In the beginning, there was light.
No, no, that's not quite it. Add falls and he falls and he falls again, but it never starts with light. He thinks back to his childhood, to the stories his mother told, to the Elrian bible lessons. He falls further down. He thinks farther back. It never starts with light.
In the beginning, there was nothing, and thus, as he falls, Add is nothing.
"You're going to want to die," Glaive says, mocking and shrill as he tends to be. Unfortunately, Glaive has never been a good mentor in these kinds of things. "If the time sickness doesn't get to you first, then Seven Tower will. You know you won't live to see a full life."
"I've never wanted to live out a full life," Add argues, and swings his fist towards the voice. It doesn't connect with anything. He keeps falling. "I just want to live a happy one."
Glaive is laughing again. "Well, then," he says, "good fucking luck. You'll need it."
Add just keeps falling.
Elsword is roasting tonight's dinner over the fire when it starts to rapidly cloud over.
At first, he's ready to abandon camp and move everyone indoors, because there's no way Rena can control a runaway tornado with her magic, but then he sees the fissure. A dark crack opens up over the camp, and then a bundle of boy and time tumbles out and splatters against the ground.
As Elsword watches in horror (and slight awe), the boy shakes himself off and winces and grips his eyepatch like falling somehow caused his eye immense pain. He staggers to his feet and stumbles into the circle by the fire, where he—
"Please," the stranger gasps, gripping Eve by her shoulders, shaking her, trying to strangle her with fingers made of melting ice, "please, I just want- I just want to live, I just want-"
Eve does not bat an eye, even though all their friends have leapt to their feet with their weapons in hand and the stranger continues to to plead with her for mercy. Eventually, he just collapses in a weak clump at her feet. Rena cautiously lowers her bow, letting her arrow dissipate, and gasps when she turns the boy over and sees the eyepatch weeping black tears. "I don't know who he is," she says, "but he needs medical attention right now."
Elsword drops his sword and looks up. The dark clouds overhead have all blown away, and the skies are clear once more, revealing a glowing, blood red sunset.
"Huh," he says. "Didn't expect hobos to start dropping out of the sky at this hour."
The boy's name is Add. He gives little other information. While everyone is wary at first because of what he did (what he could have done) to Eve, he offers an explanation: he is a traveler from a different Elrios, and in his world, the Nasod were a weaponized race led by a tyrannical ruler. In his Elrios, there are a million units just like Eve who would tear him apart without batting an eye.
(It's so easy to lie, it's so easy to lie, it's so easy to lie—)
It's easier to forgive him for the little blunder after he takes to the battlefield, though. Add fights with lightning and anger and flickers of dark energy, different from what they've seen from the demons and Henir's forces alike. He commands his energy-generating prisms (dynamos, he calls them) from a distance, preferring to fight with his gadgets rather than his hands. It's effective and speaks to his strengths, as close-quarters combat is completely out of the question for him.
Forgiveness is simple. Trust is not.
Raven is the first to voice his concerns, and honestly, why wouldn't he? His nightmares are deeply rooted in betrayal, even to this day. He comes to Elsword with his misgivings in quiet, sitting the boy down like he would a child.
"I understand that he's a good fighter," Raven says, knowing fully well that his friend knows who he's talking about, "and I know he's genuinely fighting against the demons, but I get a dangerous feeling from him. He doesn't feel safe."
And although Elsword is still young and inexperienced, he isn't naive. "I know," he says quietly. "The day he dropped from the sky, I thought a tornado was about to kick up. He uses some dangerous technologies we have practically no grasp over."
"Not to mention he tried to strangle Eve as soon as he dropped into our world," Raven mutters. Trust is not nearly as freely given as forgiveness, especially for a betrayed general.
Add fits into their clique with ease, though. It's like he was part of them all along, laughing at their jokes even though he clearly tries to mask himself as standoffish and cold. He helps them with their weapons and fights at their sides, and in return, they become his home, his family.
God knows he needs one.
"Your eye is badly damaged," Rena says gently, brushing the hair out of his face. "Can you still see through it?"
"Barely." Add squints, although it really doesn't do much. "That half of my vision is blurry and kind of dark."
Rena sighs and hands him the poultice she had been making. "As I suspected. You have advanced iritis, and it's heavily impacting your eyesight."
"What's iritis?"
"An inflammation of the iris. Yours is bad enough that it's starting to spread out into your sclera—the whites of your eyes." She helps him affix his eyepatch over the poultice, tying it around the back of his head snugly. "I don't have the exact medicines to stop it; I can only slow down the growth for now, until I can figure out the source." There's an odd kind of light in her eyes as she runs a motherly hand down the back of his hair. "Were you poisoned in some way? Jabbed by a scorpion?"
Shame washes over every corner of his being as he lowers his head and tries to find the words to speak. "My father implanted Nasod parts into my body when I was young." He scowls. "He wanted to turn me into a human superweapon."
"Hey, now." Rena tips his head up, gently, and tears begin to rise to his eyes as he remembers his mother (beloved, beloved mother) doing the same. "You are not responsible for your father's crimes, alright? In Elvish, we have a saying that translates roughly to the burden of an ancestor may last a hundred generations, but the shame should only last one. You're capable of doing more than he could have ever done."
"I know. It's just," and here he heaves a sigh, "sometimes, I don't know how I'm still here."
Rena purses her lips, like she's confused, or perhaps frustrated. "How so?"
"I can't die." Add knows this, has known it for several timelines already. "The time-sickness won't let me die. Not until I find what it is I'm looking for, apparently."
"Oh, Add." Rena pulls him into her arms warmly. Even though there's still space in her chest to breathe, Add feels stifled for other reasons entirely. "Time travel is a dangerous game. We called your folk the atalante, or the downfallen." Her breathing evens out from its frantic pace. "How many timelines are you at so far?"
"This is the seventh."
"What happened in the first?"
Add closes his eyes. "You all died, and I couldn't save you in time, so the next best thing was to leave for a new one."
She kisses his forehead; there lingers a feeling of spring that fades before he can even recognize it. "There is another word for the time traveler in my language," she says. "The pel-umbar. The fate-walkers. I hope you can walk onwards and take control of your own fate."
She leaves him with a small dose of herbs, to staunch the pain from his eye. He waits until she disappears into her tent, and then he washes them away in the river.
Addiction is hard to shake off, and quitting will be inevitably difficult when Rena leaves them too, this time.
"Do you practice fighting to destress as well?"
Add looks up from where he's scratching notes into the dirt with a stick. Ara stands there with her spear in hand, strong and upright like she's anchored to the earth. "When I was younger, I would destroy training dummies when I was angry," she reminisces. "My siblings teased and laughed, but even they knew to stay out of the way when the training dummy heads started to roll."
"How'd you know I've been training?" he asks, sticking his hands in his pockets. "It's not like I sent up some massive flare or anything." He scowls. "I made sure not to do that."
In response, Ara sweeps her foot across the dirt, kicking up a layer of practically lightning-fried dust. "You leave other trails behind," she says, "that last in other ways." She gestures widely across the clearing and the massive violet ripple wake he left. Whoops. "Sometimes, you leave behind the smallest impact that may make the greatest difference."
Add thinks of the butterfly effect that he's woven himself into, and scoffs. "Cool words." He watches as she begins to shuffle her spear through the dist, stirring up a faded lavender cloud. "Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?"
"Preparing the field." A glowing orb of energy manifests in her hand; he looks away just before she drops it, spreading golden light over the dirt. When he dares to look again, the field is clean of the lightning streaks he left behind, and the soil is packed and firm once more.
Ara fights like a bird in flight—Add has always known this, but he's never watched her train before. While he sketches ideas into the dirt at his feet, Ara flies across the field, bouncing off trees and the ground and even wind currents, ducking from invisible enemies and non-existent weapons. Every move she makes is swift and sleek and graceful.
(He kinda envies her in that manner—the will to genuinely fight, to survive, has long escaped him.)
"How do you do it?" he asks when she finally lands, one foot skimming the ground before the other places itself delicately in front. "How can you keep fighting when the world is about to end?"
She tilts her head in curiosity at that. "What do you mean, when the world is about to end?" She gestures grandly around herself, like a princess surveying her broad lands. "I thought my world ended when Ran killed my family and abducted my brother in Fahrmann. Then I came here, and my world got a whole lot wider." Her eyes are so bright, so hopeful, so full of light. "There's never an end to any world, Add. Elrios may fall, but Empyrean is still intact, and so is Maple, and all the nations over the ocean."
"Yeah, but…" How can he explain it to her? Oh, y'know, every single timeline I've been to has ended up falling to pieces. You're going to die a painful, miserable death. "The war drags on. The world is dying. How can you be so happy?"
Ara just shakes her head and smiles again. "The world may be dying, but it's not dead yet," she insists. "And I refuse to give up hope while it still lives."
Add watches as she sweeps the field with her Oriental magic again, cleansing it with a second bright orb of spirit energy. "Ciel will be cooking dinner shortly," she reminds him. "Please join us. You forget to eat too often. It's not good for you."
She leaves, and it's just Add in the lonely field again.
He sighs and goes back to sketching in the dirt.
The issue with constantly landing in war-riddled timelines is that Add is more on edge than all the rest of them combined. He jumps at the slightest sound, dynamos already whirring to life and ready to seek and destroy. Even though he knows it's futile, the time sickness won't let him go until he finds that one thing that makes him whole, and he might as well try to attain it. There are a hundred thousand ways any of them could die now, and he knows he's only delaying the inevitable, but at least he can try.
The sheer paranoia comes in handy when they nearly get ambushed, though. Everyone else is setting up camp when something rustles in the bushes, and though Elsword says it's probably just a lost phoru, Add approaches the bush cautiously with his dynamos on standby. The next moment, he's windmilling his arms through the air and falling as the incubus assassin slices cleanly through one of his dynamos with a wicked-looking scimitar.
Upon its destruction, though, the dynamo releases about two thousand volts of electric energy, which immediately jump up the scimitar's blade of cold and into the incubus's hand. The demon jitters from the energy, and immediately falls to the ground in the steaming heap, dead.
A few of the others squeak. "Okay, I'm sorry I doubted you," Elsword says, already on his feet with his eye wide. "Guys, Add's right, we're not safe here. We need to head out."
They pack up quickly, but Add just stays frozen where he landed on his butt beside the dead incubus. The halves of his dynamo are lying loose on the ground, everything down to the central microchip sliced in half by a blade of impeccable sharpness. He has a spare, but he'll have to make another dynamo soon to make up for the lost one. Maybe if I salvage the parts…
Eve wanders over, having finished her packing with the efficiency of any Nasod. He pays her no attention; he's already killed her once, twice, three times, for her parts before, after all. Her core means nothing if he has something much more powerful. "May I observe?" she asks, and he just gives half a nod and says nothing.
He pulls a jumble of wires out from inside the dynamo. Most of the damage is either superficial, or to the microchip. Thankfully, he's had the sense to make extras. While the group packs, he unravels the wires, strips the coating with his teeth, twists them back together, and installs the new microchip. The dynamo will still be effectively held together by spiderwebs until he can properly sit down and reseal everything, so he sticks it in his travel pack and configures his spare.
The last thing he remembers to do before they leave camp is to check on the incubus. The body is still intact, but he's not about to sully this earth with its blood. It's not like he has the weapon to do it, either.
Well.
He picks up the scimitar. The construction is both solid and refined, and expected of a high-ranking demon assassin. If the demons weren't so desperate, they wouldn't have sent out such a powerful pawn. They must be getting close to the stronghold, and the resonant thrum of demonic energy in the blade tells him as much.
Cold steel, however, is a powerful metal, and a technology long lost to the people of Elrios. It's lightweight, and easily supports multiple enchantments, unlike most iron and steel weapons. The only downside is that it's a lot more difficult to work with, thanks to its malleability. The fact that this scimitar has such a beautiful, efficient design means that it was worked at the hands of a master.
Add takes the scimitar. He'll ask Ain to say a blessing over it to dispel the cold burn from the demon influence, if the priest exists in this timeline. He may know nothing of swords, but another weapon couldn't hurt.
Now, he just needs to learn to use it.
Elesis offers to teach him the basics in sword fighting; she'd been a teacher for some time in Velder before joining her brother in travelling. She feels out the balance of the scimitar first by swinging it around and declares it "delicious!" before moving onto her lesson on stance and grip. She doesn't have a scimitar of her own, but has used a cutlass before, and, in her own words, "that's close enough".
"Point up, Add," she chides, twirling her branch around in a circle. He grimaces and lifts his own up. Since they don't have blunt practice swords, this is apparently the next best option. "Remember, you need to lead with your sword. It is an extension of yourself that you need to extend for best results."
"My dynamos are extensions of myself," he complains, rolling his shoulder back. They're only on the first real lesson, and his arm is already irrevocably sore. "I don't just toss my dynamos out there!"
"Uh, yes, you do," Elesis snarks. "Chin up. Check your stance."
Add sighs, tips his chin up, and checks his stance. It's mediocre at best. He shifts his foot sideways to compensate.
"Excellent. Now, your scimitar uses mostly the outer edge. That means you'll have to backhand more often." She swings experimentally as an example. Add can literally hear the air whoosh with the force of her swing. "Can you try that?"
"Um." He grips the branch, readies himself, and swings. The branch goes flying out of his hand and nearly hits Lu in the head. "Whoops. Sorry 'bout that."
Lu sticks her tongue out at him. "You'll get better with time," she cackles, before leaving to wash her face before bed.
"Well, that wasn't all that bad of a first try," Elesis reasons. "You had good stance right up until the moment the sword flew out of your hand, which is, honestly, better than I'd expected. You also didn't panic. I'd give it a solid, mmm, six out of ten."
"How do I make sure the sword doesn't just fly out of my hand every time I try to swing?" he asks, scowling. "The centripetal force practically rips the sword out of my hand!"
Elesis holds her hands up defensively. "Okay, first of all, fancy words don't work on me. I dropped out of school at eleven to join the army. Second of all, you're using a literal branch. Your scimitar is balanced across the blade, so the centipede force isn't gonna be as bad. If you can master the branch, you can deal with a scimitar, easy-peasy."
"Centripetal," Add corrects with a grimace, but he goes to pick up his fallen branch nonetheless.
From her seat by the campfire, Ara raises her hand. "Um, Elesis, may I make a suggestion?" she requests. "If it makes sense, it might be better to train him in defensive maneuvers instead of offensive ones."
This is a remark that catches both Add and Elesis off guard. "What do you mean?" Elesis asks, curious. "Isn't the point of having a sword to fight with it?"
"Yes, but he has his dynamos," Ara argues. "Where I come from, the tradition is to use curved swords, but that is because I come from a clan of former horseback nomads. We were trained in the art of the bow, because it is long-ranged, and should our arrows fail us, only then will we draw our swords. Meanwhile, here in the south of the continent, you favour one-on-one combat."
Elesis's eyes light up. "Oh, you're right," she says. "A curved sword is less effective in a one-on-one fight against a straight sword. Unless you're riding a horse into battle, the scimitar isn't going to bag you any demons immediately. You'll be better off learning how to defend yourself in case any demons get past your dynamites."
"Dynamos," Add mumbles.
"Gah, you know what I mean." Elesis slugs him in the arm, and he squawks. "C'mon, arm up, keep your stance. Ara, you wanna come help?"
"I can try, but it's been a while." Ara grabs a branch of her own from the firewood pile and starts to strip off the twigs. "Alright!"
If anything, Add has to smile. It's his first genuine smile in six timelines.
Maybe things can get better.
There's thirteen of them, crowded behind the rocks like gnomes peering over a garden wall. Beyond this thin cover, there lies a cruel plain, its expanse only marred by the massive tower wreathed in flames. It stands sentinel over the land, hissing with ancient demonic energy.
It's a gruesome sight, and one that Add has seen all too recently as of lately.
Oh, sure, he's been here for nearly two months, but is that really anything when he's lived so many years across so many lives already? Although he barely looks a day over sixteen, his calculations tell him he's lived nearly twenty years. He looks like he's never been through anything nearly as horrific as he has.
Well, except for maybe the eyepatch.
There's no rush to get to the demons, though. Elsword is marking out a plan, one that will take them past the initial rock wall, across the plain, into the tower, and hopefully victorious out the other side. Add runs the odds quietly in his head. They aren't looking great.
"Question," Aisha says, raising her staff, "what do we do if we encounter something that we can't deal with? Like, remember Amethyst in Feita? You had a really bad time fighting those, and I couldn't deal with the charging glitters because of my leg injury."
"That's why we're going to stick together," Elsword says, more resolute than ever before. "Between all of us, we can cover each other's weaknesses. It's going to be tough, but I have faith in all of you." His eyes are shining in the dim light, like he's thirteen again and hasn't learned of the world's cruelty yet. "Let's make this count."
They all charge over the ridge, weapons in hand and ready to fight. Lu and Ciel fuse into one, the way they do when times are dire and they need to conserve energy to the extreme. Rena notches five arrows at once, holding her bow at her side as she runs. Chung slams his cannon into the ground to reload and sends out a blue gust of wind that rattles at everyone's ankles. Ain shatters his pendulum on the ground and lights up in fluorescent blue.
It's an impressive display, but Add knows it's futile. His calculations tell him that it's pointless to run, to hide, to fight; the It's just a matter of time.
They don't know that, he reminds himself, and plunges himself into the battle.
What's horrifying above all else is that the plains are virtually empty. Even though their team is still dressed in bright garb beneath all the mud and bloodstains, nothing seeks them out from across the field. There is just no life across the void before the tower, only bloodstained rocks where battles of millennia past were carried out.
"This isn't right," Lu yells, carried across the field on wings of sapphire, "this isn't right. There shouldn't be this much blood here. Where are all the Asmodean demons? Where have they gone?"
There's a thrum in the ground. Add can't quite put his finger on it, but it feels like the tower is laughing at them and their misfortunes, like a cruel reminder that they shouldn't be traipsing in these forgotten lands. Nevertheless, they push on, leaping off boulders and landing in the dark with no sense of direction aside from onwards.
"Lu, what is that thing?" Aisha shouts. She's taken to running instead of wasting her mana on teleporting. "It's massive!"
"We call it the Tower of Grief," Lu replies, never once taking her eyes off the distance. "Or sometimes the Tower of Crimson Flame. It i—it was once a massive military base. The Asmodean demons were commanded by Stirbargen, there's no way they could have fallen!"
"Not the tower," Elsword yells, "the snakes!"
Add looks up. He's never gotten this far with the El Search Party, so when he finally locks his gaze on the tower, it instantly jolts him awake.
Curling around the apex of the tower, like hideous, thorny vines, is a quartet of serpentine creatures, snarling like ancient machines that haven't quite learned to purr. Add hears them from far away, and decides that he's hopping out of this timeline as soon as he can.
"Miss Demon, how do we get to the top of that tower?" Ain asks, barely skimming the ground. "I suppose it would be a bit excessive to ask for a staircase."
"There is one, but it would take too long for us to ascend," Lu confirms. "Aisha, can you teleport us up there?"
"I can try," Aisha says, grimacing. "But it'll take a few tries to get up everyone up there, I can't take you all at once!"
"Then you take half, and I'll take half," Add says, reaching for his control panel. The others turn to him with matching confusion, and he only shrugs. "I can do it, okay? Don't ask."
Aisha scowls. "Alright, we'll head up." She mutters an incantation, slams her staff into the ground, and in an instant, half of them are gone in a flash of violet light. From above, the snarling turns to roars of aggression.
"We should go too, Add," Ara urges. "Quickly!"
They gather in on him, and the contact is stifling, but Add gathers up all his willpower, sets his dynamos to transport mode, and hits the button. There is, in no particular order, a painful buzz, a scream, and a flash of light; when Add opens his eyes again, one of the crimson dragon heads looms over him, hissing and spitting globules of acid.
Then Elesis brings her claymore down on its head, and the spell breaks. Add throws himself free from everyone else's grasp, and calls his dynamos back to battle mode. "Let's try this one!" he yells, swinging an arm out to direct them. The dynamos churn and crackle, generating an orb of electricity that violently drops down onto the dragon head, the gravity field dragging the beast down and slamming its head into the stone of the tower.
"Good thinking, Add!" Rena releases her shot: a single arrow shimmering with frost and ice that pierces the hide of the dragon and begins to spread. "Keep it down for as long as you can, we can kill it that way!"
As they watch in horror, though, flames lick at the edges of the frost, and as Add's gravity field runs out of electricity, the beast rears its head and howls at the sky. Patches of magenta light capture their groups, and it's only a matter of seconds before they have to scramble out of the way of massive arcane meteors that shake the tower on impact.
"What the fuck is this thing?" Add yells, skidding to a stop. "How do we even put a dent in it?"
"Very carefully, I'd presume." Eve raises her hand, and a void opens in the air above them, revealing one of her guardian Nasod. "Avoid the meteors as they approach."
Add bares his teeth and brings his dynamos close in again. "Thirty thousand volts," he seethes, as the gadgets begin to generate more and more electricity, "forty thousand! I need it all!"
This time, they whirl into a circle that tears open a crack in the timespace fabric. Who's to say Eve is the only one who can make good use of the interdimensional gap? He brings the dynamos down, and the continuum snaps like a guitar string, shockwaves rushing down in gravitational spheres to thunder down on the dragon's back.
From all around, everyone summons their strongest magic to wear the beast down, because there are still three left after this one, and they're not out of the woods yet. Rena fires a spectacular fan of arrows that home in on the dragon's skin and worm their way under its scales. Aisha slashes her staff downwards as she chants from her book, dropping her own meteors on its back. Rose kneels on the ground, firing round after round after round as Zero jeers at the dragon from her side. It's almost heartwarming to see everyone work so diligently together to kill the beast.
"I think this one's almost down!" Elsword yells, his endless drive to fight slowly being dimmed by sheer exhaustion. "Let's give it our all, everyone!"
The rocky tower shakes as it lights up in horrid magenta again. Add dives out of the way, dragging Ain and Rena with him, and hits the ground as the three of them narrowly escape another magical meteor that cracks the stone of the tower with its impact. "I dunno about you, but we're kinda running low on fuel!" he yells, rising to his feet and summoning his dynamos to his side. They whirl through the air, crackling on the waves of demonic energy. "Can we even kill one?"
"Yes, we absolutely can," Chung says, loading another cannonball and taking aim. "Heads up!"
He fires.
The cannonball arcs through the air like a shooting star, crashing down on the dragon head in a massive blue wave. Chung and his Destroyer are propelled backwards with the shock of the recoil, practically sliding off the tower with the shockwave, but Raven and Ciel are able to catch him before he falls off.
Thankfully, the damage is done. Add heaves a sigh of relief as the gravity field of the blast washes over the dragon head, the beast roaring as it thrashes in pain. The massive head swings from side to side, digging up stone and brick alike as the horns plow through the surface of the tower. Add grits his teeth and jumps up high, letting his dynamos catch him in midair as he jumps over the dying dragon.
The head hits a nearby rocky spire with a thump, finally dead. Elesis hops down from the top of the spire, perching lightly on the fallen beast's horns. "Good riddance."
"That's one down," Aisha says, reaching for her pack at her side. "Let's try and patch up some of our injuries before we get to work on the other heads."
Rena grimaces as she rifles through the bandolier she's brought. "I don't know if I'll have enough for all of us. Ain, you'll have to help me out here with the healing, I think—"
Something changes in the air. The ground rumbles, and they all turn in horror to the source—the felled head of the dragon, they one they supposedly managed to kill. "It can't be," Lu says, desperation creeping into her voice. "It's a hydra."
The dragon head—with Elesis still hanging onto its horns for dear life—rises into the air, alive again, and howls at them.
"ELSA!" As always, Elsword is the first to react, off like a rocket as he swings his sword. "HANG TIGHT, WE'LL GET YOU DOWN!"
Add isn't far behind, commanding blasts of energy to run through his limbs as he lands punch after punch on the thick hide. One blow sinks under a scale, into the softer hide and flesh underneath, and he's surprised to find his fist covered in flakes of dried blood when he retracts it.
What surprises him even more is the adrenaline rush that follows, the sheer joy that arises in the wake of his revelation. It's a thrill he hasn't felt in literal years, since his first journey through life with these people. I hurt it, it says. I managed to land a hit on the beast. I could have killed it if I continued.
Then its tail sweeps his feet out from beneath him, and his back hits the stone painfully and immediately dispels all the feeling. Magenta flashes over him, and he only has a moment to realize he's going to die before his body is surrounded in purple and he's launched a million miles in a second. "Snap back into it," Aisha says, the glow fading from her staff in an instant before she turns back to the dragon with fire in her eyes. "Elesis, we're coming for you!"
The dragon bellows, and Add watches Elesis fall from its back in slow motion.
Not literally, of course. Time has yet to be his ally, and there's no way he can stop it enough to move across the rocky tower, to send his dynamos out. Every inch of him freezes, as Elsword's horrified scream pierces the air and Elesis disappears in a cloud of red blossoms into the void of the tower.
At the edge of the tower, Elsword and Aisha are kneeling at its edge, daring to dance near the dragon as Aisha searches for the fallen warrior with her magic. "Elsa, you can't be gone," Elsword says desperately, "please, you can't be gone."
The tower rumbles. One of the other dragon heads comes crashing in their direction, and it's only instinct that makes Add leap out of the way before it slams into the spire and brings it down entirely. The entire top of the tower lights up in magenta.
"We have to run," Raven says, as horrified realization washes over them all. "We have to run! GET GOING!"
Add looks up into the jaws of Death itself, and summons his dynamos to his side.
It's too late to think about Elesis now; they can only hope that she survived the fall down the central shaft. It takes both Ciel and Raven to haul Elsword away from the edge of the tower, so that they can survive their descent with all their remaining team members.
As it turns out, they don't. The trip up was made much easier with Aisha and Rena's magic—they don't have that now with exhaustion bogging down every limb. Ain lags behind more and more, and by the time they reach the base of the stairwell, he has to be physically supported down the last few steps.
"I'm okay," he gasps, although it's clear that he isn't. Angry red lightning flickers across his skin, a reminder that he is the most vulnerable of them all in this forsaken continent, they shouldn't have brought him here, and now he's literally struggling to breathe. "I'll just end Intervention, I'll recover—"
His breathing gets shallow, and he has to stop speaking just to conserve his breath.
"Get your El, everyone," Elsword says, voice shaking. "All of it. Doesn't matter what kind, we need to get him near it!"
Isn't that funny, Add thinks, as he digs through his pockets and comes up with a pendant he wore as a child and a few spare shards he's collected over the years. Elesis had been the chosen of the El Lady, after all. She was a beacon of strength just as her brother is. Now that she's gone, her light extinguished, it's only a matter time before Ain's flickers out as well.
They crowd around him at the base of the tower, pressing the meager few stones to his chest, but slowly but surely, he starts to fade. "Please," Elsword whispers, like a mantra, even though everyone knows it's too late, "please. Please."
The little alcove fills with blue light, and when Add dares to open his eyes again, there is no dying angel lying on the ground. Their collection of El clatters emptily to the ground under Elsword's hands.
As Elsword begins to weep, and why wouldn't he, the poor boy just lost both his beloved sister and spiritual mentor within a matter of minutes, Add looks to the stains of dried blood on his glove. The momentary thrill of the hunt, the kill, it all comes flooding back to him, and he craves it.
I must have more, it says, that beast inside him. I want to taste blood again.
It's hard to mourn when neither death leaves a body.
They return to the Tower of Grief after recovering a while, and although they search tirelessly for anything remaining of Elesis, all they're able to find is the mangled remains of her claymore. Nothing remains of Ain, not even a scrap of fabric.
The dark elves from the village seem to sense their young leader's grief, and allow them to bury the claymore quietly among themselves. For Ain, they choose a sparkling El shard from Elsword's own collection, placing it in a basket that Rena weaves diligently from bush grasses. They hold the joint funeral among themselves, and even Chloe has the dignity to join them, standing stoically at Elsword's side while he grieves.
The first signs that the deaths of Elia's herald and her agent are seriously affecting the others come from Rose. She goes very quiet after they return from the Tower of Grief the second time, and doesn't speak much until she coughs up blood at the dinner table. Elder Edith diagnoses her with a terminal lack of El, and she accepts it calmly and passes overnight. This time, the funeral is much worse now that there is a body to bury.
It becomes apparent that they've been spoiled by the light of the El over the years, and from then on, breathing through each day becomes a bit harder. Elsword is a beacon of El on his own; Rena thrives in the light of her innate El; Raven and Eve have El built into their bodies that powers them and prevents them from suffocating; Lu and Ciel frankly couldn't care less; Eun's prowess over the moon El protects Ara; and of course, Add just cannot die.
The same does not apply to Aisha and Chung, though. Chung's childhood illness comes back to haunt him, and despite all of their attempts to save him, the tumour eats away at his heart and leaves him lifeless in the cold evening. Elsword works diligently at his side like an angel, fighting back tears until his best friend's cold hand goes limp, and in the end, he's the one who closes his eyes to lay him to rest.
Aisha holds on as best she can. They all pile all of their excess El on her, giving her a bubble of safety to stay in. It's not enough. She coughs herself to pieces as her past cuts open up again and start to weep crimson tears.
"I'm sorry," she laughs, even though blood bubbles at her lips with every painful word, "I thought I'd survive. Guess I'm weaker than I thought, after all."
"Aisha, you've always been stronger than me," Elsword says pleadingly, grasping onto her bandaged hands. "Don't say that now. You'll survive, okay? You're going to live, we've going to head home and you'll be okay."
"Yeah, we'll head home alright." Another cough, this time weaker. "Together." Her eyes focus somewhere else, a million miles away. "Together…"
To Elsword's credit, he does not break. First his sister, then his mentor, then his best friend, then his childhood love; it's honestly a surprise to Add that the younger boy does not break entirely. He carries his head high, steels himself to bury a loved one, one more time.
Add spends the time between burials fighting in the woods. Occasionally, he'll catch a demon here and there, an incubus flying overhead, a Waldo with a pack of glitters. He encounters new types of demons, and he assigns names to them—blue Seekers, serpentine Mirages, and massive hulking Rackets. He kills all of them, one at a time, either with his dynamos or his scimitar. It doesn't matter, in the end. As long as they bleed before him, he's satisfied.
The joy of the hunt does not escape him, but in a way, it's an addiction of its own. Unlike the years-long pain of weaning himself off the intoxication of the Elrian poppy, the adrenaline of the kill, the sheer bloodlust, is only momentary. There is no tolerance, only ever-growing pleasure from every kill he makes. As his friends lay dying indoors, he slashes through the hearts of a million demons and leaves every regret buried in their cold chests.
He buries the tip of his scimitar in the abdomen of a succubus, and twists. The demon's body lurches as the blade sinks in, gushing out in black blood with a delicious squelch. He grins. The succubus goes still.
Add licks his lips, and drinks in the satisfaction of the moment.
The war horn blows in the evening, bringing everyone to attention from their dinner.
A scout comes running in, and quickly transmits a message to Elder Edith, who immediately stands up, fire in her eyes. "The village is under attack," she translates. "The Crimson Flame has sent its wards after us." She swears in Elven under her breath. "Where is Chloe?"
Rena rushes to the door, Raven at her heels and already drawing his sword. Eve's drones fly in from opposite sides of the room, propelling her out within seconds. Ara has been partially transformed into Eun for her own protection for the past week; it only takes a heartbeat to complete the job and for her to dash out the door. Elsword stands solemnly at Edith's side for a moment more, lingering.
"We'll keep them at bay for as long as we can, Elder," he says, and there is steely resolve in his voice where there once was grief. "You should take as many as you can and escape."
"I cannot leave our home behind, young one," Edith says, shaking her head. "It is all we have left."
"But you can, and you have to," Elsword insists. "If this is the home you'll die to stay with, then what of the others? They deserve to have the chance to live, too! The village is nothing without its inhabitants."
Add doesn't stay to hear the rest of his plea. He summons his dynamos to his side, and steps into the chaos.
With all the clandestine fighting he's been doing lately, Add knows how to maneuver around the incoming demons, just where to plunge his dynamos so that the shock unhinges their jaws and leaves them paralyzed while he cuts them down. He sees from the corner of his peripheral vision the sparkling green arrows that belong to Rena, the bursts of blue that must be Eve, a burst of blue spirits from Lu and Ciel. Their lights only flicker for a moment before he leaves them behind.
He is the conqueror. He is the one who will survive. He will win this.
His dynamos whirl to life at his command, once again opening the portal to the void in the sky. As the gravitational spheres begin to drop down like hail on the incoming demons, Add starts to laugh.
"This is the best kind of feeling," Add says, yells, until his voice is hoarse and he can't feel his chest anymore. "This is the feeling of triumph! Of victory over death! I—" He can't help but giggle. "I feel so alive!"
There is blood running down the side of his face, and it's so dark that he can't tell if it's his or not, but he turns to Ara with his white hair stained black and crimson and grins. "Pray tell me, Ara dear," he purrs, "since we're the last ones standing, are you not afraid? Does this massacre not frighten you?"
Ara—brave, brave Ara, who has outshined them all just for this moment of clarity—for her part, she exhales and leans a bit more on her spear. "Add," she says, voice betraying her exhaustion, "sometimes, the world just takes too much from a person, and all we can do is patch up the scars and move—"
She doesn't finish the sentence. Eun's influence drains from her spontaneously, and her hair is left as dark as the bloody iron blade that pierces through her chest. It's a very rapid change. The last light of golden hope fades from her eyes, and then she is just another broken body on the ground, forgotten in the heat of the battle.
And indeed, as Add looks around him, there is nothing but bodies and demons. There are scraps of fabric in some corner that might have once belonged to Elsword's outfit, a mangled scrap of steel from Raven's arm, a crushed claw from Lu's gauntlet. A trampled flower settles on the ground, stained with Edith's blood. At the end of the day, it's down to just him again, little, worthless Edward who just can't fucking die.
He raises his hand over his head again, and the dynamos do the rest of the work for him.
What was it that Mother always said to him? From stardust we came, and to stardust we'll go. Cruel now the irony that his enemies die in a storm of stardust at his hands. He looks around at the carnage of the demons around him, satisfied with the open space he's gotten, and shifts his dynamos to warp mode.
Three months, all wasted. He scoffs at the scimitar in his hands, its intricate cold steel stained with blood, and tosses it aside. There'll be more futures with better weapons and better skills to pick up and better outcomes. He just has yet to find them.
Holding the dimensional door open, Add laughs and drops down through fate again.
A/N: happy april fools day! it's time for a new fic
a few months ago, my dearest friend and i spent about 4 hours brainstorming together. what we ended up with was 4.5k words worth of plot that, after they left the idea in my hands, i synthesized into a single plan for a fic: Genesis.
unfortunately the working title for this fic was real angst hours, and i've made at least one person cry before posting this, so uh please be prepared. i think i said this when i posted Jailbreak and again with When the Winter Ends, but the plans for this fic are probably some of the darkest things i will ever write, so please take care when you read.
in terms of actual update schedules, this won't be nearly as frequently updated as WtWE since a WtWE chapter is on average 1.6k words while this (probably one of the shorter chapters) is nearly 7.6k words. updates for Genesis will always take place on the first of the month while WtWE will continue to update on mondays, and should an overlap occur like today, Genesis will take priority.
finally, the first "chapter" of this fic serves as a table of contents of sorts. parts labelled with [REDACTED] are things that i haven't settled on names for just yet. those will be updated as the chapters come!
a few acknowledgements:
i'd like to thank my friends Tin (taee on ffn), Bread (post_mortem on ao3) and gremlin man feng for their beta reading! you guys caught a ton of mistakes that i made and smoothed over several stitches of words that were extremely bumpy, and i will be forever grateful.
the biggest thanks goes to morgan, who stayed up until 2 am with me and gave me creative control over an idea that was mostly theirs from the beginning. you're the real mvp!
i love you all, and i'll see you in a month!
~Marg
