Silence was the first thing. A thick, cottony silence that absorbed even the memory of sound. The air tasted only of ash and cold metal, filling lungs that burned with every breath. Above, the sky was a shroud of soot, a gray vault where sun and stars no longer dared to shine.
At the center of this nothingness stood a man. Kael. Thirty-six years old, though every joint in his body screamed fifty more. His armor, the legendary set known as the [Armor of the Last Bastion], was now just a network of cracks and dents, its protective engravings glowing faintly like a dying constellation. He leaned heavily on his greatsword, [Echo of the Vanquished], its notched blade planted in the gray dust like a cane.
His gaze swept across the battlefield—a term far too alive for this place. It was a graveyard of reality itself. On the horizon, a mountain range seemed half-devoured by the void, its peaks fraying into a gray mist. The bed of a once-mighty river was frozen for eternity into an opaque, lifeless crystal.
There were no bodies. That, perhaps, was the worst part. Where the shield of Garrick, his brother-in-arms, should have lain, there was only a wide scar in the ground, the metal and the man who held it having been simply… erased. Further on, the blackened splinters of the archmage Elara's staff testified to her final spell. He was alone. The last echo of a world that was no more.
It was the silence that warned him. The silence within the silence. The faint whisper of wind through the rock carcasses died. The residual crackle of magic faded out. An absolute, oppressive acoustic void settled in, so deep it was painful.
He looked up. The Silence was approaching.
It was not an army, nor a creature. It was a horizon line gone wrong. A moving flaw in the fabric of the world, a wave of visual and conceptual static advancing inexorably. Where it passed, color became gray, texture became smooth, life became memory, and then memory became nothing. It did not destroy. It unmade.
Kael felt no panic. Fear was a luxury he had lost many years ago. He felt only an infinite fatigue, a weariness so profound it seemed to have reached his very soul. He felt its influence before it even touched him, a pressure not on his body, but on his being. The name engraved on his blade, Echo of the Vanquished, suddenly seemed blurry, hard to read. The memory of Elara's laugh began to lose its clarity. This was how The Silence worked: it deconstructed you before it erased you.
Knowing he only had moments left, Kael did something illogical. He tore his sword from the ground. He straightened his broken body, ignoring the protests of his muscles and bones. He settled into a fighting stance, a posture he had held thousands of times.
This was not an act of hope. It was an act of order. A final statement in the face of entropy. He would choose to die as Kael, "The Ashen Sword," not as a footnote that reality had erased.
His last thought was a memory, so sharp and painful it stole his breath. A night under the stars, long before the end, sitting around a campfire with Garrick and Elara. Elara, her face lit by the flames, had said with an invincible smile, "No matter the darkness, we will see the sun rise again together." He had promised her he would make it so.
The crushing weight of that broken vow was the last powerful, human emotion he felt. His failure.
The contact was cold, impersonal. The Silence touched him. His metal gauntlets disintegrated into a fine gray dust. A frigid tingling sensation ran up his arms as his own existence began to fray. His vision blurred, the contours of the world dissolving into a slurry of gray.
This was the end.
And then.
A voice. Cold. Clear. Mathematical. An absolute anomaly in the symphony of the end. It did not echo in his ears, but at the very center of what was left of his soul.
[Analyzing host's dissolving soul...]
[Spiritual Integrity detected: 4.9% and falling.]
[Compatibility with last resort protocol: 98.7%.]
The sensation of erasure stopped dead, suspended by an unseen force.
[BINDING CONDITIONS MET. ACTIVATING THE ECHO CODEX.]
A new sensation overwhelmed Kael, a force anchoring itself to his very essence, shielding it from the nothingness.
[SOUL REGRESSION PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
The gray was replaced by an absolute, infinite white. Then, nothing.