Chapter 131: The Crimson Games
They were there, at the center of the carnage, covered in blood, saturated with that substance too heavy to be ignored, too red to be forgotten. Him and Lysara. Red from head to toe. Red like extinguished flames. Red like the truth one refuses to see, like what one senses at the bottom of a nightmare but refuses to name. The blood drowned them, bound them, disfigured them. There was no more nobility, no armor, no hierarchy. There was only this: two bodies covered by a dead world.
And he... he slowly turned his head.
He looked around him, like a child amidst the ruins of a game too vast. He saw. Finally. The bodies. The faces. The remains. The corpses of our former companions. Those who, just a day earlier, might still have reached out to him. Collapsed silhouettes. Frozen gazes. Interrupted stories. And in his eyes, I sensed that absence of reaction which was not indifference... but vertigo. He didn’t seem to understand. He didn’t seem to believe any of this was real. That he was the cause. The center.
Then he lowered his gaze to Lysara.
She was on her knees. Wounded. Tired. Defeated. Her black armor, thick, heavy, protective, was slowly retracting, like a skin one sheds after war. And beneath that shell, her frail, young, vulnerable body was visible. A girl. Nothing more. Nothing less. A girl who had stood up to the impossible. A girl who had offered herself to fire to save him. And he looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.
Then... he turned his head to me.
And our eyes met.
One moment. Just one.
But it was enough.
I saw in his eyes that clarity which forgives nothing. That pain which precedes the fall. He understood. He knew. He saw. Everything. What he had done. What he had become. What he had broken. What he could no longer repair. I felt, deep within me, that if I had offered him something in that moment — a look of compassion, a whisper, a breath, a hand — he would have taken it. He would have faltered differently. He could have come back. Maybe.
I could have.