sting of pain instantly brought some clarity to the thick fog clouding his mind.

King Aldren stepped forward.

​The monarch was a terrifying sight. He moved not like an old man burdened by a crown, but like a force of nature given flesh.

"You did this!" He roared.

The leader of the invading Awakened stepped into the king’s path, his eyes two pools of luminous silver light. The leader thrust his hand forward, unleashing a torrent of black, corrosive spears.

Aldren didn’t flinch. Instead, he moved forward, carving through the darkness with precise, majestic arcs, the sheer pressure of his aura splitting the marble cobblestones into deep trenches.

The silver-eyed man darted back, elusively skirting through the air. A moment later, almost instantaneously, three Awakened took his place.

"Die!"

The liquid sunlight clinging to his massive broadsword flared violently as he met the onslaught of three First Awakened simultaneously.

With a single, devastating parry, Aldren shattered an enemy’s shadow-blade, the resulting kinetic pulse instantly leveling the nearby buildings.

It was a battle of gods. Yet, even as Aldren parried a strike that pulverized a nearby forty-foot statue into fine dust, Morgan noticed that something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

Aldren’s gaze kept snapping back toward the massive iron gates of the palace behind them...toward the subterranean descent leading to the royal Vault. His face, normally a mask of unyielding discipline, was now pale under the golden light.

"Think about this carefully, Aldren..." The man spoke coolly, his voice echoing eerily from the shadows around them.

The voice echoed everywhere from nowhere at the same time.

Morgan protectively stood in front of Lysara, his gaze piercing through the shadows as he searched for their elusive adversary.

The dark figure sneered, stepping back from the widening cracks in the earth, slowly spreading around them.

"If I possessed the means to break your ancestral lock, King Aldren... I would not have brought an army. I would have come alone."

"Liar!" Aldren spat, though his own sword lowered slightly as he stared at the palace in sheer disbelief. "You brought your butchers here for the secrets of the Vault!"

Even as he spoke, ​a chilling realization slowly paralyzed the battlefield. Neither side had triggered the mechanism, which only left one option.

Morgan felt an unnatural chill creep down his spine.

"How..."

High above the plaza, standing on the elevated balcony directly outside the yawning, black mouth of the opening Vault, a figure stood.

​Morgan’s eyes snapped toward the silhouette.

​The figure was entirely motionless amidst the chaos. Wrapped in a simple, unadorned cloak of ash-grey, they offered no aura, no light, no shadow.

They simply stood, unnaturally composed, watching the slaughter below with the calm detachment of an audience member at a theater.

​As if sensing Morgan’s gaze, the stranger slowly turned their head, giving him an apathetic stare.

The distance between them meant nothing. Through the haze of smoke and flying debris, Morgan met a pair of eyes that seemed to look straight through Prince Modric, straight through the illusion of the memory, and lock onto the modern soul of Morgan lying in the dark beneath the Zeregran Ranges.

​The figure’s lips moved, forming silent words that echoed directly inside Morgan’s skull:

​You’re finally here.

Before Morgan could take a breath to shout, the figure dissolved into the black mist, vanishing without a trace.

Then, the mountain shuddered. First came a single pulse, a colossal kinetic throb beneath the earth so violent that even the awakened struggled to keep their footing.

The mundane citizens who were evacuating were thrown nonceremoniously to the ground.

The sky above turned from bleeding golden to an absolute, lightless black as the ancient magical dome protecting the capital shattered like cheap glass.

The mountains framing the horizon began to groan, stone grinding against stone as the earth rose, then dropped.

The First Awakened stopped fighting. The surviving royal guards lowered their weapons.

For a brief moment, silence reigned.

Without warning, King Aldren fell to one knee with a quiet groan, his golden light flickering out like the dying embers of a flame on its last legs, his face completely drained of color.

​THUMP.

​Then, the second pulse hit.