The answers he got were not answers at all, but rather perspectives of some who took the throne or attempted to. Perhaps these were all the past, and future versions of himself who all failed to take the throne to some degree, or failed to maintain it. It wasn't grandeur he sought, he had a humble life way before this. Ruling something was never in the cards, but, perhaps the throne held a power that could help him in the future against Adel. Maybe this was just a chance given once in a lifetime. With this in mind, he tossed aside the rusted key and took the new one, heading straight for the throne through the mirrored path. "I'll push forward regardless of what's in my path. I must."
""
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━═✥═━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛
Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2025 7:37 pm
The Hollow Plaza The Hollow Plaza burned with a slow, deliberate fury. The lightning hadn’t stopped — it had simply quieted, condensed into a pulsing pressure that hung in the air like the moment before a thunderclap. The Elder’s form crackled faintly as he paced, thunder curling around his boots in spectral echoes. With every measured step, the warped architecture of the Plaza twisted further, its angles bending to the wrath he barely contained. His voice cut through the heat like the edge of a blade.
“I know you won’t give everything to keep them safe. You just said it — proud, like it was a virtue.” His lip curled as arcs of power leapt from the iron struts above, burning veins of white-hot electricity through the half-remembered wood and stone. “You think you’re ready to sacrifice. But I know you, Kalen. You’re a proud pup who’s still lost in the storm.”
His fury manifested in the plaza itself. Books, once frozen midair in the false calm of this broken space, now tore themselves open. Pages flipped in unnatural winds, revealing flickering visions — more real than memory, more painful than prophecy. In one, Kalen stood shaking, his revolver trembling in his grasp. Across from him stood Salem Everett, no longer the laughing, half-serious father figure. He wore obsidian-trimmed armor polished like judgment, a white-gold cloak dragging behind him, soaked in something unseen but unmistakable. His eyes, once curious, now burned with sovereign command. And then — it was too late. Kalen's hesitation bloomed like a wound in time. Nyale surged forward, her body ripping apart, twisting into something unnatural, something perfected. A Queen born of Echoes. A scream — his own — tore the vision in half.
“Lose what makes you human? Do you even know who your father was? What he gave up?” the Elder snarled, teeth bared. “He sacrificed more than his humanity, Kalen. He gave up his place in time. His legacy. He became a myth so that you could inherit a future. And now you cling to softness like it’s sacred.” His spittle hit the floor. Lightning roared like a heartbeat behind him.
Another book exploded into motion. Raeka this time — or a version of him. The boy was clad in robes made from shattered junction rings and fused scar-tissue, pulsating between liquid and glass. From his back arced eight broken wings — malformed GF appendages that flickered like failed summons. He advanced, half-divine and wholly in pain. This Raeka pleaded, begged Kalen not to strike. And Kalen — the Kalen in the book — hesitated. The blade swing faltered. Behind them, another figure barked orders. Finish him. Finish him! But the blade didn’t rise in time. The corrupted Raeka surged. The real Kalen could only watch as his mirror self was cut down in a single blink — his final breath spent trying to call Remington’s name. She tried to escape through time — but her spell cracked. Something pulled her back. Her scream led to silence.
The Elder stopped walking. The storm dimmed — not with peace, but exhaustion. He looked at his younger self again, but his gaze was distant now. The fury hadn’t passed, but it had deepened — matured — hardened into something worse.
"Adel wakes beneath the skin of satellites." His voice was low, half-spoken. "Esthar thinks they caged her. They only fed her." A moment passed, and then another vision shimmered between them. Adel — not in containment, but in ascendance. Her body reformed with nanite alloy and sorcerous latticework, her voice transmitted in pulses across every Esthar-born mind. From orbit, Esthar cracked like an egg as she passed over it — her power no longer elemental, but ideological. Not a goddess. A signal.
The Elder didn’t wait for Kalen’s reaction. A third vision opened of its own accord. Remington. Floating. Flickering. Her outline blurred by paradox — her eyes a shifting mosaic of timelines. She wore Ultimecia’s sigils not as chains, but as inheritance. Her voice echoed in a hundred dialects — all versions of herself, splintered and reconverging.
“You had the chance to save me. And you chose to hope I’d save myself.”
Behind her, a throne sat cracked but waiting. Raeka’s body, chained, knelt at her side, only half-recognizable. A wing gone. The other corrupted. The last flicker before the vision died was Kalen — another Kalen, nowhere near strong enough — collapsing at her feet.
The Elder’s hand closed to a fist.
"You see it now, don’t you? What we let happen, again and again. Because we wanted to stay human. Because we wanted to believe in forgiveness. In hope."
He turned his head, almost gently, to the golden wolf beside him. The chains had slackened. The creature met his gaze — not with rage, but with sorrow. With understanding.
"So I killed hope. And I became the weapon they needed." Across the bridge, the future revealed itself — the shattered corpses of those who once threatened everything. Sorceresses. Tyrants. Ghosts of impossible power. All destroyed. All silent.
Then came the thunder.
In a blink, the Elder was upon him. The younger Kalen hung in his grasp, feet off the ground, crackling light burning through his coat. The Elder’s voice was barely audible now — but it shook the world.
“I hope your novel never apparates here.” His grip tightened. “But if it does, I pray the next one of us makes the right choice.”
The plaza fell deathly still. The chains at the Elder’s feet fell slack. The golden wolf raised its head one last time — and then turned away. The Elder closed his eyes. And threw him. A crack like thunder split the air — and the Younger was gone. The echo collapsed behind him in silence.
—
Kalen awoke gasping. Somewhere unfamiliar.
The Hall of Reflections
When Varitas stepped forward, there was no explosion of light. No divine chorus. The crown did not rise to meet him. The throne did not bend toward his will. What met him instead was something quieter. Stranger. The mirrored path ahead did not shatter under the weight of his decision — it simply vanished, as if it had only ever been there to test whether he would dare walk it. The obsidian beneath his boots seemed to hum, not with welcome, but with memory.
The moment stretched, and from somewhere beyond the chamber came a sound — small, but absolute. A faint mechanical click, like the unfastening of a long-locked door, or the snap of a shutter finally pressed. There was no direction to it. No clear source. But it carried weight. A signal that something — someone — had noticed. For a man who had spent so long on the margins of history, the feeling struck deep. At last, the world saw him.
The kneeling reflections of himself — those broken, crowned, regretful versions — did not rise in protest. They simply faded, like old dreams surrendered to the morning. They had waited for permission. Varitas had not. That choice alone marked the divergence.
And yet, there was no triumph. The throne did not warm to his presence; if anything, it grew colder. Denser. As if now aware that someone had finally reached for it — someone unexpected. Someone unacceptable. The air grew heavier. Not with menace, but with focus. For the first time in his journey, Varitas was not watching the world. It was watching him.
Then the floor fell away.
He did not plummet. He did not soar. He simply shifted — as if space and narrative no longer obeyed the laws of presence and place. No noise, no sensation of movement. Just the feeling of displacement, as if the universe had tucked him somewhere else with the precision of a forgotten bookmark slipped between pages.
When his eyes opened, the throne room was gone. There were no mirrors. No echoes of himself. Only a space — unfamiliar, unmarked — and the ache in his chest of something having finally changed. There were no trumpets. No witnesses.
But for the first time in a long time, Varitas was not irrelevant. He had moved the story. And it would have to account for him now.
Seeing no change initially when he entered the mirror had him on alert, his hand constantly placed on the hilt of his blade, prepared to draw on it at any moment. He had no idea what he had done, or whether or not it was a good choice that he had made, but it was a choice nonetheless. When the area around him vanished, shifting, altering, becoming something new and unfamiliar, as if space and time itself reshuffled him into some other place. He took a good look around at his surroundings, trying to peace whether or not he was alone, or in danger immediately, and if nothing came of his senses, he simply prepared his antimagic gear and stepped forth towards whatever appeared to be an exit or progression somewhere other than remaining still in one place for too long. He needed to save the boys if possible, if Adel didn't kill them already.
Status: Lost. Location: ???? Company: Varitas, Makoto Thoughts: No Place Like Home Weapons: Hrunting ll Thunder Rose Magic: Scan (1) Crystal Stock: Earth (x10)
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Kiss me good-bye, love's memory Follow your heart and find your destiny Won't shed a tear, for love's mortality For you put the dream in my reality
The world seemed to come to a slow despite everything him twisting and twirling like the active thunderstorm it was, flashing and whirling nonstop while the two looked each other eye to eye, cold, iridescent steel blue to cold, iridescent, heartless blue. The power of the Elder was palpable, causing all of the hairs on the nape of Kalen's neck and arms to rise at the strength that came from him. It was near sorcery the strength that came from his frame, and this both awed and slightly terrified the younger man; such a power seemed absolutely foreign to his abilities yet it stood here before him, inherent and almost too real. There was indeed a world where the loving and affable blonde became seemingly inhuman, holding a capacity for strength that transcended what any would imagine, on a level that seemed like magic no regular human could honestly harness without repercussion.
But the repercussion was obvious here, wasn't it?
All Kalen's words did were seemingly infuriate the Elder before him, the words that dripped from the depths of his mouth came spilling out like vitriolic bolts of lightning; the power cutting not just into Kalen's psyche but into the very depth of his soul. Altruistic, hopeful, and foolish were all that he was before the elder blonde, the nostalgia of what Kalen was now seemingly like the most painful reminder, an old wound that not only nagged and pained, but infuriated at the reminder of such a moment. The young man realized that his presence was like an old cancer to this man, something that in this world he had to cut out in order to survive. A proud pup who's still lost in the storm. A rather pointed way of describing how he had been feeling the past month in the depths of the Trabian frostland, learning to survive with naught but his wit and a blade at the behest of his teacher and fellow pupil. Almost on que, the pages whirled around him, his hair whipping around whilst his eyes looked to and fro at the sudden and rapid movement.
There it was all like a narration of horror to him, one curtailed specifically to move him in a direction, to persuade him. Salem, Nyale, Raeka...all narrated by the all too familiar tones of his own voice, describing not the scenes that played out before his very eyes, but perhaps the very fact of reality that he was living and would come to face like their father had before them all whilst rooted into the spot he had come to stand after shooting at himself. Frozen was more of an apt to describe it, chilled by the scenes from a memory that were absolutely foreign to his being but all the same, were somehow familiar. Scenes that he had not lived, not yet, but his soul across time had lived over and over again. Over and over. Over and over. All coming to fall at the fruit of their own ambition, and fail at the feet of their own hubris. Their achilles heel becoming more and more apparent as each scene played itself out, parables of the failures of not just man, but of himself. Sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, the idea of giving seemed altruistic but it was the lesson this man was trying to teach Kalen, just risking your body was not enough for what was coming.
As the storm became exhausted, so too did the young man who seemed to wilt where he stood. Kalen Vicaria was terrified of the things that he saw before him, feeling the gaze of his elder form lingering on his aghast, mortified expression. His low tones of Adel lilted like a careless whisper into his senses, a near subliminal message that cemented what the world was coming to face. It was not just like Ultimecia, who watched as Remington twisted and shifted from the form of his loving sister into a nightmare. The ending of each echo's movie was always ending with one thing, his own undoing. Failure at the hands of his own hesitation. The aspiration that Kalen held in his own humanity, at the hope that there was inherently good in people and he could love them through it all. Each time he saw this was what killed him. Kalen wanted to believe this was just the sorceress tormenting him...but in his heart, and in the depths of his soul, a lurching feeling only told him that this was a reality across the many worlds and universes that existed out of his reach and understanding.
Once more, his own voice, tired with anger and maturity at the cost of those that he loved, came into his ear like a foreboding warning.
"So I killed hope...and became the weapon they needed."
It was the instant that Kalen's penance stare was broken, turning to look in wonder and horror at his elder, who grasped him in his grip. All that Kalen could muster in this moment, his mind, heart, and soul whirling, was a look filled with a true sense of loss and horror.
"I hope your novel never apparates here..."
This was the one book that Kalen hoped to never publish
As soon as he was thrown, Kalen Vicaria woke with a scream, lashing out like a wild animal that was just shocked with an electrical prod, a sheen of sweat covering his face at the level of panic he came to feeling.
Where he awoke was foreign yet familiar, but in his heart and mind, he was racing with all that was placed on his shoulders, a feeling completely alien to how he felt.
He hated that part of him knew the Elder was right.
Guardian Force: G...Gilgamesh? Status: O'HO, I HAVE SOMETHING Spells 0
