Location: Canyon of Erasure, ArchenLand | Year: 7002 A.A
The Canyon of Erasure did not settle. It throbbed. It was a raw, open nerve in the body of the world, pulsing with the after-shock of its own creation. The air was not air, but a thin, meager substance that tasted of chalk and burnt ozone, a pathetic ghost of atmosphere clinging to the edge of the abyss. Smoke, the last memory of burned things, rose in slow, purposeless spirals, only to be silently dissolved as it drifted too close to the epicenter of negation.
At the heart of this void-scar, two figures stood opposed.
Trevor Maymum, Rank Two of the Hazël, planted his staff, Gözkıran, into the glassy, cracked ground. The golden bands encircling the ancient wood flickered with a dull, stubborn light, a hearth-fire trying to burn in a vacuum. He drew a breath and immediately choked—a dry, rasping sound. His lungs strained against nothingness, each inhalation a desperate scrape for molecules that Kon' aura had already devoured. He endured. He had endured worse. But never, he thought with a cold pang, from a friend.
Across from him, wreathed in the living storm of his own corruption, stood Kon. The once-proud Tiger Lord was a silhouette cut from the fabric of annihilation. His aura pulsed in a slow, arrhythmic cadence—blackened crimson threaded with seething violet Amythx. Each pulse was not an emission of power, but a retraction of reality. Where it passed, color bled from stone, sound died unborn, and matter simply lost its will to cohere.
And yet, Trevor searched those hollow, white eyes. He looked past the seething energy, past the twisted armor, past the blade that had unmade a city. He looked for the flicker of amber intelligence, for the ghost of shared laughter, for the man who had stood beside him at a hundred campfires, dreaming of a restored ArchenLand.
'Please, Kon. Somewhere, beneath the Shadow's poison, you are still there. You have to be.'
His voice, when it came, was hoarse, scraped raw by the dead air, but it held the timbre of a brother's plea.
"Please, Kon," he rasped, tightening his grip on Gözkıran. "Snap out of it. I don't want to hurt you."
For a single, suspended heartbeat, something happened.
Kon's hands, clenched around the hilts of his corrupted blades, trembled. The tips of the swords dipped, scraping against the glassy stone with a sound like a sigh. The Crimson Ring on his finger—the Arya of Destruction—glimmered weakly, a flash of its true, furious red fighting to surface beneath the sickly violet ice of the Fısıltı Çivisi, the Whisper Spike. In the depths of those blank white eyes, a shadow flickered—a glimpse of anguish, of recognition, of a soul screaming from the bottom of a well.
Trevor's heart leapt. A wild, desperate hope flared. 'He's fighting it! He's still in there, fighting!'
But the flicker died as quickly as it was born.
The sound that tore from Kon's throat was not a snarl, not a roar. It was the rending of sanity, a guttural, broken noise that seemed to start in the pit of the abyss and tear its way out through his flesh. It vibrated through the canyon floor, shaking loose pebbles that then vanished into motes of dust before they could fall.
The second blade whispered from its sheath. The screech of steel was a wrong note in the silent world, jagged and final. Violet fire and crawling black serrations licked along its length, warping the air around it with a visible, nauseating shimmer. It was no longer a weapon. It was a conduit, a slit in the world through which the void within him poured.
Trevor's shoulders sagged, not in defeat, but in the profound, weary acceptance of a terrible truth. The hope drained from him, leaving behind a cold, clear resolve.
'So much for hoping.'
Gözkıran pulsed in his hand, the ancient runes along its length flaring in sympathy, as if the staff, too, mourned the passing of that fragile chance. Trevor lifted his head. His eyes, usually so calm and observant, now burned with a fierce, sorrowful light.
"I did not wish for this, brother," he whispered, the words swallowed by the hungry silence. "But if this is the path the Shadow has forced you down… then I will be the one to stand in your way."
The canyon groaned in agreement, a bass note of tectonic grief.
Kon moved.
It was not a lunge; it was an eruption of feral intent given motion. A blur of corrupted color, he crossed the distance in the space between Trevor's heartbeats. His twin swords carved the air, leaving behind lingering scars of violet after-image that sizzled and popped. The strikes formed a perfect, devastating 'X'—a cross of annihilation aimed at Trevor's center.
Trevor met it not with evasion, but with foundation.
He roared, a sound of pure, defiant will, and slammed Gözkıran into the glassy earth. The golden bands blazed like captured suns. Amber mana, warm and vital, erupted from the staff, weaving itself into a colossal, domed shield of layered wards. Ancient, geometric runes spiraled across its surface, each one a whispered prayer of protection against the dark, now shouted into the void.
The impact was not a clash, but a collision of principles.
BOOOOOOM!!
The shockwave was silent in its epicenter, a sphere of compressed nothingness, before it ripped outward in a screaming tide of force. The already-shattered canyon floor beneath them disintegrated into a fine, grey powder that was instantly sucked into the growing abyss. The walls shuddered, great sheets of glassy stone shearing away to plunge into the depths. Trevor's shield flared, brilliant and desperate, the runes straining, cracking at the edges under the relentless, gnawing pressure of Kon's erasure—but it held.
For now.
From the precarious rim of the canyon, Thrax Deniz watched, his old heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. Each thunderous impact from below was not just a blow traded; it was the sound of fate's hourglass cracking. His jaw was set, his brow a ledge of granite, but his eyes held the weary knowledge of centuries.
"Darius," he rumbled, his voice like stones grinding in a deep tide. "Lord Maymum is in grave danger. Talonir and I… we held back. We sought to contain, to minimize the cataclysm. And even then, Kaplan nearly unmade us without a thought. If he is unleashed now, if Trevor faces that fury alone—" His voice hitched, the unspoken conclusion hanging in the poisoned air: He will be erased.
Darius stood beside him, a statue of fading emerald light. The vibrant green aura that once haloed the Bull King now flickered and spat, leaking from him like ethereal blood from a mortal wound. He looked aged, the lines on his face not just of years, but of losses piled upon losses. Yet his gaze, fixed on the duel in the pit, was unwavering.
When he spoke, his voice was calm. Not the brittle calm of denial, but the deep, still calm of a sea that has accepted the storm.
"Have faith, Elder Thrax."
The words were simple, but they carried the weight of a king's decree and a father's reassurance. Darius's voice deepened, resonating with a certainty that seemed to momentarily push back the despair.
"Lord Trevor did not ascend to Rank Two by being easily broken."
Slowly, Darius turned his head. His tired, lion-eyes met Thrax's, and in them, Thrax saw not hubris, but a stark, unshakable truth.
"Give him his chance."
______________________________________
"Retract, Gözkıran!"
Trevor's command was sharp, a crack of will in the dead air. The staff obeyed instantly, the golden bands shimmering as it shrank to its customary length with a sound like a snapping cord. The runes along its spine flared, alive with purpose. Trevor spun the weapon, a blur of molten gold in his hands, centuries of ingrained muscle memory taking over.
The next assault was a tempest.
Kon's swords fell like twin black lightning bolts, each stroke screaming with the hunger of the void. Sparks—real, violent sparks of amber and black—erupted where steel met ancient wood. Each parry sent a jolt of concussive force up Trevor's arms, a brutal reminder that he was not fighting a man, but a force of cosmic spite wearing his friend's face.
Sweat stung Trevor's eyes, cutting clean trails through the mask of ash on his face. He could feel Gözkıran vibrate, not in fear, but in strain, a bowstring pulled to its absolute limit.
"Kargaşa, First and Second Climb… Şaka! Dağılma!" (Chaos, First and Second Climb… Mirage! Dispersion!)
The runes on the staff ignited.
From its form, dozens of spectral duplicates spiraled into being. They were perfect echoes of Gözkıran, glowing with a steady, warm amber light. They orbited Trevor in a complex, humming constellation, a celestial defense against the encroaching night. With a flick of his wrist, the constellation reacted. The phantasmal staves shot forward, not to attack, but to intercept, each one positioning itself with unerring accuracy to meet the arc of Kon's corrupted blades.
The battlefield became a kaleidoscope of colliding lights. Each of Kon's furious, world-ending slashes was caught, deflected, or dissipated by a shimmering golden phantom. Amber warmth met black-violet hunger with a sizzling hiss. Kon's corrosive mana ate at the edges of the illusions, but the phantoms burned brighter in response, their collective light pushing back the gloom.
Trevor's mind was a crystal of focus. 'You will not break my guard, Kon. Not while my will still holds.'
But the Mad Tiger was not a mindless beast. He was a predator, and his instincts were honed by the Shadow's cunning.
With a sudden, unnatural pivot that defied physics, Kon shifted his weight. His movement was feral yet eerily precise—the lunge of a tiger for the throat. One blackened blade descended in a vertical cleave of pure erasure, aimed to split Trevor from crown to heel.
Trevor's reaction was not of the mind, but of the body—a Tracient's heritage.
His long, prehensile tail, powerful as a steel cable, lashed out. It coiled around Kon's ankle with crushing force. A grunt of effort, and Trevor yanked. Kon's perfect balance shattered. He stumbled, the killing stroke going wide.
In that opening, Trevor swung Gözkıran with all the strength in his compact frame.
CRACK.
The sound was of sundered bone and compressed mana. The golden staff connected with Kon's ribs. The corrupted armor hissed in protest, but the force was undeniable. Kon was lifted off his feet and hurled backward. He skidded across the glassy canyon floor, his claws carving deep, shrieking gouges in the stone as he fought to arrest his momentum. A cloud of pulverized rock dust rose around him, only to be silently consumed by his own aura.
And then, he stilled.
He knelt on one knee, head bowed. Not in submission, but in the terrible, shuddering tension of a marionette whose strings are being pulled in opposite directions. His chest heaved, not with exhaustion, but with the violent, internal war between the soul and the poison that owned it.
When he finally spoke, his voice was a ruin. It was two voices, warped and layered—one, the cracked, anguished tone of Kon Kaplan; the other, a guttural, alien growl that seemed to bubble up from the abyss.
"Tre…vor…"
Trevor froze. His grip on Gözkıran slackened for a fraction of a second.
There. In that fractured syllable. The ghost was real. The man was still trapped inside the nightmare, screaming to be let out.
"Fight it, damn you!" Trevor's shout was a lash, but his eyes betrayed the wrenching hope and pity that tore at him. 'Don't do this. Don't make me be the one who ends you.'
The canyon answered for Kon.
He did not speak again. Instead, he unleashed a storm of mana-slashes. A dozen arcs of violet-crimson energy, howling with malice, ripped from his blades. They tore into the far canyon walls not to destroy, but to unmake. Vast swathes of stone simply vanished, leaving smooth, scooped-out hollows. The canyon groaned, its wound deepening, widening, as if ArchenLand itself were bleeding into nothingness.
Trevor's hope curdled into cold horror. 'He doesn't care. He'll erase it all—the land, the memory, us. There's no target, only terminus.'
Then Kon raised his swords again. The familiar, terrifying coil of energy began to gather—the same annihilative power that had wiped Valoria from the map.
"Not again…!" The words were torn from Trevor's throat.
He moved on pure instinct. Abandoning defense, he slammed Gözkıran into the ground and lunged forward, barehanded, into the path of the gathering cataclysm.
The wave of corrupted energy met his outstretched palms.
For any other being, it would have been instant, painless cessation. But Trevor Maymum was the Second of the Hazël. His Arcem was not merely power; it was conversion.
The moment the void-touched mana touched his skin, it hesitated. Light bent wildly around his hands. Sparks of conflicting energy—violet annihilation and amber vitality—danced and died in a furious, silent struggle. The energy writhed in his grip, confused, enraged by this defiance of its nature.
With a roar that came from the depths of his spirit, Trevor twisted his entire body. He didn't block the energy; he caught it, redirected its horrific vector, and with a final, monumental heave, hurled it back at its source.
The corrupted wave, now infused with a core of defiant amber, screamed back across the canyon.
Kon snarled, crossing his blades in a defensive 'X'. The rebounded cataclysm struck him head-on.
KABOOOM!
The explosion was a sun of violet and amber blooming in the pit of darkness. The shockwave flattened Trevor, sent him skidding backward. The canyon walls shrieked, new, vast cracks racing toward the sky. Dust, real and temporary, billowed in a colossal cloud.
When it cleared, Kon stood, slightly scorched, but utterly unharmed. The aura around him pulsed, darker, angrier.
Trevor pushed himself to his hands and knees, coughing, his arms trembling violently. His palms were blistered and smoking, the skin cracked and glowing faintly with residual violet energy. Even Gözkıran, where it lay nearby, seemed dimmer, its runes flickering weakly.
"Damn it…" he whispered, the word a puff of agony.
His body was a ledger of strain. Every caught blow, every redirected cataclysm, was a withdrawal from a finite reserve. Kon's rage was a bottomless well, fed by the Shadow and his own infinite grief. Trevor's strength had limits.
He clenched his jaw, forcing the despair down. It was a cold, heavy weight in his gut.
'I can only hold the line for so long with so much at stake.'
His eyes flicked upward, to the trembling, fading remnants of ArchenLand's defensive shields on the horizon. They were like the last glow of bioluminescence in a deep-sea trench, flickering with each pulse of Kon's aura. The land itself groaned under the assault, a low, seismic whimper of a world pushed past its breaking point.
His heart screamed a warning.
'If I unleash everything… if I break my own restraints to match him… I might stop him. But the backlash… the sheer collateral…'
His grip tightened on the recovered Gözkıran.
The cost could be the complete annihilation of what little remained of ArchenLand.
Trevor shut his eyes. For one single, stolen breath, he let the weight of the choice press upon him.
Then he opened them, and the doubt was gone. There was only the fight. There was only the now.
___________________________________
On the fractured ledge overlooking the abyss, the three remaining Lords and their commander stood as sentinels to a doom.
Below, the battle was a dance of apocalypses. Each clash between Trevor's golden resolve and Kon's black hunger sent tremors through the stone, widening the canyon, eating another piece of the world.
Darius watched, his arms crossed, but the posture was one of immense strain, not command. The faint lemon-green aura around him sputtered and guttered like a candle in a tomb. It leaked from fissures in his majestic horns, visible cracks spreading like fault lines. He was a king bleeding light. He had not recovered from the war's earlier savagery, and now, the land itself—wounded, dying—siphoned what little strength he had left to cling to life.
"It's no use." His voice was a low, ragged thing, stripped of royal timbre. It held no despair, only the stark, unforgiving clarity of a general surveying a lost battlefield. His gaze never left Trevor's straining form. "Even he cannot restrain Kon without shattering what remains of ArchenLand."
The words fell into the silence between thunderclaps, each one a verdict.
Thrax, the ancient tide, clutched the fabric of his robe. His hands, which had once stilled tsunamis, shook with a palsy born of helpless dread. His eyes were wide, the blue of them clouded with a fear he had not known in centuries.
"We can't abandon him," Thrax murmured, the voice of the stubborn guardian. "There must be a way… a ritual, a focus… to extract the Fısıltı Çivisi! There has to be!"
His words were moss on stone, hope clinging to a sheer cliff face.
Talonir whirled on him, his magnificent plumage dulled and limp, leeched of vitality by Kon's proximity. Each breath he took was a conscious effort, as if the air were being stolen from his lungs before it could give life.
"And how, Thrax?" Talonir's snap was edged with a frustration born of exhaustion and shared horror. "You saw what happened to my arrow. You felt it. The space around him isn't hostile—it's nonexistent. We cannot reach him. His power isn't resisting us; it is deleting the premise of our existence."
Thrax recoiled as if slapped. The truth of it was a physical blow. He had no retort. Only a hollow, widening fear.
Then, Darius moved.
Slowly, with a grim, ceremonial grace, he straightened. The fading green aura around him condensed, hardened, pulling itself inward with a sound like grinding stone. It coalesced, solidified, and in his hands materialized Baltaçek—the massive, ornate hammer-axe that was both his weapon and the symbol of his kingship. It glowed with a sickly, determined light.
The moment the weapon appeared, Johan Fare stepped from the shadows of a crumbling buttress. The raccoon Tracient's armor was a tapestry of dents and dried blood, his fur matted with soot. He had been silent, a statue of loyal vigilance, but the sight of his king summoning a weapon with the last of his light broke his silence.
"No, my king!" Johan's bark was sharp, layered with the iron of duty and the raw fear of a soldier watching his commander walk into a furnace. "You do not have the strength to go any further!"
Darius did not look at him. His eyes remained on the canyon, on the friend fighting and the brother lost. His jaw clenched, the muscles standing out like cords. When he finally spoke, his words were quiet, serene, and carried the finality of a tombstone being laid.
"A Mana Vow."
The others froze. The very air seemed to crystallize.
"Exchange my life," Darius continued, his voice devoid of tremor, "to sever the Shadow's hold."
Thrax staggered as if struck in the chest. "What…?" The word was a breathless expulsion of horror.
"No," Talonir breathed, the denial pure and instinctual. His feathers stood on end.
Johan's voice rose, fraying at the edges. "You'll die!"
Darius finally looked at them. The weariness in his eyes was bottomless, but beneath it was a resolve forged in the fires of a thousand impossible choices. He had borne the crown, the chains of expectation, the weight of every life in ArchenLand. Now, he looked upon the final, most terrible chain—the one that would bind his life to Kon's salvation—and he did not flinch.
"Better me," he said, each word measured and heavy, "than thousands."
The silence that followed was a living thing, choked with the dust of a dead city and the scent of a king's sacrifice.
For Thrax, it was the breaking of a dam. Rage, grief, loyalty, and helplessness warred in his ancient heart, tightening his throat until he could only stare, his old body trembling.
Talonir's fists clenched so tight his claws drew blood from his own palms. His heart hammered a frantic, rebellious rhythm. Not you. Not you too. First the city, then the people, and now the cornerstone?
"No…" Talonir rasped, his voice breaking. "Darius, there must be another way. A vow that trades your life for his? That isn't kingship. That's despair wearing a crown."
But Darius offered no argument. He only looked down at Baltaçek. The weapon thrummed in his grasp, eager and mournful, as if it, too, understood the terrible calculus of its final swing.
Johan took another step, his boots crunching on gravel. His tail lashed behind him, a frantic pendulum of distress. He had sworn oaths to protect ArchenLand, to obey his king. Now those oaths warred with the deeper, more human oath to protect the man he served.
"My king… if you take that vow, if you fall here… who leads? Who holds the broken pieces together when this storm passes?" His voice cracked, the commander giving way to the disciple. "If you are gone, we are leaderless. We are prey."
Darius's gaze softened, just for a moment. The mask of the Hazël Lord slipped, revealing the profoundly tired, profoundly responsible man beneath.
"That may be true," he said, his voice barely above the groan of the canyon. "But if Kon remains as he is… there will be no people left to lead."
Below, another of Kon's errant slashes tore a new, smoking rent in the world, violet flames licking at the edges of the new-made void.
The silence stretched, taut and terrible.
Thrax's hands would not stop shaking. Talonir's jaw was locked in a rictus of denial. Johan's breath came in short, ragged gasps. Darius stood among them, a green-lit statue of acceptance.
He took a breath, ready to take the step that would begin the end of his story.
A voice, dry as desert wind and sharp as a shard of glass, cut through the tension.
"Writing off your comrades so easily, King Darius?"
They turned as one.
Emerging from a veil of drifting ash and smoke at the canyon's crumbling edge came a figure supported by two others. Adam Kurt, his gait a broken, painful shuffle, each step a victory of will over ruined flesh. On his left, Kopa, the antlered stag Viceroy, his noble head bowed with strain. On his right, Karadir, the mountain goat, his massive frame a crutch of sheer stubbornness. They were battered, bleeding, but their eyes held the unquenchable fire of those who refused to accept an ending.
"Adam!" Darius breathed, the name a mixture of disbelief and a surge of something perilously close to hope.
Adam's lips twitched in a grim approximation of a smile, devoid of all its customary mischief. "Barely," he coughed, the sound wet and painful, "but alive enough to clean up this mess."
His eyes, however, were not the warm, laughing blue of the fool. They were sharp, calculating, coldly clear. They scanned the scene—the broken Lords, the determined king, the cataclysm below—with the detached efficiency of a tactician assessing a doomed battlefield.
Talonir's feathers shivered. "You're in no state to fight. Your mana core is—"
"I don't need much." Adam's interruption was a blade. His gaze sliced to Thrax. "Lord Deniz. A buff. Just enough to stabilize this wreck."
Thrax froze. His healer's instincts screamed in protest. His hands twitched at his sides. "This could kill you," he rasped, the warning torn from him.
Adam didn't blink. "Do it."
For a long moment, Thrax stared into those glacial blue eyes. He saw no plea, no fear, only a stark, unwavering demand. With a shuddering breath that seemed to age him another century, the elder Lord stepped forward. He placed his broad, weathered hands on Adam's battered back.
Cerulean mana, the essence of the sustaining tide, flowed from Thrax into Adam's broken vessel. At first, Adam stiffened violently, a gasp ripped from his throat. His body, pushed far past its limits, rebelled against the influx. Veins stood out on his neck, his muscles seizing. It was too much, too fast—a torrent into a cracked cup.
Then—the crescent moon pendant at his throat ignited.
A soft, ethereal blue light spilled forth, bathing his ravaged frame. The pendant pulsed in time with his struggling heartbeat, each pulse steadier, stronger, weaving Thrax's tidal energy into something cohesive, something his. The light solidified, flowing over him like liquid moonlight.
His voice, when it came, was not a shout, but a low, resonant command that seemed to vibrate in the marrow of the world.
"UNLEASH… GRAND KURT."
The change was not an explosion, but a revelation.
His torn and bloodied rags dissolved into motes of blue light. In their place formed a sleeveless battlesuit of impossible material—a deep, ocean blue that shimmered with the sheen of flowing ice under a full moon. Golden armguards, etched with intricate, unfamiliar runes, snapped into place over his biceps and the reversed bends of his knees with audible, final clicks. A mane of frost-tipped fur, pristine and majestic, unfurled from his shoulders and down his back, rippling as if alive with its own glacial wind. His bushy tail, now cinched by bands of glowing gold, lashed once against the stone.
CRACK!
The sound was not of impact, but of reality acknowledging a new law.
The air grew cold. Not the dead cold of Kon's erasure, but the sharp, clean, alive cold of a high mountain peak under a winter sky.
But it was his eyes that silenced them completely.
Gone was the sky-blue warmth of Adam Kurt, the jester, the loyal friend. In its place were eyes of glacial blue—piercing, detached, ancient. Eyes that looked past flesh and armor, past rage and sorrow, and saw only the fraying threads of fate that needed to be cut and re-knit.
Darius's heart clenched. For the first time since the world had ended, he felt it—a fragile, dangerous bud of hope. "Adam…" The name was a question and an acknowledgment.
But alongside the hope slithered a thread of profound unease. The wolf who stood before them was familiar, yet utterly alien. He was sharper, colder, a weapon that had finally shed its decorative sheath. This was not the Adam they joked with; this was the power that had earned him the rank of Three.
"Save the speeches," Adam said, his voice flat, stripped of all inflection, ringing with a frostbitten resolve that brooked no argument.
He turned his head. Those glacial eyes locked onto the seething epicenter of darkness in the canyon below—onto the Mad Tiger, the walking erasure, the brother consumed.
"Time to bring our friend back to his senses."