The air was white ash, yet still burning.
Ciel Morningnoir knelt, a creature of silver hair, tattered robes, and blood that healed faster than it could fall. Two jagged, obsidian horns, cracked but stubbornly affixed to his skull, barely broke through the gore covering his head. Beneath the soot and grime, his eyes were a startling, furious red.
Above him, the Angel of Purity, one of the Celestial vanguard, descended on wings woven from sun-fire. It didn't strike; it merely existed. And that existence was dissolving Ciel. The Angel's pure light was the natural predator of the Yaksha soul, peeling Ciel's very essence from his bones.
It took them five hundred years to learn how to kill me, Ciel thought, his lips peeling back from his teeth in a grotesque smile of pain. But they did it.
He had seen his father, the Heavenly Yaksha, reduced to spiritual dust by these celestial abominations. He had seen the Demon Lords slaughtered and the Humans turned to crystalline statues. He, the half-blood who couldn't properly sense a single mote of spiritual energy, had lived the longest. His survival was based entirely on sheer animal rage and his disgusting, inhuman ability to regrow severed limbs and shredded organs—a feature his proud, spiritual brethren had always mocked as "the low-born curse."
Now, even that curse was failing.
His remaining hand, caked in the dried blood of a thousand forgotten battles, clutched the final artifact: the Seventh Crystal Skull. He had spent the preceding years tracking down these relics, moving through the ash and ruin until all seven were collected. They rested, humming cold and silent, upon the cracked, ruined altar of the forgotten Dragon God. It was the only legend the Celestials hadn't managed to erase.
"I'm out of time," Ciel rasped. The light was consuming his left shoulder. He could feel his skin dissolving, and the regeneration struggling, desperately slow against the divine decay.
The Angel of Purity raised its glowing sword—a blade of focused light, prepared to erase the last demi-demon stain on their conquest.
Ciel ignored it. He stared at the seven silent skulls, their collective spiritual power vast and horrifying. It was the antithesis of his own weak soul, yet it was his only connection to the entity that could grant his demand.
"Dragon God," his voice was a raw shout that tore through his regenerating throat. "I don't want victory. I don't want peace. The world is yours. I only want one thing."
He threw back his head, exposing his neck to the Angel's blade.
"Give me back the time I wasted. Send me back to the moment where I could have changed this hell."
The Angel's blade sliced down. A blinding, searing white light enveloped everything. It was not the Angel's power. It was the unleashed will of the seven skulls, granting the final, desperate demand of the last, undying witness.
The world went silent.