I was dying.
Blood fell from the sky, warm and heavy, each drop smearing across my dark skin.
It was as if the world wished to brand me in its final shade.
I felt each drop like a reminder that this was the end I had earned.
The moon hung low over the forests of Anstalionah.
Its pale glow dripped through the tall black trees like cold water through broken fingers.
The branches arched overhead in jagged silhouettes, shaping a crown of thorns around the clearing where I had been cornered.
Even then, I could not help thinking how fitting it was that nature itself formed a grave for me.
Each leaf shimmered faintly in the night breeze, trembling as if even the forest did not wish to witness what would happen next.
I wondered if I should tremble too.
The stars scattered across the great above flickered weakly through drifting smoke, and it was in this great expanse that I saw it: the blinding light that is death.
For a moment, I thought it welcomed me.
I lifted my sword. Small, cracked, dull, a pitiful piece of iron and light trembling in my black-stained hand.
I stared at the blade, wondering how this scrap of metal had carried me through so many sins.
I turned my head, long black hair sticking to sweat and mud, clinging across my face.
The strands felt like shackles, as if even my own body tried to restrain me from fighting any longer.
The screams around me tore at my ears, sharp and desperate, cutting deeper than any blade.
They called me names while hiding behind black armor.
They cursed me like a demon while brandishing golden seals.
I heard every insult clearly, each one stabbing deeper than the wound in my back.
Perhaps they were not wrong. My eyes, pitch black and empty, reflected nothing but ruin.
In contrast to their polished holiness, I looked like a creature shaped from shadow.
A monster. The kind children dreamed about and priests warned against.
Zealots. Every one of them. Fools lost in God's mercy, clinging to a mercy they had never earned.
It was a mercy that let them breathe while I drew air into lungs already failing.
Part of me hated them. Another part envied them.
I stole one breath more, forcing it past the taste of blood in my throat, and I charged forward, cutting down as many as I could.
I felt nothing but momentum and desperation.
Until one stabbed me in the back.
The impact drove me forward, my body folding around the blade.
My knees crashed into the ground, forcing me to fall backward onto my arms as the world spun.
The grass drank the red spilling out, soaking my clothes, sticky and warm, the scent of iron stinging my nose.
In that moment, I realized how fragile my life truly was.
The earth hummed with the rhythm of footsteps and metal, every strike ringing like a bell tolling my final moments.
My heart slammed inside my chest, furious that it still had to work for a wretch like me.
I almost wanted it to stop.
Tears gathered in my eyes, unwanted, mixing with dirt as the shrieks of dying men tangled with my ragged breathing.
I tried to swallow them back, but they clung to me like ghosts demanding to be felt.
Still, I could not feel pity for myself. I could not cry injustice for my fate.
I am an evil man. Or maybe I was.
An evil man who lost his way long ago, only to find it here at the very end, when even redemption seemed a cruel joke.
I wondered if I would be remembered as anything other than a mistake.
My arms shook violently, strength draining as fast as the warmth left my blood.
I tried to force myself up, but my legs buckled beneath me, collapsing again and sending a sharp jolt through my spine.
My sword slipped from my hand, clattering across the dirt.
A pathetic sound, like a dying plea. Instinct clawed through me.
I lunged for it, fingers dragging trenches through the soil as I grabbed the hilt just in time to deflect a strike to my right.
Sparks burst bright enough to sting my eyes as steel met steel.
I told myself I could still survive.
That lie kept me moving. I rolled to one side, kicking up mud, then ducked under a hammering overhead swing.
I shot upright with a desperate pivot, twisting aside as a thrust sliced a cold line across my cheek.
My breathing rasped, uneven and shallow, each movement more sluggish than the last as my failing body betrayed me.
I felt death chasing my heels, eager to claim me.
Yet as I danced with death, dangling my life on a thread thinner than faith, a voice sliced through everything.
Clear.
Cold.
Merciless.
"Falter, and come to the end of your means."
My body froze. Even my heart hesitated. I could not disobey the weight of that voice.
All the soldiers of false love halted, their hatred quieting into a trembling stillness.
Because a man walked through them.
His steps were slow, heavy, deliberate, each one sending a hush across the battlefield. My fear tightened its grip around my throat.
His hair was bluish silver, shimmering in the crimson haze like a blade catching dawn.
His eyes were low, heavy gold, calm yet crushing, judging every living thing in sight.
His lips were soft, untouched by blood, almost mocking the filth coating everyone else.
His skin was light, smooth, saintly, unmarked by the violence clinging to the rest of us.
He looked like holiness sculpted into human form, and for the first time that night, I felt small.
This man was Griffin.
Short hair split perfectly down the middle, framing a small cross beneath his bottom lip, faintly glowing under the dying light.
Even that cross felt like an accusation.
In his hand, he carried a long black sword, the metal so dark it seemed to drink in the world around it.
The air recoiled from its edge. I could feel it tugging at my breath.
His armor was black, shaped to perfection, with the golden lamb resting on his chest. The Lamb of God.
A symbol these zealots used to slaughter without hesitation. A symbol they had stolen and twisted.
"Nicholas Anstalionah, do you know what I despise most in this world?"
I could not speak, but I knew what he would say. I hated that I knew.
"Nothing," he said quietly. "It is the act of doing nothing I despise most."
He lifted his blade, slow and deliberate, letting the light run down its flawless edge. Handing his helm to another soldier, he took one steady step forward. The step felt heavier than the world.
"And you, Nicholas..." His voice dripped with accusation.
"You're the worst kind of monster. A man pretending to be a hero."
His words pierced deeper than any weapon. I wondered if I had ever been anything else.
He pressed the blade to my throat, the chill of steel meeting the warmth of my blood.
"Heaven will never accept you," he whispered, heavy with disdain.
I smiled faintly, breath ragged, voice cracking beneath the strain.
"Maybe it shouldn't."
Because he was right. I wasn't a savior. I wasn't even a man anymore. Just a fool clutching meaning long after it had crumbled away. A fool afraid to let go.
Humans cherish life. We praise it as sacred, a miracle wrapped in flesh.
But in the end, it always leads here, to this unraveling, to death.
We dress that truth in pageantry. We invent false idols. Build nations. Craft justice. Ignite wars.
We glorify vengeance. Romanticize love. Smother pain with ritual. All in an effort to shield ourselves from the unblinking truth.
Death is not the opposite of life, it is its dictator.
We are creatures of paradox.
We injure to feel. We lie to endure. We fabricate meaning like architects building towers on sand, pretending the tide will not rise.
Me, I was the most delusional of them all.
Despite the truth, despite the void ahead, I continued. I fed myself the delusion that I was something.
How could I be? If even God abandoned me, how could I ever amount to anything?
Still, I had to try. I had to refuse death.
My heart began to beat more violently, with regret, and with darkness.
"Nicholas, with that power, you could have been everything. You are something."
He hesitated, the name lingering like regret. "Mirabel would have wanted better."
Her name sent a shiver through me, soft, painful, almost reverent. My chest tightened until it hurt more than my wounds.
The world narrowed until all I could hear was that voice.
And still, even as I bled into the soil of Anstalionah, I remembered the truth I tried so long to outrun.
My Regalia.
The ability to alter the world before me, to reshape the physical, the spiritual, the written fabric of causality itself.
Anything outside my skin bent. Anything beyond my flesh trembled and obeyed. But not myself.
My own body. My own life. I could never touch it. I could rebuild mountains yet not mend my own bones.
I could rewrite rivers yet not clear the rot inside my lungs. I could rewrite the fate of nations yet not fix the fate sealed inside my flesh.
Until now.
[His nightmare was finally beginning.]
A voice, ancient and familiar, rose from the dark.
[He would soon come to realize he was nothing.]
The world tilted. The ground pulled me down as vision dimmed. My body collapsed, head rolling against wet grass. The scent of blood filled the air again. The light of the world went out.
[Wake, O beacon of nothing. Your dream is over.]
Darkness swallowed me whole, yet within that abyss something stirred: a faint light, fragile and trembling.
It pulsed like a memory long forgotten. It was born from humility, pulsing softly in the void.
I drifted between life and death, suspended in a stillness both tomb and cradle.
In that silence, I heard echoes of every sin, every name, every prayer I had ignored. I wished I could unhear them.
Then it happened. Everything changed.
My hair, long and black, shimmered with streaks of white, light seeping through like dawn through smoke.
My skin hardened, bronze and bark-like, veins glowing faintly beneath the surface. My eyes opened, blank, colorless, infinite.
For the first time, I didn't recognize myself.
From my back, wings erupted, black, smoldering, alive, each feather seething with light devoured by shadow. They felt both mine and foreign.
I rose through the abyss, breaking through a vast sea of starlight and void.
Waves crashed as the world reformed around me, like a dream retold in reverse. The heavens split with light.
Pain flooded through me, sacred, searing, followed by the first desperate rush of breath. Then came silence. Clarity.
I was no longer sinking. No longer lost.
My eyes locked onto the sight before me, so perfect I thought they had betrayed me.
My mind was locked and I noticed it, my personal regression.
It was an absurd notion. It was a woman, tying her hair back into a bun.
It was scarlet in color, and she looked serene while doing it.
Her skin was polished like oakwood and her eyes looked down with slight boredom, those eyes which were ruby red.
She wore light loose clothes, white and black, and she sat cross-legged on a massive black bed, fit for a prince.
I felt myself fall back into a past I tried to bury.
She caught sight of my gaze and looked up, smiling.
"Nicky, instead of staring, don't you want to help me?"
I felt sharp pain in my chest, and a burning sensation in my mind. I remember this day. I remembered it too well.
I go over to help her, and soon after, we have a long talk about the future.
It is today I kicked her out. I got angry, she wanted me to do more, I was lazy.
I pushed her away, and even still she came every day to speak to the guards and maids, making sure they were doing their job.
She worked throughout the kingdom helping in any way she could, all while I sat back and wasted away in this room.
A month later, Fertical declared war and she went off and fought, dying at the hands of Horia, a duke in those close lands.
This was the day everything had changed for me, and this was the day everything had fallen into darkness.
I laughed, I laughed at the wonderful and marvelous events which transpired, and I realized that this was it. A second chance wrapped in tragedy.
"God, you must have forsaken me not, for this is the best wish I could ask for."
Mirabel looked at me with a confused and crazy smile. "Nicholas, I am sure of it, you are definitely a fool."
Her words felt like absolution and punishment at once.
This was it, my resurrection, my second chance.