Aeloria: Turmoil of Destiny
Volume 1 — The Rise of Nightveil
Chapter 3: Echoes of Betrayal
Ash hung thick over the ruined streets of Solbory, the once-proud capital of Caer Thalor.
The banners of old kings lay torn in gutters filled with blackened water.
The golden statues of heroes long dead wept soot from their cracked eyes.
And among the ruins, a boy staggered broken, bleeding, abandoned.
Caelan clutched his ribs, feeling every shallow breath tear something loose inside.
His armor was shattered, his blade dulled.
The goddess he once prayed to had cast him aside without a second glance.
The last lights of Solbory flickered in the distance, dying embers swallowed by dusk.
He stumbled through the ruins in a daze, his boots scraping across shattered glass and bones.
The world around him seemed painted in ash and blood — a city of memories crumbling into dust.
He collapsed to his knees beside a broken fountain.
Crimson stained the stones.
The smell of burning wood and flesh stung his throat, clawing into his lungs.
He lifted his trembling gaze to the soot-choked heavens.
Through bloodied lips, he forced out a whisper:
"Aestra… please… I fought for you… I bled for you… please… save me…"
For a moment, the ruins seemed to still.
Then, a voice, cold and distant as winter, echoed through the broken city:
"You are stained by the Abyss."
"You are no longer of my light."
"Suffer thy fate alone."
The presence faded, leaving only a hollow ache where faith had once lived.
Caelan stared upward, a dry sob catching in his throat.
Even the goddess had turned her face from him.
There would be no salvation.
Not from the heavens.
Not from the light.
Not from anyone he had once trusted.
He pressed trembling hands together, not in faith anymore, just in desperate, human need.
His fingers shook violently, scraping across one another as if even the act of prayer had forgotten how to find him.
The words fell from his cracked lips, not aimed at gods or demons but to anyone, anything, that might listen:
“Please… someone… anyone… I don’t care who you are… just… please… help me… don’t let me fall.”
“I just want it to stop hurting… I don’t want to be lost…”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Not yet… not yet…”
A gust of scorched wind blew across the plaza, scattering ash like the remnants of forgotten prayers.
There was no answer.
Only the endless silence of a world that had already moved on without him.
The ground tilted.
The sky spun.
Darkness, vast and absolute, swallowed the ruins.
And Caelan fell not into damnation, but into a silence so deep it felt like even the gods had forgotten how to speak.
Meanwhile…
Across the crumbling fields and broken cities of Aeloria, another nightmare walked.
Valen Nightveil stood atop the smoking walls of Caer Thalor’s last bastion.
His black cloak whipped in the poisoned winds.
Around him, the Death Knights, mockeries of crusaders, their armor fused to rotting flesh tore through the remnants of the royal guard.
Steel rang against steel.
Men screamed.
The lords of Aeloria so proud behind their marble walls fell like stalks of wheat before Valen’s blade.
His sword, once the Moon Sword, symbol of hope, now writhed in his grip.
The blade shimmered with an unnatural fluidity, as if alive, pulsing with a slow hunger.
Its crescent edges had sharpened into a twisted serpentine curve, hissing faintly with every strike.
Fires burned unchecked across the city.
Smoke choked the sky until day and night became indistinguishable.
The river that once sang through Solbory now ran black and red with ash and blood.
A senior priest, hidden among the rubble, watched the nightmare unfold.
He had lived long enough to remember the old hymns the ones that spoke of two divine weapons.
One was the Blade of the Pure Moon the sword of Aestra, light incarnate.
The other… was the Serpentine Fang.
A cursed weapon said to have shattered the first Holy Empire when Veylharoth rose from corruption.
The priest’s heart froze.
He stumbled back from the edge of the battlement, heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"The Fang has returned," he whispered, terror turning his blood to ice.
"The Abyss walks again among mortals…"
"We are forsaken."
In blind panic, he fled abandoning prayer, dignity, and all that he had once believed sacred into the burning villages beyond the city walls.
There, among terrified peasants and broken soldiers, the word began to spread like wildfire:
"The old evil has returned."
"The gods have abandoned us."
"The blade that ended the first empire now drinks again."
Fear, more than any sword or spell, conquered the hearts of kingdoms.
And then…
In the ruins of a forgotten alley, beneath a sky choked with ash,
Caelan’s body stirred.
His breath returned in shallow, trembling gasps.
His wounds deep gashes that should have killed him had closed.
No scars, no infections only a strange faint warmth coiled under his skin, thrumming quietly.
Around him, the world was still.
But he felt it a faint shimmer in the air.
A presence, neither cold nor cruel merely vast, ancient, indifferent.
The stones beneath him were faintly veined with black crystalline fractures,
as if something had touched the earth itself during his sleep.
He sat up slowly, hands shaking.
Pain flared but not mortal pain.
Something… deeper.
As if part of him had been hollowed out and replaced with something colder, quieter.
Glancing at his hands, he saw thin dark lines like glassy veins along his arms where the worst of his wounds had been.
Not grotesque.
Not monstrous.
But different.
Marked.
The memories returned slowly the prayer, the collapse and the realization hit him like a blade:
"The Abyss."
It had answered.
Not with chains, not with corruption, not with whispered promises of doom.
It had healed him.
Saved him.
And it had asked for nothing in return…
except a sliver of himself he barely noticed was missing.
Caelan rose shakily to his feet, his movements uncertain.
The city stretched before him burned, broken, silent.
In the distance, black banners rose over the ruins.
Valen’s army.
The Death Knights.
The abyss reborn.
He clutched his chest where the faint warmth still pulsed and whispered:
"If the light abandoned me…"
"And the darkness saved me…"
"Was the darkness ever truly evil?"
The questions had no answers.
Not yet.
But the world he knew was dead.
And a new one terrible, uncertain, and vast waited ahead.
Caelan turned his back on the fallen city and walked into the wasteland beyond.
Behind him, Solbory burned.
Before him, the Abyss whispered not of damnation but of possibilities.
