The Scouring of the Shire
(ALT-TIMELINE OMAKE)
"It's done."
No finer words were better to describe it. No expression, meaning, or abject alliteration would undermine the breadth of those two, heavy words at that very moment.
The frigid temperature, condensing the breath subtly of each and every person brought a literal and figurative chill to the whole ensemble.
It was just… unbelievable.
The world did not shake, crack, or rupture under supreme power.
Nay, it was nary a sound that enveloped their senses. A peaceful silence that seemed too serene, too clean in the onset of reality that transpired beyond the impossible walls of this immaculate complex. A grim reality that most, if not all in attendance were still trying to wrap their heads in.
"Your war…. Your conflict has ended." She proclaimed with a dry, emotionless tune to her voice. As if she were a monster without equal. One that did not care about the harsh aftermath felt and survived by the outside world. Yet truly, her mind on the matter was complex. She neither hated nor divulged into the ecstasy of such an act, because it was all necessary.
Forcing her hand, leaving her to see a mere narrow path was the sole reason this had all transpired. Diplomacy was just not there. She understood chaos at its most basic form. She understood belief, cynicism, and greed too well.
Barbaric her method may have been to the men and women native to this world, it was simply a means to an end. A choice that was not her own.
She stared at one specific person within her audience.
One bent to his knees in disbelief.
One whose world had crashed right under him without the smallest chance of respite nor restitution against her actions. One, whose strength and power had been taken away the moment he stepped into her abode.
"What say you, Homelander? What does the most powerful hero say, while he quivers in fear under my heel with nothing left to his name?"
The man slowly raised his head. Tears visible on his face. His will, broken as clear as any eye could see. He was but a withering man, with barely any muscle left, barely any handsome, redeeming features left as his shriveling bones struggled to help him up.
"You… everything… e-everything I've built. None of it… none of it mattered, to you? It was all… futile. You could have done this at the start." He painfully realized.
She stared at the man. Her expression.
Her non-answer already told everyone what the inescapable truth was.
If the shimmering veils that revealed the precise, accurate, but harrowing images of the world outside of them were any more proof of what she had just enacted, then Humanity had essentially experienced a very traumatic but no less destructive calamity.
Weapons of war in land, air, and sea drifted empty as pale corpses lay in their bellies and wake. Enhanced individuals, powered by faulty abominations in alchemy strewn across streets, unmoving while civilians cried in anguish and shock.
Weapons that would turn wars, great calamities of their own completely neutralized within their steel bunkers, the prospect of them ever touching the ground once more, bringing death through ash and heat would no longer be an inevitability.
It was…
A strangely traumatic but specific spell that had rendered the world in an age of uncertainty. Empires that rose across the recent decade laid low as the chill of the soft snow dampened the sadness, shock, and fear that every living man, woman, and child felt.
Even the seat of power to which the aforementioned 'strongest country' in the world was left to merely a crater, a hundred fathoms deep. A surviving flag flew into the wind with its stars and bars…
Pale, lifeless corpses lay on their feet, disbelief in their eyes.
"We n-never had a chance… at all… didn't we?" Homelander said as his body paled further, his whole world crumpling into nothing as his body slowly but surely laid itself on the cold, lifeless floor. A tear streaked across his gaunt face as life left his eyes.
The heavy sound of armor clanking against the individual plates was heard as the dead corpse was bathed by the looming shadow of one of her champions.
"Pity." She simply said as she turned her head towards the two groups of people staring at her, completely unsure of what to do.
Chief amongst them was the 'leader' of their cause who until now continued to stare in utter shock at the shimmering veils before turning to her. Uncharacteristic, especially for a man of conviction and pure utter devotion to such… barbarism.
She commended him for how honest he was, far… far honest than the man she considered husband when she still held power over her homeland.
"Rejoice, William Butcher… your dream of absolution and death has arrived." She mocked him, though her voice was dripping with exhaustion and chief amongst them, was sadness. Sadness not for the deaths, but for the cycle of her own misery returning to her at full force.
"… are you satisfied? Of this climax? Of this resolution?" she asked as a hundred different emotions cycled through the man's face.
"…I… this isn't a dream?" he asked, voice tinged with fear and confusion.
She merely sighed, exasperated as she shared a glance with her champion, her knight who was present. The tall woman, hailing from Manchester without another wood stood atop the corpse and stabbed it with her sword. Flames started to writhe the paling corpse's maw until it succumbed to it.
The sounds of the flames popping as the eerie face of the world's strongest man slowly crumpled into ash in front of everyone to see. The Butcher of the Enhanced stared at the corpse, completely baffled that this ended with such…
…finality and abruptness. An anticlimax of the most extreme.
"God…" he whispered to himself as all the repercussions gnawed at him.
A resolution that had untold consequences which he understood just from these glimpses conveyed in a manner that left nothing to the imagination.
"…you told me once that the day every single Enhanced dies, you would stare into the sunset, smiling like never before." She focused on him. "Today is that day… so I ask again, are you satisfied? Or do you truly believe such a foolish dream is achievable as you stand here knowing what I could have done if I was pushed so far?"
The challenging nature of the voice allowed a bit of arrogance to return to William Butcher's face. Yet the arrogance there was but a fraction of what it once was.
Because he understood. The woman, sitting atop her high throne was no Homelander.
She was no mere 'Supe'.
She was a goddess tolerating the presence of ants in her domain…
And nothing stood in her way even at the very start if she would choose to stomp them.
He felt helpless. Truly helpless.
Yet, at the same time, he felt empty with the victory now thrust into his lap. Empty that the men and women of both the Government and Vought chose madness over reason. Empty that this was karma on a scale unlike anything before.
Even Hughie, the man of conviction and morality that William Butcher appreciated, was conflicted about what to say.
"I will take your silence as… acceptance. You do not know the cycle of chaos as well as I have experienced it. Age by age, calamity by calamity. Tis merely a spiral. One that sadly… I am not free of." She stated with the sadness in her voice rising. "Consider this a lesson. A lesson to the path you seek. It may not be you who thrust the blade to enact such an ending, and I pray you never have to, but it's all the same. A spiral you cannot escape… a road you will always circle back to whether you die or live again."
The Queen then turned her head to the last group within the chamber.
Behind her stood three knights, men of great power.
In front of them was one who shared her face. At least in a past that was no longer reachable.
They were there and back again. Two sides of the same coin.
The spiral once again forced them to face each other.
"Have thou decided… child of prophecy?" she asked as her own two knights shifted in their positions. Her other half, her enemy, her sister, her replacement amongst many other such relationships across dozens, if not thousands of timelines stared right back at her with uncertainty.
"Have thee decided, Artoria Pendragon… hero of the story… to condemn this witch of this grave crime?" she asked as the girl, holding the staff, shook in place. Her resolve quickly crumbled with the weight of what decision was to come…
"Have thou decided, that I am still the villain… of this story?"
"No," Artoria said. Shocking even the Queen, slightly.
Her eyes lost all their fear and gained back some semblance of resolve.
"Thou are not. I do not… blame thee, O' Queen of Winter. Thy hand was a r-reasonable action, against a myriad of terrible futures." Artoria's face turned into regret and sadness. "I don't blame you for an outcome where the world would wish you dead knowing that you… were innocent."
Artoria's words lost their formality as her eyes were downcast.
The knights behind her felt the same.
The world had turned against them for no reason other than to follow a false Blonde Prophet's words yet despite the admission of not blaming her for such a calamity…
"…"
High Queen Morgan, Ruler of Britain, the Winter Queen felt nothing but emptiness.
"I see."
AN: I strangely wrote a very elaborate backstory for this. But the simple gist was, living Caster Artoria at the start of her journey (before she met Chaldea) was isekai'd into the Boys like Wodime in this alternate timeline with her summoning the servants found in Lostbelt 6.
Oberon was not included (due to reasons we all know) and because I've had my fill with Cosmic Horror Oberon with my own finished older fic lol.
But yeah, this one-shot is basically an anti-climax for all characters involved, as well as a painful reminder of the spiral Tonelico/Aesc still suffers even in a world where both Artoria and Morgan found common ground to be friends or equals.
I don't really know why I suddenly wrote this out of the blue, but I guess wanted to re-explore my Fae Britain appreciation roots a bit.