Aurelius stood in the center of the slaughter, his heavy breathing loud within the confines of his Dark Mantle helm.
He looked dead ahead.
Rising from the churning, blood-soaked earth were the Obsidian Gates.
They were massive, impenetrable slabs of black stone that guarded the absolute center of the Whispering Hollows.
Even from a distance, the sheer scale of the Hollow left him momentarily completely still.
They were fighting at its very roots—roots thick enough to crush siege engines—yet the canopy above vanished into the dark clouds.
It was less of a tree and more of a living, breathing continent.
Aurelius took a step forward and nearly stumbled.
He paused, gripping the hilt of his broadsword tightly to steady himself.
His muscles were misfiring.
He was having a brutal time adjusting back to normal physics.
For the last several minutes, Vaelin had warped the kinetic density of the air, making every movement feel like dragging iron through thick mud.
Now, with Vaelin lying headless in the dirt nearby, the air felt dangerously thin.
Aurelius felt too light.
He rolled his shoulders, forcing his body to recalibrate to the natural gravity of the battlefield.
He turned his back on the Obsidian Gates for a moment, letting his golden eyes sweep over the remaining Tamaskritian vanguard.
He needed to calculate the damages.
It was a massacre.
Their once-unstoppable army was in absolute tatters.
He slowly walked toward his brother.
Ignis was kneeling in the mud.
He hadn't moved.
The Prince of Fire had his head bowed, his Crimson Blade katana planted point-down in the earth directly in front of Thalor's headless body.
It was a silent, heavy vigil of respect for the ancient Elven warlord.
Aurelius stopped a few paces away.
He kept his broadsword clutched loosely in his right gauntlet.
"Ignis," Aurelius called out, his voice a low, mechanical rumble through the dark metal of his helmet.
Ignis slowly opened his eyes.
He grabbed the hilt of the Crimson Blade and stood up, the mud squelching beneath his boots.
"Yes, brother Aurelius? What do you want from me?" Ignis asked.
His voice was hoarse, carrying the rough edge of exhaustion.
Aurelius looked at the fallen warlord.
"Quite an emotional one. I never thought you would shed tears over someone's death. Especially an enemy."
A faint, hollow smile appeared on Aurelius's face behind the visor, but it vanished the second he looked past Ignis to the rest of the field.
The situation was critical.
Valerius was completely unconscious.
The youngest prince lay slumped against a shattered canopy root, his armor scorched black and dented inward.
He had pushed his body past its absolute limit to deliver that localized thunderstorm against Durok.
But the sight that actually made a cold knot form in Aurelius's stomach was Malakor.
The Prince of Shadows was on his knees.
He wasn't moving.
He wasn't fighting.
He was staring blankly at a small, dark pile of ashes on the wet ground.
Malakor's violet eyes were completely dead, dilated and empty of any will to live.
His hands were trembling violently.
Slowly, Malakor pressed his fingers into the black ash.
He brought his hands up and smeared the gritty, dark remains across his pale cheeks and forehead.
He didn't blink.
He just kept smearing the ash into his skin, his chest heaving with silent, agonizing sobs.
The sheer, suffocating gravity of Malakor's grief unsettled Aurelius.
The Crown Prince tightened his grip on his broadsword.
He decided not to push it.
He couldn't fix Malakor right now.
"I am going," Aurelius stated.
Ignis turned, wiping a streak of soot from his own face.
"Where?" he asked, sheathing the Crimson Blade with a sharp click.
Aurelius turned his gaze back to the towering fortress.
"To the Whispering Hollows."
His voice was calm, entirely devoid of warmth.
"Alone."
Ignis's eyes widened.
"Are you kidding me? No way I would let you go alone, big brother."
Ignis stepped forward.
He reached out, placing his heavily armored hand firmly over the dark metal shoulder of Aurelius's mantle.
Aurelius didn't flinch.
He just slowly shook his head, his golden eyes locking onto his brother.
"You cannot come with me," Aurelius said.
"Look at the battlefield, Ignis. Our army is in tatters. Our supply line is severed. The vanguard is bleeding out."
Aurelius pointed his gauntlet toward the broken princes.
"Most of our brothers are either physically incapable of fighting or in an entirely unstable state. Protect Valerius. And especially protect Malakor."
Ignis looked over his shoulder at the Prince of Shadows, who was still painting his face with the dead girl's ashes.
"They are the only brothers we have left on this side of the wall," Aurelius continued, his tone shifting into absolute command.
"Stay here. Hold the vanguard. Make sure we don't lose the remaining soldiers. Do not take anything casually."
Ignis swallowed hard.
He slowly pulled his hand away from Aurelius's shoulder.
"Alright. I get it, brother," Ignis nodded.
Aurelius turned away, letting his hand rest on the heavy iron pommel of his broadsword.
He started to walk.
"Wait, Aurelius," Ignis called out suddenly.
Aurelius stopped.
He turned his head slightly.
"What?"
Ignis dropped to one knee.
He slammed his fist against his chest plate, bowing his head deeply in the mud.
"I wanted to apologize," Ignis gritted his teeth, his voice filled with raw shame.
"For not paying attention to your call. For not stopping my blade in time."
Aurelius stared down at him in silence.
"I was so engrossed in the bloodlust of the battle," Ignis confessed, his voice shaking with regret.
"I was completely inattentive to the surroundings. I couldn't figure out the trap... that the mist was actually methanol. I burned our own men alive. I am sorry."
Ignis pressed his forehead closer to the earth.
"I accept any punishment you give me as my Elder brother, and as the Crown Prince of Tamaskrit."
Aurelius looked at the kneeling Prince of Fire.
He was angry.
The mistake had cost them thousands of lives.
It was expected for the Second Prince to perfectly complement the Crown Prince in warfare, and Ignis had failed.
He had let his arrogance blind him.
"Finish them all," Aurelius ordered coldly.
He looked past Ignis, toward the treeline where heavily armed Elven reinforcements were beginning to swarm out of the roots, charging toward the exhausted, charred Tamaskritian survivors.
"Those are all of them," Aurelius said.
"I won't let a single other Elven warrior get past the gates. I expect you to slaughter every single one present here. Defend our brothers."
Aurelius paused, his golden eyes piercing through the dark visor.
"Do not disappoint me again."
Ignis raised his head.
A fierce, burning resolve ignited in his eyes.
"Yes, brother," Ignis growled. "I won't let you down again."
Ignis stood up.
He drew the Crimson Blade.
The metal immediately began to hiss as the superheated plasma surged from his core, traveling rapidly through his veins and into the steel.
His crimson eyes glowed with an aggressive, terrifying heat.
He turned toward the advancing Elven horde who were trying to flank the vulnerable, unconscious Valerius.
Ignis smirked darkly.
The air around him warped from the extreme temperature.
He dug his boots into the mud and lunged forward with explosive speed.
SLASH.
The deafening sound of superheated steel tearing through Elven armor faded, replaced seamlessly by the heavy, rhythmic sound of metal boots striking a polished stone path.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Aurelius walked alone.
He was finally on the main causeway leading directly to the Obsidian Gates.
The Whispering Hollow loomed before him.
It was a structure that defied natural logic.
It was the largest, tallest, and thickest tree in the entire world, serving as the impenetrable fortress of the Athervale Kingdom for tens of thousands of years.
Legends said it didn't grow naturally.
It was the very last seed sown into the earth by a starving child dying of hunger during the Great Famines that hit the Dead Mountains.
Long before Athervale even existed, this entire lush region was nothing but a barren, rocky extension of the Dead Mountains in the west.
How a single dying child's seed managed to mutate and terraform an entire wasteland into a magical, habitable forest kingdom, no one truly knew.
But the Elves worshipped the Hollow as their ultimate savior.
"Beautiful," Aurelius murmured to himself.
He tilted his helmet upward.
He had visited Athervale once as a child, during the fragile years of the alliance, and he had found the tree breathtaking.
But tonight, it was entirely different.
The suffocating copper-red hue of the lunar eclipse was finally gone.
The natural, silver light of the clear moon shone down, casting long, sharp shadows across the bark.
Yet, the air was so saturated with vaporized blood, ash, and methanol fumes that the moonlight seemed to bend around the tree.
It made the towering fortress look ominously beautiful.
A monument of life currently drowning in an ocean of death.
HOOOOOOONK.
The deep, guttural roar of an Elven war horn shattered the silence.
They weren't going to let him just walk up to the gates.
From the high roots above the causeway, Elven archers drew their bowstrings.
A heavy siege cannon hidden within the bark pivoted, locking its sights directly onto the lone dark knight.
BOOM.
A solid iron cannonball the size of a boulder ripped through the air, hurtling straight for his chest.
Aurelius didn't stop walking.
He didn't even break his stride.
He simply raised his left gauntlet.
The cannonball slammed directly into his palm with a deafening crack.
The sheer kinetic force would have liquefied a normal man, but Aurelius's Dark Mantle armor absorbed the impact entirely.
The iron sphere sparked against the metal.
With a casual, bored flex of his fingers, Aurelius crushed the solid iron cannonball into jagged shrapnel and dropped it onto the stone path.
A rain of steel-tipped arrows followed.
They pelted against his helmet and shoulders, pinging uselessly off the enchanted dark metal like raindrops against a heavy roof.
Aurelius was completely unscathed.
An elite squad of Elven Vanguard dropped from the branches, landing on the stone path to block his way.
They raised their glowing, mana-infused spears and charged, screaming battle cries for their fallen brothers.
Aurelius didn't slow down.
He swung his broadsword with one hand.
The force of the swing didn't just cut them; it obliterated them.
The heavy blade cleaved cleanly through the first three Elves, severing their torsos from their legs.
Hot blood sprayed across the pristine stone as their upper halves hit the ground.
The fourth Elf lunged with a spear.
Aurelius grabbed the wooden shaft, jerked the soldier forward, and slammed his heavy iron boot directly into the Elf's chest.
The sickening crunch of a ribcage caving inward echoed over the causeway.
The soldier coughed a fountain of blood and went entirely limp.
Aurelius kept walking.
He was a juggernaut.
A force of absolute, uncaring destruction.
Waves of warriors descended.
Cannonballs fired.
Arrows rained.
He slaughtered them all, his boots leaving dark, bloody footprints on the ancient stone.
But then, something strange happened.
As he drew closer to the massive Obsidian Gates, the frequency of the attacks began to decrease.
The archers stopped firing.
The cannons fell silent.
The Vanguard stopped dropping from the trees.
Within a few dozen yards, the attacks stopped altogether.
An eerie, suffocating silence fell over the causeway.
The brutal, chaotic sounds of Ignis fighting the horde far behind him became muffled, as if Aurelius had crossed an invisible threshold into a vacuum.
The only sound was the heavy thud of his own breathing inside his helmet.
A sharp, creeping sense of unease finally pierced through Aurelius's cold exterior.
His grip on the broadsword tightened.
Then, he heard it.
Pluck... Pluck...
A sweet, delicate, melodic sound drifted down from the gates.
It was the gentle strumming of a lyre.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been a beautiful tune.
But here, surrounded by butchered corpses and the stench of burning flesh, the sweet melody felt deeply wrong.
It made the atmosphere feel impossibly dreadful, raising the hairs on the back of Aurelius's neck.
He took another step forward and stopped dead in his tracks.
The world around him was wrong.
The remaining Elven warriors who had been charging him a moment ago were no longer moving.
They were completely suspended in place.
Their boots were hovering inches above the stone.
Aurelius looked closely at the nearest soldier.
The Elf's mouth was open in a silent scream, but his eyes were completely hollow.
The pupils were dilated and dead, staring at absolutely nothing.
Aurelius turned his head.
A massive armored war rhino was frozen mid-charge, one heavy hoof suspended in the air.
The terrifying Hollow spawns that had been creeping along the roots were stuck to the bark like petrified wood.
Even the air itself was frozen.
Arrows hung perfectly still in mid-flight, inches from Aurelius's face.
A cannonball was suspended completely motionless in the sky above him.
Time and space had been entirely severed.
Aurelius slowly pushed his way past a frozen, hollow-eyed soldier, his broadsword ready.
He looked up, tracing the source of the dreadful, sweet melody.
He stared at the very top of the massive Obsidian Gates.
Sitting on the edge of the black stone, with his legs dangling casually over the hundred-foot drop, was a solitary figure.
A bard was playing his lyre.