Annum 378 : 12M/28D
The red page pulsed once.
Now.
Slothi blinked.
Cast it.
He didn't understand why. But he obeyed.
He whispered the name scratched in blood-ink:"Bastion of the Moment."
The air cracked.
A thin red shimmer bloomed around him — a dome, humming low, flickering like candlelight. It was... underwhelming. Because it wasn't his power, the dome had been formed by the grimoire.
Then the ground moved.
A rumble passed beneath the camp, deep and slow, like something ancient turning over in its sleep beneath the dirt. Men stirred. Someone yelled from the far tents, voice tight with panic.
"What the hell was that?"
"An Earthquake?"
"No—too deep—too—"
BOOM.
The sky cracked open.
It didn't split — it peeled.
A jagged wound tore across the heavens, spilling white-red light like veins bursting. The stars disappeared in one blink. Snow turned to mist. Tents flapped violently, then ripped from their stakes. The ground began to sink.
Screams.
Slothi turned, wide-eyed inside the dome, as the world began to fall apart.
"Eh?" Slothi began to hyperventilate, but it seemed he was safe inside the dome.
A soldier staggered past, eyes wild. "What's happening?!" he shouted, blood running from one nostril.
Another was on his knees, clutching his head, howling like something was breaking inside his skull.
A horse bolted through camp with no rider — blind, foaming at the mouth, crying like a child.
"MAKE IT STOP!"
Sarge Ruun tried to rally the troops, barking orders, voice cracking mid-word. "Hold! Shields up! I said—"
His skin turned to ash.
Right there. Mid-breath.
Ash blew away in the wind that wasn't wind — an unraveling, not a gust.
Then the snow caught fire.
Slothi flinched as the flames didn't burn — they peeled. Reality folded, like someone was turning pages too fast.
The world was falling apart all around him.
The air itself grew heavy. A boy named Till — one of the youngest in the corps, maybe fifteen — ran toward Slothi, tears streaking down his soot-covered face.
"Help! Please! I don't wanna—!"
He didn't finish.
He fell forward mid-run — vanished before he hit the ground. Clothes and boots dropped, empty. A shadow smeared across the snow behind where he'd stood.
Slothi stared at the boots. His knees buckled.
His barrier still held.
Everything outside it was coming undone.
A woman, Lieutenant Kael, screamed as her arms disintegrated from the fingertips in. She tried to hold her sword, but her fingers flaked into dust, then her jaw, then her eyes.
She met Slothi's gaze as she died.
Her last expression wasn't pain.
It was confusion.
The dome held three seconds longer.
Then it dropped.
Slothi staggered, coughing, heat rushing into his lungs. The air had changed — lighter, almost thin, like the atmosphere itself had been peeled back a layer. Sound faded to a hush. The wind stopped. The snow stopped. Even the crackling of fire had ceased.
He looked around.
There was nothing left.
The camp was a crater of black glass and steaming ash. Not just destroyed — deleted.
Three hundred souls, gone. Soldiers who mocked him. Cookhands who passed him scraps. Sleepers. Dreamers. Laughers. Drinkers.
All dust.
Slothi stood in their ruin.
His chest rose and fell. Slowly. Shakily. His body trembled, not from cold, but from something far worse: emptiness.
He wasn't crying. He didn't feel guilt. But a strange nausea twisted through his gut.
You were spared, the grimoire whispered inside his head.
The world has been rewritten. The weak have been removed. The canvas has been cleaned.
Slothi turned in a slow circle.
He recognized landmarks — the shattered stump where Brax ordered them to piss. The blackened ruin of the watchtower. The latrine pit, now a molten hole.
All of it—ghosted, gone and broken.
A dog barked once in the distance. Then silence.
He took a step forward. Glass crunched beneath his heel.
Another step.
A scorch mark stretched across the mud like a shadow burned in place. Someone had tried to run. A trail of smeared boots. They'd gotten four steps. Maybe five.
He followed it.
He found a melted badge. Bent metal. Still warm.
He pocketed it. No reason. Just reflex.
And then—He heard it.
The wind returned. But it didn't blow. It sang.
Low. Long. Like a chant carried from miles below the surface.
Slothi looked up. The sky was wrong again.
He turned away from the corpses-that-weren't. From the silence. From the boots and bones and shadows.
He didn't mourn. Not properly. But something heavy sat in his throat — like a sob held back, not out of strength, but because it had no place to go.
He had known these people. Hated them. Endured them.
And now…
They were part of the silence.
Would you walk through the end of the world, Slothi? Would you carry its memory? Would you keep killing, so it remembers you back?
Slothi stared down at his red-tinged reflection in the glass-like mud.
And whispered:"Yes."
Then he walked, searching for life, food, anything.
Because as he knew it, the world was gone.
The wind had died again.Everything was still. Too still.
Slothi walked beneath the charred ribs of a tree — or what was left of it. Blackened branches curled skyward like reaching fingers, bark stripped, wood cracked and weeping amber.
At the base, he saw it.
A nest.
Half-tumbled from a crooked limb, resting in a patch of gray dust. Twigs scorched, leaves brittle, barely holding together. Inside — four small eggs. All broken. Tiny splinters of shell scattered like porcelain teeth.
He crouched.
The insides were long cooked. One had burst entirely, its yolk caked across the side of the nest like something trying to crawl out before the end.
Slothi frowned. Not sad. Just... puzzled.
"Is this real?" He pondered, the chaos in the sky above him was real.
The grimoire lay silent in his hands.
Heavy winds blew through the lands, Slothi faced his head towards the ground, his wild green hair flapping freely.
Destruction stood all around him, destruction and silence.
For someone who had been nothing in the world, to see everything else be reduced to his level... Slothi felt better.
In the chaos, he felt enlightened.
He felt, for the first time in his life...
Chosen.