Chapter 1: Prologue: The Dying Dark

It took five years for the human race to face extinction. For the light to fade and crops to fail. For kingdoms to crumble and their riches turn into nothing more than paltry trinkets that not even the most desperate bandit would bite his teeth on.

The sky grew darker earlier every day, forecasting a warning of the eternal black that was to come. The last bars of sunlight crept through rents in the walls of the throne room in which I sat. The palace was marred and broken, hefts of stone scattered across the floor and scorch marks staining the hues of paint that gilt the walls and frescoed the ceilings. No soul stood at attention ready to welcome back their king, to sweep the dust laid floors, or to continue the charade in any capacity that the best craft of human hands would survive the coming doom.

No bodies either, as appropriate as such an event called for.

I was alone waiting on a throne that was not mine, it's arms and upper crest sparkling white and polished steel reflecting the last vestiges of light this world would ever see. "Walthier! My king, where are you?"

Restless

I stood and strode the halls as my sight hazed and faded into confused static. "Perhaps I should have joined you. Perhaps I still will." It was foolish to speak to myself so blatantly, but in the absence of others, I felt no need for inhibitions. "My king. My king. . . ." My words bounced through the ruinous fortress and disappeaered to wherever the light had hid itself.

My fingers drifted rough against mortar within the cracks that held this place aloft. My finger nail scraped off the thinnest layer of dirt. In that all encompassing blackness, my hand next brushed passed a large rod– the right side of a mirror. I traced over the cool surface and imagined my pointed chin, too large a nose, eyes that still saw the world anew and filled with promise. If I could see my reflection, it would present no vision that did justice to what I had imagined.

For the best.

And then–

Ah yes, I spent my time idling about some fine tapestries, feeling their frayed threads with the back of my hand before resuming my babbling, passing the time in reflexive communication– the faint stage play that was imagined conversation.

"Come see milord."

The words were not mine and I stumbled at the strangeness. A faint light appeared at the bend of the hallway and then flooded the entire hallway with warmness. A boy, squire, rounded the corner with his hand held before his chest and a light hovering there, flickering in time with his heart beat. "There you are, milord," the King calls for your presence at the lake.

"The lake?"

"That's what it is now, we suppose. The day is won."

I glanced each way through the hall with a steady eye, seeing no other source of light. "I watched the end fall not minutes ago. How could you be here so quickly?" As I spoke, my hand fell to the dagger at my waist. That pulsing flame marked the boy as a more than human, as a threat. He was a Psychic.

That was the point to all this, to see an end.

The squire cleared his throat, the light flickering and dying before he yelped and relit it. "Pardon sirra, but I've been here for hours. Listening to you mutter to yourself up and down the hallways. His Highness said to not disturb such a thing, but his Highness will be cross if I don't fetch you at all. My apologies." The flicker of light from his powers betrayed the boy's eyes staring at my weapon with caution, emphasized it.

"Hours?" I brushed a strand of hair that had fallen across my vision. "And when was nightfall?"

"The first or second?" The boy hesitated before adding, "Milord."

"Two?" Ah, but of course such a thing made sense. If the light was to come back and the dark abated, why shouldn't it happen all at once. I forced a smile and removed my hand from the dagger. The death of a Psychic as of yet appealed to me, and it was with no doubt that this boy drew some terrible lot to fetch me, but the matter could wait. "Just the first loss of light will do."

"Nigh on twelve hours, I expect."

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I began muttering to myself again, questioning the veracity of the boy's claims. It was possible; I could not deny that. I found it easy to lose myself to the rolls of time the more my mind aged. And yet he was Psychic and prone to evil. Prone to all sort of unnatural– I tensed at the site of his conjured light yet again. My fingers twitched for my dagger, but instead the muscles of my neck strung tight in restraint, ready to be plucked like the string of a harp.

Restraint was not in my nature but neither was it an impossibility.

As the boy guided me through the maze of paths that I had weaved myself through, we spoke no more. I could have asked about the battle, how the great Walthier v. Raer lead his army in one final desperate struggle against the Dark. How he used the weapon I provided to strike the beast down. But the stories of liars and thieves bear no weight. If I was to reach the site of the battle, I could find the truth there. While I would not call the King my friend, he was no Psychic. It was why I chose him to be our champion.

The next glimpses of light were crisp. One stone door of the front gates of Fort Benehedren had fallen causing the other to hang skewed and droop under the loss of its twin. Thick clouds hid the night sky except for sparse pockets that poked through the cover. The two brother moons hung faraway and obscured, soon to retreat below the cover of the distant mountains. The world was in darkness, but that darkness paled in comparison to what had already come and passed.

"Milord," the squire said, handing me the reins to a horse.

Only now I could see the red stripes stitched onto the shoulder of his white shirt, denoting his affinity with a power just as great, just as terrible as the one that had died today. A power in this world that would be the next to die with any grace given to me by above.

The squire pulled himself besides me as I alighted onto a steed that I could call nothing more than a modest gelding. And yet in a world with so little food, the horses were the first to go. Starved or eaten. A fine gelding would be worth the weight of a kingdom when the sun rose. And we had two.

"If we ride hard," the boy began, "we can reach the Dark's corpse by morning. Just follow me."

"I know the way." I said it with a whisper.

It was so long ago, but I don't think I did it intentionally. But when the boy leaned in, straining to hear my words the moment simply felt right. My knife sheared through his neck only halting at the stocky built muscle, at which point I pushed through the resistance and finished the cut in a sawing effort.

His eyes darkened in understanding and his face contorted. The boy fell from his saddle and his shoulder hit the ground with a crisp snap like a branch in winter. If the pagans would welcome the new year with blood sacrifice, then so much the better to welcome in the rebirth of our world with one of my own.

And yet I was and always have been an over confident fool.

His blood milling about with the dirt, one hand cupping his severed artery, the boy's face clenched and true hatred spewed from those eyes. His other arm, stuck under him and broken, pulled free in fury and I saw too late the spasms of orange energy that ran through along his fingers as he slammed his hand into the ground.

I watched my blunder with bleak understanding. As the energy flowed beneath my horse and I, it expanded. A cataclysm of fire and heat rose like a blume and engulfed me, the squire releasing every last spark of energy into me he could. The world turned to a horrific slew of oranges and reds.

After the salvation of humanity, after the death of the Dark, that is how one of the most portentous days in human history began– with myself melted into a red smear.

                                                                                                                                                                              My story, a long time ago

 

 

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