Year: 7002 A.A. | Location: Valoria, Eastern Battlefield
The world had forgotten how to make sound.
It was a silence that did not soothe, but suffocated. A vacuum where noise went to die. Ash motes, the final ghosts of Valoria's wooden bones, drifted in languid, meaningless spirals, untouched by breeze, for the very concept of wind had been scoured from this place. The air was not still; it was thin, an afterthought stretched over a yawning absence, tasting of ozone and the chalky finality of erased matter.
Before them, the Eastern Gate—and the miles of proud city that had sprawled behind it—were gone. Not ruined. Not shattered.
Removed.
In their place yawned a canyon of such profound negation it seemed to swallow the light from the sky. Its walls were smooth, glassy, as if the stone had been sheared away by a blade of pure anti-existence. They plunged into a depth where sight failed and only a cold, lightless void stared back. The edges of the wound in the world crumbled ceaselessly, whispering streams of dust into the abyss, a slow-motion hemorrhage of reality itself.
And at the epicenter of this geometric scar, stood the architect.
Kon.
Or the vessel that bore his name.
He was encased in an aura that was less an emission of light and more a localized corruption of physics. Blackened crimson, threaded through with seething, violent violet, pulsed around him in rhythm with a heartbeat that was not his own. It did not radiate heat or cold; it radiated unmaking. Where its outermost tendrils licked the ground, the very soil lost coherence, not burning, not freezing, but simply reverting to inert, grey powder. Color drained from the world in a widening circle, leaving behind a monochrome wasteland of ash and silence.
This was not destruction. Destruction left rubble, memories, scars. This was erasure. The systematic deletion of creation from the ledger of what is.
Thrax Deniz, whose soul was as deep and enduring as the ocean, felt a tremor pass through the very bedrock of his being. His massive shell, a fortress that had weathered millennia of storms, felt fragile as an eggshell. The pressure was not against his body, but against his essence, a whisper that said, You are temporary. I am the end of things.
"So intense…" The words escaped him, hoarse and brittle, swallowed almost instantly by the hungry silence. He pressed a heavy hand to the carapace over his heart, as if to keep it from fleeing his chest. His analytical mind, usually a calm pool, was a roiling sea of dread. To approach was not to risk injury, but to risk cessation. To step into that aura was to offer oneself up to be unmade, atom by atom, memory by memory, until nothing remained, not even the echo of a name.
"This aura…" he breathed, sweat beading on his brow despite the chill of negation. "The fabric of space is fraying around him. To enter that field…" He swallowed, his throat parched. "…is to court oblivion."
Yet, behind the dread, the core of him—the guardian, the shield—remained. To flee was to condemn everything that lay beyond this canyon to the same fate. Some lines could not be retreated across.
It was Talonir Kushan who gave voice to the unspeakable duty. His tone was not that of a warrior rallying troops, but of a surgeon stating the grim necessity of an amputation. Clean. Sharp. Devoid of all but fatal resolve.
"We have to stop him."
His hawk's eyes, capable of spotting a field mouse from a league away, were locked on the figure of his friend. There was no rage in them, only a profound, crystalline sorrow, and beneath it, the steely acceptance of a terrible equation.
"By any means necessary."
He did not entertain fantasies of waking Kon, of reaching the man buried beneath the madness. The thing before them was no longer Kon Kaplan. It was a walking singularity of grief and rage, a black hole wearing a friend's face. To hesitate was to grant that void more of the world to consume.
Talonir's hand rose. His bow, Sky Sunder, was not drawn; it simply was, materializing from gathered light and intent, an extension of his will. The string hummed a note that the dead air tried to stifle as he nocked an arrow that gleamed with condensed celestial fury. His cloak of primary feathers spread behind him, not for flight, but as a statement of final, avian defiance.
The ground splintered under his boot as he took a single, decisive step forward.
A step toward the abyss.
A step toward the friend he had to kill.
Thrax's breath hitched. "Talonir—!" The warning was instinctive, born of centuries of camaraderie.
But the Eagle Lord did not slow. His gaze was fixed, though a part of his soul wept. If the price of saving what remained of their world was to extinguish this beautiful, broken star, then his hands would bear the stain. He would not flinch.
The corrupted aura around Kon convulsed. It bulged outward in a wave of silent annihilation, causing the very space around it to warp and buckle. The few remaining stumps of wall behind him further dissolved, not falling, but submitting, their matter unraveling into non-particulate dust.
Jarik, watching from a safe, calculated distance, clasped his paws together, his pink fur almost glowing with perverse delight. "Oh, ho! There it is!" he trilled, his voice a sacrilege in the silence. "The unmaking of a legend, performed live! A masterpiece!"
His paw landed on Tigrera's shoulder, a gesture of grotesque ownership. She stood rigid, her golden eyes wide, not with triumph, but with a horror so deep it had frozen her. She was watching the living ghost of her betrayal become the reaper of a kingdom.
"Uh-oh!" Jarik sang. "I think that's our cue for a strategic withdrawal, daughter. One must admire art from a respectful distance!"
The crest on his palm flared with Amythx light. In the heartbeat before the expanding wave of erasure could touch them, space folded in on itself, and they were gone—spectators spared from the finale of their own play.
"KON, NO!!"
Talonir's scream was a raw, torn thing, but it was a whisper against the tide of silent power.
Kon's blade descended.
There was no thunderous impact. There was a flash—a terrible, soundless detonation of crimson and violet that did not illuminate, but consumed illumination. It was a negative sun, blooming at the canyon's heart. It spread not as a wave of force, but as a tide of cancellation. Stone, steel, the lingering memories held in mortar and tapestry—all met the same fate. They did not burn or shatter. They simply ceased to be.
The world did not shake; it flinched.
And when the terrible light receded, the scale of the erasure was laid bare.
Valoria was not destroyed.
It was missing.
The canyon was no longer just at the gate. It had expanded, a voracious black scar that now gashed through the entire historical basin of the capital. Where bustling districts, soaring spires, and ancient halls had stood, there was only a vast, empty gulf, its depths lost in shadow. The far edges were raw, crumbling steadily, as if the wound were still hungry.
The silence that followed was absolute. It was the silence of a void, of a place where even echoes were afraid to be born.
Kon stood at the precipice he had created, a lone monument to annihilative grief. His chest rose and fell with a slow, mechanical rhythm. His eyes, those blank, white orbs, held no triumph, no regret—only the serene emptiness of a force of nature.
Talonir's bowstring trembled, but his hands were stone. His heart was a battlefield of grief and duty.
"Forgive me, Kon," he whispered to the ghost of his friend.
Then his voice rang out, clear and terrible, a command to the grieving sky.
"Varya's Command—6th Beat: Fırtına Hatırası!" (Storm's Memory)
The air itself tore. From his wings and from the ether, thousands of mana-forged feathers erupted, each one a sliver of Talonir's own spirit, sharpened by loss. They did not simply fly; they remembered the shape of the storm. They whirled into a colossal, screaming vortex around Kon, a cage woven from hurricane winds and piercing light. The feathers sang a dissonant, beautiful dirge—the memory of Valoria's last breath given sound. They slashed downward, not just to cut, but to contain, to bind the madness within a prison of mournful power.
Simultaneously, Thrax moved. He did not roar. He focused. His shell blazed with aquamarine sigils, and he thrust a palm forward, fingers splayed as if gripping the heart of a tidal wave.
"Aegis Tide—5th Wave: Dalga Çarpması!" (Wave Impact)
The energy that shot forth was not a blunt force. It was a precise, piercing lance of hydrokinetic force, designed not to smash, but to disrupt. It targeted the flow of Kon's corrupted mana, seeking to find the resonant frequency of the chaos and shatter it, to paralyze the system from within. If Talonir's storm was the cage, Thrax's wave was the lockpick.
'That should destabilize his core flow,' Thrax thought, the hope a fragile bird in his chest.
The combined might of two Hazël Lords, a symphony of containment and negation, converged on the silent figure.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!
The canyon screamed. Not with sound, but with a violent distortion of space.
Kon's aura erupted.
It was not an explosion of power outward, but an implosion of reality inward. Talonir's beautiful, mournful storm of feathers—each a piece of his will—touched the seething black-crimson field and dissolved. They didn't break; they un-wrote themselves, vanishing mid-arc as if they had never been conjured. Their sorrowful song was cut off into nothingness.
Thrax's precisely aimed wave of disruption struck the aura and shattered like glass against a mountain. The energy didn't deflect; it was absorbed, consumed by the void, leaving not even a ripple of protest.
The two-pronged assault, a move that could have halted an army, was negated in less than a thought.
The corrupted aura coiled tighter around Kon, now visibly thickening, pulsing with a dark, intelligent hunger. His Grand Kaplan suit seemed to drink in the ambient despair, the cracks of violet light within it glowing brighter. He stood, not just protected, but insulated by a fortress of absolute negation.
Thrax was physically forced back a step, his massive frame groaning in protest. Sweat now poured in earnest down his face. "Damn it!" he growled, frustration and fear warring in his voice. "It's not just his mana! The Grand Kaplan form itself… it's synergizing with the corruption! It's making him untouchable!"
Talonir's feathers lay flat against his back, a subconscious reaction to overwhelming threat. His sharp eyes scanned the impossible defense, and the truth settled in his gut like ice.
"He's completely invulnerable in this state…" he murmured, the words tasting of ash. "This… this is the true potential of the Grand Kaplan form." The title was no longer a badge of honor, but a epitaph for reason.
There was no time for despair. Only action.
"Cover me, Talonir!" Thrax's voice was a gravelly boom, urgency overriding caution.
Talonir was already moving. Sky Sunder melted and reformed in his grip, becoming a sleek, deadly longblade. In a streak of silver and azure, he was upon Kon, not with a mighty blow, but with a flurry of precise, lightning-fast strikes aimed at joints, at the eyes, at any perceived flaw. He was a blizzard of steel, each strike a probe, a test.
The sound that resulted was a nightmare of dissonance. Kon's parries were not elegant. They were final. Each block felt to Talonir as if he were striking the bedrock of the world. The shockwaves traveled up his arms, jolting his bones, threatening to splinter his very weapon. Sparks flew, but they were sickly, half-formed things that died in the dead air.
Talonir was speed incarnate. But here, in this field of slowed time and corrupted physics, even his transcendent velocity felt sluggish. As their blades locked for a fleeting second, Talonir's hawk-eyes saw the true horror up close. The aura wasn't just a shield; it was corrosive.
The brilliant sheen of his own feathers, mere inches from the black-crimson energy, began to dull, their vibrant blues leaching into grey. His mana reserves, so vast and deep, didn't just deplete—they frayed, unraveling at the edges as if being eaten by invisible moths. Each breath he took within that sphere was thinner, colder, laced with the taste of oblivion.
'I'm being unmade just by being near him…'
With a desperate, powerful beat of his wings, he wrenched himself backward, disengaging. The moment he left the immediate corona of Kon's aura, it felt like bursting from deep water into air. He gasped, his vision swimming.
A second longer, and he would have been erased not by a sword, but by proximity.
Thrax did not let the opening pass. He planted his feet, the ground cracking under his weight, and brought his hands together in a complex seal. The ancient runes on his shell blazed, and he spoke not a shout, but a command to the fundamental forces he embodied:
"Aegis Tide—Stagnant Current: Sleep!"
The effect was not violent. It was profound. The very air around Kon thickened, grew heavy, not with pressure, but with a deep, oceanic stillness. It was the calm of the deepest trench, where current ceases and time itself seems to hesitate.
For the first time, Kon's relentless advance faltered. His sword-arm slowed, the blade dipping toward the ground. The seething, violent pulse of his aura stuttered, thinned. It was as if the infinite rage had encountered an infinite peace, and for a fractured moment, they neutralized each other.
Both Lords felt it—a tiny, precious crack in the monolith of despair.
"NOW!" Talonir's bow was back in his hands in the space between heartbeats. He didn't aim for Kon's heart or head. His hawk's gaze, piercing through the chaos, fixed on the source—the Crimson Ring on Kon's finger, now throbbing with a sickly violet light. 'The Arya… it's the conduit. The Shadow's hook in his soul. If I can sever that link…'
The arrow he nocked glowed with a pure, silvery light, a counterpoint to the Amythx corruption. It carried not just power, but a focused plea—a memory of the man beneath the monster.
It flew, a line of desperate hope across the stained air.
It never reached its target.
Kon's aura gave a single, languid pulse.
The arrow, a vessel of Talonir's will and a Hazël Lord's power, did not shatter. It dissipated. It unraveled from the tip backward, into motes of harmless light that were then swallowed by the void. It was erased from existence as thoroughly as the stones of Valoria.
Talonir's breath caught. A cold, absolute certainty flooded him. This was beyond any power they had faced. This was negation made manifest.
Slowly, with a terrifying, mechanical grace, Kon turned his head. Those blank, white eyes found Talonir's.
The aura flared.
The moment of stillness was over.
In the next instant, Kon was simply gone from where he stood.
A blur of corrupted color.
A bone-jarring impact.
The hilt of Kon's sword, moving with the speed of erased time, slammed into the side of Talonir's face. The sound was a sickening crunch of cartilage and bone. The Eagle Lord was lifted from his feet, spinning through the air in a spray of blood and scattered azure feathers. He hit the canyon floor with a force that cratered the stone, skidding to a limp, broken halt.
"TALONIR!" Thrax's roar was pure anguish.
He had no time for more. Kon materialized before him, having crossed the distance in the space of a blinked tear. The blackened sword was already in motion, a horizontal arc aimed to cleave the tortoise Lord in two. It moved silently, inevitably, a slice of oblivion itself.
"KON! DON'T!!"
CLANG!!!!!!!!
The sound was not of metal on metal, but of primordial forces colliding. A shockwave of golden light erupted, pushing back the clinging darkness for a precious yard.
Standing between Thrax and the killing blow, his golden-banded staff Gözkıran crossed against Kon's blade, was Trevor.
His usually calm face was a mask of strained fury and disbelief. The ancient runes along his staff pulsed angrily, as if the weapon itself recognized the abomination it held at bay.
"GÖZKIRAN—GROW!" Trevor bellowed.
The staff obeyed its master. It expanded in girth and length instantly, its weight multiplying a hundredfold. The sudden, immense pressure shoved Kon's blade upward and hurled the Mad Tiger backward. He tumbled through the air, a marionette with cut strings, before landing in a low, predatory crouch twenty yards away, utterly unscathed.
Trevor stood panting, his knuckles white on the staff, his eyes blazing with a fury that was almost as terrifying as Kon's emptiness.
"KON!!! WHAT IN ASLAN'S NAME HAVE YOU DONE?!" The plea was a roar, laced with the agony of seeing a brother become a calamity.
But the being that rose from its crouch offered no answer. The pure white eyes regarded them with the blank indifference of a landslide or a plague. It breathed, and with each exhalation, the edges of the great canyon crumbled further into the hungry dark.
A new, slower set of footsteps echoed in the grim silence.
King Darius approached, his form a stark contrast to the vibrant leader he had been. A faint, emerald-green aura—the last vestiges of his royal Arcem—leaked from him like ethereal blood, a visible sign of a spirit clinging to life by its fingernails. His face was drawn, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion and a grief so vast it had carved new lines into his features.
His voice, when it came, was heavy, final. It held no question, only a tragic diagnosis.
"He is being controlled by the Shadow. The Kon we knew is not present. He is… completely gone."
Trevor's jaw worked, his grip on Gözkıran trembling not from fear, but from impotent rage. "Dammit… Kon, look at me! SNAP OUT OF IT!"
Darius didn't acknowledge the shout. His weary eyes moved from Trevor to Thrax, then to the motionless form of Talonir in the distance. "Are you both alive?"
Thrax, wiping a trickle of blood from his split lip, glared at his king. "We breathe. But you, Darius…" His voice dropped, the concern cutting through his own pain. "You look one step from joining the ghosts. You should not be here."
Darius offered a ghost of a smile, a brittle thing that held no warmth. "I'll live. For now." Then his gaze was pulled, irresistibly, to the canyon—to the absolute, geometric nothingness where his capital, his home, the heart of his kingdom, had once beat. For a long moment, the king vanished, and only a grieving man remained, shoulders slumping under the weight of a loss too vast to comprehend.
He closed his eyes, drew in a shuddering breath that seemed to cost him dearly, and when he opened them again, the king was back. The grief was now fuel.
His voice was low, but it carried across the abyss, a decree against the silence.
"…We have to stop Lord Kaplan. Before there is no ArchenLand left to save."
The wind from the canyon—a cold, ghost-wind that carried the memory of screams—howled its agreement.
Above the fathomless wound he had carved into the world, Kon Kaplan stood. His aura pulsed—a black heart beating in a corpse of light. His sword was not raised in challenge; it was held in readiness, the instrument of a world's un-writing.
The Lords—the wounded, the weary, the king on the brink—gathered what remained of their strength. They formed a fragile line against the end of all things.
The final stand had not been at the gates of Valoria.
It was here, on the edge of the canyon of erasure, against the friend who had become the void.