Alea Triscan
The air in the town of Loraen was thick with a ln anguishing symphony of suffering. It was a chorus that by now I knew too well, a brutal melody composed of screams that shredded the soul, shouts of desperate orders that went unanswered, and the low, constant hum of pure, undiluted terror.
I ran, my boots sinking into the soft, sacred earth of the Elshire Forest, now churned to mud by blood and violence.
The once-beautiful trees, their bark etched with ancient elven scripts, were now scarred by blackened spell-fire, their luminous leaves lying trampled and dull underfoot.
This was Loraen, a smaller settlement in the northern reaches of my homeland. A place of artisans and weavers, of singers and scholars. Now, it was just the umpteenth slaughterhouse of this damned war.
If the Alacryans had pierced this deep, it meant our defenses were shattered. It meant they could carve a path straight to the heart of Elenoir in less than a month. They could reach Zestier before we could properly counterattack.
And that was a optimistic estimate, one that relied on me stopping the bleeding here, now, in this trampled grove.
Elenoir was being choked, slowly and methodically. The great Wall in the south still held, a shield for the deeper forest, but everywhere else, the Alacryan war machines—their obsidian ships like carrion birds and their corrupted mana beasts, things of twisted flesh and malice—were driving deep into our sacred woods.
I gripped Roseguard, the blade feeling less like metal and more like an extension of my own frantic heartbeat. Channelling mana through its core, I willed the rose embedded in the hilt to bloom with a fierce, silver light.
I raised it high, a beacon in the deepening gloom, a signal to any soldier who still had fight left in them.
"To me!" I shouted.
No answer came. No rallying cry, no surge of hopeful mana. Only the silence that follows the storm of death, a silence more terrifying than any noise. And then, the silence broke, replaced by something far worse.
A rustling. A dragging. A wet, tearing sound.
I turned, and my blood ran cold. The scenery unfolded like a page from the most profane nightmare. The soldiers—elves with their elegant features frozen in final agony, dwarves with their stout forms broken, humans who had come to our aid—were stirring.
Their dead bodies, limbs twisted at impossible angles, wounds still weeping, began to rise. It was a grotesque puppet show, the strings pulled by a unseen, monstrous hand. Their empty eyes scanned the ruins, not with purpose, but with a hollow, predatory hunger, seeking the living who still hid.
Rage, hot and pure, washed over the cold fear. Using the dead as weapons? This was an outrage that struck at the very core of what it meant to have a soul, to honor those who had fallen.
I acted without thought, driven by instinct and fury. Driving Roseguard deep into the soil, I poured my will through the blade. The rose on the hilt flared, its light pulsing down into the roots beneath my feet. I commanded the forest itself, the very spirit of Elshire, to rise and protect its children.
"Block them!" I screamed.
Vines, thick as my arm and thorned like the weapon I wielded, erupted from the earth. They coiled around ankles, yanked at lifeless limbs, creating a writhing, green barricade between the reanimated horror and the cowering civilians I could sense in the collapsed structures around us.
A low, sultry chuckle slithered through the chaos, a sound like poisoned honey. "Oh, don't you have a little respect for your dead, elf?"
I wrenched Roseguard from the ground, spinning to face the voice. She stood atop a pile of rubble, tall and imperious. Her hair was a cascade of living, purple vines, and her eyes held a bored, predatory amusement.
With a casual, cruel precision, she drove the stiletto heel of her boot down, delivering a final, piercing thrust into the neck of a poor man whose only crime had been living here. The act was so effortless, so devoid of emotion, it made my stomach clench.
Scythe Viessa Vritra. The intelligence from Grey and… from His Highness… flashed in my mind. An illusionist. A puppeteer.
"Viessa Vritra," I spat, my knuckles white on Roseguard's grip.
The Scythe smirked, a slow, wicked thing. "Careful," she purred with mock concern.
A guttural, animalistic scream tore my attention to the right. I pivoted, my heart lurching into my throat. A woman—or what had been one—lurched towards me. Her skin was a deathly pale, her eyes vacant pools of nothing, a horrific tear in her neck still dribbling blackened blood. She moved with a frenzied, jerking gait, a wolf driven by a master's whip.
I gritted my teeth, the moral abyss of the action yawning before me. This was a citizen of Elenoir. A sister. With a prayer for her soul on my lips, I moved Roseguard in a clean, silver arc, granting her the swift, dignified death she had been denied.
"Killing your own?" Viessa tutted, her chuckle returning. "And then you Dicathians say that the Vritra are the monsters."
Her tone shifted then, the amusement evaporating, replaced by a cold, sharp fury. It wasn't the protective rage one feels for a ward; it was the fury of a collector for a damaged possession. "Oh. Are you the one who killed Jagrette?"
"By killing her, I did a favor to both my soldiers and yours," I stated, the memory of that vile witch, Jagrette, and her cruel disregard for her own troops surfacing with bitter clarity.
"You Dicathians don't know the value of property," she hissed, rolling her eyes as if discussing a broken trinket. "First Jagrette, and then Bilal, killed by that little princess. I have no intentions of playing with someone who doesn't know the most basic courtesies."
As her words faded, the entire town of Loraen seemed to revolt against me. The very ground seethed. Dozens, then scores of desecrated bodies clawed their way from under rubble, from behind trees, their collective movement a wave of putrescence.
I became a whirlwind of steel and sorrow, slashing and hacking my way through the tide of my former comrades, my people. Each fall of my blade was a sacrilege, a violation of the peace they deserved. I bit my lip until I tasted blood, using the pain to anchor myself, to focus.
The adornments on Roseguard's blade, intricate leaf patterns, glowed softly, guiding my senses, pulling me towards the Scythe's true presence, a shimmer of malignant energy hiding within her own macabre theater.
"A Scythe hiding behind the dead—" I began, my voice dripping with contempt.
And then I saw him.
My breath caught in my throat. The world narrowed to a single point.
"Alwyn…"
My little brother. His hair was as white as moon-kissed snow, his hazel eyes bright and full of the gentle curiosity that had defined his too-short life. He stood there, just as he had in the final days before the illness took him, a smile playing on his lips.
A part of me, the trained Lance, screamed that this was a lie, a phantom woven from Viessa's vile magic. Grey's briefings, His Highness's warnings about her proficiency with illusions—they echoed in a distant corner of my mind.
But it was so real. I could almost smell the scent of the herbs from his room, hear the weak, rasping sound of his breath. The grief, a wound I thought had scarred over, tore open anew, fresh and agonizing.
"A-Alwyn…" I murmured again, my arm wavering, Roseguard's point dipping towards the earth.
The pain was instantaneous and excruciating. A searing, piercing agony erupted in my thigh. I glanced down, my mind struggling to process the sight. A perfect, clean hole, the size of a coin, went straight through the meat of my leg, missing the bone by mere millimeters. Blood, shockingly red, began to well and flow.
"In Dicathen, they don't teach you to never lower your guard, Lance?" Viessa's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere, a taunting specter.
I shook my head, clearing the phantom of my brother, forcing the lance of pain to sharpen my focus. "You fight like the monster you are," I growled, the words a physical effort.
"And you fall into my traps like the insect you are," she chuckled, the sound slithering through the trees.
"The same can be said for you." I declared, my voice suddenly steady.
With every ounce of my will, I threw Roseguard not at the illusion of Alwyn, but to my right, towards the subtle, whispering pull of Viessa's true mana signature. The blade flew, a spinning disc of silver and crimson.
A sharp, pained gasp cut through the air. "H-how?!"
"Agrona Vritra hasn't taught you to never lower your guard?" I mocked, my voice cold.
I triggered the mechanism His Highness had engineered into the blade. The Acclorite core within Roseguard burst. It wasn't an explosion of fire and force, but one of life itself run rampant.
A sphere of incandescent, burning roses erupted where the sword had landed, thorns of solidified mana and petals of searing light shredding the air.
I saw her then, Viessa, thrown from her concealment. She landed a dozen feet away, her elegant clothes torn and ragged, her pale skin marked with angry, smoldering burns. For a moment, her mask of bored superiority was gone, replaced by raw, startled pain.
"Cheap tricks won't do anything," she hissed, her voice laced with venom. Black flames, cold and hungry, writhed over her body, knitting flesh and smoothing away the burns with terrifying speed.
My eyes locked on hers. There was no more conversation, no more taunts. There was only the fight. Pushing mana into my wounded leg, I ignored the fiery protest of my nerves and sprinted forward. Roseguard, back in my hand, became a silver and red arc aimed at her heart.
And met the illusion of Prince Corvis.
My breath hitched. There he stood, his face calm, his green eyes holding that unique mixture of kindness and immense burden. His hair, the same shade as the forest around us, was tousled by a non-existent wind. I gritted my teeth so hard I feared they would crack.
"First you mock the name of Princess Tessia. Then you use His Highness against me?" I roared my challenge into the void, my heart a frantic drum of guilt and loyalty. He was taken. Taken from right under our noses, from the heart of the Castle, and the failure of it was a stone in my gut.
"Serving a child," Viessa's disembodied voice sighed with theatrical pity. "You Dicathians are fascinating in your stupidity."
I whirled, my combat-honed instincts screaming a warning. I brought Roseguard up just in time to parry not a gust of wind, but a missile of pure vacuum that tore the sound from the air around it. The impact shuddered up my arms.
"He is so much more than a child," I said, the words a vow. Facing a Scythe was a descent into a different tier of combat altogether. The Retainers were powerful, but this was… elemental. I had drawn blood through surprise, but it was a mosquito bite to a giant.
"If I didn't have orders to kill every elf I encounter," she mused, her voice now coming from above, "I would gladly wait until the High Sovereign sends your beloved Prince back as the spearhead of your continent's subjugation."
From above! I dropped and rolled, slashing Roseguard upwards, deflecting another silent, tearing vacuum missile.
"Idiocy," I snarled, trying to still my mind, to feel for her through the web of lies she was spinning. The town of Loraen was gone, replaced by a shifting, macabre theater of red mist and whispering corpses, all designed to disorient and break my spirit.
Then she appeared in front of me, corporeal, a slender rapier in her hand. Her expression was blank, utterly devoid of emotion as she lunged.
An illusion! I didn't parry; I threw myself backward, trusting the guidance of my bond with Roseguard and the forest. I anticipated her true strike would come from the flank. As I landed, I whirled, putting all my momentum, all my fear, all my rage into a single, desperate horizontal slash.
Roseguard found its mark.
A sharp, clean cut opened across Viessa's neck. An expression of genuine, wide-eyed surprise flashed across her features before the black flames erupted again, searing the wound closed. I couldn't give her time! I couldn't!
I slammed my palm back onto the earth. "Rise!" I commanded the Elshire Forest. "Rebel against her!"
The very foliage around us answered my call. Leaves tore from branches, transforming in mid-air into blazing, razor-sharp thorns. I moved Roseguard like a conductor's baton, like I had seen His Highness teach Princess Tessia in the Castle courtyards, a lifetime ago.
A storm of fiery projectiles shot towards Viessa, a horizontal rain of vengeance.
She was forced to run, to dodge, her healing interrupted. The injury on her neck was sealed, but her movements were less fluid, a flicker of strain in her eyes.
Damn, how fast is she?! I screamed inwardly as she continued to dodge every attack I sent at her.
"That weapon is truly a pain," she murmured, her voice losing its sultry edge, becoming sharp and annoyed. "You have no strength on your own, Lance. Only petty instruments."
"Instruments given to me by my liege!" I exclaimed, the truth of it fueling my resolve. "The difference between Prince Corvis and your High Sovereign is that His Highness is fighting in the heart of your continent against a god, while your god is sending you here to die!"
I saw my opening. It was a gamble, a final, all-or-nothing play. I poured every last drop of mana I possessed into Roseguard. The blade glowed so brightly it became a sliver of captured sunlight. I became the focused embodiment of will, launching myself at Viessa in a perfect, suicidal lunge.
The Scythe, sensing the cataclysmic force of the attack, had no time for elegant evasion. She met it head-on, her rapier a needle of condensed shadow against my dawn.
Our weapons clashed.
And time stopped.
There was no sound. No light. Only a immense, crushing pressure. Then, the pain came. It was not the clean pain of a blade, but a corrosive, insidious agony. Black flames, cold as the void between stars, coiled up from the point of impact, wrapping around my arms, my torso, my legs.
They didn't burn my skin; they devoured my mana, my strength, my very sould and life force.
"So arrogant…" Viessa's whisper was a breath in my ear, though she stood yards away, her form flickering. "You are going to die alone in a forest turned cemetery, Lance of Dicathen."
The darkness pressed in. The cold was in my bones, in my soul. I felt my mana core, the source of my power, falter. It strained, cracked, and then… it broke.
But it was not an end.
It was a beginning.
As the shards of my white core dissolved within me, they did not bring emptiness. They brought… everything. A barrier I had never known was there shattered.
The individual well of my power vanished, and in its place, I became a conduit. The forest was no longer around me; it was me. Every branch, every leaf had a voice of their own. Every particle of plant-attuned mana had a story to tell.
I could feel the agonized scream of every blade of grass, the silent weeping of the ancient trees, the determined pulse of the roots deep beneath the soil.
The very air, the very light, the very essence of the Elshire Forest poured into me.
"I am Corvis Eralith's Lance," I declared, and my voice was no longer my own. It was the voice of the wind through the leaves, the rumble of the earth, the silent song of growth and decay. "I am the one he empowered, and I will be your end."
An infinite ocean of mana surged through my being, not from the mana core in my body, but from the world itself.
The Elshire Forest roared its approval through me. From my body, from the ground at my feet, from the very air I was breathing, an uncountable number of roses erupted.
The blossoming of spring bursting into existence in a single instant.
They were pure, solidified life force, blazing with a gentle, inexorable radiance that scoured the undead puppets to ash and made Viessa shield her eyes with a cry of shock and pain.
It was a fire that burned neither body nor soul, but purified the very space it touched, washing the corruption from the land.
A fire that didn't destroy. A fire that didn't burn. I, an elf, was wielding the inner fire that burnt in the depths of every living creature.
I did it, Your Highness… The thought was a peaceful, final sigh in the heart of the storm. I reached the Integration Stage you talked so much of.
The sounds of the world blended into a single, harmonious chord—the song of the forest, the crescendo of my magic, the fading shout of the Scythe, and the steady, triumphant beat of my own heart.
I smiled, a smile of perfect, transcendent understanding.
And as my body could no longer contain the universe I had become, the world, at last, turned not to the black of death, but to a gentle, everlasting green.
———
A/N:
This was the last of the chapters I have written before I hit a dead end. I don't know when I will be able to continue, if I will ever be able to continue.
Now, as for what will happen in the next chapters.
What follows is not even an outline or a summary of future chapters—I often drastically change the plot as I am writing it—but a brainstorm I made even before starting writing the fourth volume of Corvis Eralith, so take this with a pinch of salt and don't take anything for granted as it could very well take a completely different way:
There is the rest of the "Battle for Elenoir" arc (Other main battles with Chul vs Cadell, a rematch between Grey and Dragoth in southern Elenoir on the border with the Beast Glades and Tessia fighting the Alacryan army like in canon, but with her both being white core and knowing her place and what she is doing).
After that the POV would change to Aldir and Epheotus, with Kezess making a speech similar to the one he made in the chapter "Ash and Dust" of TBATE (chapter 341) and understanding through the news of Cecilia's reincarnation that Corvis is related to Fate in one way or another.
Meanwhile the freed Lady Dawn would return to the Hearth and after a heated argument with Mordain she would be entrusted with being again the diplomat of the Asclepius Clan. Only that this time she would be the envoy to the Tri-Union, as thus initiating an unofficial integration of the Hearth with the rest of Dicathen (she would be obviously disguised so that Epheotus can't track her back to the Hearth).
As for Corvis and Caera they would visit both the First and Second Djinn Remnant (not much is changed from canon other than Corvis being there instead of Arthur). As they prepare to exit the Relictombs the keystone containing Aroa's Requiem would shatter in Corvis' hands giving the Godrune to him—much to Corvis' horror.
However being a Godrune of aevum Corvis would manage to use Aroa's Requiem on himself to revert his mana core back to silver and as thus resetting the bond with Berna. He would try to do the same for Romulos, but that wouldn't work.
After some shenanigans between Berna and Caera the three of them would exit the Relictombs. Following Leon's suggestion they would appear in Seris' villa in Aedelgard as everywhere else could result in a death sentence (either from Agrona or from Epheotus' spies due to the presence of the Legacy within Caera).
The POV would change to Seris who is found speaking with Grey giving her the way to break Agrona's bindings to the Alacryan spellforms (something Nico managed to reverse-engineer from what Corvis has done to him while he was kept in the dungeons of the Castle).
There would be a brief view of Grey—who obtained Regis after the fight with the Wraiths—dealing with his feelings for the girls he has loved in his two lives: Tessia and Cecilia.
For instance Regis here is made up 50% of Uto, 10% of Sylvia and Sylvie and the remaining 40% of Corvis causing Regis to have one of the worst cases of bipolarism to exist.
As Seris leaves to return to Alacrya (as no orders were coming from Taegrin Caelum simce the end of the Battle for Elenoir) Windsom arrives to the Castle to retrieve Sylvie under Kezess' order.
A fight would erupt, which is completely one-sided for Windsom, but in a desperate attempt to save Grey Sylvie would use the Mark of Banishment (the same thing Ademir Thyestes used on Aldir in the novel that Romulos taught Sylvie how to use on potentially every single Asura) causing Windsom to be forced into retreat, but making him unable to return to Epheotus.
Seris, Cylrit, Caera and Corvis would start to plot the Alacryan revolution with Seris giving Corvis a Tempus Warp in case he wanted to return to Dicathen which Corvis outrightly denies as he considers himself a traitor and will return to Dicathen only to face justice for his betrayal when everything will be fixed.
Volume 5 would end with the situation in Alacrya being a few steps from exploding and Dicathen starting to push the Alacryans away.
The Denoirs and various other Highbloods would start to join Seris and Alacrya would fall into a civil war between the various Sovereigns as Agrona seems to have disappeared.
Volume 6 would start with Agrona's POV.
The ritual that gave Caera the Legacy didn't work 100% like Corvis wanted. In fact Agrona was able to keep the corruptive aspect of the Legacy for himself (what Cecilia described as tooth decay when she was reincarnated).
Agrona would find himself fighting against both the Legacy who is threatening to make him undergo the process of Integration killing him on the spot and Romulos.
Romulos predicted the risk of Corvis' plan to fail miserably and Agrona keeping all the Legacy for himself so before he "passes away" he managed to inscribe the Parasite Spell on the body of Khaernos Agrona is inhabiting.
But that obviously wouldn't work unless he has enough power to counter the abyss that is Agrona's mana. For that comes the Legacy who is by definition something deeply connected to the concept of reincarnation and who is more connected to reincarnation than an instance of the Thwart like Romulos, an Aspect of Fate?
While Romulos and Agrona fight for control over the Legacy Romulos understands how short-sighted he has been. How similar to Kezess he has been. He always considered Agrona to be his Dad, the only individual who could understand him. But his Dad was like that only because of an error in the timeline. The Agrona Vritra he knew was a cancer that needed the Thwart to exist.
The Agrona Vritra in his mind has never actually existed. The Vritra name he was so proud of never existed.
As Romulos renounces the name Vritra for the name Eralith Ji-Ae finally comes to the conclusion that Corvis is the rightful heir of the Djinn knowledge now that she discovered about the existence of the Hearth and the Djinn survivors.
She cuts off Agrona's real body from the stasis chamber he was in. Taegrin Caelum would then become the battlefield between Romulos inside Khaernos body and Agrona with the "Legacy" as the prize for the winner.
As father and son fight a duel that destroys Taegrin Caelum and its surroundings, as the civil war in Alacrya rages on with the only Scythes remaining choosing their sides (Seris leading the rebellion, Cadell leading Agrona's loyalists against both Seris and the other Sovereigns and Melzri alongside Mawar retreating from the war like in the novel only to later help Seris), Dicathen finally sees some peace as the last corrupted mana beasts are killed and the stranded Alacryan soldiers captured.
Windsom would have a sort of redemption arc (although he would only stop being Kezess' dog) and be offered refuge in the Hearth by Mordain.
With the government of the High Sovereign crumbling Kezess declares the treaty with the Vritra Clan obsolete intervening directly in Dicathen by sending his dragons to restore control over the continent while he declares the Vritra Clan a threat to be terminated immediately and prepares to erase Alacrya from the Old World.