Location: Canyon of Erasure, ArchenLand | Year: 7002 A.A
The silence was not the quiet of peace, but the hush of a world holding its breath over an open grave.
Where Valoria had once breathed—a living tapestry of clattering carts, ringing anvils, children's laughter echoing off sun-warmed stone—there was now only a geometric scar. A canyon of such perfect, terrible negation it seemed less a wound in the earth and more an autopsy of memory. It stretched, raw and glassy-edged, from the shattered Eastern Gate to the distant, weeping cliffs of the Winding Arrow River. The air above it hissed, thin and ozone-bitter, reality itself fraying at the seams where Kon's corrupted will had bitten too deep.
It was a monument to erasure. A tomb for a city that had not been buried, but unwritten.
Into this cathedral of absence, Adam Kurt descended.
His movement was not a charge, but a flow—like water finding the path of least resistance through cracked stone. He was battered, his form a testament to survived ruin, but in this state, his body obeyed a different grammar. Economy. Precision. A terrible, focused grace. His arrival was a punctuation mark in the narrative of despair.
He landed beside Trevor Maymum, a soft impact on the glassy ground. The moment his paws touched, Canvari manifested in his grip—the three-segmented staff, its frost-blue and gold links gleaming dully in the pallid light. It coiled slightly, a serpent of restrained potential.
"Adam!!!"
Trevor's voice was a crack in the suffocating silence, raw with a relief so profound it bordered on pain. His own staff, Gözkıran, wavered as he stumbled forward, not in attack, but in embrace. He seized Adam, his grip fierce, desperate—the clutch of a brother who has watched the world end and found, against all odds, a piece of it still standing.
"I thought—I was sure you were—" The words muffled against Adam's shoulder, choked with emotion.
Adam stiffened, a fraction of a second of pure, reflexive stillness. Then, with a deliberation that felt foreign, he raised a hand and patted Trevor's back. The gesture was correct, but distant. "It's okay. I'm fine." The voice was calm, placid, like the surface of a frozen lake.
Trevor pulled back, his amber eyes searching, probing. Up close, the difference was stark. This was not the wolf whose grin could disarm a war council, whose warmth was a hearth in the long winter of campaigning. His face was a blade honed sharp, the glacial blue of his eyes holding no reflection, only depth. "What happened to you?" Trevor's voice dropped, laced with unease. The battle had tempered Trevor, but never extinguished his empathy. What he saw in Adam now… it chilled him. "I mean… I sensed your mana before, but now—"
He couldn't finish. The words congealed in his throat.
Adam's gaze flickered away, a brief evasion. His hand tightened on Canvari. For a heartbeat, something human surfaced—a shadow of the old weariness, a flicker of something like fear—but it was gone, swallowed by that glacial calm. "I don't know, Trevor," he said, his tone even, measured. "But this isn't the time to think about it."
He turned. His focus, absolute and cold, fixed on the epicenter of the void.
Kon.
The Tiger Lord was a vortex of corrupted physics. Violet-black energy pulsed around him in waves that devoured light and sound. His white eyes were blank portals, his every exhale a sigh that eroded the edges of the world. He was not a fighter; he was an ending, given form.
Adam's own aura flared in answer—not hot, but sharp. A cold, clear light against the devouring dark.
The Mad Tiger moved.
A blur of annihilation. His twin swords carved a screaming 'X' of void-energy across the space between them. Stone and air ceased to exist along the path of the strokes. A whole section of the canyon wall behind Trevor and Adam silently dissolved into swirling ash that fell into the abyss.
They barely evaded, the deathly wind of the strike grazing them. Adam's grip on Canvari tightened. The segmented staff rattled once, a serpent coiling, then fell into an unnerving, predatory stillness. His aura sharpened further, a needle of winter poised to pierce the heart of the storm.
"Cover me, Trevor."
The words were quiet, almost casual. But they carried a weight of absolute certainty. It was not a request. It was a statement of fact, an irrevocable piece of the battle's new geometry.
Trevor turned, startled by the iron in that tone. For a fleeting second, he saw the ghost of his friend—the one who'd trip over his own cloak for a laugh, who'd argue strategy with a mouth full of bread. But the man beside him was a stranger forged in a colder fire. His eyes held no mirth, only the unyielding resolution of a final axiom.
Trevor swallowed. He did not question.
"Elemi: 50%—Öge İkizi!"
The command was a thunderclap in the dead air. Gözkıran blazed, and with a sound of tearing reality, four shimmering forms stepped from Trevor's own silhouette.
Elemental clones. One wreathed in dancing, hungry flame. One grounded, its form shifting like living stone. One crackling with unstable, snapping lightning. One flowing with the serene, relentless pressure of deep water. Each held a phantom of the golden staff. Each was a shard of Trevor's will, given elemental purpose.
In flawless, silent synchrony, they surged forward.
Kon met them with a predator's economy. His blades were extensions of the void, deflecting strikes, not with parries, but with localized erasures. Sparks of elemental energy died as they touched his aura. Fire was snuffed. Stone powdered. Lightning grounded into nothing. Water evaporated into mist. Yet, for a moment, the sheer, coordinated pressure worked. They boxed him, harried him, four points of golden light forcing his defense into a tightening knot. The real Trevor closed in, heart hammering, Gözkıran poised for a crippling strike to the core. This was the moment. Contain. Subdue.
Kon's aura swelled.
It was not an explosion, but an expansion of negation. A wave of violet-crimson darkness that did not push, but consumed.
BOOOOOOM!!!
The silent shockwave hit. The elemental clones shattered. Not into fragments, but into motes of extinguished light, erased from existence. The backlash was physical, a hammer of void-force that caught Trevor square in the chest. He was hurled backward, Gözkıran flying from his grip, body crumpling against a jagged outcrop. The air was gone from his lungs. The world was a ringing, grey haze.
Through the distortion, he saw Kon, standing untouched at the calm center of his own storm. The white eyes stared out, not with malice, not with triumph, but with the serene, awful emptiness of a finished equation.
Trevor's chest clenched, a cold fist of despair. 'He doesn't tire. He doesn't strain. How much of him is even left?'
However—
That precise, catastrophic moment was the aperture Adam had waited for.
"ARCEM: Doğuş… Genesis."
The words were spoken not as an incantation, but as a declaration of fact. A single, pure pulse of ethereal blue mana rippled outward from Adam. It did not rage. It did not roar. It simply was. A foundational truth reasserting itself.
Trevor felt it immediately. Where Kon's aura was a hungry maw, Adam's was a deep, restoring breath. Where the void left vacuum, Adam's presence filled with substance—clean, cold, and alive. His mana washed over the battlefield, not as an attack, but as a redefinition of the local reality.
Adam moved.
The instant his blue aura met Kon's black-purple haze, the battlefield shuddered. The corrosive fog that clung to the Tiger faltered, fraying at the edges like mist under a strong sun. It hissed, a sound of protest, of two opposing absolutes grating against one another. For the first time, the zone of erasure stopped its advance. Creation and uncreation met in a silent, desperate stalemate.
Kon snarled, a raw, bestial sound, and struck. Twin blades seeking to carve Adam from the world.
Adam vanished.
"Ghost Step."
A whisper of displaced air. A blur of afterimage. Then Adam was behind him. Canvari descended not with a warrior's fury, but with the terrible, final weight of a falling monolith. It crashed across Kon's back.
THUD.
The impact was a sound of profound finality, a hammer on the anvil of fate. Kon was driven forward, stumbling, the corruption around him flickering.
Yet Adam's expression showed no triumph. His eyes held no joy. Only a deep, weary intensity.
"Wake up."
The command was quiet. Not a shout. Not a threat. A plea, sheathed in steel.
Kon whirled, blades rising, but before they could complete their arc, two massive, translucent hands of solidified blue mana erupted from the glassy earth. They seized his wrists, their grip tectonic, unyielding. Kon strained, his corrupted power boiling outward in violent waves, but the mana-constructs held, shimmering under the assault.
Adam advanced. His steps were measured, deliberate. The steps of a surgeon approaching the operating table, of a priest approaching the altar. He raised his own hand, not clenched in a fist, but open. His aura swirled around it, not with rage, but with a terrible, focused sorrow.
He struck.
Not with a closed fist, but with an open palm. A slap that echoed across the canyon with a sound more shocking than any clap of thunder.
"Wake up this instant, Kon Kaplan!!!"
Trevor flinched. The raw, torn desperation in Adam's voice was a physical pain. Beneath the anger was a tremor, a vulnerability so profound it was almost more frightening than Kon's madness.
Adam's eyes blazed with blue fire, his voice rising, each word a hammer driving a nail of truth.
"How could you allow yourself to fall this low?!"
Kon's growl hitched. His body trembled within the mana-grip.
"Hiding away—giving in to your rage just to escape reality? To escape despair?!" Adam's words were scalpel-sharp, dissecting the poison with brutal clarity. "Do you think burning the world will cauterize your pain? Do you think burying your heart in shadows will undo the choices you've made?!"
Kon shuddered violently. The blank white sheen of his eyes flickered, like a faulty lantern.
"The results of your own actions—your own choices—have led you here!" Adam's voice rang through the canyon, louder than the aftershocks of crumbling stone, a verdict against the silence. "This ruin is the harvest of seeds you planted!"
Trevor's throat closed. He had never heard such raw, accusing grief from Adam. It was anger, yes, but it was the anger of a shepherd for a lost sheep, of a brother for a sibling walking off a cliff.
Adam stepped closer, his cold aura pressing against Kon's corrupted one, smothering it, containing it.
"And yet, instead of facing the consequence," Adam roared, the sound tearing from a place of deep, personal wounding, "you would betray your people by being a coward?! By becoming the very danger they need you to protect them from?!"
Kon's body seized. His breathing became ragged, torn gasps. The mana-hands trembled with the force of his internal war.
Adam's voice cracked—not with weakness, but with the strain of holding back an ocean of shared grief.
"YOUR FATHER WOULD TURN IN HIS GRAVE WITH DISAPPOINTMENT!!!"
The words were a detonation.
In Kon's hollow, white eyes, a fissure appeared. A glimmer of something raw, shattered, and agonizingly human.
And Trevor, watching, saw the impossible.
Tears.
They welled in those vacant eyes, blurring the terrifying white glow. They spilled over, cutting tracks through the grime and ash on Kon's cheeks. His chest hitched, a sob trapped in a broken machine. His body went limp in the grip of the mana constructs, all fight draining away as if the strings had been cut.
Then, like the first, fragile ray of dawn piercing an eternal night, his familiar golden eye returned.
One, then the other. They shone through the tears, dimmed by bottomless grief, bloodshot and lost—but undeniably his. The white haze of possession was gone, scoured away by the acid truth of Adam's words.
The dark aura that had been his second skin splintered. It fractured like black ice, then dissolved with a hissing sigh, vanishing into the charged air. The mana-hands released their grip and dissipated into harmless blue mist.
Kon collapsed. Not forward, but into Adam. His swords fell from nerveless fingers, clattering on the stone. He clutched at Adam's coat, his fists twisting in the fabric, his whole frame wracked with violent, body-wracking sobs that held no sound at first, then erupted into ragged, animal cries.
"I'm sorry!!!" The words were torn from him, ragged and wet. "I'm so sorry!!!"
He buried his face in the frost-tipped fur of Adam's shoulder, his tears soaking into the pristine blue battlesuit. He shook, each sob a convulsion that seemed to pull years of buried anguish, pride, and failure up from the depths of his soul.
"Please forgive me!" The plea was a child's, raw and unprotected. "Forgive me, Adam! Please!!!"
For a long moment, Adam said nothing.
He stood still, one arm firm around Kon's shuddering back, the other holding Canvari loosely. His face was a mask, but not of indifference. It was the mask of someone bearing a tremendous, silent weight. His silence was not withholding; it was absorbing. Words of forgiveness would be cheap currency here. But this—standing as an anchor in the storm of another's ruin, offering not absolution but simple, unwavering presence—this was the costly grace.
And so he held him. He let the dam break. He let the tsunami of grief wash over them both, his own chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm—a lighthouse heartbeat in the shipwreck of Kon's spirit.
Trevor, watching from the sidelines, could not contain the tide within himself. A single, silent tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek. He turned his head, pressing the back of a trembling hand to his face, but the shudder in his shoulders betrayed him.
"What a relief…" he whispered to the broken earth, the words barely audible. Gözkıran, where it lay beside him, seemed to sigh, its golden light dimming to a gentle, steady glow. The immediate fight was over.
___________________________________
From the precarious ledge above, the gathered Lords exhaled as one—a sound that was half relief, half the exhaustion of a world pushed back from the brink.
"He did it," Thrax whispered, the words a prayer of disbelief. His trembling hands, which had been clenched in his robe, fell open, limp at his sides.
Talonir did not speak. The proud arch of his spine softened, the terrible tension that had turned his feathers to iron slowly leaching away. For the first time since the sky had rained feathers of death, he allowed a sliver of hope, fragile as a bird's egg, to settle in his chest. 'Thank Asalan… He is returned to us.'
But their eyes were drawn to the lingering poison.
From the Crimson Ring on Kon's finger—the Arya of Destruction—a faint, malevolent shimmer stirred. The Fısıltı Çivisi, the Whispering Icicle, detached itself. It hovered in the air, a jagged shard of violet ice still pulsing with the Shadow's residual malice. Black tendrils of energy seeped from it, questing, hungry, searching for another heart to corrupt.
The Lords tensed, hands going to weapons.
Adam merely lifted his gaze. His expression did not change. He raised a single hand, palm open, toward the fragment.
His voice was calm, devoid of theatrics, utterly absolute.
"No more evil-doing for you, little Icicle… Be de-evilized."
The words were almost gentle, a nursery rhyme for a nightmare. But the power behind them was primordial.
A sphere of pure, uncorrupted mana—light spun from the first moment of dawn—materialized around the hovering shard. It was not a cage of force, but a womb of purification.
The Icicle shuddered violently. Dark mana lashed against the inside of the sphere like a trapped serpent, throwing off sparks of hatred and despair. The canyon groaned in sympathetic resonance. For a heart-stopping second, it seemed the pure light might shatter.
Adam did not flinch. His hand remained steady, his gaze fixed.
The sphere pulsed once, a beat of cosmic rhythm.
A soundless wave of cleansing energy rippled out.
The darkness within frayed, dissolved, sublimated from corruption into harmless mist. The jagged, hateful edges of the Icicle smoothed, its violet stain bleaching into a radiant, crystalline clarity. It hung in the air, no longer a weapon, but a relic—a testament to evil overcome.
Slowly, gently, it began to drift upward, turning lazily in the dead air, ascending toward the wounded sky like a lost soul finally finding its way home.
The Lords watched in reverent silence.
A slow, deliberate clap shattered the moment.
Clap… clap… clap.
The sound was obscenely casual, a mockery of grief woven into applause. It was light, rhythmic, utterly out of place in the graveyard of a kingdom.
"Oh my, oh my!" came a sing-song voice, dripping with false cheer.
Trevor moved before thought. Gözkıran flashed in his hand, and a spectral duplicate of the staff shot across the canyon like a bolt of golden judgment. It struck the ground where the voice originated with a thunderous BOOM, shaking the cliffs and sending fresh cracks through the glassy stone.
The dust cleared.
Nothing. No scorch mark. No impact crater. Just undisturbed ruin.
The voice chuckled, a dry, rustling sound.
And there he was.
Jarik.
The pink-furred rabbit leaned casually against a jagged spur of rock, his long hat tilted at a jaunty angle. His grin was a crescent moon of pure, unadulterated malice. He looked like a tourist admiring a particularly interesting landmark.
"I guess all the Narn Lords are the same," he mused, tilting his head. "So aggressive."
Trevor's jaw clenched, fury boiling behind his eyes.
In an instant, the other Lords were there. They materialized around Trevor and Adam, a battered, bleeding phalanx of defiance. Darius, his green aura guttering but his spine straight. Thrax, solid as a sea-stack. Talonir, feathers still dulled but eyes sharp as talons. Their unity was a silent roar against the mocking silence.
Adam, meanwhile, carefully lowered the now-limp Kon to the ground. The tiger's sobs had quieted to ragged breaths, his consciousness slipping into exhausted oblivion. As Adam released him, the radiant, frost-tipped form of Grand Kurt dissolved. The gleaming aura faded, the majestic mane receded, the golden armguards vanished into motes of light. What remained was just Adam—scarred, weary, sweat-soaked, his legs buckling beneath him.
Karadir was there in a heartbeat, the massive mountain goat catching him with surprising gentleness, supporting his weight.
"Careful, Lord Kurt," Karadir rumbled, his voice low.
Adam nodded faintly, a ghost of gratitude in his exhausted eyes. "Thank you, Karadir." His voice was thin, but his gaze, as it lifted to Jarik, was not.
Darius stepped forward. The weight of kingship was a visible mantle, though his crown was ash. His voice, though hoarse, carried across the abyss.
"What else does your master want, Child of Shadow?"
His lion's eyes were hard, etched with the grief of a hundred thousand lost souls.
"Speak," he said, the word a blade on a whetstone, "for my patience has reached its end."
Jarik's grin widened, a gash of pink in the monochrome devastation. He executed a shallow, mocking bow.
"Ah! King Darius. What an honor. Truly." His tone was syrup over poison. "Such a shame I'm here on official business. Otherwise, I would have loved to get to know you better."
Darius offered no reply. His silence was a wall.
Jarik sighed, a parody of disappointment. Then he spread his hands wide, his ears giving a lazy twitch.
"Anyway… my master humbly requests that the Four Grand Lords…"
A deliberate, tantalizing pause. His grin acquired a razor's edge.
"…hand over the Aryas."
The words hung in the air, simple, outrageous, and heavy with implicit threat.
"Do that," he continued, rocking back on his heels, "and ArchenLand will be left alone. Forever. You might even be permitted to rebuild this… charming little ruin."
The canyon seemed to grow colder, the void at its heart sucking the warmth from the very idea.
Darius opened his mouth. No sound emerged. A profound, kingly sorrow welled in his eyes, a grief for not just a city, but for the very necessity of this negotiation with decay. He swayed slightly.
Kopa, the stag Viceroy, was at his side in an instant, a steadying hand on his shoulder. The touch was grounding, a silent communion of ruler and steward. Darius leaned into it, drawing a shallow breath. But still, he could not give voice to the fury and despair.
Another voice answered. Cold. Clear. Final.
Adam's.
"Go back and tell your master…" His blue eyes, weary but lit from within by an unquenchable flame, locked onto Jarik. "…that he has hurt us. Badly. But we live."
His voice did not waver. It was the sound of bedrock.
"And as long as we live, we will endure. And as long as we endure—"
Here, a shadow passed over Adam's face. Not of doubt, but of a deep, ancient knowing. His aura trembled for a second, resonating with something old and fierce and terrible.
"—he will never get what he wants."
The words landed not as defiance, but as prophecy. A cold, unshakable law laid down upon the broken world.
Adam's voice dropped, lower now, a wolf's growl vibrating in the stillness. "And let him know…"
His eyes darkened, the glacial blue deepening to the colour of a winter sea under storm clouds.
"…that I personally will be the end of him."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the faint hiss of fading magic seemed to still.
Jarik broke it with another slow, mocking clap.
"A pretty speech," he sneered, his amusement undimmed. "But speeches don't win wars."
"No," Adam agreed, his voice quiet as falling snow. "They don't."
He raised his hand. A snap of his fingers.
The purified, radiant remnant of the Fısıltı Çivisi, still drifting overhead, shimmered. It coalesced, reformed, becoming a dagger of solidified light—a weapon forged from the evil it once was. It blazed with a clean, fierce white luminescence in the air above Adam's palm.
With a flick of his wrist, he hurled it.
The blade was a streak of righteous lightning. It did not aim to kill. It grazed Jarik's cheek, a whisper of impossible cold, before embedding itself with a soft shunk in a pillar of stone behind him, where it hummed with purified power.
The rabbit froze. Slowly, he raised a paw to his cheek. His fingers came away stained with a single, vivid drop of crimson, bright against his white fur. His grin faltered. For the first time, a flicker of something other than amusement—surprise, perhaps a sliver of dawning respect—crossed his features.
"…Interesting," he murmured, studying the blood on his paw.
Adam's voice cut through the air, final and sharp as the blade he had thrown.
"Leave. And tell your master his end comes for him."
His eyes narrowed, the promise in them as cold and certain as the grave.
"I come for him."