Nightblade (Darkest night)

Morgan was pulled out of the memory with a physical jolt, a force akin to a shockwave striking his chest.

The air around him shifted violently. The warm, ash-choked wind of the past was replaced by the freezing, damp chill of subterranean stone.

Morgan’s boots slid back across cold, shattered slate.

Dust, heavy and smelling of centuries-old damp rock, filled his nostrils.

He was back.

Back in the lightless, subterranean depths beneath the Zeregran Ranges, inside the ruined, half-buried temple where the expedition had faltered.

Except he was still trapped in this strange place, in the recesses of his mind, but it seemed the rush of memories had come to an end, at least.

A short distance away, before him, stood a man.

The same golden-eyed man from before.

He was unchanged from the moment Morgan had been dragged into the vision.

His dark mantle hung motionless over his broad shoulders, catching the faint, eerie iridescence of the bioluminescent moss crawling across the surrounding stone pillars.

The silence of the tomb-like cavern pressed in from all sides, broken only by the distant, agonizing groan of the bedrock deep beneath their feet, a subterranean tremor that reminded Morgan the entity resting below was not a dream.

Morgan stood unmoving, his breath coming in shallow, frosty, ragged wisps. His hands were raised slightly, fingers still tingling from the phantom sensation of a sword he had held thousands of years ago.

He stared at the stranger. The man watched him back.

For a time, none of them moved. They both simply stood in a solemn silence.

The man stood among the broken pillars, his golden eyes burning with a deep, silent light in the dark gloom of the cavern.

In the past, when Morgan had first encountered this figure, those eyes had terrified him.

They carried a weight that made Morgan feel entirely insignificant, like an insect standing in the path of an oncoming glacier.

But now, as Morgan looked at the sharp cut of the man’s jaw, the subtle, measured stillness of his posture, the faint, nearly imperceptible curve of his brow when he observed something.

Like the pieces of a puzzle coming together, clicking into place in his mind.

The fog in Morgan’s mind began to clear.

Details, once disconnected and disjointed, suddenly slammed together with catastrophic clarity.

The golden eyes.

They were not just similar but identical to the burning gaze of the King’s youngest son standing amidst the courtyard.

The mannerisms. The absolute, motionless stillness. The way the man held himself not like a warrior preparing to strike, but like a ruler who had already weighed the outcome of a war and found it lacking.

The voice. It wasn’t just familiar because Morgan had heard it in the subterranean chamber earlier.

It was the same timbre, the same low, resonant pitch that had called out to King Aldren amidst the falling towers, the voice that had cried out for Lysara as the sky bled gold.

And then there were the memories. Memories Morgan had assumed were forced into his head by the black mist—a mere spectator viewing historical records carved into ancient stone.

But he remembered the exact texture of the silk lining inside Prince Modric’s gloves. He remembered the sharp, metallic taste of the elixir King Aldren had forced down Modric’s throat on the night of his sixteenth winter.

He remembered the specific, unspoken language of glances shared with Lysara, not as a historian observing a romance, but as the boy who had felt his own heart hammer against his ribs whenever her fingers brushed his sleeve.

"Whoa..."

Most of all, Morgan remembered the way King Aldren had looked at Modric in those final, desperate seconds.

It wasn’t just the love of a father for a son.

It was terror. It was the realization that the boy he had raised carried something fundamentally unnatural inside his soul, something that made him more than human, and far more dangerous than the First Awakened knocking down their gates.

Morgan’s chest heaved, his moving with slow ragged breaths.

"I see..."

Morgan shook his head, staring at the man in front of him warily.

"...how..."

The realization crept over him like a cold tide, soaking into his bones until he couldn’t deny the terrifying truth staring back at him.

"What the hell are you? How are you the progenitor?"

The phrase the man had uttered when they first met echoed through the silent cavern.

"You carry my blood."

Morgan had thought it meant lineage. He had thought he was a distant descendant of a fallen royal house, an accidental heir to an ancient lineage.

Instead, he was utterly wrong.

"You..." Morgan whispered. The word sounded small, fragile against the damp stone walls, but it carried the full weight of three thousand years of forgotten grief.

The golden-eyed man didn’t flinch. He didn’t smile. He merely tilted his head, watching Morgan with a quiet, solemn intensity.

"You’re not a ghost," Morgan said, his voice growing steadier as the certainty anchored itself in his mind.

"You’re not a spirit left behind by the Vault. You were there. You stood in the courtyard when the mountain tore open."

Morgan took a step forward, his boots crunching over the crushed gravel.

"You’re Modric."

The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating. The air felt thick enough to cut.

"But how?"

The man slowly let out a breath. It formed a faint cloud of pale mist in the subterranean chill.

"I was," the man said quietly. His voice carried no pride, no arrogance.

"I am what remained when the world finished burning."

Morgan stopped three paces away.

The psychological vertigo was dizzying. He looked at the face of the man who had lived through the fall of the greatest civilization the world had ever known, this world.

Elaris was long forgotten, buried in the stony abyssal depths of the past. All that remained of them were the Zeregran Ranges; their story had been all but forgotten.

But not anymore.

And it was because of this man.

A man whose memories now resided inside Morgan’s own skull, tangled so thoroughly with his own identity that he could no longer tell where Morgan ended and Modric began.

"Aaaarggh..."

Morgan let out a quiet groan, closing his eyes as his mind struggled to process everything he had just lived through.

"If you were there..." Morgan’s mind raced back to the final horrific moments of the vision.

"If you stood before the serpent when it woke... how are you standing here now? The First Awakened were obliterated. The city was turned to dust. King Aldren..."

Morgan swallowed hard, the memory of his father’s—Modric’s father’s—bleeding body fresh in his mind.

"How did anyone survive that thing?"

In Morgan’s mind, the memories of a different time, a time before the First Awakened, slowly stirred.

Morgan stared at the man in disbelief, then—he saw it.

In one memory, the sun was too large, burning with an unholy, violet-hued corona.

Beneath it lay no white marble city, no gilded gates, no towering spires of the First Awakened.

There was only ash, red clay, and a horizon choked with the stench of copper and burning iron.

​An army stretched out beyond the edge of sight, tens of thousands of soldiers clad in crude, hand-hammered bronze plates, their banners bearing emblems of beasts and stars that existed in no history book Morgan had ever read.

A city burned in the distance, its architecture squat, heavy, and alien, built from jagged blocks of black basalt.

​And standing amidst a sea of corpses, leaning heavily upon a wide, unpolished iron broadsword, was the golden-eyed man.

He looked different. His jaw was smoother, his shoulders broader, his dark mantle missing entirely in favor of a battered leather cuirass stained dark with dried blood.

But his expression lacked the bone-deep, exhaustion Morgan had come to know. There was a raw, bleeding humanity in his face, a young warrior catching his breath after a battle that had taken everything he had.

Morgan tried to speak, tried to anchor himself to the moment, but the memory gave him no purchase.

​The image buckled, tearing apart in the blink of an eye.

The scene shifted.

This time, he was inside a different place.

A stone courtyard beneath a sky split by two pale moons.

He wore different clothes. A high-collared coat of dark velvet. The man stood in a doorway, his face carved from ice, watching a young boy with his same straight dark hair take his first unsteady steps across the flagstones.

Beside him stood a woman with pale silver hair and robes of rich crimson silk, her hand resting gently on his lower back.

Morgan choked on emotion, his eyes widening slightly.

"Lara..."

A split second later, the scene maddeningly changed once more.

It was now a battlefield covered in white frost. Thousands lay dead upon the snow, their blood freezing into scarlet ice.

The man stood alone beneath a grey sky, clutching a broken spear.

His face was caked in grime and blood, his chest heaving slowly. This time, there was no woman, no child, and no home.

Only the howling wind and the unbearable silence of a dead army.

The memories came faster.

A funeral pyre crackling beneath a starless night.

A child holding a wooden sword, looking up at him with wide, idolizing eyes.

The sheer weight of it all was crushing.

"Wait..."

He grasped at his head, stumbling backward.

"Stttoppp!!!" He stuttered.

Morgan fell to his knees, his mouth open in a soundless scream.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh"