Consciousness returned not as a dawn, but as a slow, gentle tide washing over a barren shore. There was no pain, no disorientation of a sudden awakening. One moment, there was the endless, silent scream of the void. Next thing he knew, Arden was aware of the soft, yielding pressure of rich soil beneath his back and the delicate, almost citrus-like scent of flowers.
He opened his eyes.
The sky above was a deep, velvety amethyst, strewn with stars in constellations he had never seen. Two moons dominated the celestial canvas—one large and silver, its face a familiar, comforting pale grey, and another, smaller one, a striking sapphire blue. They hung in a tranquil, silent dance. He sat up, his muscles responding with a strange, fluid ease, as if he had slept for a single night, not languished for an eternity. He was in a vast, rolling field, blanketed in flowers he had never seen. They were silver, their petals long and slender like needles, and they glowed with a soft, internal radiance, casting the entire landscape in a dreamlike, ethereal luminescence.
He looked at his hands. They were his hands, yet… not. The skin was unblemished, the calluses and countless scars of a hundred battles—the thin line from a goblin's dagger on his left thumb, the burn mark from a demon's breath on his right forearm—were all gone. Around them, a familiar golden light shimmered. The Aura of the Valen line, the birthright of heroes. But now, threading through that noble gold like veins in marble, were pulses of a deep, vibrant, pulsating violet. They moved with a life of their own, coiling up his arms like sympathetic serpents before retreating back into his skin. He felt no malice from them, only a potent, dormant, and deeply unsettling power.
He stood, his body feeling both impossibly ancient and startlingly new. He turned in a slow circle. The land was wrong. The jagged, obsidian peaks of the Spire of Sorrows—where he had made his final stand—were gone. In their place were these rolling, flower-covered hills, serene and undisturbed. The air was clean, soft, and utterly alien. There was no residue of the war, no psychic scar on the world, no echo of the carnage. Only peace.
A profound, soul-deep relief washed over him, so powerful it brought hot tears to his eyes. He sank to his knees amidst the glowing flowers.
"We won," he whispered, the words strange and rough in his throat, the first he had spoken in thirty years. He looked up at the twin moons, a sob of laughter escaping him. "We actually won. That's… that's all that matters… right?"
His first thought, his only thought, was of them. Arlen. Elara. His comrades. They had done it. They had taken his sacrifice and built this breathtaking peace from the ashes. The joy of that thought was a sun in his chest, momentarily blinding him to the violet threads under his skin, to the wrongness of the stars. He would find them. They would explain everything. They would welcome him home, a brother returned from a long journey. The story of his return would be a new legend for this new age.