Chương 130: Memories From Ash

While Dex Williams was submerged in his heavy philosophical reflections on fate and the new freedom surrounding him like a storm, the atmosphere around them changed suddenly and radically. It was not a mere ordinary shift in the weather of the upper heights, a colder wind, or a fresh thickening of clouds. It was a change in the mana itself, in the invisible magical fabric of the place.

The very thin air around the flat Observation Branch began to vibrate with strange, disturbing, earth-shaking frequencies, as though physical reality itself were trembling in fear of something approaching. Lumia's body stiffened without warning, still standing near Dex, as though struck by an invisible bolt of lightning.

Her silver eyes widened to an unnatural degree, the pupils inside them expanding and contracting at a terrifying speed, and then, in the span of a single second, a blinding silver light, unstable and violent, erupted directly from her eyes, turning them into two lighthouses slicing through the pitch darkness above the clouds, casting long and frightening shadows of Dex and the tree across the branch.

"Lumia?!" Dex shot to his feet with the speed of lightning, half-drawing his dagger by instinct, but stopped and froze where he stood when he saw the terrifying aura that had begun to engulf her slender body. This was no ordinary mana by any measure he knew, it was nothing like the burning energy of the phoenix, nor like the clean green mana of the elves.

It was an energy ancient beyond reckoning, dense enough to touch, and cold, cold in a strange and lethal way, cold enough to freeze the scattered dewdrops on the enormous tree leaves within a matter of seconds, turning them into solid crystals. Lumia pressed both her slender hands hard against the sides of her head, as though suffering unbearable physical pain, desperately trying to keep her skull from exploding from within.

"Dex... the sky... it wasn't like this..." she mumbled in a voice hoarse and utterly unlike her own. It was not the voice of the calm girl he knew, it sounded like a strange echo, like the whispers of thousands of souls speaking in unison, transmitted through a long, very dark tunnel of time.

"The sky... was... burning completely." In that deadly moment, Lumia could no longer see Dex standing before her in alarm. She could no longer see the Observation Branch, or the sea of clouds, or even Falus Forest far below. The thick veil that had covered her lost and sealed memory for centuries had collapsed, and the visions crashed through her like a devastating flood that left nothing standing. She saw herself in rapid flashes, but not wearing the simple leather clothes and dark cloak she wore now.

She was clad in armor both magnificent and terrifying at once, armor woven entirely from threads of cold, hard starlight, glowing with a sacred and lethal aura. And she stood in full, godlike dominance, like a war deity, at the prow of an immense, colossal flying ship built from flawless pure white crystal, its sails made of undiluted mana. The sky around her, in that ancient vision, was nothing like the calm, star-studded sky Dex was looking at now.

It seethed and boiled, to the point of suffocation, with thousands of those enormous crystal ships, clashing in devastating violence against immense and hideous shadow-creatures, creatures that emerged from black rifts tearing open in the fabric of reality like bleeding wounds.

"The Great War..." her mind, drowning in pain, whispered the name she had long forgotten and erased from her existence. More than a thousand years ago, when the sky itself was a merciless battlefield. She saw the Celestial Peoples, her original kindred, falling from the sky like burning, shattered meteors, their radiant and magnificent wings torn and scorched, their sacred golden blood raining down in cascades upon the ravaged earth below, burning away what little life remained.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. And she saw, in the heart of that cosmic battle, the World Tree. Not as it was now, a refuge for elves. The tree had been far larger then, far more radiant with green mana, and yet... it was screaming.

Not a sonic scream that ears could hear, but colossal oscillating waves of pure, concentrated agony that shook the very core of the planet, while a dark entity, something beyond description, the size of an entire continent, coiled around its immense trunk like the ancient legend of the cosmic serpent, greedily trying to drain and wring the very essence of life and matter from it. That dark entity was not a beast with any defined shape.

It was simply a terrifying mass of absolute void, a colossal black hole consuming light, mana, and even hope from the souls of those who fought. And in the center of that inferno of tearing worlds, there she was, Lumia, standing on her ship. Not afraid in the slightest. Not weeping for her fallen kindred. She was terrifyingly cold, emptied of every emotion, like a statue of ice, raising her slender hand, blazing with a power that defied imagination, to simply release a single concentrated beam of silver light.

A beam of total annihilation that erased an entire fleet of shadow-enemies from existence in a single second... yet which, with the same frigid indifference, killed and erased hundreds of her allies' and kindred's ships that stood in its path, without her eyes so much as blinking.

"I saw myself..." Lumia cried out with force in the present reality, dropping suddenly to her knees on the rough surface of the branch, as radiant silver tears poured in torrents down her pale cheeks, leaving burning trails behind them. Her slender body was shaking violently, as though she were wrestling a demonic possession trying to tear her apart from within. Dex lunged toward her and dropped to his knees before her, indifferent to the cold aura that nearly froze his limbs.

"Lumia! Look at me! You are here, with me, on the tree!" Dex shouted, trying to pull her back to reality. But she was not fully with him.

"I was standing... in the middle of an endless field of bodies floating weightlessly in the cold void of space..." she continued to mumble, her voice torn, the tears refusing to stop.

"I was not a victim in that war... I was not heroically defending anyone... and I was not weak..." She raised her pale, wet face toward Dex, the violent silver light in her eyes beginning to dim gradually, uncovering an absolute terror, the terror of a person who has just understood the full horror of what they truly are. She looked into Dex's eyes, but she was looking through them, toward the thousands of souls these two hands of hers had extinguished.

"I was... a weapon, Dex..." she whispered, in a voice weighted with the guilt of a thousand sins.

"Nothing more than a tool. A soulless weapon of total annihilation, forged in cold blood by the leaders of the Celestial Peoples to end that war, regardless of the tremendous cost, and regardless of who stood in my path, friend or enemy alike. I had no name among them... I had no heart that beat with mercy... I was known by one title alone..." She closed her eyes, and a final silver tear slid down.

"I was...

'The Obliterator.'" The scene within her recovered memory was more terrifying and crueler than death itself, thousands of the most powerful beings in the cosmos kneeling before her, not out of love or reverence, but out of pure, naked terror. The loneliness and absolute isolation she had experienced in that ancient memory was a million times deeper and crueler than any solitary prison cell Dex Williams had endured in his previous life.

She had been the cold goddess of death whom everyone feared, even those who had built her with their own hands.