The Age of Wonder
The Legend of Lyrics
The lost past
The chaos was all around them, shifting in the strands of nether cracks of tortured skies. The worlds were dying, ripped apart by the violent torrents of uncontrollable magic that consumed all like a bursting flame. He was standing on the top of a devastated ridge, pulled from the ground by unimaginable forces that raged below. His face was somehow sad, but smiling miserably with a sour smile of a tiered man, which was like an insult to his greatest achievement. Three shades of dark and red were present within his reach. However they seemed somehow distant from his brooding, silent stare that wondered around this failing world that was once so proud and beautiful and strong without compare.
The world's shards began to ascend and veins of black nether were becoming wide open wounds that were telling the watcher of unspeakable terrors beyond their dark, pulping gates. He knew to where they lead. To a wretched place he himself was once …
Another figure soared from the skies and blocked his view on all of that exquisite game of light and shades, only to be forced to look in eyes that he despised greater that the deepest scars of creeping darkness. Those eyes of vivid blue that had once stricken painful emotions into his heart and soul were now flooded with angry tears, filled with fear and disappointment. She, for it was a girl that not jet reached her full bloom, was riding the withering winds on her snow-white wings of weaven magic, her long staff of gold and pearl sparkling with hidden danger, ready to strike at him at any moment.
… How sad, he thought, that he will never see her in full bloom. Non-the-less, what must be done, must be done at once and without hesitation on better times that are never meant to be.
She spoke: "This is as far as you will watch your madness, you …" Her voice deserted her for a moment, swallowed by a fit of sadness, but then she composed herself again and began anew, her gaze even more dreadful than before: "This is as far as you will watch this foul end, you traitor! I swear I will kill you!
"I know you'd try eventually," he laughed at her sorrowfully: "But this is nor your time nor space in which you'd soar, like a bird, ever so free from the strains of the living. This here …" he made a gesture to everything around him: "This here is my world now not yours! I conceived it just to mock your petty little wings, I killed thousands to see your tears … And here they are at last!" There was no happiness in his words. Hollow they sounded in the midst of twisting calls of doom.
Her eyes were crying, jet her tears dried before they reached her tight shut lips, before they reached him. At this time, he was already unreachable. He prayed for her cherry lips to crack and bleed on the heat of his withering madness. At that thought, his face was stretched into a foul snaring grimace that reminded her of a rabies infested wolf. He took his long blade of two dividing ends back into his right arm and pointed it towards her chest. It was snaring at her with its insane yaw of metal-born teeth, hoping to bite trough her soft pale skin into her flesh, hot from anger and life. Her lips spread into an expression of loosened hatred and she finally said the words he was waiting for so long: "Die monster!"
"My pleasure … But not just jet I won't. I have to witness the birth of this frightened new world in which I'm afraid, there is no place for you or your kind. So I must say with great hesitation and regret in mind, that it is you who must die instead of me … Or would you like all of this nether to creep uncontrolled on those who cannot weave their own wings … But then again, you would probably liked that wouldn't you!?"
The space around him shook in awe when a burst of light divided the air and clashed into his ridge, which kneeled before it with an avalanche of rolling rocks that fell down into the river of twisting shapes of light and shade. Whatever power have that burst held it was not enough. His shape stood unchallenged on the remnants of the cliff.
"The magic you possess will not suffice my dear little witch," he purred into her face, "Face it, you cannot erase the inevitable now, not if you were god itself if it would ever existed!"
A strange howl penetrated into their ears and left them both with different emotions.
"Did you hear that? The demons are coming. Jet just another sign that you should be better off dead than alive."
His warning came too late. A dark image, neither true and neither false, came diving from above like a screaming shadow of a great bird of prey. The girl was left in shock of the revelation, because she knew they were always a vanguard for even greater storms of horrors than mere shades that tried to reap trough heavy cloth of reality onto this collapsing plane.
Another shape, white as her wings, appeared on the skies and pounced at the damned apparition, so that it reared and screamed in fear and disbelief. It was a great beast of white and gray, a sphinx of great white wings and long locks of silk and silver that fell behind her pointy cat ears and onto her proud gray back. She was the girl's guardian and keeper, a beast that could face even demons.
"Hoooo?" he opened his mouth in false astonishment, "So you let the beasts do your dirty work now?"
"She's more of a person that you will ever be!" the girl threw at him.
"I bet she is, but still, one like her will change nothing, you still have to die you know."
He pounced. His feet flew from the ground like on a spring and the blade bit into a silver barrier that formed itself around the girl, but to no avail. His blade cut deep, breaking the protection with ease and sent the caster into the swirling shadows below, only to hold back a wave of intense magical stream that bashed his master flying even higher in the dense hot air.
Sphinx was trying to help, but one of the silent dark shapes still standing on the ridge draw its long crimson sword and she stopped at once. The three were too much of an opponent, even for her and her mistress.
A spatial barrier of deep purple shades erupted before him and he raised his free hand to stop it with his own. It was like stopping a raging wave and it decorated his arm with dark burns and painful redness. He grinned in pain but did not stop until the dark magic around him tried to swallow him whole. Then he retreated to a higher point and stood there, his heavy sword leaning over his head. He swung it at the exploding barrier and cut it wide open with a sound of reeling magical energies screaming in his head like tortured souls. The barrier vanished and she appeared again, visually tiered.
"You tried to lock me in your little grasp of pain didn't you? Didn't anyone told you not to use someone's own methods against them, or have you forgotten? It was I who perfected that method! Besides, it would only work on some ordinary chaps to be locked away in one's barrier. I suppose it cannot be helped, let me show you the real thing, but the barrier just won't do …" He waited on purpose, talking like an idiot, waiting for her to recover for he wanted her to witness his final blow at her fullest.
The world was at its limit and the last grips of gravity were dissipating. With every passing moment there was less air to breathe and more darkness in the sky.
He jumped for the last time, falling towards her with his sword gapping like some beast's yaws.
The brilliant light and darkness of two colliding powers was seen for miles, and when they finally went soft again, he found himself impaled on her staff and her, struck by the sharpness of his blade beneath her ribs. The blood was everywhere.
"You'll die, monster," she spoke softly for the very last time.
"So will you," he whispered in her ear, her straw colored hair tingling gently on his face: "But you are wrong. I will remain and watch the world be reborn … and someday … someday in the unforeseen future, where no one will know of such magic and wonder, I shall be reborn as a monster you hated so much, only to watch over the fulfillment of my wishes you sought so hard to prevent."
Sphinx, bound to the girl's soul fell from the sky and he started laughing like mad, his screams echoed in the lone wasteland as he too succumbed to his wound and fell in silence.
Three shapes of crimson red came and went, carrying with them the remnants of their master. The raging chaos engulfed their crimson shapes.
The unknown war was over and the destruction of the worlds came to past. The wounds of time and space healed and the creeping nether subsided in the shadows. The proud cities of old wisdom that astonished so many became empty skeletons of molten rock and hidden treasures guarded by fear and intrigue. Some foolish knights that called themselves holy even sought to harvest the knowledge of this fallen age and only achieved in waging wars and endless slaughter that lasted for generations. In this unforeseen future, a girl with tangled fox brown hair was waking from her sleep in a small sunny bedroom for two.
The first chapter preview: You all must have heard of a particular military magic instructress that has way too much power, an elementary overview over the battlefield tactics, and we all like to think of her as a sweet character even thou she's sometimes kind of rough around the edges. Some nasty tongues of military brass would even say that she's a little too perfect and to dangerous to be efficiently integrated into modern warfare, but they just say things because they are tiered and drowning in paperwork.
The truth is that this perfect soldier girl is far from being perfect, which shows in her everyday life as a serious workaholic syndrome, a professional deformation of a too excellent drill instructor, and some seriously bad cooking skills … I mean come on, by all Belkan nobility that rot in their graves (respectfully), who can boil vegetables like a well-bred English granny nowadays, I beg of you!? Well, this social glitch is immediately followed by a popular guys' rumor of her sexual orientation which, if true, is definitely a no-go for raising a child of such importance as Vivio!
So how will this great young captain Nanoha Takamachi, the Ace of aces, with all her friends being constantly busy with their own important jobs, cope with all the ups and downs of adulthood and military bureaucracy that never ceases to amaze people with its self restriction and complicity? The answers to all that and more shall await you in the next chapter of The Legend of Lyrics-The Gained present … maybe.