When Rion opened his eyes, the world smelled clean.
Grass shimmered like silk beneath a lavender sky, and laughter drifted through the air like music. He blinked once, twice, expecting the weight of his old life, the fluorescent glare of an office, the ache in his spine, the taste of coffee gone bitter from overwork, but none of it came.
Only peace.
He wandered for hours until a farmer spotted him by the road and offered water. "You from the Northern Reach?" the farmer asked.
Rion shook his head. "I… don't know."
The man frowned but smiled anyway. "Then welcome, stranger. The world's small you'll find where you belong soon enough."
And somehow, he did.
Within weeks, Rion had a roof, a job repairing enchanted tools, and friends who smiled without suspicion. He learned that the continent of Elaria and the four others surrounding it lived in harmony under the Era of Radiance, a thousand years of peace. Demons still spawned in the wilds, but they were no more than nuisances. Farmers used holy lanterns to vaporize them like insects.
Rion once watched a group of children playing "Hero's Light," pretending to slay a demon with sticks. When they finished, the youngest boy giggled, "No demon could ever win, right, big brother?"
The older boy raised his stick like a sword. "Of course not! They're weak, weaker than flies!"
Everyone laughed. Everyone except Rion.
He smiled with them, but something inside twisted.
---
Weeks turned to months. Rion began to notice things others ignored, the silence in people's eyes, the absence of doubt. Even kindness, here, felt automated. Every "thank you" sounded identical, every prayer rehearsed.
And then came the whispers.
At the Temple of Dawnsight, the priests began murmuring about him — the man whose blood bore no color of nation.
When he cut his palm during work one day, the healer gasped. "Your blood… it doesn't shine with any crest."
Crests were the living signature of ancestry. Even a foreigner's veins would shimmer faintly with their homeland's rune-light. But Rion's was clear. Too clear.
The priests tested him. The scholars questioned him. And finally, the High Cleric herself visited him at dusk.
"Do you know," she said softly, "that long ago, our founder wrote of one such as you?"
She led him through a hall of marble, into a chamber lit by candles shaped like teardrops. There, carved upon an obsidian slab, were words he couldn't read until suddenly, he could.
> When the blood unbound walks the light, the world shall face its shadow, and a Savior shall descend to end all evil.
The High Cleric smiled. "It speaks of you, perhaps. A wanderer of no lineage. Perhaps you are the Savior our world was promised."
Rion's breath trembled. "End all evil… but what evil is left?"
"That," the Cleric said, "is for you to discover."
---
That night, he couldn't sleep. He thought of the demons, harmless, frail, and hated. He thought of their wordless dissolving cries.
If there was no evil… perhaps humanity had created it by defining what didn't deserve to exist.
> "End all evil," he whispered. "Then maybe… it means ending this kind of peace."
A voice in the dark replied.
> "Or reshaping it."
He turned but no one was there. Only a flicker of violet flame hovering above his hand, born from nothing.
Instinct guided him to try again. He spoke words he didn't know he knew, the syllables burned on his tongue, ancient and forbidden.
The flame deepened to black.
When he touched it, it didn't hurt. It understood.
For the first time since arriving, he felt something real.
And beneath the moonlight, Rion smiled, not with peace, but with purpose.
- THE END