Chapter 57: The Beginning Of War
The air in the vaulted chamber hung heavy with the scent of smoldering incense and aged straws. Sunlight filtered through the gaps with drawings depicting the Five Sacred Sigils—twin serpents coiled around a mountain, a crown of roots, and a star-strewn void—casting fractured emerald and gold light across the stained soil. The Aelvarian’s throne, carved from the petrified trunk of the First Tree, loomed like a skeletal hand, its gnarled roots snaking into cracks in the floor.
He was no mere ruler—he was a relic. His once-gilded armor, now dulled and pitted, clung to a frame gaunt from decades of war. Silver hair, streaked with ash, fell to his shoulders, and his eyes burned like molten iron. When he slammed his fist on the throne’s arm, sigils etched into the wood flared crimson, pulsing in time with his ragged breaths.
"Do you want to die!?" His voice cracked like a whip, echoing off walls lined with tapestries fraying at their edges—threadbare scenes of harvests and harmony, now stained with soot.
She stood rigid, her posture at odds with the delicate silver curls framing her face. Her clothing smudged with charcoal and something iridescent, hung open over a tunic of patched linen. But it was her eyes that unsettled him—lime green galaxies, pupils like collapsing stars, swirling with flecks of light that mirrored the forbidden sigils she studied.
"I’m short of people as it is!" The Aelvarian’s voice rose, raw as an open wound. "My men are rotting in the mud at the Eastern Pass—their lungs filled with the very toxins you dredged from the earth! Do you even comprehend the weight of a life?!"
Veira’s fingers twitched at her sides, fingers bruised from her physical experiments"Sacrifices are necessary for progress. They signed their lives off to die for this land how is this any—" she said, toneless.
The throne’s sigils blazed as he surged to his feet. "What?!" The word shook the air, dislodging dust from the rafters. "Foolish child! Progress?" He spat the word. "You’ve butchered the commandments, Veira. I keep you alive only because your poison might yet save us—but do not mistake mercy for weakness."
She lowered her head, her gray-streaked hair trembling faintly. A jagged scar peaked above her collar—a relic of an experiment gone wrong, he recalled.
"Don’t make me regret that call," he growled.
"Recite them," he hissed, slumping back onto the throne. His hand waving as if giving her the go ahead to start.
Veira’s voice rang hollow, as if reciting a funeral dirge: