The silence in the library's alcove was a physical weight, pressing down on them, thick with the ghosts of what had just been unmade. Retour remained slumped on the floor, his back against the cold stone of the pedestal. Each ragged breath he took felt like a betrayal, drawing air into lungs that had just housed an apocalypse. The phantom scent of rust and ozone was a permanent stain in his sinuses now, a perfume of annihilation. He could still see it. The way the guards had simply ceased to be, their forms dissolving not in a spray of gore but in a silent, systematic unraveling into memory and dust. It was cleaner than any sword kill, and infinitely more monstrous. His stomach churned, a fresh wave of nausea twisting his guts, mingling with the white-hot brand of pain searing the back of his eyeballs. He wasn't a prince. He wasn't a man. He was a plague. A walking extinction event wrapped in flesh.
Across the small space, Dean stood like a statue carved from tension. He had found a scrap of cloth and was scrubbing frantically at the rust on his vambrace. The motion was useless, a compulsive, nervous tic. The metal was permanently pitted, the leather strap beneath it petrified and black. He wouldn't, or couldn't, look directly at Retour. His gaze would flicker over, a skittish, sideways glance, before darting away as if burned. The unwavering loyalty that had blazed in his eyes just hours before was gone, cauterized away by a primal, gut-level fear. He had sworn to protect his prince, but how did you protect the world from the prince himself? He was standing guard over a volcano, and he had just felt the first, catastrophic tremors.
Only Ile seemed functionally unchanged. If anything, the event had concentrated him, sharpening his clinical detachment into a tool of pure, voracious inquiry. He was on his knees, carefully using a small bone spatula to sweep the fine, grey ash that had once been living, breathing soldiers into a series of glass vials. He worked with the methodical precision of a master jeweler.
"Fascinating," he murmured, holding one vial up to the shard of light from the ceiling. The ash swirled, inert and final. "Complete molecular disaggregation. Inorganic and organic matter reduced to identical base particulate. No differentiation between steel, bone, and flesh. The energy application isn't destructive in the conventional sense. It's... de-creative." He looked at Retour, his eyes alight with a terrifying kind of reverence. "You must understand the monumental significance. This isn't merely a powerful weapon. It is a fundamental contradiction to the laws of this reality. A localized nullification."
"It's a curse," Retour croaked, his voice sandpaper rough. He felt hollow, scooped out. The power had taken something from him in return, something essential. "It's the same thing that killed my father. It consumed him."
"It is what your father contained," Ile corrected, his tone surgical, devoid of comfort. "There is a critical distinction. He sealed it within his own body, a living prison, to stop its spread. You, however, have opened the gates. The primary variable is your emotional state. The Red Codex acted as a potent psychological catalyst, but the source of the energy... it is inextricably linked to your very life force."
Dean finally spoke, his voice a low, strained rumble that seemed to be pulled from a deep well of dread. He was still staring at his ruined vambrace. "That woman. Their leader. She saw everything. She lived." He finally forced himself to meet Retour's gaze, and the look there was a desperate plea. "She will crawl back to Kora on broken bones if she has to. And when she does... they won't send a capture squad next time. They'll send an army. They'll send siege engines. They will throw everything at us with one goal: to scour your existence from the face of this earth."
The truth of it was a cold, sharp stone in Retour's gut. The fragile hope of operating from the shadows was gone, obliterated as completely as the guards. He was a beacon now, a terrifying one, and every power in this broken kingdom would see its light. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs trembling with a weakness that was more than physical. The world swam, the scorched murals on the walls blurring into a smear of color. "Then we don't stay here a moment longer." He reached for the Red Codex. His hand hovered over the dark leather, a tremor running through his fingers before he willed them still and snapped the cover shut. The swirling crimson eye vanished, sealed away. He tucked the book firmly into his belt, its weight an anchor, a chain, a promise of further damnation.
They fled the library like ghosts, slipping back into the oppressive daylight through the broken entrance. The world outside was jarringly unchanged. The crimson grass still swayed in the listless wind, the same sickly orange sky pressed down from above. Yet, everything was different. The very air felt charged with a new and terrible potential. Dean set a brutal pace, his movements sharp and efficient, his head constantly turning, his eyes searching the horizon for the dust cloud of an approaching host. The library had been a lesson written in ash: there was no more safety, only the fleeting grace of distance.
They traveled until the sun was a dying ember on the horizon, and then deep into the starless night, driven by a shared, silent urgency. Dean led them off the open plains and into a region of cracked and broken badlands, where the red earth was split by deep fissures that seemed to breathe out a cold, damp air. He finally brought them to a narrow, rocky gully, hidden from view on all sides. A thin, polluted-looking stream trickled along its bottom, the water the color of weak tea. It was a defensible position, a place to make a last stand. It felt like a grave.
As they slumped against the gully walls, too exhausted to even make a fire, a new sound reached them. It wasn't the heavy tread of armored boots. It was the soft, almost imperceptible scuff of feet on loose stone, the whisper of cloth against rock. Two figures detached themselves from the deep shadows at the far end of the gully, moving with a silence that was more animal than human.
Dean was on his feet in an instant, his cudgel held ready, his body a wall between the newcomers and Retour. Retour's own hand went to his sword, and he felt it immediately—the familiar, terrifying prickle beneath his skin, the mist stirring in its sleep, awakened by the threat, the fear, the simple, exhausting fact of yet another confrontation.
The figures halted, holding up empty hands in a universal gesture of peace that felt anything but peaceful here. The one in front was a young woman, her hair a wild, untamed mane of black curls, her eyes like chips of flint, sharp and missing nothing. She wore patched leather armor that had been worn to a soft sheen, and she moved with a feral, grounded confidence. Just a step behind her was a young man, taller, broader in the shoulder, with a sullen, brooding intensity. A long, practical knife was strapped to his thigh. Their faces were lean, etched with the same deep-seated hunger and hardened resilience that marked all who had endured the fall of Asterfell.
The woman's eyes, those flint-sharp chips, swept over their group. They passed over a tense Dean, dismissed a watching Ile, and locked onto Retour. They lingered on the way he stood, the set of his shoulders, the quality of his travel-stained cloak. Then her gaze dropped, and fastened on the distinctive, dark shape of the book tucked into his belt. A slow, knowing smile spread across her face, a flash of white in the gloom.
"So the rumors are true," she said, her voice a low, clear chime that cut through the tension. "The stories they whisper around the campfires when the wind is right. About a ghost walking the Red Plains. About a heir returned from the grave. About a red mist that doesn't just kill, but... erases." She took a single, confident step forward, completely ignoring Dean's threatening posture as if he were mere scenery. "My name is Ciski. This is my brother, Roty. We heard what you did at the library. Word travels fast among the forgotten."
Retour said nothing, his body a coiled spring. He could feel Roty's gaze, a palpable weight of suspicion and assessment, boring into him from the darkness.
Ciski's smile didn't waver. If anything, it grew sharper, more fierce. "The outcasts have been waiting for a sign. For a spark in all this damnable darkness. For someone to rally the broken pieces that are left." Her eyes, blazing with a desperate, fervent hope, locked with his. "They've been waiting for you, Retour Monarc. They believe the true heir has come home. And they believe you can unite us."
Retour looked at her, at the raw, unvarnished hope shining in her face, a hope that felt less like a gift and more like a sentence. They saw a king, a savior. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that he was only a destroyer. But as he stood in that desolate gully, hunted and hollow, he wondered if in the brutal, new arithmetic of this fallen world, a destroyer was exactly what they needed.