Gahran Winarr
Thousand year old ship: Muhreim
Weltharas continent (east)
Valley of Dareth
Five days before the destruction of Aravan island
Seven years before Gahran Winarr entered the valley of Dareth:
Battle of Hanmer
Wet blood. Broken lances. Swords slick with mud, or perhaps blood.
It had all happened so fast.
Everything became a blur the moment the Tyrant God stepped onto the battlefield. One strike. That was all it took. A single swing of his sword decided our fate.
I, too, lay among those corpses. Perhaps a knight had dragged me to safety. Perhaps a god had secretly answered my prayers. Perhaps it was even the enemy who spared me. Or perhaps they saved me only so they could torture me later.
Whatever the truth, I was the only survivor of that battle. Except for the Tyrant God, of course.
His elvents were dead as well. I could see their bodies strewn across the barren field, their armour shattered and their amber-lit swords scattered dismally amongst the dead.
And at the center of it all stood the Tyrant God. Unwounded. Unchallenged. Victorious.
"Your God," he said, "is dead."
The words should have broken me.
Instead, they angered me. Even now, I do not know what possessed me in that moment.
Before me stood a being who had annihilated an entire army with a single strike. His armour was untouched by blood or mud. His sword radiated blue sorcery, its glow dancing across the corpses that littered the battlefield.
And yet, when I looked at him, I felt something unexpected. Regret. Regret that I had survived. Regret that I had not fought harder. Regret that I had never even reached him.
I spat blood onto the ground and challenged him to a duel.
At first, the Tyrant God simply stared at me. No anger. No amusement. No contempt. He merely looked.
Then his gaze drifted across my wounds, my broken armour, and the fact that I could barely remain standing.
A faint smile touched his lips. He realized I was joking. Or perhaps he thought I was.
"You?" he asked.
And for the first time since the battle began, the Tyrant God laughed.
Sparks flew in rapid succession. We charged at each other with such speed that dirt exploded beneath our feet, and blood splashed across our vision.
The tyrant god unleashed another quick burst of sorcery. I deflected it.
Another blast followed, fire licking through the air as it reached for me. I threw myself aside. Heat washed over my face, and the ground where I had stood exploded into a shower of molten earth.
He did not relent.
A dozen crimson bolts streaked from his outstretched hand. I met them with my blade, each impact sending sparks screaming into the darkness. The force of the barrage drove me backward, boots carving trenches into the dirt.
"Run," he mocked, his voice rolling like distant thunder. "That is all mortals ever do."
I charged.
The distance between us vanished in heartbeats. My sword descended in a silver arc aimed at his neck. He caught the strike on a gauntleted forearm. The collision cracked the air like a lightning strike.
We exchanged blows in a frenzy.
Steel rang against enchanted metal. Sparks flew in quick succession as our weapons collided again and again. Neither of us yielded an inch. Every swing carried enough force to shatter stone.
The tyrant god suddenly thrust his palm forward.
A wave of invisible force struck me square in the chest.
I flew backward, tumbling across the battlefield. Pain exploded through my ribs. Before I could recover, he was already upon me.
His blade came down.
I rolled aside just as it struck the earth. The impact split the ground open, jagged fissures racing outward from the point of contact.
I rose and drove my shoulder into him.
For the first time, he staggered.
A flicker of surprise crossed his face.
I seized the moment.
My sword pierced his side.
Golden blood spilled from the wound, hissing as it touched the earth. The tyrant god looked down at the blade protruding from his flesh, then back at me.
He smiled.
Not with amusement.
With anticipation.
The heavens darkened.
Clouds churned overhead, spiraling around an unseen center. The air grew heavy, charged with a power that made every instinct scream in warning.
"You wished to challenge a god," he said, drawing the sword from his side. The wound closed even as I watched.
"Now face one."
The storm answered his call.
Lightning descended. Not from the sky, but from him. It coiled around his body like living serpents, illuminating the battlefield in blinding white.
I tightened my grip on my sword.
The duel had only just begun.
The tyrant god hurled another blast of sorcery.
I caught it on my blade.
The impact detonated along the length of the steel. White fire raced over the edge. The scream of tortured metal tore through the battlefield. My arms numbed instantly. Tendons felt ready to snap.
Another blast.
No pause. No breath.
A lance of emerald light crossed the distance between us and struck with the weight of a falling mountain.
I twisted. Too slow.
The edge of the sorcery clipped my shoulder. Flesh vanished. Not burned. Not cut. Simply erased.
Pain arrived a heartbeat later. It ripped a howl from my throat.
The tyrant god smiled.
His next spell struck before the sound had even left my mouth.
The world exploded.
Earth erupted beneath my feet. Stone became shrapnel. Dirt transformed into a storm of knives. I was thrown through the air, tumbling end over end before crashing into a mound of shattered rock.
My vision blurred.
The god advanced. Each step cracked the ground.
Each step seemed to drag shadows behind him like chains.
Then came another barrage. Bolts of sorcery. Dozens. Hundreds.
The sky itself seemed to fracture as streams of power descended upon me.
I ran. Not from fear. From necessity.
The battlefield vanished beneath curtains of destruction. Every impact gouged craters into the earth. Towers of dirt and stone rose into the air. Fire rolled outward in expanding rings. The heat stripped moisture from my lungs.
Still the god cast. Still the power intensified.
The air itself began to die. Colors bled away. Sound distorted. Reality groaned under the strain.
I could feel it now.
This was no longer battle sorcery.
This was the kind of power that civilizations remembered as extinction.
A sphere of darkness formed above the tyrant god's palm.
It drank the light around it. Drank the heat. Drank the sky.
The battlefield dimmed. Then dimmed further.
The thing hanging above his hand looked less like a spell and more like a wound punched into existence.
For the first time, doubt found me. The tyrant god saw it. "Yes," he said.
The single word echoed like a funeral bell. Then he unleashed the spell.
The darkness crossed the battlefield.
Mountains would have vanished before it.
Cities would have become memory.
I lowered my stance. Tightened my grip on the sword. And charged directly into the apocalypse.
The tyrant god released it.
The darkness left his hand without sound or visible motion, as though the world had simply accepted its passage and chosen not to resist. Where it moved, matter abandoned its own existence. Stone did not break, it forgot it had ever been stone. Fire did not extinguish, it lost the memory of burning. The air itself seemed to thin, uncertain whether it had ever been part of anything at all.
I moved anyway.
Not toward survival. Not away from death.
Just forward, into the shape of what was coming.
My blade rose out of instinct and defiance, meeting nothing, because there was nothing left to meet. The absence passed through me like a verdict without voice. For a brief instant the battlefield ceased to exist as a place. It became a hollow stretch of erased certainty where direction, weight, and distance no longer agreed on what they were supposed to be.
Then the tyrant god faltered.
Not in collapse. Not in defeat.
In refusal of form.
Something inside his presence began to unravel, as though the structure holding him together had been denied permission to continue. Armor lost definition. Flesh ceased to insist upon itself. The towering shape of divinity broke into shifting fragments of shadow and suggestion, pulled inward by a force older than will.
His eyes changed first.
Not human. Not divine.
Something vast compressing itself into a smaller truth.
The transformation spread without sound. Wings replaced arms. Bone lengthened and cracked into a new arrangement. The air around him thickened with a pressure that felt like memory being rewritten. There was no violence in it, only inevitability, as though the world had finally corrected an error it had tolerated for too long.
Where the tyrant god had stood, there was now a raven.
Enormous beyond reason, its shape cutting into the broken sky like a wound that refused to close. It regarded me for a long moment, head tilted slightly, black eyes holding no trace of battle, no echo of rage or dominion. Only distance, deep and ancient, as if it had never been part of the conflict at all.
Then it rose. No ceremony. No final assertion of power. Just ascent.
The wings beat once, and the battlefield below, all its craters, its shattered earth, its dying heat, seemed suddenly insignificant, reduced to something briefly disturbed rather than truly changed. The raven climbed through the fractured sky and disappeared into the thinning edge of the world, leaving behind only silence where a god had been.
World of sumaka through the eyes of an old king:
King kustan perenisi- ll
I found the tomb. It was there, right in front of me. Yet something inside told me that I should not have gone for it. I was under its spell. For the longest time, I thought it was eluding me. It was not. It was just calling me.
I still regret it. I still despise the face I saw when I murdered my own sons and daughters. It was terrible. I wish someone would come and destroy these treacherous tombs.