Vescrutia: Legacy

The air over Denkou was a toxic cocktail of ozone, brine, and sorrow. It clung to the back of the throat, a gritty testament to the kingdom’s ruin. Below Dalazar, what was once the jewel of the northern continent, the Emerald City, was now a fractured mosaic of shattered marble and pooling blood. The cries of the wounded were a faint, desperate counterpoint to the keening of the wind, a wind that still carried the ghost-heat of his own cataclysmic power.

He had won the moment, but lost the day. Victory was a hollow, ringing thing in his ears. The blood of many, so much blood, slicked the feet of the few who had survived, a grim baptism into this new, broken world. Without his intervention, every soul would have been an offering to the monstrous will of the girl now crumpled at the base of the scarred mountain.

Kilik. A name that would be etched into the memory of his kingdom with the same permanence as the chasms she had torn through their streets. She wielded the fundamental elements of nature not as a mage borrowing power, but as a sovereign commanding her birthright. Before her, the Emerald King, Dalazar, the pinnacle of their society, the living sigil of their strength, was revealed. Not as a god, not as a singularity, but as what he was. What they all were.

Mortal.

Through Kilik flowed a legacy forged from the very bedrock of the primal world. Dalazar could feel it, an ancient, crushing pressure radiating from her small form—epochs of oceanic fury and abyssal silence, a history written in salt and bone. It was a power that should have broken his nerve, turned his blood to ice.

Yet, his heart thrummed with the stubborn might of his kinghood. It was a fire kindled not by ancient lineage but by promises made, by hands shaken in the market square, by the laughter of children in the palace gardens. Though mortal he may be, the conviction strumming through every fiber of his being was an anthem of defiance against her crushing dominion. There was still so much left to say, so much left to do. He would not stand idly by while everything he held dear fell to ruin.

It was from this terrible, sacred duty that the might of his Terravolt was forged. From the heavy mantle of the crown pressing upon his head, he had mustered the force of unity, the collective will of Denkou coursing within him. The Eldest Lightning had answered. It had claimed total rights over the air, every pulsing electron and ion gathering, compressing, condensing until it flashed a blinding, world-unmaking white. A strike of elemental fury so vast, so raw, the air had become a kiln, scorching nigh every ounce of moisture for miles. His magic had scathed the mustered ocean and its summoner with a wrathful, white-hot vengeance.

Now, he descended, landing a few feet from her. His feet made no sound on the vitrified earth. Smoke coiled from his pauldrons. His eyes, smouldering orbs of blazing fury, fixed on the broken form of his enemy. Kilik was slammed into the mountain, a rag doll tossed aside by a god. But as the haze of battle cleared, the god saw not a monster, but a child.

Scales, iridescent and beautiful even in their ruin, were peeling from her brown flesh, turning to grey ash as they touched the scorched ground. Her hair, the colour of deep-sea kelp, was matted with blood and soot. Past his rage, a profound grief lanced through Dalazar. The ancient, calcified hatred of the Atlantean people for the surface world was a palpable poison, and here it was, festering in the heart of a girl who looked no older than his own niece.

“Do it….”

Her voice was a rasp, a shard of glass scraping across stone. She looked up, her eyes the colour of a stormy sea, devoid of fear, only a chilling, bottomless exhaustion.

“End it… or I’ll kill you all.” The words were laden with soot, barely making it past her scorched throat, but their intent was as clear as a headsman’s axe.

For the briefest, most perilous of moments, Dalazar hesitated. He saw not the primal force that had butchered his people, but the small hand, now clenched into a fist, that could have belonged to any child in his kingdom. He saw a victim of a war that had begun millennia before either of them was born. In that heartbeat of compassion, the world ended anew.

Kilik’s eyes flashed, not with her own will, but with a colder, more ancient command. The lapse in his action was an open door, and something monstrous strode through it. A shriek, torn not just from her throat but from the very ocean, echoed across the land. The Freshwater Seas, a massive expanse of water miles away, convulsed. Harbors and piers were left instantly bare, vast ships tossed onto dry land like bath toys as the sea itself was ripped from its basin.

She was the conduit. A colossal tsunami, an impossible wall of blackened water, rose to scrape the clouds. But this was no natural disaster. Her hatred and grief had tainted the very essence of the water, turning it a churning, venomous black. It was less a wave and more a liquid abyss, corrosive and hungry. It didn't crash against the Emerald Ascension, the mountain range upon which Denkou was built; it embraced it.

A horrific, sizzling hiss filled the air as the black water ate into the stone. The foundations of his kingdom, of his entire world, began to dissolve. The part of the mountain that held the city groaned, a sound of geological agony, and began to list, to descend into the churning black maw.

"What have you done?!"

Panic, cold and absolute, seized Dalazar.

"I have stopped asking," Kilik rasped, the words tearing at her throat as she extended a hand not in command, but in kinship with the approaching apocalypse. "I have stopped...caring."

He was faced with another choice, one more immediate and more terrible than the last. Slay the child, the nexus of this destruction, and pray the cataclysm halted?

Or abandon the fight to save his people, to save what little was left? The logic of war screamed for the first. Kill the enemy general, and the army might break. But the screams of his people, real and immediate, drowned out all other thoughts.

His people. Always.

The choice was never a choice at all. He closed his eyes, turning his back on Kilik, and reached for a power forged for this very moment. One that he would wield with a heavy heart....

He tapped into the Vermeil Realm.

It was not a place, but a current flowing just beneath the skin of reality, a world-spanning river where willpower itself was the water and the fish, the current and the stone. It was a realm of pure potential, the source of legends. With a grace born of desperation, he enacted the Giltarmory, the art of giving shape to the formless.

Remembering his training at the Conservatory, he had to draw on instances of connection, where his tether felt the strongest. And here, in the midst of extinction for his people, he could think of nothing more than the times they had together. The memories flooded his mind, engorging his heart with both pride and mourning, for so many seasons of change had come and gone. The first harvest festival after his coronation, the raising of the Sky-Spire, the quiet morning he’d spent judging a children’s art fair, his pronouncement of a particularly lumpy clay bird as ‘magnificent.’ Each memory was a thread of gold in the dark tapestry of this day.

A soft, silver light manifested around him, a gentle hum that defied the surrounding chaos. It responded to the void where his left hand had once been, a price paid in a battle where he allowed his arrogance to nearly cost him his life. The light condensed, flowed, and solidified. Where there was nothing, now there was a hand, a phantom limb forged not of flesh and bone, but of pure, incandescent will.

His Cordo: the Arm of the Founder.

It was the manifestation of his kingship, the living embodiment of his ideals and his passion. And it granted him one final, desperate gambit. A single, reality-defying arbiter. Yet...it did not come without a cost. Sensing the impending advent, the echoes of the former kings manifested before Dalazar. Semi-translucent, clad in the spectral armour of their reigns, they stood against the backdrop of the oncoming apocalypse.

Ains, the Founder, his a gaze as sharp and measured.

Nivian, the Scholar, her form shimmering with the stored light of a thousand libraries.

Valerius, the Conqueror, his arms crossed, a silent, unyielding bastion.

Roric, the Peacemaker, his expression a mask of profound sorrow.

And his father, Dracovis, whose spectral eyes held not judgment, but the unbearable weight of a father’s love.

Each of the five previous Inheritors gazed upon Dalazar with a knowing. Bound to him by blood, bound to him by bone, and tethered by spirit, they all were prepared for what this would mean.

The Severing of a line, the devouring of a dynasty.

Dalazar’s voice was a low whisper against the roar of the coming end. “Forgive me....”

It was Ains who spoke first, his voice like the turning of an ancient page. “There is nothing to forgive, Son of Denkou. You do what a king must.”

Valerius gave a single, sharp nod. “A throne is a gilded cage. You have found the key. Use it.”

His father, Dracovis, stepped forward, the spectre of his hand reaching out but passing through Dalazar’s shoulder. “We gave our lives for this kingdom. We only ask that you give yours to the fullest. Do not let it be in vain.”

A tear traced a clean path through the grime on Dalazar’s cheek. He met his father’s eyes, then looked at each of his ancestors in turn, a final, silent salute. They shimmered, their forms already beginning to thin, their essence being drawn into the Cordo.

With a final, ragged breath, Dalazar raised the silver hand. The Arm of the Founder pulsed with the light of six souls, six lifetimes of rule and responsibility. He reached into the Vermeil Realm and pulled. He did not pull an object or a creature. He pulled a concept. A philosophy. He pulled-

"Indignation..."


Reality fractured.

The sky, already dark, was ripped asunder not by light, but by the absence of anything that was not light. A sea of viridian energy, crackling with the thoughts of thunderstorms and the fury of collapsing stars, poured through the Cordo. It was not a bolt, not a mere storm, but an entire bastion of raw, untamed power, a colossal, lightning-wrought hand, a mirror of his own phantom limb, descended. It ignored Kilik entirely. Instead, it plunged into the churning black tide, its five fingers, each a storm system unto itself, wrapping around the dissolving base of the Emerald Ascension. Its grip is like a series of sutures to a gaping wound.

His light bloomed, a beacon in the encroaching darkness, buying his people precious seconds. Below, the evacuation klaxons, once silenced, began to blare anew. Figures scrambled from broken homes, pouring towards the stable highlands, their king a lone, luminous figure holding back the end of the world. The corrosive wave sizzled and recoiled, its unholy essence vaporized by the pure, conceptual energy of the storm. The black abyss met an emerald ocean in a cataclysmic stalemate.

Dalazar’s body shuddered. The Arm of the Founder, once brilliant silver, began to flicker and spit like a dying candle. The power he wielded was not his to command indefinitely; it was a loan taken against not only his life force but that of the previous Kings.

He felt them go.

Ains crumbled into motes of geometric light.

Nivian faded like a forgotten word.

Valerius shattered like glass, his form dissolving into the violent energy.

Roric sighed into the wind, a whisper of peace in the heart of destruction.

His father’s phantom was the last to go. Dracovis looked at his son, his burning son, and for a moment, the spectral king’s stoic expression broke. A look of infinite pride, of infinite sorrow. Then he, too, was gone, devoured by the spell, his essence fuel for the fire.

Dalazar was alone, a king with no past and no future. His body was coming apart, his flesh turning to incandescent plasma. But he held the line. As his vision blurred and the screams of his people became a distant echo, his last thought was not of his crown, or his power, or the girl who had caused all this. It was of a lumpy clay bird, and the sound of a child’s laughter in a garden that, for a few precious seconds more, still existed.

The world screamed.

It was a symphony of agony, and Kilik was its maestro. She stood upon a jutting spire of salt-crusted rock, arms outstretched, the eye of her self-made hurricane. Below her, the Grieving Tide, a tsunami of impossible scale, crashed against the foundations of the Emerald Ascension. This was no cleansing wave of cerulean blue. This was the Ur Hollow made manifest—a churning, viscous mass of black water, reeking of brine and bitter sorrow. It was her grief, her betrayal, given form and fang.

Every crash of the wave against the mountain was a shuddering ecstasy that ran through her veins. The B'halian Empire had sent her here to die, a pawn in a game she hadn’t understood. They had used her love for the oceans, twisted it into a weapon, and then abandoned her when the humans of Denkou proved too resilient. The pain of that betrayal had been a void, a cold, dead thing in her chest. But now… now it was a fire. It was this roaring tide, this all-consuming power.

The mountain groaned, a behemoth in its death throes. The black water, acidic and corrupt, ate at the ancient stone, turning granite to slurry. Fissures spiderwebbed across its face. She could see it, even from this distance—a flicker of emerald light, a defiant sigil against the encroaching darkness. Dalazar. The Emerald King. He was holding his kingdom together with sheer will, a fool trying to cup water in his hands. A futile, beautiful gesture that only fed her rage.

Let him try. Let them all watch as their world dissolved. This. was. justice. This was reciprocity for every poisoned reef, every slaughtered leviathan, every drop of human filth that had ever bled into her sacred seas.

The power was intoxicating. It was the whispers of Ragana, the Mother of the Ur Hollow, a dark resonance that had always lived in the deep currents of Atlantean magic. Her monastery has always warned of the abyss, but now she has embraced it. It understood her pain.

It gave it a voice.

A voice that could unmake mountains.

A deeper thunder rumbled, not from the tide, but from within her soul.

Kilik.

The voice was ancient, a pressure against her mind like the crushing weight of the deepest trench. It was a voice she had known since birth, the rhythm of her own heart. Ovryn.

She ignored it, focusing on the glorious destruction. Another section of the mountain sheared away, plunging into the toxic surf with a deafening roar. The screams of the dying were a sweet, sharp note in her symphony.

LOOK! The command was not a suggestion. It seized her, wrenching her gaze from the crumbling peak and turning it back, back towards the ravaged sea from which her weapon had been born. Orvyn, seizing the emerald king's defiance, mustered the might to reach Kilik.

The ecstasy faltered, replaced by a cold knot of confusion. The Fresh Water Seas, once a vibrant expanse of life, were now a graveyard. The Grieving Tide had not just been a physical mass; it had been a plague. Her rage, her sorrow, amplified by Ragana’s touch, had become a poison that had boiled the very life from the water as she drew it to her.

The shores were littered with a silver carpet of death.

No, not silver.

It was the pale bellies of a million fish. It was the great, majestic forms of whales, their immense bodies beached and bloating, their skin sloughing off in slick, grey sheets from the acidic touch of her magic. Entire pods of dolphins, graceful hunters of the currents, now lay tangled in the blackened seaweed, their bodies contorted. The kaleidoscopic shells of nautili were cracked and empty. The intelligent, curious eyes of octopi were milky and vacant, their once-pliant bodies dissolving into a foul ichor upon the sand.

The scale of it was… absolute.

"You sought vengeance for the desecration of the ocean," Ovryn’s voice echoed, no longer a rumble but a keen of profound heartbreak. " You wept for the coral bleached by human ignorance. You raged at the leviathans choked by their waste. You called them a poison. And now, Kilik, what are you? You have murdered more in a single breath than they have in a generation. You have become a blight that makes their petty evils seem like a child’s tantrum."

The words were like shards of ice in her heart. The fire of her rage was doused, leaving behind only the cold, wet ash of horror. She looked down at her hands, the conduits of this apocalypse. They trembled. The dark power still thrummed through them, but it no longer felt like a part of her. It felt like a parasite, coiling in her gut, whispering with Ragana’s voice.

“What…” she whispered, her voice cracking, lost in the shriek of the wind. “What am I even doing anymore?”

The question hung in the poisoned air, a testament to her shattered identity. She was Kilik, daughter of Nissagro, Warden of the Tides. Her life, her very being, was defined by her connection to the water. The Psalm of Waves was the language of her soul. But the music she heard now was a dirge—a death-song she herself had composed.

"There is only one way to quell the tide, Ovryn said, a dreadful finality in her tone. To save what little remains. To save you from becoming the monster you sought to destroy.

Kilik felt a new kind of terror, a primal fear that dwarfed even her grief. She knew what Ovryn meant. The thought was impossible, a sacrilege. “No,” she breathed. “Ovryn. You can’t.”

"I am the Primordial of Water, Kilik. That essence flows through you, a gift. But you have corrupted it. You have allowed the whispers of the Hollow to turn the tide upon itself..."

A frantic energy seized her. “It’s my grief! My pain! They left me to die! The ocean… It’s the only thing that understands! It’s the only part of me left!”

"And I grieve with you, little one. My heart breaks for the child I have watched grow. I have felt every tear you have shed into the currents. But I am not just you. I am the tidepool and the trench. I am the rain and the river. I am the great whale and the smallest plankton. My love for you, my chosen vessel, is immense. But it cannot outweigh my duty to the whole."

Black viscous tears streamed down Kilik’s face, indistinguishable from the toxic spray that misted around her. “Please! Please don’t take it from me! It’s me! It is me! Without it, I am nothing!”

She could feel the connection beginning to fray, a tearing deep within her spirit. It was the most profound agony she had ever known, worse than any blade, worse than any betrayal. It was an amputation of the soul.

"You were never nothing, Kilik," Ovryn’s voice was softer now, thick with a sorrow that mirrored her own. "But what you are becoming...must end. Forgive me."

The severing was not a clean cut. It was a violent, cataclysmic tearing. For a moment, she felt the entirety of the world’s oceans rush through her, a billion voices screaming in unison—a symphony of life and loss, of ancient depths and sunlit shallows, of every creature that swam and crawled and drifted. It was the Psalm of Waves, the song of her existence, played as a final, desperate crescendo.

And then, silence.

The sudden, absolute void was deafening. The power fled from her limbs. The storm around her, no longer sustained by her will, began to falter. The Grieving Tide, its animating force gone, lost its churning fury and became just a mass of dead, poisonous water.

Kilik’s knees buckled. She collapsed forward, tumbling from the rock spire and plunging into the black water she had created. The cold was a shock, but the burn was worse. The acidic tide, once an extension of her own body, now treated her as the alien flesh she was. It seared her skin, a final, intimate betrayal.

She didn't struggle. She floated on her back, staring up at the grey, weeping sky. The roar of the waves was just noise now, a meaningless physical phenomenon. The subtle currents that had once spoken to her of distant lands and deep secrets were just dumb motions of liquid.

The Psalm was gone.

The music had stopped.

In the distance, the Emerald Ascension continued its slow, inexorable collapse, the last flicker of Dalazar’s light a dying ember.

Mission Accomplished

But for what?

For whom?

Ovryn was wrong. Without the water, without the song, she truly was nothing. Just a hollow vessel, filled with a grief she could no longer express, adrift in a sea of her own making, forever deaf to the only language she had ever truly known. Her fate elf tup to the very blackned waters she conjured.

The sky above the Kingdom was a bruise, purple and black, weeping a rain of superheated ash. At its heart, a man bled power.

It was taking every ounce, every iota of Dalazar’s might to keep the Indignation spell stable. Raw, untamed lightning, older than mountains, screamed through his veins. His body, a vessel never meant to contain such a tempest, was breaking. Brown skin, once the warm shade of sun-kissed almonds, now fluoresced with a sickly, blue-green luminescence. Veins of pure, burning viridian energy mapped the agonizing path of the spell across his flesh. He was no longer a man; he was a conduit, a living storm holding back an ocean of oblivion.

Below the eclipsing shadow of his spell—a crackling dome of emerald light that held the crushing weight of Kilik’s blackened waters at bay—the last of his people fled. A handful of souls scrambling over shattered marble and the bodies of their kin. Their numbers were few indeed, a pitiful remnant of a once-teeming paradise. Every shuddering breath they took from this moment on was a debt owed to him, to the tireless devotion of a king willing to unmake himself for their survival.

This was the way of Dalazar. It had always been. Even as a boy, his noble blood had never been a barrier. He knew the farmer who tended the sky-vines by name, had debated philosophy with the seamstress who wove starlight into their ceremonial robes. He fought now for the memory of their faces, for the echoes of their dreams, for the simple, profound truth that their lives mattered more than his own lineage, his birthright, his very existence.

His eyes, now glowing slits of pure energy, drifted over the vista of his broken kingdom. For twenty thousand years, this mountain sanctuary had remained untouched, a jewel hidden from the grasping hands of the outside world. And now, epochs of tightly curated culture—their art, their histories, their love—were being undone in mere moments. The Grand Orrery, which charted the celestial dance, was a tangle of molten brass. The Library of Whispers, where knowledge was breathed into the very stones, was silenced, its wisdom drowned.

All that glitters is not gold. The world saw them as a paradise, the Kingdom of Opulence. He, too, had wished to see them that way. But the shimmer had hidden a festering sickness. For generations, they had been so paranoid, so consumed by the imagined threats from beyond their borders, that they had ignored the rot building within. The unrest wasn't a sudden blight; it was a cancer, cultivated in the shadows of their own gilded halls, fed by jealousy and a lust for forbidden power. The heinous evils they had feared from outsiders were already festering in the hearts of their own people. In his own brother.

His mind, a storm-tossed raft on a sea of pain, snagged on the faces of the lost. "What of Mother? he wondered, the thought a shard of ice in the furnace of his being." And Myos? My brother, did you stand against him?" How many noble lines were now just memories? How many centuries of heritage were erased?

The mighty "grizzly" mages of House Urso, whose earth-shattering spells could level fortresses, had been turned to mud and swallowed.

The sharp-minded and witty strategists of House Flonne, whose plans were as intricate as woven silk, their strategies had unraveled in the face of pure, nihilistic chaos.

The brazen ants of House Gamallow, soldiers of unbreakable will and tireless spirit, now lie broken among the causeways.

The slithering sovereigns of House Ri'ore, masters of intrigue and the subtle arts, their serpentine banners were cinder, their secrets drowned in the black tides.

And Evant..., a fresh wave of agony that had nothing to do with the spell. Evant. His knight, his shield, his love. The steady warmth of his hand, the easy laughter in his eyes. Had that light, too, been extinguished? Had he perished in the first wave, defending the palace gates? The uncertainty was a crueler torment than the lightning in his blood.

Grief was an active, corrosive bile eating him from the inside out. His body screamed. Every second he held the Indignation spell was another lifetime of torment. This magic was an apex predator, a beast of force meant for singular, devastating annihilation. To wield it as a shield was like trying to catch a falling star in a net of glass. The strain was cosmological. He could feel his own spirit beginning to fray, his connection to the very essence of his power thinning to a spider's thread.

But he could not let go.

Not yet.

He watched the last skiff, a battered, desperate thing, clear the outermost ward. He saw them, a smear of life against the encroaching dark. He had done it.

Making sure there were survivors would be his last duty as king.

King…

The word echoed in the sudden, cavernous silence of his mind.

King of nothing.

King of failures.

King of ruin.

King… of loneliness.

The voices were gone. Now, there was only a profound, deafening void. They were gone, their spiritual echoes finally and irrevocably erased by the sacrilege that had consumed their kingdom. The mental link he shared with the other Denkou was also severed. It was like having all his senses ripped away at once. He was utterly, terrifyingly alone.

With a final, guttural roar that was more energy than sound, he released his hold.

The Indignation spell did not fade; it detonated. The emerald dome shattered into a billion motes of light, a final, beautiful funeral pyre. For a breathtaking moment, it blasted the dark waters back, a fleeting victory against an inevitable tide. But the release of such power was the final blow to the mountain itself. The wound Kilik had carved into its heart, the wound Dalazar had held closed through sheer will, now gave way.

With a groan that shook the foundations of the world, the Kingdom of Opulence began to fall.

Dalazar fell with it. He was weightless, a leaf in a hurricane of stone and memory. He crashed onto a tilted plaza, the impact a dull, distant thing to his ravaged body. He lay on his back, the fractured marble cool against his burning skin. Above, through a latticework of crumbling spires and broken arches, he could see the sky. The storm was clearing. A few, indifferent stars began to peek through the gloom.

The kingdom was empty. Desolate. A hollowed-out god, its divinity spent. He could hear the lapping of Kilik's black water, a hungry, patient sound. It was already beginning to seep through the cracks, to climb the grand staircases. The ornate ironwork, the pride of their artisans, was already beginning to bleed trails of rust into the encroaching tide. The silence was the worst part. Where there should have been music, the bustle of the market, the laughter of children, there was only the gurgle of a world drowning.

A single, hot tear traced a clean path through the grime and arcane residue on his cheek. Then another. His chest heaved with a sob that was too weak to make a sound. His hand, shaking uncontrollably, lifted towards the uncaring stars. It was a gesture of supplication, of surrender.

"Forgive me, my brothers…" His voice was a rasp, a whisper of sand and ash. Each breath was an agonizing effort, a fire in his ruined lungs. The black water was at his heels now, cold and cloying. "Evant… Mother… Forgive me…"

His arm fell, limp.

"I… have failed."

He closed his eyes, welcoming the end. The dark waves washed over his legs, a chilling finality. This was his tomb. A kingdom of ghosts, with a king of ruin to watch over them in their watery grave.

But just as the blackness reached for his heart, just before the tide consumed him utterly, a light bloomed behind his eyelids.

It was not the green fury of his own magic, nor the sickly glow of the corrupted waters. This was a light of impossible purity, a white-gold radiance that was not hot, but warm, not blinding, but profound. It shone not on him, but from within him. It consumed the pain, the grief, the failure. It seeped into the broken stones of the plaza, raced up the drowning towers, and illuminated the entire falling mountain.

For one silent, eternal moment, the Kingdom of Opulence did not sink into ruin. It became a star, a beacon of defiant grace in the heart of the abyss, before it, and Dalazar with it, vanished into the deep.