Ersia: Raven Dawn

The rain keeps falling.

Flames clawed at shattered walls. Corpses—some whole, some broken beyond recognition—lay strewn across the stone pathways of Great Gardenia. Wind howled through the ruins like a beast that had finally slipped its chain. What had once been a temple of joy and exhilaration—arched trellises, sculpted hedges, marble fountains—had become a theater of ruin. Firelight and lightning stitched the sky together in violent flashes, illuminating devastation in cruel intervals.

Great Gardenia was no longer a garden of excitement.

It was a cauldron of fear and pain, chaos made flesh.

And yet, in the heart of that nightmare, something happened—an anomaly no witness would ever forget.

Randia and Vito stopped.

Not staggered. Not halted by force.

Stopped.

Midair.

Time itself fractured around them.

The storm did not cease—but it froze. Heavy raindrops hung suspended in the air, trembling as though caught in invisible glass. Thousands upon thousands of droplets formed a trembling veil around the two figures, curving into a near-perfect sphere. Fire no longer crackled. Smoke no longer climbed. The wind remained in a twisted shape, like a sculpture carved from invisible stone.

Silence swallowed the center of the battlefield.

To most who still clung to life, the phenomenon went unnoticed.

They were too busy surviving.

Eardrums had ruptured from the shockwaves of earlier shower of lightning, leaving many disoriented and vomiting from maimed equilibrium. The sheer pressure of meta-energy—divine in its intensity—radiated outward from Randia’s transformation, pressing down upon bodies and minds alike. It felt as though the air itself had thickened into something almost liquid, something one had to endure rather than breathe. Every heartbeat required effort. Every thought felt heavier than it should.

Survival, in that madness, was an act of defiance.

Lisabelle was among the few who endured.

Through a stroke of luck Lady Morwenn’s thorned vines had coiled protectively around nearly her entire body—across her torso, around her limbs, even over her ears. The vines were alive in a way that defied simple explanation; they pulsed faintly with strange, ancient energy, dampening the shockwaves and insulating her from the worst of Randia’s metamorphic surge.

Because of that unnatural protection, Lisabelle remained conscious.

But Viena—

Viena had not been so fortunate.

She lay sprawled across a broken stone bench, small and terribly fragile against the devastation. For a terrible moment, Lisabelle thought she resembled hunted prey—an animal struck mid-flight, collapsed before it even understood it had been shot. Blood trickled from Viena’s ears, thin streams made almost black beneath the storm’s dim light. Her lips trembled, parting and closing without sound. Her eyes fluttered desperately, unfocused, fighting to remain open, to remain present.

To do something.

To stay.

The sight pierced Lisabelle more sharply than any blade.

Panic surged through her veins like wildfire. She thrashed against the vines, ignoring the thorns biting into her skin. The coils resisted at first, tightening reflexively as if they could sense her agitation. She forced her arms outward, muscles straining, breath coming ragged.

The vines creaked, fibers stretching under her desperate strength. Slowly, painfully, one arm broke free. Then her mouth. Then the other. Thorn scratches scored her skin, but she did not feel them—not truly. Her world had narrowed to a single, terrible image: Viena unmoving.

“Vivi—!”

Her voice cracked.

“Ugh! Let me go—!”

With a final wrench of effort, Lisabelle tore herself fully from the tangled embrace and stumbled forward through the rain-suspended air. Even frozen, the droplets brushed her skin like cold beads of glass as she pushed through the spherical boundary surrounding the halted duel.

She reached Viena and dropped to her knees.

“Vivi! Are you okay?! Vivi!” Her hands trembled as she cradled the girl’s face. “Can you hear me? Say something—please!”

Viena’s eyes flickered toward the place that Lisabelle had grabbed. She's sensing her sister through touch. Her pupils struggled to focus. Her lips moved, but no voice came—only a faint, broken breath.

Lisabelle swallowed hard, terror clawing at her throat. She pressed her forehead briefly against Viena’s, as if willing her own steadiness into the smaller girl’s shaking body.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of fear she refused to show. “It's okay, I'm here.”

Behind her, Lady Morwenn stood motionless.

The ancient woman did not spare Lisabelle or Viena so much as a glance.

Her gaze under the veil—cold, luminous, and unreadable—remained fixed upon the arena’s frozen heart, where Randia and Vito hovered within that suspended sphere of rain and silence. The vines that had protected Lisabelle now slackened at her feet, forgotten.

Whatever was happening at the center of the storm commanded all of Morwenn’s attention. All that she know is this moment right now, is no less than the rebirth of the stagnant world.

The space-time bubble that had cocooned Randia and Vito shuddered once, like glass under strain.

And it shattered.

There was no audible crack, no thunderclap to announce its breaking. It simply gave way—like a held breath finally released. Time rushed back into the world in a violent, disorienting surge. The accumulated rain drops that sheltered them in a sphere resumed its fall in a single roaring pour.

But what followed did not resolve the quiet bedlam.

It deepened it.

Vito lay sprawled upon the fractured marble of the arena floor.

A cavernous wound gaped in the left side of his chest—exactly where a human heart should have been. Blood poured from it in heavy pulses, staining the rain-slicked stone a deep and terrible crimson. Even a layman would know the truth at a glance: the injury was fatal. No healer, no priest, no miracle short of divine intervention could mend such devastation.

He was dying.

He would not last long.

And yet—

His gaze remained sharp.

Those red eyes, once blazing with fury, still burned with a hateful clarity. Rain streamed down his face, mixing with blood, but it did nothing to extinguish that fire. If anything, it seemed to magnify it.

His eyes fixed upon the figure standing before him.

And in that instant, the world seemed to narrow to the space between them.

.

.

.

Randia was no longer entirely Randia.

He still wore the shape of a man—his height, his stance, the familiar silhouette of a mighty hero of tales so grand. But something had shifted. Something fundamental.

From the right side of his head curved a small antler—subtle, yet unmistakable. Not grand like Mistus’s towering horns, but present. Claiming space. Declaring an existence.

One of his eyes had turned red.

Not bloodshot.

Red.

A deep, lucid crimson that glowed faintly beneath the storm’s dim light.

And upon the right side of his chest, visible where fabric had burned away, an intricate black marking had formed—a tattoo-like sigil in the shape of an octagram star. It was roughly the size of a palm, its lines thin yet absolute, as though etched into his flesh by a hand older than time.

The sight of it sent a ripple of understanding through Vito.

He began to laugh.

The sound was wet, broken.

It ended in a violent cough that forced blood from his lips.

“In the end…” he rasped, each word scraping against failing lungs, “you too… lied and denied me my justice, Mistus.”

His heartbeat faltered.

The rhythm slowed.

The rage in his eyes flickered—not extinguished, but thinning. The flames that had sustained him for so long were guttering. Something in him was preparing for departure. Preparing to loosen its grip on flesh.

“If hell does not exist,” Vito whispered, voice barely more than breath against the storm, “then I will make one… for all of you.”

A faint tremor passed through him.

“And if it does exist … I will drag you down with me. Every single one of you. As deep as it goes.”

Those were the final words of Vito Farelsi.

A man born ordinary.

A man who had nearly slain the divine—and their champion.

The rain continued to fall, and for a long moment, there was no movement from the figure standing over him. Because the one who stood there was not only just Randia. Mistus, is now inhabiting Randia’s body, and he had heard every word.

And Vito had not been wrong.

Mistus had betrayed him.

He had promised Vito something in exchange for servitude—for becoming his proxy, his vessel, his blade in the mortal realm. He had promised him the deaths of Randia and the pantheon. Promised him a reckoning. Promised him justice.

And even as Vito’s time in the world ran dry, that promise had gone unfulfilled.

Mistus could feel the last fragile threads of the man’s life unraveling.

He stepped forward.

Rain parted faintly around him—not in defiance, but in reluctant reverence.

“You do not need to drag us, my son,” Mistus said softly, his voice layered—Randia’s tone interwoven with something deeper, resonant like wind through gentle hollows. "I will gladly walk with you in hell, so you will not be left alone again by then."

He knelt.

Gently—almost tenderly—he placed his hand over Vito’s eyes and closed them.

The red was gone now.

Only stillness remained.

Mistus adjusted the fallen man’s posture, straightening his limbs, arranging him with quiet dignity despite the ruin of his chest. The rain washed the blood away in thin rivers, as if the world itself wished to cleanse the scene.

For a heartbeat—just one—there was no god, no war, no grand design. Only a father kneeling beside a son he had tricked and failed.

And somewhere, deep within the shared vessel of flesh and bone, Randia watched.