A fire raged through the night. It had grown into an inextinguishable inferno. He watched alone, shivering, muttering silent prayers that fell on deaf ears. Blood ran like a poisonous river, and everything he loved was either dead at his feet or dying in his arms. Her blood dyed her dress crimson, pooled in his arms and dripped on the ashen ground. Her heartbeat was a weak flutter, yet it still beat. She was alive. That was all that mattered to him.

He had to take his beloved away, far, far away from here. He ran, but the horizon only stretched further and further away. Eventually, he came to a halt, exhausted and weak. At that moment, he realised that running was pointless.

The bright, full moon above him cast a silver glow over the unconscious body he cradled in his embrace. He was surrounded by pheasants, all white like the moon, with neon blue eyes that glowed like stars in the night. One of them had a golden crown over its head, and its eyes were far more terrifying than the rest. With a flap of its wings, it summoned a gale that sent a knife flying to his hands. It looked at the woman he carried and then back at him.

'Kill it. It's your duty,' the king of the pheasants said. 'Kill it. You serve me, now and forever.'

He shook his head. The monarch tilted its head at him, angered that he had not obeyed.

His arm lifted, tied to golden threads that stemmed from the pheasants' beaks. He cried for the one in his arms to wake. She had to leave before it was too late. Thankfully, he could avoid hitting her, and she vanished.

No blood spilt out of his self-inflicted wound, but he could no longer breathe. Fire was consuming from the inside out, tearing through every muscle, gnawing away at his soul until he had no choice but to wake with his mind blank.


Ainchase was out of breath, his legs felt weak, and the only reason he was still standing was thanks to his halberd. His hand was audibly sizzling as he clenched his weapon tighter and tighter. The entire world was swirling around him as if caught on eddies.

Sharp needles of pain spread through his head down to his nape. He looked down, seeing the pile of abominations at his feet. He blinked, and the mangled bodies became recognisable if he squinted his eyes. Bloodied, terrified faces, butchered horns, severed bat-like wings, and clawed hands, all of them pointed at him, accusing him of their cruel demise.

Traitor, they cried. Murderer, they screamed with their lifeless stares. He had to silence them once and for all. If death were not enough for them, then he would deform their corpses until they were nothing but an offering for the Abyss. He raised his weapon, but he was too weak to stab the dead again. His vision blurred as he dug his halberd back into the ground.

Ainchase blinked again, and the bodies returned to being the same quasi-human, monstrous black and blue limbs he knew he should be looking at.

Yet, one thought came back, insidious like poison: how was he so sure he had killed Henir's Scourge? The Celestial knew he had fought from sunset to sunrise but not much more.

These beasts had come from somewhere, but where? His mind was blank. He had to focus. He had fought demons. No, monsters. But why? Why would he fight either of those things?

The burning sensation in his hand was searing his skin and wiping every thought from his head. He looked at his halberd and saw it was covered in blood and gore, both his and from his enemies.

'But who were my enemies?' He stared at the gooey mess beneath him that spread a dark, oily substance on the sandy ground. 'What…am I doing here?'

A woman's voice called him, though her voice was so muffled he could not be sure she had called his name. Yet, he knew her voice. He expected to hear her say his name and…

His ears rang, making his splitting headache unbearable. Though he tried to focus on what was happening around him, Ainchase could not think of anything but the unpleasant sensations assaulting his every sense. The woman's voice echoed in his head; he finally found the will to follow it.

Ainchase looked back and saw the demoness's blurry silhouette. Her slave was there, too, lying on his back, uninjured but exhausted. Seeing them made the pain an afterthought as he anchored his presence on Elrios again. The memories were cascading back into his mind.

They were only an hour away from the Scion's lair, and all these abominations had attacked them in the middle of the night. He had taken care of the brunt of it, but even then…

The Celestial blinked a few times as his sight got clearer and his mind sharper. He had flirted with death again, in all likelihood. Celestials knew not of death as mortals did: they turned to a little speck of light, and their consciousness eventually vanished into the void. It could happen to any Celestial who did not sufficiently anchor their presence on Elrios. Ishmael was supposed to prevent any of her precious soldiers from facing death more than once.

But the goddess had not gazed at him. She had not uttered a word or held his soul together with her merciful touch. The creator of the El had left him to drift in and out of existence in his fight against Henir's influence on the forests. Without Luciela, he was sure he would have died. It was odd to find himself anchored to reality by a demon, but he knew it was all part of the goddess' plan.

'She trusts me,' he thought, 'I'm her strongest soldier. I don't need her help in this mission. The goddess trusts me. She knows Luciela is good enough as my anchor.'

He had told himself that so often by now that those words rang a little hollow. Still, he had to believe them. Not doing so would be antithetical to his nature.

"Thank you," he told the demoness as he walked towards her and her exhausted servant. He looked down at Ciel, who rolled his eyes before moving to the side, making his intentions clear.

Arms crossed, the Celestial grit his teeth. They were only moments away from their objective, and this poor excuse of a Steel Cross refused to get back on his feet. He clenched his fists and was greeted by a sharp pain on the palm of his hands, going up to his fingers.

Ainchase looked at his hands, immediately noticing the scabs and red, bleeding skin that had charred some of his fingers roughly around the joints. The only cause he could recall for his injury was his weapon, but that made no sense. He was created to wield the power of the goddess; it would never hurt him.

Without a word, he modified his shell to create a pair of black gloves over the wounds and merely tuned out the pain receptors before grabbing the medical supplies for himself. He barely sat down to treat them when he felt a very familiar gaze on him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the demoness staring at his injuries.

"I can take care of it, don't worry," he told her before disinfecting his injuries. "We should be en route soon enough."

"You should leave the fighting to us next time." The demoness sighed. "You're running out of divine power, aren't you?"

Ainchase shrugged. "It's nothing to worry about."

The Steel Queen walked before him and slammed her fist on the ground, sending sparks of demonic energy as the ground cracked where she had hit it. She was now crouching in front of him. Her beastly blue gaze held a spark of anger threatening to consume her. Even so, he presumed she would not fight him if she lost control over her emotions.

"Do you take me for an idiot?" she growled. "You will not fight until you find a way to stabilise your divine energy. I will knock you out if you try to defy me on this."

The Celestial smirked. "I'm the only one who can exorcise the Scourge, and you don't want me to fight? That's a foolish move, wouldn't you agree?"

Her eyes narrowed at him. "Yes, we need you to kill those things," she conceded, her voice full of venom. "So why do you keep fighting so recklessly – dare I say suicidally? The rational way to deal with the Scourge is to let us weaken them and then go for the final strike, is it not?"

"That's less efficient," he mumbled, looking away from her. "We've already talked about this, Luciela. You two are better suited to find the El while I keep the Scourge off your backs."

"Yes, that was before you started vanishing into thin air!"

Her shout echoed around them, though no one but him and Ciel would hear her. All life had died, and the corpses of the monsters they had just fought were already turning into dust that the wind would carry away. Ainchase looked at her, and although he was initially puzzled by her anger, he somehow had the impression he had seen it before. It was strange, but that feeling of deja vu perhaps changed his expression because the anger evaporated from the demoness' face.

"Just try to be more careful next time, Ainchase." She sighed as she got back on her feet and walked away. "That's all I ask."


The rest of the way to the ruins was shorter than he expected. The eerie calm of the monochrome scenery had stopped bothering him. Seeing dull, empty husks of trees, the skeletal remains of all sorts of animals and grey, ash-like sand piling up in small dunes as far as the eye could see brought a strange sense of comfort. Something about this wasteland – a phenomenon that had no place to be nor remain on Elrios – made him feel nostalgic. Ainchase tossed those feelings aside, chalking it up to his strange dreams where he had seen a similar scenery. It was a figment of his imagination and nothing more. It would not sway him away from his mission.

Slabs of stone soon rose from the ground instead of trees, all cracked somewhere, blackened as if a fire had lapped at their edges. Ainchase took a deep breath, and the tangy scent of ash invaded his nostrils. He stopped and looked at the crumbled homes around them. There was no smoke or traces of an active fire anywhere. A rusty gate, covered by withered vines, caught his attention. Though time had eroded the runes carved on it, he could still read some of it. It was an ancient language, perhaps predating the founding of the Elrian Kingdom itself.

The sign also attracted the attention of his two companions, and they all walked carefully towards the dilapidated two-story building the gate led to. The first floor was intact, or as much as it could be. It would make for a good rest spot.

"East…ward Library?" Ainchase guessed as he touched the relief left behind by the missing runes.

"Eastwind," Luciela corrected him, which made him turn towards her, raising an eyebrow at how she could read an inscription in Old Elrian. He dismissed her correction, thinking she was merely contradicting him for the sake of it.

"There may be maps in there we could use if we're lucky," Ciel deadpanned as he pushed the door and entered first. "I'll set up some warding runes, so you two can go and hold hands, kiss or whatever you want to do in the meantime. Just stay the fuck outta my way."

Luciela rolled her eyes at her servant but followed him, saying she would look for the maps. Though he had come to view the demoness in a more favourable light, Ainchase was taken aback by how casually the abomination she kept as a servant insinuated that a Celestial like him could be infatuated with a demon. Considering how Ciel treated Rena, it was understandable that he could assume any goodwill as romantic. The Celestial had no interest in correcting him.

Ainchase entered the dark building last and closed the door behind them. The demoness was lighting the old torches around them, navigating from one torch to another as if she knew the place inside out.

The room they had entered was surprisingly large, with a high ceiling held by dusty columns that had more carved into them. Every bookshelf was either empty or destroyed by the passage of time, making the central study area ahead look rather pointless. Its marble desk and rusty candleholders had perhaps once been elegant but now only cluttered the space. Ciel threw their bags over one of the tables, knocking the candlestick over the edge. It clanged as it fell and rolled on the dusty floor, breaking the white candle it had held for centuries, if not millennia.

The Celestial sighed and set his sights on the pillars once again. He carefully approached one of them and read the runes carved on it. It was a protection spell that combined an illusion that would only affect the appearance of the building.

'But they're not powered by mana at all,' the green-eyed priest noted, 'This energy is similar to the goddess' but…'

He slid a finger over one of the runes, enough for the old spell to ignite. A wave of the same familiar yet foreign energy flowed across the room, lighting the remaining torches and the extinguished candles, summoning rows of books on the shelves until all those still standing filled from top to bottom. Ainchase looked down at his hand and back at the columns. He had not used a drop of his power, yet the spell reacted as if he had been its original caster. The Celestial shook his head, reminding himself that nothing but his mission mattered. Finding a map would help them find the Scion's lair, and they were sure to find one among all the books that had appeared.


Rena woke up to the sound of a chair grating against the stone. She leapt away and drew her bow, only to find herself surrounded by the same fog that had clouded her path for the past two days. There was no trace of the Captain or the two young knights she was guiding back to the village.

The scratch approached from her left. Rena had packed a set of wooden arrows in her quiver and fired one at the source of the sound. The wind whistled before she heard a mushy sound. Her arrow had hit someone or something. The smell of rotten flesh overwhelmed her as a shadow of a winged throne appeared in the middle of the fog. Chains chimed as the throne continued to drag itself to where she stood.

"Ah, it's been far too long," a man's voice wheezed as the chair finally came to a halt, though the chains still chimed softly, marking every syllable of his weakened voice. "I have grown too old to dodge your greeting, but here, take it back."

A wet, squelching sound interrupted the man's voice and his chains before her arrow appeared at her feet; impaled on it was a reddened human eyeball whose bright blue iris contrasted sharply with the crimson-toned sclera. The elf took a deep breath and faced the shadow again, clenching her fists at the figure of someone she had never expected to see again.

"How are you still alive?" she asked, "It's been six centuries, Luther."

The man laughed at her, and his chains did not follow, letting the hideous, guttural, and raspy tone of his voice come out in all its unnatural repulsiveness. It was enough for her to understand why Luther had laughed. He was not alive at all.

After a long, strenuous wheeze, the dead man continued to speak, with his chains chiming the same way they had done before. "Well, I suppose I can understand your surprise. I am surprised, too, old friend, to hear you say my name properly after all this time. It's almost a shame… Luto had a nice ring to it."

Rena huffed. "Archduke Luto Felford sounds horrible if you asked me."

"Bah, it's not like my full name nor my title mattered much to you," the man on the throne replied, dismissively waving a decrepit, almost skeletal hand in the air. "Nor does my latest title matter either. You see, I've retired from that hell. It's in younger hands now. More ambitious hands, might I add."

"Right, and because you've retired, you kidnapped the humans that were with me for fun," Rena quipped, putting her weapon away before crossing her arms. She carried no weapons that would work against whatever monster Luther had turned into.

"It's precisely because I saw who took them away that I came to help you," the decaying man said as he pushed his throne beyond the fog. "I have nothing to gain by lying to you after all this time."

Rena had known Luther Felford as a young man with shiny copper hair and a crimson gaze. Tall and lean like a fencer, charismatic to nobles and peasants alike, and wise beyond his years, the Archduke embodied a golden age that the duchy of Velder did not get to enjoy for very long.

The man that came through was not even the shadow of what Luther had once been. He was chained to a broken throne made from his tombstone. The marble wings were still intact, but the cross that held them had fallen entirely to Henir's corruption. The seat was a fusion of the more broken pieces of his mausoleum, and the same could be said for the armrests, which also bore marks of his House's fall from grace.

The only life that still animated Luther's body was the bright, blue light that coursed through his veins. His dry, gangrenous skin wrinkled unnaturally as if to make him seem far older than he was when he died. Luther's hair was greasy and messy, cut in jagged layers that made it look even worse. His nails had long since fallen off, and his eyes were sunken in his scrawny face, frozen in a perpetual grin.

He could only hold a sceptre that looked more like a key. He kept it in his right hand, holding the shining gem that held the soul of the last person they had both cherished more than their lives. His kingly robes were replaced by a pitch-black robe, torn by time and carrying the dirt from his burial. Luther snickered, and his chains chimed around his sceptre.

"A young general of my organization captured them. As far as I know, he has contented himself to teleport them near the White Mist Swamp," Luther informed her, but his lips did not move. Where his chains clanked together, the sound was overlaid with the voice Rena once knew. His bloodshot, unnaturally blue gaze fixed on her like a maniac's, even if his voice was anything but. "That general is far more cunning than I was. It's a shame he's dedicated himself to destroying Elrios."

Despite his appearance, his every word was the spitting image of the young leader she had known. The resemblance left a bad taste in her mouth.

"So," she interjected, "Did you come to brag about your pupil?"

"No. I'm trying to put an end to his ambitions," the former king said with a shrug that made his bones crackle. "But it's exponentially more difficult to fight him from the inside. I'm always one step behind. In fact, I'm fairly certain that he may have pulled a few strings on both sides to make them a little more hasty than they should have been. Had your Elders known who the Scion was, they would have never allowed demons to get close to it, am I wrong?"

Though it pained her to do so, the Ranger nodded at his question.

Luther leaned back in his chair, looking down at his sceptre as if deep in thought before turning his attention towards her. Cackling softly as his chains chimed against the stone, he turned his attention towards her.

"I'm not judging your decision to lie about that," he clarified. "In fact, it was a wise move at the time, far more than my own…" He wheezed before he let out a snicker. The chains chimed softly to mark his words. "As things stand now, it falls on the people who belong to Elrios to fight for their world. All I can do is point towards the path that will most likely lead to their salvation."

His sunken eyes, dead and deformed, held a spark she had not seen in ages. It was a slap to the face.

"Where was this Luther when it mattered?" Rena muttered to herself, looking away from his decrepit figure.

His expression and shoulders shook as if he had fallen prey to laughter, but the chains translated it into intelligible words expressing no joy or madness: "He was young, stupid and crushed by grief, and so were you."

The elf scoffed at him. "Don't compare me to you. You were simply angry to lose something that belonged to you."

"I can understand why you still cannot fathom that I loved her," he chuckled. "Time can heal anything but the burns left by hatred… But back to important matters. You should protect the red-haired boy you've travelled with from Ainchase Ishmael."

"You want me to protect a human child from a Celestial?" Rena chuckled joylessly, rolling her eyes. "Sure, let's protect the river from the rain."

Luto's gaze briefly narrowed as he was overcome with laughter. The chains clanked loudly against his throne, forming an angrier, almost hissing tone he carried in his voice. "The demons and that so-called Celestial are already in the Forest Ruins, right next to the Scion. Do you think they'll get out unscathed?"

Rena paused, erasing the half-hearted smirk from her face.

It was all Luto needed to continue to talk: "I don't have that much time left here, Rena. Protect the kid and the El from Ainchase Ishmael. That's all you have to do."

"Why?" she asked. It was the only question she had left at how insistent Luther was. "No Celestial would hurt a human loved by the El."

A new wave of fog barreled between them, reducing Luther to a shadow.

"Ainchase is an experiment born out of Ishmael's hatred for demonkind. And it'll take a miracle for the world to avoid the consequences when that experiment goes awry," the man cursed by Henir explained with a sigh. "Well, it seems our time has run out. Elrios is rejecting my presence with all its might, and I've grown tired of resisting it."

Luther's shadow vanished, and so did the fog around her. Though most of the forest had died, Rena spotted a sign on the edge of the road she stood on. She approached it and saw she was only half a day away from Spirit Falls. The Ranger looked back, knowing that both the ruins were in a straight line, only in different directions. She remembered how the Steel Cross had used a powerful hex on her and turned left, walking towards the hot springs.

If Henir's dimension swallowed those three whole, she figured that the first to die would be that half-demon. A Celestial, no matter how weakened, would survive and remain unscathed. Luther was probably less sane than he appeared; no Celestial was an experiment. They were all warriors of the goddess, created to protect the Elrios from the monstrosities Henir created.

All that talk about the world suffering the consequence of an experiment was nothing more than one of his many paranoid delusions, the same ones that had led him to commit an unforgivable crime after Lua's passing.


Rena knocked on the door to the main building of the hot springs, hoping that maybe one of the knights had been teleported back to the starting point. When Aisha was the one to open the door, the Ranger took a small step back in surprise. The mage's violet gaze also widened in surprise, but she invited the elf to enter.

As she feared, Rena saw no sign of any of the knights. After asking Aisha a few questions, it became evident that they had not seen the Captain nor the brothers he had taken with him.

"How long ago did you see them?" the mage asked her. "When we got here, the food was still warm."

That information made the Ranger frown. She thought about what Luther had told her; even if he was wrong about Ainchase, she worried about that young general he warned her about. If the borders between the past and the present were getting blurred, he had most likely come into contact with the real Scion. In the worst-case scenario, the general had it under his control.

'No,' she reasoned, 'The Scion is a small, confused child. He would be hostile towards that general unless—'

"Rena?" The mage called to her, taking the elf out of her thoughts.

"Oh, sorry, Aisha," Rena said apologetically, "What were you saying?"

The mage sighed, rolling her eyes before putting Wyll's hat over her head. "How long ago did you see them?"

"Oh, just a moment ago," the elf lied. "I wondered if they had returned."

"Well, at least there's the chance the Withering hasn't killed them yet," the teen muttered to herself before looking at her. "Hey, and also, do you happen to know how to heal humans?"

Rena raised an eyebrow at the sudden change of topic. "Yeah, I was a war medic a few…" she paused for a moment, furrowing her brow. The Ranger quickly reconsidered giving away an estimate of her long lifespan to a human girl. "Uh, well, a while back. I still remember most of what I learnt."

"Wonderful!" the Sanderian mage beamed as she clapped once. "Let me take you upstairs. Elsword really needs your help."

"Elsword?" Rena tilted her head at the name.

"The loud redhead," Aisha clarified. "I thought you knew him; he's the one who greeted you when those demons surrounded the Tree of El."

It took her a second, but Rena recalled who Aisha was referring to. It was quite a coincidence that Luther had insisted she had to protect that boy only to meet him hours later.