His path strayed from the throne, from the Forge, from the sacred and damned alike. He no longer followed grace nor resisted it—he simply walked. Months passed—perhaps more. The sun and moon lost meaning. Seasons no longer obeyed the sky, and the cycle of time unraveled like thread from a torn robe. The constellations faded behind thick veils of ash, and day bled into night with no announcement. But even without celestial order, the world moved on. And it marked him. Time carved lines into his skin, not just on his face but across his spirit. He grew quieter, slower, not from weakness—but from weight. The weight of everything he saw, and everything he had once believed.
The lands he crossed were scarred by battles he hadn't witnessed, atrocities too ancient for song, and sorrow too deep for language. He came across ruins built atop older ruins, each layer hiding a truth no one cared to remember. The ghosts of forgotten cultures whispered in stone carvings, in broken tools, in the bones of children buried with golden trinkets meant to buy favor from dead gods.
He wandered the husk of the Lands Between, not as a conqueror, not even as a pilgrim, but as something else: a witness. A vessel collecting fragments of the truth. Where once he charged into war, he now paused to listen. Where once he rushed past rubble, he now sifted through it with bare hands, seeking remnants, signs, meanings lost beneath the dust. He listened to wind sweeping through hollow temples, to the dirges sung by the mad, to the lullabies that only trees seemed to remember. And all of it—every whisper and ruin—told him the same thing: that glory was a mask stretched over a corpse.
He saw history.
He saw its darkness—crimes committed in the name of grace. Entire villages razed for questioning the divine, bloodlines hunted down to preserve a lineage sanctioned by celestial decree. He saw the graves of forgotten peoples, their names scratched off old stones, replaced with golden runes of false forgiveness. The walls of temples built atop massacres, shrines guarded by beasts twisted by holy intent. He found records buried in the rot—ledgers of judgment, signed by names history had exalted as saints.
He saw men executed for loving in ways unfit for the Order. He saw old women nailed to trees as offerings, not because of heresy, but because they remembered a time before the Erdtree's rise. In ancient crypts now lost to the map, he found murals painted over again and again—until only the final layer showed the Order's victory, hiding centuries of resistance, hope, and culture beneath strokes of white and gold.
And he saw light, too—flickers of humanity clinging to ruin like stubborn flame. The songs of broken tribes, sung in voices hoarse from disuse but still proud. The care of beasts for their own, refusing to fall to savagery even after generations in shadow. He saw a circle of children praying not to gods, but to the memory of their dead, whispering names in rhythm like spells. He saw ritual fires lit not for faith, but for warmth and memory. The world did not thrive, but it persisted. It evolved in spite of its wounds. And in that persistence, there was something the Golden Order could neither claim nor extinguish—a raw, enduring defiance carved into the bones of the land itself.
In a frostbitten valley he met Ymir, a blind smith who forged weapons from melted remnants of fallen Erdtree branches. Ymir's forge was nestled beneath a cliff, sheltered only by collapsed stone arches and the quiet presence of ancient, buried roots. He spoke little, but his work sang for him—curved blades that hummed in the wind, each etched with the names of lost friends, their letters scorched into the steel as though burning to be remembered. His hammer strikes were rhythmic, deliberate, each echo carrying through the ice like a funeral chant.
At night, the Tarnished sat beside Ymir's glowing forge and listened—not just to the crackle of fire, but to the long silences between words. Ymir never asked his name. He never asked why he had come. But when the Tarnished finally asked why he remained in such desolation, Ymir paused mid-strike, his blind eyes staring into nothing and everything at once.
"Even ash can be shaped," he said. "If there's still breath to swing the hammer."
Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "And some of us aren't done grieving yet."
In a desecrated chapel deep within Caelid, the Tarnished found Sister Alira, a nun of no faith, who had gathered plague-ridden children and taught them to speak again using scraps of lullabies from the old world. Her chapel was nothing more than a shattered ruin—its altar broken, stained-glass windows long gone, and the air thick with ash and rot. Yet amidst the decay, laughter echoed. Children's voices, frail but growing stronger, wove through the crumbled stone like birdsong after a storm.
Her robes were burned at the edges, her skin pocked with scars, but her eyes held more clarity than any priest he'd met. She never quoted scripture. She never claimed miracles. But each morning, she would lead the children in a ritual not of prayer, but of memory—teaching them to name the stars, to trace maps in the dirt, to remember the names of their mothers and fathers.
Alira told the Tarnished, "Faith was meant to be a cradle, not a noose. If the gods abandoned us, we are still here. And that must count for something."
He stayed there longer than intended. Helped mend walls, carried water, listened to stories that had nothing to do with war or fate. And when he left, one of the children handed him a small charm carved from bone—a symbol from a godless ritual, but given with hope.
It weighed nothing. And everything.
On a dying cliff village where the ocean had swallowed half the land and salt had turned the soil to stone, he came across a knight with no name. The village was little more than shattered rooftops and wind-beaten remnants of stone walls, where waves crashed with relentless fury. The knight had buried his armor in the black sand years ago, letting rust claim what memory no longer needed. He now served as a guardian—not to a banner or a god, but to feral wolves that roamed the cliffs, and to a handful of orphans who refused to leave the edge of the world.
He wore no sigil, no sword. His only weapon was a gnarled walking staff, and his presence alone kept the predators of the wild at bay. The children followed him like silent shadows, never asking questions, only mimicking his stillness. He hunted only what was needed. He buried every dead animal with care. And when the Tarnished asked who he had once been, the knight only stared into the sea and replied, "I chose silence because words broke everything."
Later that night, by a fire of driftwood and dry roots, he added just one more sentence: "Once, I spoke in rooms where every word became a command. And each command cost a life."
He spoke no more after that. But the silence that followed was louder than any truth.
In these people, and in their scars, he saw truths. No one spoke of gods. No one called for grace. And yet they endured. They did not endure because of divine mercy or celestial prophecy—they endured in spite of it. They endured with hands caked in mud, hearts cracked open by grief, and wills too stubborn to yield to the silence left by dead deities. In the gestures they passed on, in the meals they shared, in the songs hummed with no audience but the wind, they carved out meaning where the Order had left only void.
Each story etched itself into him, until his armor felt heavier not with metal, but memory. And he began to wonder—if divinity required silence, what then was sacred in speech? If grace demanded sacrifice, who was left to bless the broken?
When he returned, it was not to a palace or battlefield—but to a village at the edge of everything. There, beneath a shattered statue of Marika, surrounded by the skeletal remnants of once-grand halls and vines reclaiming forgotten altars, Shabriri waited.
"You've seen enough now," the prophet said. "So, what did you see?"
The Tarnished answered, not in a single breath, but over days. He spoke of what endured. What was lost. What was corrupted. What was never whole to begin with. He told of broken places where life still clung to the edges—villages where names were whispered in fear, not reverence; places where justice had become a ghost, and remembrance a rebellion. He recounted the faces—those who survived not by sword, but by love, by song, by stubborn rituals that meant little to the Order but everything to those who lived them.
He described the way people stared at the Erdtree not with awe, but with hollow eyes that had cried too long, too often. He spoke of children born into silence, who had no words for gods but every word for pain. He shared the weight of truths buried beneath sanctified lies, the centuries of rot beneath gold-leaf myths, and the dreams people were told not to dream.
And still—despite it all—they endured. He saw that endurance not as survival, but resistance. And when he finished speaking, the world around them seemed to hold its breath, as if the very earth had been listening too.
And Shabriri, when the words finally ceased, simply said:
"What's the use of saving a world already on the verge of death? To try and preserve it in this state is to stretch the line of fate long after it has snapped. The Golden Order is not a truth. It is a performance. And now the actors are dead, and the stage is burned. The audience has left, the curtain is ash, and only the illusion clings to life—fragile and absurd."
He stepped forward, voice steadier, almost solemn now. "What you saw were not accidents of time, but symptoms of a system that refuses to die with dignity. Even the rot endures under the pretense of order. The myths of the gods, the rites of the faithful—all of it exists to uphold a structure built on suffering, sanitized by doctrine."
Shabriri lifted a hand, gesturing toward the sky, as if the clouds themselves carried the weight of his indictment. "There is no rebirth here. No cleansing in order. Just a cycle, dragging its carcass forward, draped in robes of gold. You would not be saving the world—you would be embalming it."
He stepped closer, voice lowering, each word dropping like coals into the silence between them.
"Isn't it strange? That the Erdtree would reject the very one who vanquished its enemies? You, the blade of its will, the fulfiller of its decrees. You fought and bled for its cause, endured the weight of its silence, carried its light through storm and shadow... and still, it turned away. Not in warning. In judgment. As though you were the trespasser."
He let the thought hang in the air a moment before continuing.
"What a sad paradox—when the subject demands sacrifice from its god. When the world, supposedly ordered and righteous, cannot recognize its own salvation. You were prepared to offer everything—your soul, your companion, your humanity—not in defiance, but in loyalty. And it would have let you burn, not to ascend, but to erase you. To protect its illusion."
His gaze burned.
"And you, you were about to give it, unknowingly. As all gods demand."
The words lingered like cinders, drifting through the air long after they were spoken. They settled into the Tarnished's chest with the weight of a thousand unspoken truths. Shabriri's gaze held no mockery now—only a cold, absolute certainty, as if he were less a man and more a reflection of the world's decay, given voice.
The Tarnished studied him for a long moment. He said nothing at first, his thoughts pacing through every ruin, every grave, every story he had carried back like soot on his skin. Doubt did not gnaw at him—it sat beside him now, quietly, like an old companion.
Then he said, simply, but with a gravity that anchored the space between them:
"They call you a mad prophet. Why is that?"
Shabriri said, "That's a story for another time. But you—tell me, what is the solution for the crimes of the Golden Order? What answer do you offer to the graves, to the silenced, to the faithful who were cast aside like ash?"
The Tarnished was quiet. Not just in words, but in presence. The weight of the question pressed into his ribs like armor grown too heavy to wear. His eyes dropped—not in shame, but in search of something beneath the soil, beneath memory. He didn't know what to say. Not yet. He had seen too much to accept a simple answer, and too little to craft a new one. The silence stretched, not awkwardly, but with purpose—like a blade being drawn, slow and deliberate.
Shabriri stepped back, folding his arms as the wind tugged at his robes like forgotten banners. His voice softened, the sharpness replaced with something close to understanding.
"Find the answer. In the ruins. In the stories. In yourself. I will be there when you have it. Not just an answer for what came before—but for what must come after. Let's continue this later, when your silence becomes truth, when you carry more than just fire—when you carry reason."