Chapter 727: Horror Show

It had been twelve hours since Nova began preparing to withstand a siege.

As night finally approached, a heavy silence settled over the city, the sun’s last light fading beneath a horizon thick with storm clouds that had been building since morning.

Even the night itself felt unusually oppressive tonight, the sky raging overhead as though the world itself were bracing to wash away the blood it already knew would soon soak the ground below.

The tension gripping the city sat over it like a physical weight, pressing down on the minds of every defender standing post along the walls, all of them waiting for the combined armies of the Empire and the Devourer horde to finally descend.

They expected the attack to come with the dark. Over a dozen sieges in the past several months had taught the city that lesson clearly enough — more assaults had come under cover of night than had ever come in daylight.

The attack could begin at any minute now. An array kept wormholes from opening within ten kilometers of the city, preventing the enemy from simply appearing at their gates without warning, but that only ever bought them a little extra time. Nothing more.

And like everything else in a world consumed by a war this terrible, that extra time came with its own price. The particular horror of watching, from a distance, as countless twisted abominations of flesh and bone clawed their way across open ground toward a city that smelled, to them, of untainted life waiting to be consumed.

The attack was coming soon because three other cities were already under siege, each assault having begun within the past hour alone. Nova’s turn was close now, and everyone on the walls could feel it.

In the darkness, beneath the raging clouds, a light bloomed far in the distance.

Small. Faint as a single candle flame. Easy to miss at first, swallowed by the size of the night around it, but it grew, slowly, steadily, until the defenders along the walls began to notice it one by one, countless eyes turning toward the same point on the horizon as vast pulse cannons shifted on their iron mounts, grinding to a halt with their barrels trained on the source.

A few minutes later, the light resolved into something recognizable. It was not a rogue Devourer beast, and not an enemy scout. A literal candle, its small flame guttering weakly against the howling wind, carried by a child who couldn’t have been older than ten.

She walked slowly toward the city’s main gate.

Some among the defenders with a clear consciousness assumed she had been separated from a caravan somewhere out in the dark, or worse, that she was the sole survivor of one.

Others reasoned differently, that surviving out there at all, this close to Nova, was close to impossible given how thoroughly the surrounding land crawled with Devourer beasts. An anomaly like this reeked of something arranged. A trick. Empire work.

Unrest began spreading along the wall, questions thrown from post to post, voices rising with the particular sharp edge of soldiers who didn’t like what they were seeing and liked even less not knowing what to do about it.

However, the questions died as quickly as they had risen.

A figure cloaked in darkness appeared in the sky beyond the walls, descending without hurry toward the ground before the girl.

Alex landed a short distance from her. Up close, she wore a simple white dress, its hem smeared thick with mud and dust from what must have been a long walk. Her feet, wrapped in shoes torn nearly to nothing, were slick with fresh blood, proof enough of just how far she had come to reach this gate.

And yet not a single trace of pain showed in her eyes as she tilted her head back to meet his hard, dark gaze.

"My condolences," she said. "And my prayers, for the souls you are about to lose." Her voice was small. Childlike, soft at its edges, and yet beneath that softness hid something cold enough to still the air around it.

She raised the candle toward him, offering it up between two small hands, a faint smile spreading slowly across her face.

"Empress Siles."

Alex spoke the name like something being torn loose against his will, seared through with an anger that had been building for far longer than the last twelve hours alone. It carried the weight of every city he had failed to reach in time, every name he had learned only after it no longer belonged to anyone living.

The girl standing before him was a thrall, one of the dreadful Empress’s countless living instruments. Siles’s control over souls let her reach through tens of thousands of bodies simultaneously, borrowing eyes, ears, hands, whatever shape she required in a given moment, discarding each one the instant its usefulness ran out.

"Such hatred for me," the girl said, her voice small and unnervingly calm, carrying not the faintest trace of mockery. "When you are every bit as responsible for this war, and every life it’s claimed, as I am."

"Do you tell yourself that lie so you can believe you have no other choice but to slaughter millions?" Alex spat the words, anger and disgust braided together in equal, roiling measure.

"Domain Ruler." The child smiled, her eyes shining with an emotion that belonged to no ten-year-old who had ever lived. "I told you already. All of this could be stopped. All you would have to do is hand that horror show over to me."

"The sword." She shivered visibly, her small frame clearly too little to properly contain whatever excitement moved through her at the mere mention of it.

"The one you call The End." She said the name like it tasted good in her mouth. "What a fitting title. A weapon that claims the souls of the wicked and unworthy, and never lets a single one go."

"It houses billions." She shook her head slowly, side to side, almost mournfully. "No... putting a number to it does the thing a disservice."

"When I first laid eyes on it, I nearly drowned in the ocean of souls that are as old as anything imaginable. Vast beyond any real measure. Caged in an endless void that has no bottom." A pause, something close to reverence entering her voice. "If not for the Soul Cube, I think those horrors might have consumed me where I stood."

"There is an endless supply of them, caged inside your blade. I would need only a handful to finish what I have started." Her smile widened, stretching too far across a face too young to wear it. "And then there would be no need for any more bloodshed at all. Think of how many lives that alone would save."

"I have told you already." Alex’s voice came through clenched teeth, low and dangerous, every word deliberate. "I am not its master. I cannot command it to release what it has caged inside it. Not for you. Not for anyone."

He fought to keep his mind clear of the darker current threatening to rise beneath his own anger. He knew Empress Siles was, in her own twisted way, telling him something true, but she also understood perfectly well that Alex held no real authority over The End.

Even at the height of everything he had become, the blade still belonged to an Ancient. A being older than the entire system, its will entirely its own, untouched by anything Alex could offer or threaten. Which meant her insistence on repeating that fact, reminding him again, was with an aim different from simply reminding him.

"Of course you can," the child said, her smile never once wavering. "You just need the right motivation."

"Today seemed like a good day for that. I have prepared quite a lot of motivation for you." Her small head tilted to one side, almost playful, almost gentle. "For starters, this child will be the first one in the long list of souls you fail to save."

Alex moved before the sentence had fully left her mouth.

His hand came to rest over her head, his eyes flooding fully into the abyssal black of the ancient sight, reaching inward, past skin and bone, down into the depth of the soul, searching desperately for the mark binding her, that he could tear free before it was too late.

He was already too late.

Her soul had shattered long before he ever touched her. Scattered into countless fragments, held together for one final, borrowed moment by a foreign force that dissolved as he watched it, unraveling faster than his reach could close the distance.

A breath later, the girl’s eyes lost their luster, her fragmented soul collapsing fully before escaping into the immaterial, and a moment later her body began to crumple lifelessly to the ground.

Alex took the small girl into his arms, catching her before she could fall. Her body was frighteningly light, almost weightless in his embrace.

For a moment, he simply stood there, holding her.

There was rage in his eyes, and grief. A heavy silence followed, as he lowered his gaze to her lifeless face, then gently closed her eyes with his fingers.

"Rest."

His voice was barely a whisper.