He opened his eyes to the visage of the sky, veiled in unpenetrable, dark plumes of acrid smoke rising high up into the clouds. Ash fell from the sky like snow, while thick dust and smoke filled the air.
Ashoka blinked, clearing away the fog slowing his mind. He could see... the sky? The thought itself came slowly and it took him a few more seconds still to gather his mind.
Right, the ceiling had collapsed on them, so it made sense. The cause seemed to be a huge explosion somewhere in the capital center, and Ashoka dreaded thinking just how massive it must've been for its tremors to destroy the Palace.
There was the sound of blood rushing past his ears like a drumbeat, and he quickly realized the drumbeat was the only sound left.
No screaming, no footsteps, and no collective voice of a crowd.
Just the soft hiss of ash settling on stone.
Ashoka tried to sit up and failed. Something heavy pressed against his legs. He turned his head slowly, wincing. A slab of marble, thick as a door, had come down at an angle and wedged itself against a fallen column, leaving a small pocket of space over him. Dust trickled from its edge like sand through an hourglass.
'Damnation!'
He coughed, and the taste of ash filled his mouth, bitter and dry. The air was hot too, but not the scorching heat from before but a stale, suffocating warmth, like the inside of a furnace long after the fire had died.
There was no fire anymore, all swallowed by the rubble.
Gritting his teeth, he pulled his legs free inch by inch. Pain flared along his shin, then dulled. From the looks of it, nothing was broken, but it hurt all the same. For once, his cursed luck had taken a day off.
'Don't jinx it...'
He crawled out from beneath the slab and finally saw the court.
Or what was left of it.
The floor had tilted. The entire hall sloped downward toward the front doors, as if the palace had bowed forward under some unseen weight. At the bottom of that slope, where the grand entrance used to be, a mountain of broken stone, shattered beams, and torn banners filled the space from wall to wall, blocking his view of the outside.
Dust drifted everywhere, thick enough to blur the far end of the hall into a grey haze.
And in that haze, nothing moved.
The slope was quiet now. The thousands who had just been shouting Ashoka's name were buried in heaps of stone and torn cloth. A hand reached out from under a fallen beam, fingers hooked as if grasping for a hand.
Ashoka stared, his mind numbed by the suddenness of the ruin. He watched the wreckage, bracing for a groan or the shifting of stone, but the hillside remained completely dead.
Something acidic built up in his throat, threatening to escape, and he could only turn his eyes away and cover his mouth.
What the hell had happened? What had caused the explosion? It definitely wasn't something mundane, considering what he had witnessed prior to it. He wanted to know, to figure out the cause of all this.
Just then, his gaze drifted up the slope instead, to where the Brass Pillar still stood in the middle of the hall, untouched. It gleamed dully under the smoke-dark sky, perfectly straight desptite the tilted floor.
That felt wrong in a way he couldn't explain. For a second, he wondered why he'd thought he could take apart the Brass pillar. The thing had stood for who knew how many years, and surely, something that could channel the Hand of Order wouldn't be so easily broken.
Then he remembered.
"Eldrin!"
His voice came out as a croak. He tried again, louder, scrambling across the broken dais on his hands and knees, trying not to slip because of the slop. The throne had split in two, and the ceremonial sword lay snapped beside it.
"Eldrin! Hey! Answer me, damn it!"
When nothing answered to his pleading voice, he hurriedly stood up and ran a hand over his head. Then, he summoned his runes and when nothing came new, he let out a relieved sigh. He didn't have the Crown, neither over his head nor as a memory. That atleast meant that Eldrin was alive. The Ascended must've shielded him from the rubble, so there was no immediate urgency.
Sucking a breath, he turned towards the mountain of debris and started walking. It was about time he found out what had caused the explosion.
He reached the base and began climbing, the mountain of rubble shifting under every step. Loose stone slid away, and twice he slipped and caught himself on a broken beam. By the time he reached the top, his palms were scraped raw.
He pulled himself over the last slab and looked out.
And what he saw was a hell.
Darkness veiled the heavens as ash fell like snow through a wall of black smoke. Far away, the horizon remained untouched, illuminating the world like a cursed, dim twilight, but below it, the city had vanished into a forest of scarlet flames. Everything burned—wooden buildings and cloth banners consumed in blazes, while stone and brick melted in the heat.
Despite the hellish landscape, there was no scream or pained wail. Every soul had already burned to a cinder. Strangely, silent, shadowy silhouettes of humans walked across the ashen paths, their steps unhurried.
Finally, at the heart of the capital, where the city centre had once stood, colossal cracks crawled across the earth like scars on the world. At their epicentre, the ground rose up, forming a young volcano. A pillar of smoke and ghostly mist climbed from it to enshroud the sky, and thick tongues of magma spewed from its mouth every other second, setting more of the city on fire.
One of those cracks had spread to the hill upon which the Palace was built, causing it to crumble and a section of the Palace to tilt downward.
Ashoka's heart turned cold, and his eyes widened in horror as he looked at the devastation.
But as his gaze drifted far into the distance, the coldness in his heart quickly transformed into a physical, scorching heat that threatened to burn his insides.
There, almost three kilometres away, a massive form of molten magma and stone towered above the city like a mountain, nearly two hundred metres tall. The air around it seemed to transform into plasma simply from the proximity, which in turn formed a second pillar of billowing smoke.
The ground quaked under its every titanic weight, and wherever it went, parts of the city in a large radius around it spontaneously wet up into scarlet flames at once. Covered in thick smoke and flames as it was, Ashoka couldn't see what it truly looked like. Still, he felt the silhouette looked strangely humanoid, though only roughly, bent in a steep hunch.
The great distance between them should've given him some comfort, but Ashoka felt none of that. Instead, as he looked at it even from so far away, he felt the scorching heat within him grow more and more intense as thick sweat covered his brow once more.
Dread crept up his spine, and he took a step back, only to stumble and fall.
'T-This...'
This scene was terrifyingly similar to what he had witnessed at the start of his nightmare.
Rivers of blood. A forest of fire. And a land covered in pale ash.
The only difference was there hadn't been a volcano at the heart of Casamir in the vision, and there had yet to be rivers of blood in the present.
But how?!
From what he'd seen and recorded, the vision shouldn't have come true for another 16 days!
Ashoka's hands trembled. He clenched them into fists and forced the panic down before it could take hold. His mind raced, desperately searching for an answer. If there had been such a massive change in fate, it must've been due to him and his actions. That action too could only be something that affected something about the expedition, so something related to Alariv or Gaius.
The ghastly abomination in the distance bore a resemblance to the Corrupted Tyrant. Was this a Corrupted Devil of the same tribe? Or, because Gaius and his team been a day late to slay the Tyrant, a new Tyrant had emerged from its tribe?
"Ashoka!"
Just then, a voice interrupted his line of thought, childish yet hoarse. Ashoka's body stiffened instantly, but quickly relaxed as he turned around. Behind him, Eldrin and the Palace's Ascended were hurriedly climbing the mountain of debri, their hair and clothes covered in a layer of dust.
A breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding escaped Ashoka's lips and his shoulders slumped. He stood up as the two got near.
"You're injured!" Eldrin quickly added, sounding worried.
Ashoka frowned.
"Am I?" He had already checked his face and hadn't found anything. Hesitating, he passed a hand through the hair at the back of his head and felt something wet and sticky. There was also a sharp pain piercing through his skull.
Ashoka cursed as a terrible grimace contorted his expression. There was blood on his palm as he pulled it back. It seemed the old wound had opened up. No wonder he had passed out.
"Yeah... I don't know how you didn't notice. The blood was all over the back of your clothes."
Saying that, Eldrin continued forward to stand beside him. At first, Ashoka wanted to stop him, but quickly stopped himself. This wasn't something that could be hidden anyways.
Unsurprisingly, the boy instantly froze the instant he saw the ruins of his kingdom's capital.
A second later, the Ascended climbed up as well, and hished.
For a moment, all three of them remained motionless amidst the ash and smoke, watching the city below them burn.
The silence was finally broken by the Ascended and his gravely voice that sounded abnormally quiet.
"It's the Corrupted Tyrant... It must've travelled deep underground to hide its tracks from us before emerging through the main underwater reservoir of the capital. All the steam and pressure, it must be the source of that massive explosion."
Ashoka turned to him, baffled.
"But the Tyrant was slain by Gaius, was it not?" He looked away, towards the looming form of the abomination advancing far ahead. Eventually, he bit his lips "I believe its a new Tyrant or Devil that rose from the previous Tyrant's tribe."
The Ascended spared him a tense glance before shaking his head.
"No, it's the same Tyrant. You might not be able to because of being mundane, but I can see the terrible wound on its nape that Gaius had reported. I don't know how, but it is the same Corrupted Tyrant."
That was new information for him. Still, he gritted his teeth. "But it still doesn't make sense..."
The Ascended turned to him fully now.
"The world we live in is that of chaos and madness. Many things don't always make sense, and you sometime just need to accept what's in front of you. It's best we figure out what to do next instead of grieving our loses."
His gaze suddenly became piercing as he stared at Ashoka. Was there suspicion in his eyes?
"My duty is to keep the king safe, and that's what I plan to do."
It seemed he still hadn't forgotten the strange things Ashoka had done in the court.
Ashoka looked away, turning his gaze to the brass pillar instead.
No, this wasn't going to do. He had to figure what was going on. As a lawyer, he was excellent at solving problems, but that too required information, something he clearly lacked.
The gears in his brain churned, desperately trying to map the scattered pieces of the puzzle.
'If it really is the original Tyrant, then how? A resurrection? Its devil ability? No... that doesn't square with its known Tyrant traits. A necromancer, then? Some undiscovered creature of corruption that stumbled across the Tyrant's corpse and reanimated it?'
He shook his head sharply, gridlocked.
'No. If it were just an outside necromancer, it would have happened regardless of my interference. It wouldn't be half a month late. Just what did I actually even change about the expedition?!'
He suddenly paused as another piece of information flashed by his mind. The vision of the Nightmare.
He knew that what he'd seen was destined to happen. Sure, he could've finished the trial early to not witness it, or new things could've been added like the volcano, but it was unlikely that a major element would be missing.
And one such element he remembered was the streets covered in blood. The memory had stuck with him, and for some reason, he had an intuition that it was the key to solving the current problem.
"Blood..."
Just as he felt he was on the precipice of a realisation, a voice suddenly interrupted his thoughts. It was Eldrin, he had still been looking at the city.
"Guys..." He called out to both of them, sounding distressed. "Is it supposed to be doing that...?"
Ashoka and the Ascended turned their heads. Finally, Ashoka realised that the echoing steps of the Tyrant had stopped at some point. Not only that, but the heat in his heart wasnt as scorching anymore.
'Heat...'
Narrowing his eyes, he turned his head towards where Eldrin was pointing at — the Corrupted Tyrant. It seemed to have stopped its march for some reason, thought still enveloped by raging flames.
Wait a second... Was it just him, or had the fire on the Tyrant became brighter than before?
Just then, the light coming from it seem to dim, before drastically becoming more intense. Then, it happened again, then again, like a heartbeat, until he could feel the heat on his skin.
The air around Ashoka seemed to hum and tremble, following the rhythm of the strange pulsing.
'Not good!'
The thought had barely formed in his mind when suddenly, a Brilliant flash of light illuminated the world, drowning the entire city in radiance.
.
.
.
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[A/N: hello readers! First of all, apologies for the late upload, and also apologies for the fact that this isn't the last ch of the NM. The reason for this is simple.
I got poked in my eyes.
This is not a joke, but neither is it as serious. One thing led to another and my sis accidentally did this, because of which everything there hurts and i haven't been able to finish the ch. This ch was also initially supposed to be the last, but seeing how much ive delayed, i decided to cut it in half and upload this one early. Rest assured, the next ch will indeed be the end.
Anyways, see y'all on the next upload lol✌️]