Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 124: The Twelve and Him

Chapter 124: The Twelve and Him

They were there.

All of them.

My former companions.

They weren’t the same anymore, but I would have recognized them among a thousand. Even deformed, even changed, even covered in scales, living armor, black feathers or ritual marks. Even unrecognizable, their gazes, their breaths, their absences — everything in them still vibrated with what we once were.

And for a second — just one — my whole body wanted to reach out to them.

I wanted to scream. To walk. To break that ridiculous distance. To tell them I was here. That I hadn’t forgotten. That despite the races, the mutations, the pacts, the erasures... I had never stopped carrying them within me.

But I didn’t move.

I didn’t even think to. Because something invisible — and far older than fear — already had its claws around me.

The entire coliseum had frozen.

Or maybe it was me.

Or maybe it was them.

The Lords.

Seventy-two entities. Six per species. Twelve species. Aligned all around, above, at varying heights depending on caste, lineage, legitimacy. Seated on materials older than the tongues of the peoples present. Their thrones pulsed with memory. Bone, solidified lava, black ice, spectral wood, chanting metal.

They didn’t need to rise.

They looked.

And their gaze was enough.

I felt their presence like a second breath in my ribcage. Not a breath of air — a breath of force. A slow pressure, squeezing me like a tide rising in my throat.

The audience, meanwhile, was screaming.

Louder than ever.

Each gallery vibrated with a different rhythm. The troll voices burst in guttural bursts. The sylveth choirs made the magical foliage above the arches tremble. The dragons sang with their fangs. The vampires didn’t sing. They stared.

Their gazes alone weighed as much as a scream.

— CAS-SAN-DREEE!

Someone screamed my name. But I didn’t see them. Other names followed. Some old. Others I had never heard. But in this sonic chaos, nothing made sense. It was a sea of war. A song of summoning. A carnivorous prayer.

And above them all, like an abyss suspended in the heavens, stood the upper box.

The Box of the Vestiges.

Twelve thrones. One per race. Larger forms. Calmer. Still. They did not speak. They did not vibrate. And yet, they repressed everything.

The noise. The magic. The wind.

Even the skies above us seemed to hold their breath.

Their silhouettes were blurry, impossible to fix. Figures carved from the impossible, from myth, from the pure essence of the world. Their mere stillness subdued us.

— The Vestiges...

Orphéa’s voice was broken. No longer a whisper, it was a breath of fever.

But I wasn’t listening anymore.

Three were missing.

And I knew them.

Anarael. Vestige Rank of the Vampires.

Yorath. Vestige Rank of the Trolls.

And him.

Xylorath.

Vestige Rank of the Elves.

A name I carried like a badly closed wound. A sound I repeated each night not to forget. A face I had never truly seen, but that I felt under my skin.

That damn Xylorath.

He wasn’t a creature. Not a figure.

He was the final point of everything I had lost.

He had taken Anthony.

He had closed his claws around my world, my choices, my life. And he had rewritten it all. Slowly. Unjustly.

He would not be here today.

But one day.

One day, I would drive that name down his throat.

And then...

As if to tear me brutally from my thoughts, she appeared.

Anarael.

Not as an expected presence. Not as a figure being announced. No. She was simply there. From one heartbeat of absence to the next. Appeared without a sound. Fallen from above, or maybe emerged from within the sky itself. Like a breach in reality, a shadow unhooked from a world we never truly understood.

The Vampire Vestige.

One of the twelve most powerful entities in this world.

And yet, she was not preceded by a cry. Not even by silence. She was her own announcement. A bare, contained, imperious force. Every gesture seemed written in an ancient code, in a grammar of power even the Lords no longer dared to correct.

She was carrying Lukaris.

Or rather... she transported him. He floated beside her, his body perfectly still, suspended in a dense torpor. Not a twitch, not a spasm, nothing human. Just a shape. A man’s carcass still too charged with meaning for anyone to dare call it anything else.

She laid him down beside us.

Without a word.

And then she looked at us.

One single look. Not long. But enough.

I felt my skin, my bones, my memories — everything that still belonged to me — being read. Slowly. Deeply. Down to the exact place where my last defenses were hiding.

Her gaze pierced the flesh.

It didn’t try to persuade. It sorted. It tore. It decided.

Even Lysara, whom nothing ever seemed to shake, lowered her eyelids ever so slightly.

Orphéa, she, had frozen. No spark left. No breath.

And me, I no longer even knew if I was still breathing.

Then Anarael opened her lips.

One word.

Just one.

— Win.

That was all.

No blessing. No threat. No promise.

Just that verb, cold, straight, final.

Then she vanished.

As quickly as she had come.

And in the emptiness she left behind, something started turning again. The air. The noise. The crowd’s cry. The heat. The entire world seemed to start moving again, like a mechanism that had momentarily held its gears in reverence.

But nothing... nothing would ever be quite the same again.

I turned my head.

And he was there.

Sitting to my right. Motionless. Too motionless. His posture wasn’t strange, but something in him struck me immediately. Not his appearance. Not his power. But a vertigo. Like a dull vibration that didn’t come from him... but from me.

I didn’t know why.

But he disturbed me.

Not like an enemy. Not like a threat.

Like a crack.

A piece of silence that echoed in my memories without ever settling into them. A foreign impression lodged just beneath the skin. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

He wasn’t looking at anything.

Not the Arena. Not us.

He was looking... into the void.

But a void turned inward.

There was in his eyes a darkness I had never seen before. Something gnawed. Hollow. As if all traces of thought had been burned away. He had no more anger. No more rage. Just... a beast sitting in silence. Calm. And ready.

And suddenly, all around, the vampire crowd rose.

Like a single cry from the depths of centuries.

— VAARKHYR!

— VAARKHYR!

— VAARKHYR!

The name snapped through the air like an incantation. Like a wave. He wasn’t being cheered. He was being invoked. Summoned. The crowd wasn’t celebrating a hero. They were recognizing an incarnation. They weren’t supporting him — they were offering him.

And that name...

I didn’t understand it. But I felt it imprint into my spine.

Lysara, she, had already moved closer. Her step was quick, but not rushed. A contained worry, mastered, as if she sensed the slightest abrupt motion could shatter something.

— Can you hear me? she said softly.

Her voice wasn’t childish. Not naïve. But in it, there was a fear I had never heard from her. A real one.

— Answer me... please.

She placed her hand on his arm. A gentle gesture. Far from combat, far from rituals.

But he didn’t move.

— Tell me you’re there.

She tilted her head, searched for his eyes. He wasn’t looking at her.

He wasn’t looking at anyone.

He was breathing. But barely.

— Why are you doing this...

Her voice caught a little. No tears. But as if her breath had become too narrow.

And me, I watched that scene with a discomfort I couldn’t name.

I didn’t know this man.

I knew nothing of him.

But something in my body recognized him.

Not his face. Not his voice.

Something buried.

Something from before.

And that thing burned in my guts.

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