The knowledge Ile had imparted was a key turning in a lock deep within Retour's psyche, opening a door to a truth he had always feared but never fully seen. It was not a shock, but a dreadful crystallization, a cold, hard reality settling into the marrow of his bones. He left the healer's tent, the phantom scent of drying herbs and Ciski's fading life clinging to him like a shroud, and sought the deepest solitude the conquered keep of Elaron could provide. He found it in a derelict scriptorium, a room forgotten by time at the end of a disused corridor. The air was thick and motionless, heavy with the smells of ancient dust, slowly decaying vellum, and the metallic tang of old ink. In this sepulcher for dead words, he spread the wounded fragments of the Red Codex across a massive, scarred oak desk, its surface a topography of nicks and stains left by scribes centuries gone. Here, in the profound silence, he prepared to stare into the abyss of his own potential damnation.
The Codex was no longer a book of mysteries or a window to possible futures. In the stark light of Ile's revelations, it had transformed. It was now a mirror, and the reflection it showed was monstrous. As his fingers, still faintly trembling from the effort of containing the mist, brushed against the scorched edges of the parchment, the visions did not assault him with their former violence. Instead, they unfolded as subtle, insidious suggestions, feeling less like prophecies and more like memories of a self he had not yet become, a life he had not yet lived, but whose contours were being etched into his soul.
He saw a version of himself standing on the blighted edges of the Red Plains, where the very soil seemed to weep a thin, black ichor, and nothing grew but the stubborn, crimson grass. He did not chant, he did not gesture. He simply stood, and with a focused act of will that felt less like magic and more like a fundamental adjustment of reality, he commanded the land to be whole. The corruption recoiled, not as a living thing fleeing, but as a mistake being corrected. The earth itself groaned, the black stain receding like a tide, replaced by dark, healthy loam from which the first tender shoots of normal green grass began to sprout. It was not healing; it was an act of sovereign authority over the state of things.
He saw a different scene, one of cold betrayal within the walls of a throne room. A guardsman, a man whose face he vaguely recognized from the Ravencleft, his features twisted by greed or Rotard's influence, lunged at him with a naked dagger. In this vision, Retour felt no fear, no surge of adrenaline. A flicker of annoyance, perhaps. The mist responded not as a wild, erupting storm, but as a precise and final instrument of his will. It did not blast the man away. It touched him, and the man's body simply unraveled. He dissolved from the feet upward, not into the grey ash of the library guards, but into a fine, colorless dust that lost all cohesion and scattered on a non-existent breeze. His dying scream was cut short, not because he was dead, but because the continuity of his existence was severed, revoked. The power in that vision was clean, absolute, and utterly chilling in its lack of emotional resonance. This was not a loss of control; it was control so absolute it could rescind the gift of life itself.
Most potent, most cruel of all, he saw himself kneeling once more beside the cot in the healer's tent. Ciski lay as she did now, trapped in her agonizing stasis. He did not call upon complex alchemy or rare herbs. He simply laid a hand over the black veins that marred her skin. He did not push healing energy into her; he issued a silent decree. The poison, Rotard's "key," did not neutralize, purge, or break down. It simply ceased to be. Its history within her body was erased, as one might wipe a false line from a ledger. The veins vanished without a trace, and the healthy color returned to her skin not as a gradual flush of returning life, but as an instantaneous restoration of a natural state that should never have been violated. In that vision, her eyes fluttered open, clear, aware, and full of the life he feared was already lost. The relief in that moment, even within the vision, was a tidal wave that nearly swept him away.
The allure was a siren song from the deepest, darkest ocean of power, and he felt himself standing on its shore, the waves lapping at his feet. It promised an end to all fragility, all loss, all the gut-wrenching, soul-crushing helplessness that had been the defining melody of his life since the fall of his family. To become a fixed point in a turning world. A stone that the river of time could not erode. To never again feel the cold, clawing dread of watching someone he loved slip through his fingers into the void.
But the Codex, in its cruel, paradoxical honesty, also showed him the price of this crown. In these visions of absolute, uncontested authority, the vibrant, messy tapestry of the world seemed muted. The brilliant green of a summer forest was viewed through a thin, grey veil. The passionate, desperate cries of victory on a battlefield, the agonized wails of the defeated—they reached his ears as distant, faint noises, the inconsequential concerns of mayflies buzzing in the sun. The warmth of a shared smile, the bitter sting of a harsh word, the simple, profound joy of a cool drink on a hot day... these sensations felt like echoes from a life he had already left behind, memories of a simpler creature he had once been. To command the very boundaries between life and death, he would have to take a permanent seat outside the circle of mortality. To become eternal, he would have to sacrifice his ticket to the beautiful, painful, fleeting, and infinitely precious dance of being human.
And woven through every one of these visions, a constant, vile presence, was the "artisan's" influence. It was a cold, intellectual current subtly steering his perception, making the path of apotheosis seem not just logical and efficient, but inevitable, the only natural conclusion to his journey. "Why tremble at the storm when you can become the sky that contains it?" the voice murmured, not from the pages, but from the very substance of the visions themselves. "Why mourn a single, fallen leaf when you hold the authority over the life and death of the entire forest? This pain you feel for the girl is the final whetstone upon which your mortal attachments will be sharpened away. Let us use it to hone your resolve for what you must become."
Retour finally understood with a clarity that was both terrifying and liberating. The Codex was not merely a repository of dangerous knowledge. It was the primary instrument of Rotard's grand design, the gleaming, poisoned lure in the trap. It was the chisel that would methodically sculpt him into the God-King, the anvil upon which his humanity was being systematically broken and reforged into something else. As long as it existed in its current form, it would call to the nascent deity within him, the hollow king Rotard sought to crown. It would find every fear, every desire, every vulnerability, and expertly twist it into a compelling reason to surrender, to accept the sterile "perfection" being offered.
He made his choice. It was not born of a hot, blinding rage or the cold grip of despair, but from a place of cold, clear, and utterly resolute understanding.
He would not burn it. Fire felt too much like a ritual, a release, an acknowledgment of its inherent power. He would not try to destroy it with the mist, for that would be using the very power it sought to perfect, playing directly into its design.
Instead, he gathered the fragments. He did it not in a frenzy, but methodically, his movements deliberate and precise. He carried the pile of wounded parchment to the ancient, ash-cold hearth in the scriptorium. He did not seek tinder or flint. He knelt on the cold stone, and with his own hands, he began to tear the pages. Not into large pieces, but into smaller and smaller fragments. Then he tore those fragments again, reducing them to confetti, and then again, until he held nothing but a mound of soft, disconnected paper fibers, a pile of meaningless potential. He was not destroying knowledge. He was performing an unraveling. He was un-making the Codex, page by page, line by line, word by word, returning it to a state of pure, silent potentiality, robbing it of its form, its voice, its insidious power to corrupt and persuade.
It was a silent, solitary, painstaking act of defiance. With every deliberate tear, he was not just destroying a book; he was refusing a crown. He was choosing the uncertain, painful, beautiful, and heartbreaking struggle of remaining human over the sterile, absolute, and lonely peace of becoming a god. He was saving his own soul, even if that very act might mean he would lose everything and everyone else he was fighting for.