The doors of the grand hall creak opened. The sound echoing through laughter and chatter like a blade scraping over glass.
Every head turned.
The musicians stopped mid-note. Forks froze in trembling hands. The Emperor's heart leapt in his chest, his blind eyes glimmering faintly. "Humaia?" he whispered, voice trembling between hope and disbelief. "My daughter.... she has come!"
She appeared in the archway, but not as the daughter he had raised.
A snail-like creature, her once-porcelain skin twisted into slimy membranes, dragged itself across the polished floor.
Its broken shell coloured crimson and gray leaked rotting organs that were disgusting like half-living innards. Her neck, or what remained of it, carried a human head, her head tilted, pale, and trembling. Her long gray hair was tangled with dark sludge.
Her eyes were crying blood, each tear burning her face as it slid down.
The hall fell silent. The candles flickered. Some nobles gasped; others collapsed, fainting.
From that disfigured mouth, her voice came not fully of hers, fractured and distant like an enchant of a ghost trapped between breaths.
"D.… don't…."
The word shivered the walls.
"Save…. me.…"
The Emperor's wine cup fell from his hand, shattering. The red spilled across the white marble like a prophecy fulfilled.
He couldn't see her, but he could feel it. Her presence, her agony, the malformed remnants of her soul crying through his spirit. His mind painted her face from memory, and that made it worse.
He stood, trembling, fists tightening around the edge of the table. "Who—who has done this to my child!?"
No one answered. The hall was dead silent except for the drip… drip… drip of blood.
His voice rose again, now shaking the pillars. "Who dared to touch my bloodline!? Who cursed my Humaia!?"
The creature groaned again, dragging its malformed body closer, the slime scorched the floor. Her head tilted, lips twitching into something between a sob and a scream. "Father…. burn…. me…."
"NO!" Hamish roared, slamming his hand on the table. The plates rattled. "I will not burn you, my child! I will burn them. The monsters who did this!"
The nobles began to cry, priests fell to their knees praying. The Emperor, blind but burning with a light beyond sight, lifted his hands toward the heavens.
His rage was not human anymore. It was the fury of a man who had lost everything, yet still clung to the illusion that vengeance could mend the world.
"I will erase them," he vowed through clenched teeth. "Every empire that conspired! Every god who watched! Every soul who laughed at you!!"
The hall began to crack in his presence. Glass cracked. The chandeliers swayed. His voice thundered,
"By my name Hamish Kha, Emperor of Dael Kayef — I shall tear their names from history itself!!"
The creature waved, tried to come closer to Hamish while everyone was stepping away. Hamish Kha reached his hand further searching for her head. He grabbed her head in his chest.
"Father.... kill me.... It.... hurts...."
It made Emperor want to shout in grief and roll on the floor.
Outside, lightning burst the palace towers, and the world itself seemed to die beneath the weight of his wrath.
The broken princess screamed once more half-pain, half-love and her sound vanished into silence, leaving only her father's roaring grief across the dying empire.
Back in the shattered shadows of the once-beautiful city, Jack still parasited, stood in the basement with smell of burnt incense and iron. His hands shook, not with hesitation, but with the rage of something no longer entirely his own. His eyes glowed faintly violet, pupils dilated like a beast staring into void.
The cauldron before him hissed and growled like it was alive, bubbling with a black-red liquid, swirling and boiling with faces that screamed and vanished. The glow of the flames beneath it was not of fire, but of blood burning itself to stay alive.
In his trembling hands, he held the baby—his and Humaia's. The small body, warm and innocent, unaware of the horror around it.
"This world was built on lies. Let it burn in truth."
Jack's real self screamed inside, the faint spark of humanity clawing against invisible chains. But his body moved without mercy. He raised the child slowly above the cauldron.
"Stop," whispered the buried voice of the real Jack. "Please…. not him.… not my child.…"
He was just an ordinary baker at the streets, helpless. The parasite's voice overpowered him with a cold choir whispering in his head.
"Every empire births itself on sacrifice. This is yours."
With a single movement, the baby slipped from his trembling hands.
A crimson wave rippled across the surface, forming strange runes shaped like veins that spread beyond the cauldron, into the ground, into the city, into the very foundation of the empire.
Ghira's laughter filled the basement, distorted, layered, not human. "At last…. The Orchestra of Shepda is born."
Jack's face twisted, half-crying, half-laughing. His tears were bloody now. He tried to scream, but his throat only spat cough. Unwilling, his body, plays the Orchestra.
Then,
Above ground, the sky split apart. Clouds twisted into spirals, glowing red and black. From the palace to the forest, every light turned darker.
People screamed, running for cover, but the music followed. It resonated with the earth, amplifying until it became pure destruction.
Palaces melted into the ground. Mountains curved inward, crumbling. The sky itself seemed to tear apart like fabric, revealing an endless void.
The Dael Kayef Empire which was once bright, once eternal was erased in moments. The Orchestra of Shepda had begun its performance.
At its center, Jack stood motionless before the cauldron, half-burned, half-smiling, eyes hollow.
"Don't forgive me, Humaia.…"
"Our story…. ends in the sound of our child's cry."
The parasite dissolved fading at dawn
Its pain grasped him one last time before silence swallowed the world.
Jack fell to his knees, half-human, half-empty, the smell of burning heaven still clinging to his skin.
His eyes had no light left in them, only hollow grief and fragments of screams that weren't his. The Empire of Dael Kayef was gone.... turned to dust and melody. Yet somehow, the world did not end.
The world had finally drawn its sword.
They said Heaven grew furious, its gates cracked by the echo of the Orchestra. Angels fell like meteorites, burning cities into punishment of eternity. Earth answered with fury that its armies are marching across divine soil. The oceans split apart, carrying legions of metal and spirit alike.
Between them, Jack Tim was standing with his living body and dead spirit.
He was no longer a man. The parasite's residue had left marks inside his soul—runes of knowledge that belonged to no mortal tongue.
He saw the threads of the world differently now, as if life itself were a battlefield of equations and sins. He carried no empire, no crown, no name. Only millions of guilt he could not wash off.
So he fought.
In the heart of that war, Jack found allies unlike any he had ever imagined, warriors who spoke not in words, but in memories, each holding fragments of thier own worlds. They fought beside him in storms that screwed mountains, against celestial beings whose blood rained as golden mist.
He remembered one night, the stars were replaced by swords stuck in the firmament. Jack stood upon a ruined tower with two warriors—one cloaked in shadow, the other shining like dawn. Together, they cut through the choir of devils that fell from the broken firmament. Their names would never be spoken again. Their presence.… would never fade.
The war raged for what felt like centuries—time itself lost meaning in that chaos. At the eastern edge of the fractured world, two Overseers descended, their existence a curse upon reason. Reality was like servants for them; the space turned into mist, and screams turned into shapes.
Jack stood there, alone.
No army. No god. No heaven behind him.
He had one sword, one prayer, and a promise whispered to a name that once loved him.
The sky turned dark. Jack, mortal yet defiant, raised his blade where its glow was brightening but pure, like the last candle before night.
For three days and thirty nights, he held the Eastern Wall alone. The waves of reality shattered against him. The Overseers' eyes burned through his flesh and spirit alike.
It ended. Only the mark of a man who once loved a princess and destroyed the world…. now standing as its savior.
History would forget his name. The stars would erase his story but the wind, every time it passed through ruins, whispered softly to his ear,
"He stayed."
Jack stood before the shattered grave of Humaia, his shadow thin and trembling across the blackened soil. The marble slab that once carried her name had cracked down the middle, splitting it into two halves like the world had refused to keep her whole even in death.
He placed a single, dying rose on the grave. Its petals were brittle, colorless, drained of fragrance. His fingers shook as he traced the letters still carved on the stone, and a whisper escaped his throat, "I'm sorry."
The wind blew softly through the ruins of the garden that once thrived with music and laughter. Broken statues, half-sunken into earth, stared blankly at his. Each one a memory fossilized by grief. Jack sat beside the grave, closing his eyes.
He remembered her chattering in the corridors, her soft recital while tending the flowers. He remembered her hand brushing his cheek, her voice calling his name. All that remained now was silence and the gnawing ache of loss.
He had stopped counting days since the empire fell. Time no longer passed; it lingered, heavy and suffocating. He wandered among the ruins of Dael Kayef like a ghost still pretending to breathe.
The great towers lay split, melted by the heat of the Orchestra he had unleashed. The rivers were gone, replaced by veins of black tar that whispered in unfamiliar tongues.
At last, he returned to the garden, the one Humaia had loved most. The one where she used to kneel by the lilies and speak to the birds. It was nothing but a graveyard of twisted trees and ash now.
He walked to the same old oak where he had first kissed her. Its bark was charred and hollow, its roots clawing into the scorched earth. Jack looked up at the raining, crying sky and smiled weakly, a man who had lost the privilege of hope. From his tattered coat, he took a thin rope, stained from the war.
"I killed everything that loved me," he said softly, as though speaking to the stars. "So let the world forget me too."
He had no intention of having revenge.
He thought that revenge could give him nothing beneficial instead making him more of a monster.
Without hesitation, he tied the rope to the crooked branch and stepped forward into the silence.
His veins seeped a thick, green-black fluid—rotten blood still alive, pulsing with the remnants of that parasitic curse. It spilled into the soil like poison, yet its touch birthed something unspeakable. The flowers twisted into flesh-colored vines that dripped acid. The trees grew eyes between their knots. The soft grass became razors, slicing through the air like whispers.
Small animals that had survived the cataclysm stumbled into the tainted garden—rabbits, foxes, birds and emerged as nightmares. Their bodies turned translucent, limbs splitting into tendrils; teeth sprouted where none should exist. They were no longer animals. They were Razorbugs, the cursed offspring of grief and rot.
Yet amidst the corruption, something else stirred. The three Cerberus once tamed by Emperor Hamish wandered into the garden's heart, their bodies burned and broken from the war. The corrupted blood touched their wounds but instead of devouring, it cleansed. The darkness in their veins burned away, replaced by blinding gold light. Their three canine heads transformed into one lion, one lamb, one hawk. Each of them glowing with divine fire. Wings sprouted from their backs, wide enough to eclipse the sun.
Even miracles are feared by that living. The surviving priests of the fallen empire found the creature. A radiant, three-headed lion walking through the wasteland like a god reborn. They trembled before its light, calling it an omen of the empire's sin. In fear, they sealed it beneath the ruins of a cathedral made of mirrors, where reflections were surpressing its power endlessly.
There, beneath the ground, the angelic beast slept, guarding the broken soul of the world above, the cursed garden that once bloomed with love and laughter.
"Humaia.… I kept my promise. I stayed.
Everything that happened till now, was part of Ghira's mischievous evil plan to destroy Kayef.... Alone.