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Epilogue - Punished
🕑 Added 2019-10-18 09:12:47 +0000 UTCHe had suffered a humiliating defeat, but it wasn't due to the creature's abilities. His very own sister had betrayed him and sealed his powers, although she could never hope to seal his immortality. It was guaranteed by the Fatas and the humans that believed in his invincibility. As long as they existed, he would come back from death even if his body was reduced to dust.
But to his surprise, the creature didn't even try to kill him. Instead, it threw him in a dark cell in the vault of Arkheim and left him there without saying a word. Maybe it would wipe out humanity and all of the Fatas, but he knew that neither his sister nor Sintress would allow that.
As long as he was alive, he could come back from all this. His powers may have been sealed, but Alverost and Shelnir are still out there. They would surely try their best to free him. And even if they didn't, a time when his sister let down her guard would come. He would regain his powers and remake the entire world before she could react.
Weeks lined up into months, months turned into years, and at one point, he regretted not marking down how much time had passed. Days flowed into one another, and he thought that they might have forgotten about him. Without the need for food, water, or even sleep, all he could do was spend time with his thoughts, imagining all the things he would do once he got out of his prison cell.
Only that his imaginations never turned into reality. That meant at least his sister hadn't forgotten about him in all this time. He found solace in the fact that if she wanted to keep him locked up forever, she would have to spend the rest of eternity awake and vigilant, a part of her mind focused on him. She would live as a prisoner all the same.
One day, demons came to take him out of his cell so that he could be transported somewhere else. He didn't understand what had changed about the vaults of Arkheim, but it was a welcome change in his monotonous life. And maybe, just maybe, there would be an opening for him to escape.
He was put into a simple steel box carriage didn't present even a single opening to look outside. The guards didn't speak a word during the transfer, even when he taunted them. They placed him inside before locking the door behind him as if it was just a job to be completed.
Due to the darkness inside the carriage, he couldn't tell how much time passed, but the shaking and rattling told him that they had been moving nonstop for all this time. Maybe he was going to be brought to a new prison in a place they thought he could never break out from even if he got his powers back so that his sister no longer needed to spare him another thought.
But it all came apart when the carriage suddenly performed a jump and then fell on its side. The door was pried open, and light fell in from outside, revealing a group of bandits. There were a boar-faced demon and a masked woman of unspecified race beckoning for him to come out.
When he emerged from his prison to see the blue sky for the first time in however long he had been locked away, he breathed in the fresh air as if it was sustenance for his soul. He liked to keep up a strong façade, but being kept in darkness forever did take its toll on him.
The one that had rammed the carriage off the road was a minotaur wearing a suit of armor that seemed to be cut from granite. It stared at him with bloodshot eyes, but the boar demon assured him that it was just how he pumped himself up for this mission.
A mission to free whoever was inside this carriage, no questions asked. They were told that once the person was out, they could leave him alone as he would find his own way to the one who gave them the job.
He didn't understand who of his friends would free him while using demons rather than their own abilities, but it didn't matter. He was free now, and he would rebuild everything he had lost.
If only his sister would finally forget about him.
It took him many days to reach a settlement as he had to walk on foot. As he looked like a human, he had to cover himself in the hooded cloak given to him by the masked demon to blend in. It didn't sit well with him that he had to hide his face, but he didn't want to be found by somebody loyal to the creature and get recaptured.
It wasn't long before he found that he had been brought close to where Pontis Daemonis used to stand. That meant he could find a ship that could carry him to the Empire of Terminus.
Once there, he would be able to return to the capital of Vertex Mundia and get into the palace where his children are doubtlessly still in power. Then it would only be a matter of time before he could manipulate this sorry excuse for humanity to put their belief in his current form as the Lord of the Sky.
That would allow him to overpower his sister's fantasy eventually.
He had to lower himself and become a stowaway to board a ship that would sail to the empire. For some reason, many humans were walking the streets of the port town, and plenty of ships sailed where he wanted to go. Had the demons carved out a piece of land on Eorath and built a bridgehead much like Pontis Daemonis used to be for the empire? Were the humans slaves working under the demons?
They surely didn't look the part, and he could see smiling faces among them even as they talked to the demons. Had the two sides settled into peace despite the threat of the demon corruption? It had happened before, but that was the most boring outcome, so he sowed war between them again.
All would be revealed once he returned to Vertex Mundia, and if there were indeed peace, he would restart the war.
In the Empire of Terminus, he realized that humans and demons seemed to be more than just at peace. The ship he stowed away on was a trading vessel bringing spices to the empire harbor. Many demons were living here, neither as overlords nor as slaves, but as equals to the humans. It didn't seem as if the creature had forced the nation to surrender, so this meant that enough time had passed for this to become a natural occurrence.
Whatever the case, now that he was back, he would wake up the humans and remind them of who the enemy was.
The palace in Vertex Mundia had been razed down to its very foundations. In fact, not even those remained, as if the entire building had been ripped out of the ground. The symbol of his rule, a monument to humanity, gone in his absence.
And nobody seemed to care. The citizens of Vertex Mundia were going about their business as if the titanic building that once towered over the landscape, impossible to construct with their primitive knowledge of architecture and technology, never existed in the first place.
He found patrolling guards and asked them what had happened, receiving a shocking answer: His sister had come here and plucked the building out as if it was a giant tooth, calling it the symbol of this nation's decay. But the fact that they agreed with it caused him to boil over in anger.
For the first time in a long while, he let out his true feelings, pointing at the guards and accusing them of blasphemy. They were treasonous scum that deserved death for their disregard of the bounty that the Lord of the Sky - that he had brought them.
He didn't see the fist until it connected with his cheek. The pain ran through his face and caused tears to shoot up into his eyes. This was the first time anybody had ever dared to do that to him. But even more shocking than the fact that the guard punched him or that he was scolded for invoking the title of that false god - the root of all evil - was that he felt the pain.
He was no longer invincible.
It didn't take him long to realize that all the gods participating in the game had been denounced and de-deified. Not a single human worshipped them anymore, their failings and crimes revealed in a campaign by the Church of Light. The Lady of Brilliance and his sister had appeared all over the world to denounce him and his followers as frauds.
That is also when he finally learned that he had been isolated from the world for nearly twenty years. In all that time, the new humans had either chosen to forget about the false gods or learned to use their names as curses. Not a single person would help him.
One day, he started to feel hunger for the first time since he could remember. His sister may have grown tired of keeping him in her mind and disconnected him from the Imagination Engine entirely. From that moment on, he was an average human who could die from starvation and disease.
His life went downhill from there. Even if he quickly learned that without power, money, or any authority to his name, he couldn't survive in this harsh world, possessing the body of a weak child meant he couldn't work either.
Thus, he banded together with a group of orphans in Vertex Mundia, led by a man who always remained in the shadows. He aimed to take over his position and claw his way back up by any means necessary. But as somebody who never needed to work before, he grew impatient quickly and experienced many setbacks.
And he got to feel the cruelty of life when that man sold him to a lesser noble. There, he experienced hell.
Running away from the capital was the only path to survival. With only the clothes on his body and oversized boots stolen from a servant, he ran as far as his constitution would take him - away from the top of the world, where he used to stand and look down on the new humans. Those humans he had considered lesser beings, who could now squeeze the life out of him with a single hand around his slender neck.
His feet took him into the wilderness, into freedom. But it wouldn't be the end of his hardships; in fact, it was only the beginning.
Wild beasts, hunger, the cold winter nights, and sickness drove him back into a human settlement. It was a small village with barely three hundred inhabitants, and nobody would want to take in a stray who looked like it had a plethora of diseases it could transmit.
But that was when he saw her. Golden hair, pale blue eyes, spotless skin, and a gentle face that could bring peace to one's very soul. It was a familiar face, but he collapsed into unconsciousness before he could call out to her.
The next time he woke up, he felt much better. His pounding headache, the shaking in his limbs, the pain in his throat, and all the other ailments that befell him during his life in the wilderness were gone like a fleeting memory. He lay in a warm bed with fresh sheets, in a small room of a wooden hut with a fireplace stoked by his savior.
"Sintress..." He muttered, his voice sounding hoarse. The Lady of Brilliance turned around, her open eyes looking at him with nothing but gentleness. The last time he saw her eyes was when she closed them in an oath to not open them again until she brought peace to the world. Did she feel that she had succeeded in that?
"How are you feeling?" She asked with her bell-like voice. But something seemed different about her from when he last saw her. The memory of how she appeared before him to end the war between the new humans and the demons floated back to the surface of his mind like a bubble in a swamp.
"You can heal me with a thought, so why do you need to ask?" Feeling defiant even though she saved his life, he turned away angrily. Back then, she stood against him, and he would never forget that.
"No, I cannot. Not anymore." The resigned tone of voice she said this in caused him to turn his head on the pillow and stare at her in surprise.
"What do you mean?" His confusion soon made way for understanding when the implication of Sintress silently shaking her head settled into his consciousness. "What about my sister?"
"You need some more rest." With these words to change the topic, she made the answer sufficiently clear. And that was when it dawned on him that the innocent and childlike Sintress he knew was no more; she had grown up and become more mature since he last saw her.
The same would happen to him too. They had been stopped in time ever since they entered the stasis capsules those many millennia ago. The creature had restarted the clock in one way or another. He was mortal now, and his life in this world would be limited by the short time an average human had.
Due to his weak constitution, he stayed in Sintress' hut for a while longer. Every day, he witnessed more situations that drove home the fact that they had lost everything. She had to start fires by hand, cook food on her own, clean herself regularly, and all the other physical activities humans were forced to do, but which they had been exempt from while using the Imagination Engine.
Something in him broke when he saw her coughing from a developing cold. The girl that was the paragon of health, whose gift to the world had been healing magic, was reduced to such a sorrowful state. He knew that everything was over.
But he didn't want to accept it.
"Why did you let that monster do this to you. To us! To me!" He accused her. Never would he forget the humiliation she subjected him to when she appeared above the battlefield in Erbilan and made him retreat. Even though Zylos was the catalyst for his defeat there, her involvement led to his impatience to seek revenge before a new avatar body had formed. He was forced to use his real body while flying Olympus so close to earth that he was exposed to danger.
"So that we could finally have peace." Her expression was gentle, not defending herself against his outburst. Even when she lost all her powers, she was a saint. It hurt him to see her like this, and then he realized that this was what the creature had wanted. It had won.
"No!" He slammed his hands on the table and jumped up, causing his wooden chair to topple with a loud noise. "Could you not have talked to me about this first? Why did you have to stand against me?"
"But I did. I talked to you, but you would not listen." With a weak smile filled with regret and resignation, Sintress replied with the harsh truth. Then she covered her mouth and tried to suppress a cough, unsuccessfully.
"Damn it all!" He couldn't bear to see her like this, so he ran.
He had no aim, no place to go to. But he had to leave everything behind, or the feeling would consume his sanity. Ignoring Sintress' voice calling out to him until it faded away in the distance, he continued to run until the human limitations of his breath forced him to pause. But it was still not far enough from everything he knew, so he continued to walk - away from it all.
Forced to return to a life of vagrancy and begging in the streets, the former Lord of the Sky was reduced to the lowest among those beings he considered lower lifeforms. His glorious life as the most powerful of his kind was but a fleeting memory at this point, one the vestiges of his fading self-esteem still held onto like a flickering flame in a storm.
One small fragment in his soul maintained the hope that everything would return to the way it was. Be it by some miracle or even the pity of that creature that was doubtlessly still out there.
If he didn't, something would truly come to an irreversible end. It was just a feeling, but he knew it to be true. After all, what was he without his past?
Years had passed at this point, and he had grown into an adult. His previously blond hair hadn't reflected the sunlight for a long time now. An unkempt beard covered his face, and his skin was darkened by exposure to the sun. Despite being only around thirty years of age physically, his appearance suggested he was far older. His right leg had been broken when he fell off a cliff, and with nobody to mend it, he was now lame.
Yet, he still walked the countryside, taking more steps in days than he had in thousands of years, even while he relied on a makeshift crutch. The constant pain from the poorly healed break had already become a background feeling that didn't bother him as much as the constant hunger.
People had taken pity on his appearance and given him money in the small town he last passed through. But every store had denied him entry, so he had to walk to the next to hope that somebody would sell him food.
Two men approached him from ahead, talking to each other about meaningless things. He involuntarily lowered his head to appear as insignificant as possible. Too often had he been bumped into or outright beaten for acting above his status.
But that was the moment something inside him snapped. Years of frustration, anger, and hatred burst out when he became conscious of his current state.
"I am Zenlith, dammit!" He shouted with his coarse voice and raised his fist at the two men who recoiled in shock and surprise. "You should be the ones to lower yourselves before me!"
"Ignore him. He's that crazy homeless wandering around these parts everybody's talking about." One of the two remarked with a pitying glance at him.
"Damn you cockroaches!" But that only fanned the flames of his rage - at the creature named Chaos, at Zylos for ruining his game, at his sister for taking away his powers, at the world for throwing him into this fate. He swung his crutch at the men, but a stinging pain in his stomach stopped him.
Looking down at himself, he noticed the knife hilt stuck in his chest and the blood seeping through his dirty clothes. He had experienced far more pain than this, but something told him that this one was different.
Raising his head, he saw that the man before him was staring into his eyes with a frightened expression. He let go of the knife and stumbled back, then exchanged a look of horror with his companion.
"He attacked me! It was self-defense!" His voice sounded desperate.
"I know. Let's go." And the other quickly pushed his friend along to walk away from this situation, leaving the knife where it was.
As the pain strangely subsided and numbness spread through his body, he knew that this was not something he would walk off as he had other things before. Collapsing to the ground without even breaking his fall, all sensation grew distant, and his vision blurred.
This was the end. This was how he would die. The Lord of the Sky, reduced to a vagrant stabbed by a nobody on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. He wanted to laugh, but his breath only brought forth a blood-filled cough.
In this final moment, he remembered Sintress. She was the only girl he had ever loved, but their paths had diverged when she didn't see eye to eye with his way of treating the world as his playground. Yet, when she saved his life, he had been unable to stand seeing her reduced to a regular human being. Now he paid the price for having thrown away the only chance at redemption this world still had had to offer to him - the one she had offered to him all those years ago in her tiny but warm home.
A tear appeared in the corner of his eye when he felt the regret wash over him. It was followed by the grip of oblivion, as his world faded into darkness.
