Location: Valoria, Capital of ArchenLand | Year: 7002 A.A.
The Last Stand at the Eastern Gate
Valoria, the heart of ArchenLand, was dying.
It was not a clean death, not the swift fall of a blade in honorable combat. It was a slow, choking suffocation beneath smoke and shadow. The capital, built upon generations of hope and hewn from stone that remembered the songs of its founders, had become a furnace. Flames danced in windows that had once framed peaceful sunsets. The famed golden streets—named for the way dawn would set them ablaze each morning—now reflected only the hellish orange of burning homes and the darker crimson of things best not examined too closely. The air, once perfumed with sea-salt from the distant coast and the sweet blooms from the palace gardens, was now a toxic brew of charred timber, molten stone, and the iron-rich scent of a city bleeding out.
And through this chaos, like a spine of stubborn rock in a raging sea, stood the Royal Guard at the Eastern Gate.
They were not numerous. War had whittled them down to a grim brotherhood of the scarred and the steadfast. Each wore the silver-and-green of ArchenLand, though the colors were muted beneath soot and grime. Their armor was dented, their weapons notched, but their line was unbroken. They were all Özel rank, the elite—not by birth alone, but by the cruel arithmetic of survival. They had seen friends fall, had heard the promises of the invaders, and had chosen, again and again, to plant their feet upon the stones of their home and say, Not here. Not while I breathe.
At their head stood Commander Johan Fare.
He was a raccoon Tracient, lean where others were broad, but there was a tensile strength to him, like a well-forged rapier. His fur, the distinctive silver-and-black banding of the Fare Clan, was matted with sweat and ash. His eyes, sharp and intelligent, scanned the seething darkness beyond the gate, calculating angles, weaknesses, the ebb and flow of the shadowy tide that sought to overwhelm them. He was Özel Rank #10, nephew to the formidable Lord Jeth, and in his veins ran the same stubborn loyalty that had made his family a shield for the realm for centuries.
"Steady!" Johan's voice cut through the cacophony—the roar of fire, the distant screams, the bestial howls of the foe. He stood upon the cracked arch of the gate itself, a silhouette against the conflagration, his halberd a sliver of defiant silver. "Hold the line! This ground is ours! We do not yield it!"
His words were not a speech. They were a tonic, a reminder. He saw the exhaustion in the set of his soldiers' shoulders, the glaze of despair in some eyes. They were afraid. So was he. A cold, sharp fear lived in his gut, whispering that every parry was his last, every breath a borrowed one. But he had learned from his uncle that fear was not the enemy. Surrender was.
'The Fare Clan are shields,' his father's voice echoed in his memory, weathered and sure. 'Our worth is measured not in the enemies we slay, but in what stands behind us when we fall.' Johan tightened his grip on his halberd until the leather grip groaned. Behind him was not just a city, but the idea of one—the last flickering hearth in a gathering winter. He would not be the one to let it go dark.
The enemy surged again. They were a nightmare tapestry of forms—hulking brutes with skin like slagged iron, swift, skittering things that clacked and hissed, and among them, the disciplined killers of the Shadow's own Özel ranks. They came not with a roar, but with a chilling, coordinated silence, their eyes empty of everything but purpose.
"Push them back!" Johan roared, meeting the charge. His halberd became a blur of motion—a sweeping arc that cleaved through a brutish attacker, a swift reverse to crack the shield of another, a thrust that found a chink in dark armor. Around him, his Guard fought with the synchronized grace of a single, wounded beast. Shields interlocked with a sound like thunder, spears jabbed forward in lethal unison. For a moment, they held. For a moment, the black tide broke against a wall of silver and resolve.
But the tide was endless. For every creature that fell, two more scrambled over its corpse. Johan's arms began to burn, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He saw a young guardsman—barely more than a kit—go down under a swarm of claws, and a hot, helpless rage flared in his chest. He unleashed his signature technique, the power churning in his core.
"SARMAL KÜRE!"
The spiraling sphere of compressed wind ripped from his palms, howling like a banshee as it tore into the enemy ranks. It was a beautiful, terrible thing, shredding armor and flesh alike, carving a temporary crater of carnage in the press of bodies. The blast echoed, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.
It lasted only a second.
The gap filled instantly. Fresh shadows poured in, their numbers undiminished. Johan's heart sank. This was not battle; it was erosion. They were a sandcastle against the sea, and the tide was rising.
'We are breaking,' he thought, the realization a cold stone in his gut. 'We can kill them by the score, and it means nothing. They have infinity. We have only… us.'
His body was failing. The deep well of his Arcem, once so abundant, was now a shallow, muddy puddle. He gathered the dregs, his muscles screaming in protest, his vision spotting with exhaustion. He raised a trembling hand, aiming for the thickest knot of the enemy.
"Maximum Outpu—!"
The light in his palm guttered and died. A wave of nauseating weakness washed over him. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on his halberd, the shaft biting into his palm. The world swam. The sounds of battle grew muffled, distant. He saw his men, still fighting, but their movements were slowing, becoming clumsy.
Is this it? The thought was not dramatic, merely exhausted. After all this, do we simply… wear out?
Then, it came.
Not a sound, but a sensation—a surge of pure, cool vitality, as if someone had opened a sluice gate from a mountain spring directly into his soul. It flooded through his veins, washing away the fatigue, clearing the fog from his mind, replenishing the arid plains of his mana with a rushing, powerful tide. He gasped, straightening, staring at his hands where new light, fierce and clean, sparked and danced.
"What…?"
He turned.
And there, moving through the ruined gateway with the serene inevitability of the tide itself, was Lord Thrax Deniz.
The old tortoise Tracient's shell was a masterpiece of living stone, etched with ancient, glowing sigils that pulsed with a soft, aquamarine light. His eyes, deep and knowing as the ocean trenches, held no panic, only a profound, unshakeable calm. He did not run; he advanced, and with each step, the air around him shimmered with palpable power—not the aggressive spike of attack, but the immense, nurturing pressure of the deep sea.
"ARCEM: AEGIS TIDE — VITAL FLOW!"
His voice was not loud, yet it resonated in the chest of every defender, a fundamental note that vibrated through stone and bone. The aquamarine glow exploded outward from him in a gentle, expanding wave. It washed over the beleaguered guards.
The effect was immediate and miraculous. A soldier clutching a gash in his side cried out in shock as flesh knitted itself together, leaving only shiny new skin. Another, who had been leaning on his sword, blade trembling with exhaustion, suddenly stood tall, color returning to his face, his grip firm. Weapons were regripped. Shields were raised with renewed vigor. A collective inhale, sharp and full of wonder, swept the line.
Johan felt tears sting his eyes, swiftly blinked away. It was not weakness, but the sheer, humbling relief of a drowning man finding solid ground. The awe was almost painful. He had fought with every ounce of his being, had touched the very limits of his strength, only to find them laughably small. And here was Thrax, whose strength was not a weapon to be exhausted, but a foundation, deep and endless. This is the Deniz Clan, Johan thought, reverence washing over him. Not just a shield, but the very sea that cradles the land. My fire can blaze and burn out; his waters simply endure, and in enduring, sustain all.
"Johan!"
Thrax's voice called his name, and it was like a command from the bedrock of the world.
"Keep pushing! Go all out! As long as I'm here, I will support you!"
The words were a contract, a promise. They ignited something in Johan hotter than any battle-rage. The last vestiges of doubt burned away. He nodded, a sharp, fierce motion, and his voice tore from his throat, raw and powerful:
"FOR ARCHENLAND!"
His mana answered, flaring with an intensity he had never before achieved, a brilliant corona of white and silver that pushed back the immediate darkness. Around him, the Royal Guard found their voices, a ragged chorus that swelled into a defiant roar. They were no longer a line on the verge of breaking; they were a wave about to crash.
Thrax moved forward, his pace still deliberate. He raised a hand, not in a fist, but with fingers splayed as if feeling a current. "Aegis Tide: Enerji Kilidi."
The mana that flowed from him this time was different. It did not heal or invigorate. It was subtle, insidious, a silent riptide of negation. It washed over the front ranks of the enemy. Where it touched, soldiers stiffened. Their weapons fell from suddenly nerveless fingers. They gasped, eyes wide with a new kind of terror—the terror of being hollowed out. Their connection to their own mana, to the power that fueled their monstrous strength, was simply… severed. They stood, paralyzed and impotent, as harmless as statues.
It was Johan's moment.
He gathered the wind, not from exhaustion, but from abundance. Thrax's power thrummed within him, a second heart beating in time with his own. Dust, smoke, the very breath of the battlefield spiraled into his outstretched palms, compressing into a sphere that grew and grew, humming with apocalyptic energy. It pulled at cloaks, made stones tremble, and the very light seemed to bend toward it.
He thought of the fallen kit. Of every extinguished light in Valoria. Of the silent, watching presence of Thrax at his back. Of Aslan, whose name was more than a word—it was the memory of sun on fur, of justice, of a world that was meant to be good.
"FOR ARCHENLAND, AND FOR ASLAN!"
The name was a battle cry, a prayer, a lament, and a promise all at once.
"MAXIMUM OUTPUT: ŌDAMA SARMAL KÜRE!"
He hurled the colossal, screaming sphere.
It did not fly; it devoured the space between. It expanded as it traveled, a miniature typhoon of annihilation. When it struck the heart of the enemy formation, the world dissolved into white noise and blinding light.
The sound was not an explosion, but an unmaking. When the light faded and the dust began to settle, a vast, smooth crater lay where hundreds had stood. There were no bodies, no debris. Just clean, scoured earth and a ringing, hollow silence.
Johan stood panting, his arms leaden, his body thrumming with released power and stunned disbelief at what he had wrought. Around him, his guards stared, their faces etched with awe. The enemy line, moments ago an inexorable force, had recoiled. Hesitation, that most fragile of weaknesses, flickered through their ranks.
For a single, glorious breath, it seemed the tide had turned.
Then the world grew darker.
Not from the smoke, nor from the night. This was a deeper dark, a hungry dark, that fell from above.
And a voice spoke, cold and clear and absolute, from the sky itself.
"How dare you step foot into my home?"
Every head, friend and foe alike, snapped upward.
The sky was full of feathers.
Thousands upon thousands of them, each as black as a fragment of the void between stars, yet each edged with a razor-sharp glimmer of silver mana. They hung in a perfect, deadly constellation, utterly still, humming a single, lethal note.
At their center, suspended on wings of shadow and wrath, was Lord Talonir Kushan.
His cape was not cloth, but a living extension of those terrible wings. His eyes, usually so piercingly intelligent, now burned with a cold, avian fury that saw not individuals, but trespassers upon his nest. The Eagle of the East had returned to find his aerie defiled.
The invading army's courage, already cracked, shattered completely. The sight broke something in their collective spirit. This was not a foe to be fought. This was a force of nature, an aspect of divine retribution.
The feathers moved.
They did not fall; they struck. Each one was a precisely guided missile, a sentence of death written in silver and shadow. There was no drama to it, no grand sweeping motion. It was a harvest. A line of soldiers crumpled, neat holes punched through armor and bone. Shields splintered into kindling. A group turning to flee was simply erased from behind, falling in unison like wheat before an invisible scythe.
"No dodging."
The words were flat,factual.
"No blocking."
Each statement punctuated by the soft,deadly thwip of feather finding its mark.
"No mercy."
In less than a minute, it was over. The eastern approach to Valoria was clear. The only movement was the gentle, chilling dissolution of the black feathers into wisps of shadow. The silence that followed was profound, sacred, and terrifying.
Johan could only stare, humbled to his core. This was power of a different order. Thrax's was the deep, sustaining sea. Talonir's was the cleansing storm, the lightning strike that left only ash and awe in its wake. He understood now why the Lords were spoken of in whispers, why their ranks held the fate of nations.
Thrax inclined his head slightly, a solemn nod from one pillar of the realm to another.
And then—
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
The sound was obscene. It was slow, sardonic, and it came from the edge of the crater Johan had made.
A figure stepped from the lingering smoke, brushing a bit of ash from his sleeve with fastidious care. He was a rabbit Tracient, his fur an absurd, cheerful shade of pink. He wore a long, floppy hat tilted at a jaunty angle. He looked like a strolling minstrel who had taken a disastrous wrong turn.
"Oh wow!" he chirped, his voice bright and gratingly pleasant. "So this is the prowess of the #6 and #7 of the Hazël?" He beamed, his eyes crinkling with amusement. "Impressive!"
Thrax felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. Talonir's bow was up, drawn, and aimed in a fluid motion so fast it seemed to happen between heartbeats. His arrowhead glinted, aimed unerringly at the rabbit's heart.
"Who are you?" Talonir's voice was winter frost. "The way you answer determines how you die."
The rabbit—Jarik—pouted, raising his paws in a gesture of mock innocence. "Come on now! Would you really attack an unarmed man? No need to be so—"
BOOOOM!
The interruption was not sound, but cataclysm. A streak of crimson and gold tore across the battlefield, a sword-strike that was less an attack and more a localized apocalypse. It impacted the ground where Jarik had been standing with the force of a falling star, erupting in a cataclysmic geyser of fire, earth, and shattered reality.
From the heart of the blast, striding through the swirling devastation as if it were mere mist, came Kon Kaplan.
He was a vision of contained annihilation. The crimson suit of the Grand Kaplan form clung to him, the sigil on his bare arm burning like a brand from a forge of wrath. His eyes were twin suns of amber fury, fixed not on the crater, but on the spot a few feet to the left where Jarik now stood, utterly untouched, not a single pink hair out of place.
Kon's scowl was a tectonic plate of hatred. His chest heaved, not from exertion, but from the sheer effort of keeping the void inside him from swallowing the world.
The dust settled. The silence stretched.
Thrax's mind, ancient and tactical, reeled.
'He… dodged it. Not blocked, not countered. Dodged. Kon's attack, in the Grand Kaplan form, moved at a speed that defied physics. The form itself raised the base stats of the Tracient by 20 orders of magnitude. It's velocity that erases the interval between thought and impact. To evade it was not a feat of speed; it was a violation of possibility.
Kon did not pause to question. His body became a crimson blur again, a thrust so fast it left after-images on the retina. His sword pierced empty air. Jarik was simply… elsewhere, having shifted with the casual ease of a man sidestepping a puddle. He even sighed, puffing his cheeks.
"Sheesh! If you kill me, you won't even learn what I wanted to say."
The mockery was a sharper weapon than any blade. Kon's aura surged violently, the crimson energy lashing out like the tongues of a star gone nova. The ground at his feet began to dissolve into nothingness once more.
"Control yourself, Lord Kaplan."
Talonir's command was a spike of pure, cold authority. It did not request; it compelled. It was the voice of the Order itself, of reason over rage, of strategy over slaughter.
Kon froze. The conflict in him was visible—the all-consuming fury warring with a lifetime of discipline, with the knowledge that Talonir was right. Slowly, agonizingly, the crimson inferno was wrestled back under his skin. The erosion of reality ceased. He stood trembling, a volcano forcibly capped, and drove one of his swords deep into the earth with a sound of finality, folding his arms as if to physically contain the storm within.
Jarik placed a paw over his heart in exaggerated relief. "Phew! Thank you, Lord Kushan. Honestly, I was beginning to worry."
He grinned, and the grin was a crack in the world, revealing something void-black and endlessly amused beneath.
Talonir's bow did not waver a millimeter. "You have five minutes," he stated, each word a chip of ice. "Five minutes to explain who you are… and what you are."
The unspoken second half of the sentence hung in the air: …before what you are ceases to be.
Kon's growl was the sound of continents grinding together. "Start talking."
They stood then, a terrible tribunal: the unyielding sea, the judging storm, and the chained annihilation. Johan and his guards were mere witnesses, holding their breath in the presence of a tension so immense it felt like the sky might shatter from the pressure of it.
And Jarik the rabbit just grinned.
"Sheesh," he chuckled, "talk about a rowdy bunch!"
He adjusted his ridiculous hat. "The name," he announced with theatrical flair, "is Jarik. Jarik Fare."
The surname landed among them like a drop of acid. Johan flinched as if struck. Fare. His own blood. A cousin? A lost scion? The name was a heirloom of honor, now defiled.
Jarik savored the reaction, his smile turning sharp enough to cut. "But I assume you already guessed that… given my appearance." He let the pause linger, then leaned forward conspiratorially. "After all… Lady Hompher and I are well-acquainted."
Hompher. The Grand Priestess. The spiritual heart of Narn. The name was a keystone in the arch of their world, and this creature was casually tapping it, testing for weakness.
Thrax's voice was a low rumble, like stone deep underwater. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Jarik waved a dismissive paw. "That's not important." His tone was singsong, but his eyes were fixed, watchful, drinking in their alarm. "What is important… is that I came here on behalf of my master."
Talonir's eyes narrowed. "The Shadow."
Jarik bowed, a deep, flourishing, insulting gesture. "Indeed! The one who moves where none can see, whose hand guides the tide of nations. I am his herald. His… humble emissary." He straightened, and the last vestige of playfulness drained from his grin, leaving behind something sleek, cruel, and utterly cold.
"And I am here to tell you," he said, the words dropping into the silence like stones into a well, "why ArchenLand is in ruins."
He let the statement hang, let the images of the burning city, the dead, the broken gates, flood back into all their minds.
"And to make you an offer."
The three Lords did not move, but the air around them thickened, charged with a potential more violent than any spell. Thrax's shell gleamed with latent power. Talonir's bowstring hummed a hair's breadth from release. Kon's fingers twitched, aching for the hilt of his buried sword.
Jarik saw it all. And he laughed.
It was a sound of pure, unadulterated delight, the joy of a puppeteer watching his marionettes dance exactly as predicted.
"Oh, and Lord Kaplan?" he said, turning that serpentine smile fully on the Tiger Lord.
Kon's gaze was a physical weight.
Jarik's grin widened until it seemed his face might split. He gestured broadly, a sweeping motion that encompassed the smoldering capital, the cratered field, the blood on the stones, the silence where there should have been life.
"All of this," he said, his voice dropping to a intimate, malicious whisper that carried to every ear. "The war. The raid. The ruin of your capital. Every loss. Every death…"
His eyes locked with Kon's, gleaming with a truth more terrible than any lie.
"…it was my idea."