What could possibly go wrong? Everything went wrong! Everything!
Now for the most harrowing part Leo didn't want to experience, but he wasn't given any other choice. The shadow tendrils shot toward the door and slammed it open, finding their way to the inner decks.
Soon, he closed his eyes and gritted his triangular teeth as the screams of thousands of civilians assaulted his ears. Before he closed them, he saw Lyra finally giving up and closing her eyes as well, unable to bear the downfall of her realm.
They both couldn't see what was happening, but they knew the tendrils were killing some, driving others mad, and then making them kill each other. It was a massacre.
It went on for minutes and, after a while, it died down.
They had failed. Leo failed. The King was dead. Elowen was dead. Keith was dead. Everyone was dead.
Only he and Lyra were left.
He felt a tendril stab his chest, making him grit his teeth in pain.
"You're weak, Aquarius, and will always be."
"I'm... not... weak."
The Shadow laughed. "What? What did you say?!" He stabbed Leo again.
Leo screamed in pain as the Shadow continued to stab him repeatedly.
"I'm weak! I'm just a child. Please... please..." He shut his eyes tight as tears streamed out of them, mixing with his blood. "Please, just let me go. I beg of you."
"Pathetic!" Lyra yelled.
Leo slowly opened them as the Shell of Dread disappeared from his body, Leo's strength unable to control it anymore. Lyra, pinned down by multiple shadows, stared at Leo with an angry expression.
"Pathetic! Giving up so easily? You're pathetic!"
Leo yelled back at her, the shadows watching them with madness. "Look around you, Lyra! It's all over! Everyone is dead!"
Lyra gritted her teeth, staring back at the wooden floor. "Who gave you the right to give up?!"
"...Lyra."
"I said I won't rest until I destroy the enemy!" She turned to Leo and forced a smile again. "I won't be killed by a damn Shadow. I don't know about you, but I won't."
Leo was lost. "Have a grip on reality, Lyra."
Her smile widened. "If you truly are who you say you are, let's meet again in the future, Leo Atlantis. Maybe, just maybe, we will get to spar with each other."
With that, she started glowing, her sigils shining brighter than before. Leo knew what she was doing. Using her aura past her limit was a huge risk—she would succumb to the madness of the aura itself.
"Lyra! Stop!"
Lyra didn't listen; the glow continued to intensify. The shadow that had been watching their final discussion released Leo and suddenly disappeared from the midst of the shadows. Actually, when it left, there were no shadows left at all, as Lyra's glow turned into a blinding light that swallowed everything like a growing blob, then exploded, sending countless shadows out of existence.
Leo, who was caught in the light alongside the other shadows, barely survived. He was thrown to the other half of the ship, battered and injured, hanging on to life by a thread.
Leo's body skipped across the splintered deck like a stone on a frozen lake, his skin scraping against wood that was slick with black ichor and human salt. The Shell of Dread was gone, leaving him shivering and exposed in the biting wind of the Great Sea. Without the armor, the cold felt like a physical weight, pressing into his broken ribs and punctured lungs.
The insidious whispers were back. The Shadow Embrace was gone, revealing the madness of the storm. The waves continued to crash into one another, and whirlpools appeared anywhere and anytime. The invisible forcefield was still there, separating the cracked firmament from the ravaging storm.
He coughed, thick crimson coating his chin. Every breath was a struggle against the darkness closing in on his vision.
"Lyra..." he wheezed, but the sound was lost to the roar of the sea.
He forced his head up, his neck muscles screaming in protest. The sight that met his fading crimson eyes was impossible. It was a nightmare carved out of metal and myth.
The center of the Aquarius had ceased to be a ship. Where Lyra had stood, a gargantuan entity now rose from the wreckage, snapping the main mast like a dry twig. It was a leviathan of blue metal, a whale so massive its skin looked like overlapping plates of reinforced cobalt. Sigils he had never seen before—ancient, pulsating runes of pure heat—raced across its metallic flanks like veins of lava.
The ship buckled. The weight of the blue whale sent the bow of the Aquarius screaming upward into the storm, while the stern began its final, agonizing descent into the ravaging sea.
"So... that was your promise," Leo whispered, his voice hitching.
Lyra had surrendered to her aura. She had become the husk of a legendary beast, a sacrifice of her own humanity to ensure the Shadow had something to fear.
The Shadow—the King's distorted reflection—looked like a mere insect in front of the whale's eye. The eye was a sun of molten gold, burning with a hatred so pure it momentarily cleared the black firmament above.
He felt something tingling behind him, so he forced himself to slowly turn, coughing out more blood. A few sails away from the ship was a crash in reality itself... the end of the realm. It was similar to the vortex he had seen back in the Aquarius, but this one was much more violent, scaling upward and sideways. It was endless—ironic for something that served as the end of a realm.
The Gateway was failing... or maybe it wasn't opening. The royal bloodline who could open it and let the ship across were gone; the civilians that were meant to be saved were also gone. Leo was now the only one left. The Gateway was useless.
The roar of the blue whale forced him to turn back again. Then, the whale slammed its massive tail down. Through the chaos, he saw the Blue Whale lunge at the Shadow, dragging the entity into the churning, boiling deep of the Great Sea as the ship crossed the threshold.
As soon as the last human of the world—Leo—fell into the storm alongside the ship, everything... paused and rewound in the most bizarre way possible.
The storm ceased and flew upward toward the forcefield, forcing itself to cover the cracked firmament and forming a sky of trapped ocean. The ship fell onto a desert, but as it was falling, it rewound back to its normal phase. The broken masts fixed themselves alongside every other broken thing on the ship.
During the fall, the blue whale and the shadow mysteriously disappeared. The desert, which had been white, slowly turned obsidian as if swallowed by corruption and madness.
Leo closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a blinding light assaulted his face. A large castle that composed the world itself was standing in front of him. The castle was made of light—alive and prideful. Its shadow stretched, swallowing the light like a flaw and composing the world at the same rate, but it was vile, insidious, and evil.
[Congratulations Leonard Atlantis! You've reached the Castle Of Light.]