The sky over the Forgotten Coast was dead.
It wasn't a normal night, not the absence of light that follows dusk. It was something deeper, more absolute. A cold, empty darkness that stretched from the horizon to the zenith, as if someone had extinguished the sun forever and the celestial vault was now nothing but a black canvas without stars.
The Crimson Spire had collapsed.
Ash observed the remains of the structure from a distance, his silhouette silhouetted against the faint glow of the smoldering ruins. The tower — once imposing, a monument of crimson metal that pierced the clouds like a spear driven into the world's flesh — now lay in scattered fragments. Its mechanisms had failed one after another, the protection runes had gone out like candles consumed by the wind, and the death of the Nameless Sun had sealed its fate.
The Nameless Sun had died.
Ash still didn't fully understand what that meant. He had felt the impact on his soul — that tug of cosmic forces that humans should not experience. He had seen how the blazing white light fragmented, how the heat dissipated, how silence fell over the battlefield like a mantle of molten lead.
And now, in the silence after the storm, only the dead remained.
Ash walked among the corpses.
His boots crunched on the hardened earth, on fragments of metal and bone, on pools of blood already beginning to dry and crust over. The battlefield stretched around him like a petrified nightmare, frozen at the exact moment of its maximum horror.
Bodies of sleepers lay beside bodies of abominations. Humans and monsters — enemies in life — now shared the same cold ground in an equality that death granted without asking. Some corpses were intact, their faces still showing the fear or fury of their last instant. Others were shattered, mutilated beyond recognition, their bodies turned into unrecognizable masses of flesh and bone.
Ash counted the sleepers as he passed. Not many. Fewer than should have survived.
The spell had been relentless. The battle, too.
He walked to the edge of the area where he had fought, where his mist had covered the ground like a shroud and his weapons had reaped life after life until he lost count. There, among the corpses of abominations he himself had killed, he found the bodies of the sleepers who hadn't managed to reach the tower.
His allies.
His companions.
His dead.
Ash stopped before the first body — a young man with brown hair, his face pale and serene in death, a deep wound in his chest that had pierced his heart — and felt something strangely akin to emptiness. Not pain, not sadness. Just a cold understanding that life was fragile and death, inevitable.
He began to dig.
The earth was hard, compacted by blood and the trampling of thousands of combatants. Ash used the Sword of Seven as a shovel at first — the wide, resistant blade cut through the earth easily, though each blow stained the metal brown — but he soon discovered his hands were more effective. He dug with his fingers, with his palms, with nails that splintered and broke against hidden stones.
He didn't feel the pain.
Or rather, he did, but he ignored it.
Hours passed. The black sky offered no references to measure time, only the growing fatigue in his muscles and the hunger beginning to gnaw at his stomach reminded him he was still alive. That he had responsibilities to those who were no longer there.
The first hole was the largest — a mass grave for the sleepers who had no name or whose names Ash didn't know. He dug until the hole reached his waist, then his chest, then until his arms barely reached the edge. Seventeen bodies found rest in that disturbed earth, their forms wrapped in makeshift blankets made from the remains of the camp's tents.
Then came the individual graves.
Ash dug them one by one, with a patience he didn't know he possessed. Each hole was just the right size for a body, each aligned with the others in orderly rows that contrasted with the chaos of the battle that had preceded them. He dug for hours — four, five, perhaps six, time had become irrelevant — while his hands bled and his arms trembled with exhaustion.
When he finished burying the last sleeper, Ash remained kneeling beside the grave, his knees sunk into the loose earth. His fingers were flayed, his nails broken and black with dirt and dried blood. His gray mantle was so stained with earth and fluids that its original color was barely distinguishable.
He remained there, motionless, for a long moment.
Then he stood and went to find bones.
The battlefield was strewn with abomination corpses — shelled centurions, blood worms, fallen messengers, and hundreds of smaller creatures Ash didn't bother to identify. He walked among them like a scavenger, searching for the longest, straightest bones, those most suitable for his purpose.
Femurs of bipedal creatures. Arched ribs of flying beasts. Vertebral fragments of serpentine monsters. He selected them one by one, cleaning them of flesh remnants with the Pale Needle's blade, stacking them in a growing mound near the graves.
Building the cross took him another hour.
He tied the long bones with strips of leather cut from his own belt — small sacrifices he offered without thinking — interlacing them into a structure that stood nearly two meters above the ground. It wasn't beautiful. It was crude, primitive — the work of a man who was neither craftsman nor sculptor. But it stood firm, its white bones gleaming faintly in the darkness like a macabre reminder of what lay beneath.
Ash took the Sword of Seven and approached the cross.
He carved the letters into the wood of the central shaft — no, not wood, bone, but the bone yielded under the edge as if it were — each stroke a conscious effort to make the words as clear as possible. His hand trembled at first, but he found steadiness as he progressed, as if the words themselves gave him strength.
When he finished, he stepped back to read his work.
"Your nightmare is over"
The words were simple. They could have been more elaborate, more poetic, more worthy of those who had fallen fighting against the darkness. But Ash thought simplicity was appropriate. Death didn't ask for elegant speeches. Death asked for rest.
And that was what he offered.
Rest.
The end of the nightmare.
---
After the graves, after the cross, Ash turned to the most mundane but equally necessary task: harvesting the soul fragments from the fallen abominations.
He walked among the corpses of the most powerful creatures — those of Fallen rank that could offer ascended soul fragments. Most were already cold, their bodies stiff with rigor mortis, but some still retained a faint glow in their chests — the last gleam of a soul core that hadn't fully dissipated.
Ash extracted the fragments with the memory dagger he had used before, his movements now slower with fatigue. Each fragment was a small gem of light, warm to the touch, pulsing like a tiny heart. He stored them in his leather pouch without counting, without paying attention to the growing number.
There weren't many Fallen.
Most of those who had fallen in the battle were lower-rank abominations — Awakened or even Sleepers — whose souls offered no fragments. True Fallen were scarce even in the best of times, and that battle, violent as it had been, had not been a high-rank monster hunt. It had been a war of attrition.
When he finished searching the battlefield — looking under piled corpses, inside cracks opened by lance impacts, at the edges where the mist still clung to the ground like a ghost reluctant to disappear — Ash invoked his runes to check his progress.
Soul Fragments: [600/2000]
He stared at the numbers for a moment, his eyelids heavy with lack of sleep. He had entered the battle with four hundred fragments, the fruit of his wild frenzy as he massacred abomination after abomination in a trance of blood and fury. Now, after hours of collecting the remains of the Fallen, he had only reached six hundred.
Two hundred fragments.
All that death. All that effort. All that madness. And the spell had barely rewarded him with two hundred soul fragments.
Ash didn't smile. He didn't curse. He showed no emotion. He simply closed the rune screen with a gesture and moved away from the corpses, seeking a place where the ground was relatively clean.
---
The campfire was small, almost timid in the midst of that infinite darkness.
Ash lit the fire with the tools he carried — flint, a steel shard, patience — and the flames grew slowly, first weak and hesitant, then more confident as they found fuel in the wood remnants he had gathered from fallen trees. The fire crackled in the silence, its warm orange light a small, fragile bastion against the blackness surrounding it.
From his inventory, he took out the scavenger's meat.
He had stored it before the battle, foreseeing he would need food afterward. It was a small cut, barely a mouthful for someone his size, but at that moment it was more than enough. He skewered it on a sharpened branch and held it over the flames, watching the fat begin to bubble and drip into the fire, producing small flare-ups with an acrid smell.
The meat was tough and fibrous when it finished cooking, but Ash devoured it as if it were a feast. He chewed slowly at first, savoring each bite with an almost ritual attention, then faster, more desperately, as real hunger overcame fatigue and sadness.
When he finished, he licked the remaining grease from his fingers and lay down beside the fire.
The ground was hard. The cold of the night — if that darkness could be called night — seeped through his ragged mantle and bit his skin. His hands ached, open wounds and broken nails throbbing with every beat of his heart. His back was stiff, his shoulders cramped, his legs heavy as logs.
But he couldn't sleep.
Not yet.
He closed his eyes and allowed himself to rest — not complete sleep, just a moment of stillness in which his mind quieted and his muscles relaxed slightly. The images of the battle passed behind his eyelids like a macabre carousel: the blood, the screams, the manic laughter that had escaped his own lips without permission.
He didn't know how much time passed. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps hours.
When he opened his eyes again, the fire had reduced to faint embers, and a shiver ran down his back. The darkness was still there, infinite and cold, waiting.
He stood.
His body protested — cramped muscles, the wounds on his hands pulsing with each movement — but Ash ignored the complaints. He had work to do. The battle on the Forgotten Coast was over, but the war in the Dark City was not.
The surviving abominations waited.
Ash raised a hand toward the black sky. Blue sparks sprang from his fingers like electric fireflies, dancing in the air before converging into a single point of blinding light. The hum of electricity filled the silence, and a shadow began to form in the midst of the radiance.
The Black Steel Raven appeared with a metallic screech that echoed in the darkness like a war bell.
Its metal wings unfurled, gleaming with bluish reflections under the faint light of the embers. Its eyes, two red gems burning with inner fire, found Ash's and watched him with that unsettling intelligence that always disconcerted him. The steel claws closed on the ground, raising small clouds of dust.
Ash climbed onto its back without a word. There was no need.
The raven beat its wings once — the wind it raised nearly extinguished the fire's embers — and rose slowly, gaining altitude with each beat. The sleepers' grave, the bone cross, the dying fire: everything grew smaller as they ascended, until they became barely visible points in the immensity of the Forgotten Coast.
Ash looked down one last time, his eyes scanning the orderly rows of graves he had dug with his own hands.
"Rest," he murmured, so low that the wind carried his words away before they could fully form.
Then he turned his head forward, toward the darkness stretching east, toward where the Dark City waited with its nightmare alleyways and its surviving abominations.
"Let's go," he said, and his voice was firm, with no trace of the fatigue still weighing on his shoulders. "There's still work to do."
The Black Steel Raven screeched in response — a sound that could have been affirmation, challenge, or simply the metallic echo of its existence — and surged forward, its wings cutting through the darkness like a blade through silk.
Behind them, the small fire finally went out, consumed by wind and oblivion.
But the graves remained.
And with them, the words carved in bone.
"Your nightmare is over."
[Question: Why do the chapters jump between the present and the past?
Answer: I'm trying to write something I've always wanted to for a future project.
Simpler answer: Just because!
Final note: I will only update one chapter per day in this fic.]