Chapter11.5
The sky didn't just turn dark; it rotted. The purple hue deepened into the color of a bruised corpse, and the air grew so thick with the stench of decay that the commoners in the plaza began to choke, vomiting where they stood. The Shadow Legion didn't just march; they tore through the reality of the sky, their obsidian claws shrieking against the stone of the city walls.
"FOR THE EMPIRE!"
The cry was desperate. Duke Astra burst into the plaza, but he was a ghost of the man he had been. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, and his silver armor was hacked to pieces. Behind him, his men were being dragged into the shadows, their screams cut short by the wet sound of tearing flesh.
"Killian!" the Duke coughed, spitting black blood. "Hold the line! She's... she's the only chance!"
Killian was a madman. He didn't care about the Duke. He didn't care about the monsters. He was clawing at the knights holding him back, his fingernails bleeding as he scraped against their plate armor. "SERAPHINA!" he howled, a sound of such profound agony that it silenced the monsters for a heartbeat.
Inside the Temple, the "miracle" felt like a nightmare. As Seraphina climbed, the shadows on the walls came to life, whispering her name in the voices of the dead from her previous life. She stumbled over the body of a priest, his eyes gouged out.
She reached the top just as the High Priest finished his final ritual. He wasn't human anymore. His skin had gone translucent, showing the writhing black smoke beneath his veins.
"You think you can save them?" the Priest hissed, his voice a chorus of a thousand dying screams. "Look down, little girl. The streets are already a river."
He lunged. Seraphina wasn't fast enough. His obsidian blade sliced across her shoulder, the coldness of it more painful than fire. She fell, her blood splashing onto the ceremonial oil.
"I won't be a prisoner again," she wheezed. With a trembling hand, she grabbed the Priest's ankle and pulled him toward the edge. As he fell, she struck the flint.
BOOM.
The pyre didn't just light; it exploded in a pillar of white-hot agony. The heat was so intense it began to peel the skin from her hands. Below, the Shadow Legion shrieked, blinded by the sudden radiance of a Royal soul on fire.
At the Palace, the Emperor lurched awake, but it wasn't a peaceful recovery. He screamed as the toxins were forced out of his pores, his body arching in a horrific display of magical backlash. Eveline stood over him, her hair turning white from the sheer strain of the power she was channeling.
"I have to go to her!" Eveline cried. Her eyes were bleeding—the price of the "forbidden bridge."
She didn't fly with grace. She tore herself through space, her white robes catching fire as she materialized on the crumbling spire.
The tower was groaning, the stone turning to glass from the heat. Seraphina lay in the center of the flames, her tattered dress fused to her skin, her eyes fixed on the stars she thought she'd never see again.
"Eveline..." she whispered, her voice a rasp of smoke. "Is he... safe?"
"He's coming," Eveline sobbed, her hands glowing with a frantic, flickering light as she tried to knit Seraphina's shattered body back together.
Killian appeared over the ledge, his hands charred and bloody from climbing the red-hot stone. He saw her—the woman who was his light, now smoldering and broken in the center of a furnace.
"No," he breathed, falling to his knees. The Emperor's magic finally broke over the city, a golden wave that pulverized the Legion into dust, but the cost was etched into the silence that followed.
Killian gathered Seraphina into his arms. She was so light—as if she were already turning to ash.
"You stayed," she murmured, her charred fingers fumbling to find his face. "You didn't... let me go... in the dark."
"I'm here," Killian wept, pressing his forehead to hers, ignoring the smell of burnt flesh. "I'm here, my light. Please... the sun is coming. Just look at the sun."
"It's... so bright," she whispered. Her hand went limp, sliding down his chest.
In the plaza below, the Duke fell to his knees as the golden light faded. The Emperor stood on his balcony, alive but broken. The silence was absolute, save for the sound of Killian's muffled sobs at the top of a tower that was slowly turning to a tomb of glass.
The sun rose on a city of ash. They had won, but as Killian sat amongst the ruins of the Temple, holding the woman who had saved them all, it felt like the world had ended anyway.