The final, devastating battle had left the ground a torn, reeking grave: bodies lay strewn across the mud, limbs bent at unnatural angles, armor flayed open like torn bark. Cold rain fell in hard, stinging sheets, sluicing gore into the earth and hissing where it met the heat of recent fires. Shallow pools of blood caught the flicker of distant flames, their orange reflections trembling over the dark liquid. Smoke and steam braided together, thick and choking, carrying the acrid, coppery scent of burned flesh and singed leather that clung to the throat. Broken weapons and splintered shields jutted from the muck; helmets lay cracked, faces half-buried, mouths frozen in the last ragged sound. Some corpses were blackened and blistered, their outlines reduced to smudges; others had been torn apart by unseen, merciless force, flesh and cloth shredded where steel or something worse had struck. A few still breathed in shallow, desperate gasps, eyes glassy and pleading, fingers clawing at the mud as if to pull themselves back from the edge.
Amid that ruin stood a single shadow, a figure wrapped in smoke and faint, licking flame. Their black coat was shredded and sodden with blood and dirt, seams split where the fight had been fiercest. Around them lay comrades and foes alike—bodies heaped, weapons fallen from slack hands, the air punctuated by low, animal moans and the wet, sickening sounds of collapse. In the figure's eyes burned a cold regret braided with a hot, obsessive hatred that made their movements slow and deliberate; they stepped through the carnage with a hard, measured calm, touching a fallen shoulder, pausing over a face, as if tallying the cost in names and debts. At the same time, the rain tried and failed to wash the violence clean.
I am the survivor—still standing among the ruin, staring at the friends who didn't make it. I escaped when survival seemed impossible, each loss a raw, visible scar in my chest. My presence cuts through the silence like the last echo of thunder, a stubborn witness to what the world has become.
I turn slowly. Against the wreckage of a shattered building, someone sits, Blond hair hanging over a face that radiates nothing but cold disdain; now it reads like a threat, a black outfit folded around a body that radiates cold malice. I force the words out, voice thin and breaking.
"Why…? Why did you do this?"
That person does not answer. I shout until my throat burns.
"TELL ME! WHAT'S THE POINT? WHAT REASON DOES A HERO HAVE TO CREATE SUCH CHAOS?"
That person is hollowed out already—dead in spirit if not in flesh—but I keep speaking, because silence is worse than madness.
"They were innocent. Why—"
A skull thuds at my feet. I kneel, hands closing around bone as if it were a relic, as if holding it might stitch the world back together.
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry… everyone…"
The rain thins. The clouds tear open and a cold night pours down, stars pricking the black. One burns brighter than the rest—then dies, a single light snuffed.
Tears blur the wreckage.
"Even if you're fictional… why does it feel so real..."
I whisper, losing the line between what I wrote and what I lived.
"I tried to... rewrite the story... I tried to make... a new chapter. I—"
A voice floats from the ruined roof, amused and small. "I see. You truly cannot change the fate of those characters."
"Rewritten? New chapter? You always make crazy things."
The voice sneers.
I look up. On the rubble stands the person I've been waiting for, the one I longed to see. They smirk, the expression a blade.
"You are…"