Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 131: The Crimson Games

Chapter 131: The Crimson Games

They were there, at the center of the carnage, covered in blood, saturated with that substance too heavy to be ignored, too red to be forgotten. Him and Lysara. Red from head to toe. Red like extinguished flames. Red like the truth one refuses to see, like what one senses at the bottom of a nightmare but refuses to name. The blood drowned them, bound them, disfigured them. There was no more nobility, no armor, no hierarchy. There was only this: two bodies covered by a dead world.

And he... he slowly turned his head.

He looked around him, like a child amidst the ruins of a game too vast. He saw. Finally. The bodies. The faces. The remains. The corpses of our former companions. Those who, just a day earlier, might still have reached out to him. Collapsed silhouettes. Frozen gazes. Interrupted stories. And in his eyes, I sensed that absence of reaction which was not indifference... but vertigo. He didn’t seem to understand. He didn’t seem to believe any of this was real. That he was the cause. The center.

Then he lowered his gaze to Lysara.

She was on her knees. Wounded. Tired. Defeated. Her black armor, thick, heavy, protective, was slowly retracting, like a skin one sheds after war. And beneath that shell, her frail, young, vulnerable body was visible. A girl. Nothing more. Nothing less. A girl who had stood up to the impossible. A girl who had offered herself to fire to save him. And he looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.

Then... he turned his head to me.

And our eyes met.

One moment. Just one.

But it was enough.

I saw in his eyes that clarity which forgives nothing. That pain which precedes the fall. He understood. He knew. He saw. Everything. What he had done. What he had become. What he had broken. What he could no longer repair. I felt, deep within me, that if I had offered him something in that moment — a look of compassion, a whisper, a breath, a hand — he would have taken it. He would have faltered differently. He could have come back. Maybe.

I could have.

I could have offered him a thread.

A breath of forgiveness.

A reflection of humanity.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t want to.

I gave him what I had most cutting: a look of fear. Of rejection. Of contempt. As if I no longer saw anything in him but a beast. A monster. A starving animal that could never be tamed. My instinct spoke before my heart. And in that precise instant, something broke in him.

I saw it.

His gaze wavered.

Then emptied.

And it was over.

He pushed her away violently — with a brutal, almost instinctive gesture, as if his own body could no longer accept being touched, as if Lysara’s contact, though gentle, though real, had become an unbearable burn, a senseless reminder of what he had been, of what he should have remained, of what he might never recover.

And he began to flee. Fleeing without purpose, without direction, as if the entire arena had suddenly become a prison, as if the world itself — the ground, the walls, the sky — had conspired to lock him inside his own monstrosity.

He was running, not to escape, but to disappear, to dissolve, to flee the intolerable awareness of still existing.

He was clawing at his face. Literally. His nails — or rather his claws, those inhuman extensions of himself that he no longer seemed to recognize — tore at his skin, ripped off shreds of flesh in a silent rasp.

Blood burst with each strike, splashing across his cheeks, his temples, his lips, as if he were trying to redraw his own face with muffled screams.

He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t truly screaming. He was retching. Talking to himself. Words without structure, without logic, fragments of flayed childhood, scraps of prayers turned to curses, names that no longer meant anything, mixed with beastly growls, incomprehensible pleas, broken murmurs.

He looked like a child lost in the jaws of a monster — except the monster was him, and the child had nowhere left to hide.

And all around, the audience. The stands. The nobles. The creatures from the four corners of the world. All of them. Frozen. Paralyzed. Wide-eyed. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t. The clamour had been replaced by silence.

Cheers stuck in their throats. The lords, the generals, the spectators, the judges... none knew how to react.

The horror didn’t come from an attack. It came from the aftermath. It came from what they saw there, in the center of the sacred arena: a being who was no longer anything — no longer hero, nor champion, nor demon, nor vampire — just a human fragment who could no longer bear his own body.

Some stepped back, instinctively.

Others looked away, uncomfortable, worried, troubled without daring to admit it.

But all... all watched him.

And I, from afar, watched him fall.

Not stumble.

Fall.

Into an inner spiral no power could contain. Into a slow, viscous, irreversible madness. A madness he may not have deserved. But that now lived in him like a sentence. There was no more fight. No more enemy. No more end. Just him, alone, torn, devoured by what he had done, by what he had become. And the storm he had unleashed... had turned against him.

And in the silence of the arena, among still-warm corpses, under the frozen gazes of the world, there was nothing left to say.

There was only this.

A father in ruins.

A myth collapsed.

A man who hadn’t known how to return in time.

Then... in the suspended uproar, on the edge of a silence too heavy, where horror finally seemed ready to fall silent, a voice rose — sharp, slicing, furious, like a cleaver thrown into the theater of defeat. Aranael. The First. The relic. The voice of an order too high to be questioned. Furious to see the scene escape her, to lose control of this tournament turned sacrifice, she screamed, and her cry ripped through the stands, the stone, the sky, like a whip of obsidian cracking against the bones of the world.

— Orphéa!

That name cracked like a sacred injunction, like a reawakened curse, and immediately, without waiting for an echo, she repeated it, louder still, more acidic:

— Orphéa! Kill that human!

Not a judgment. Not a sentence. An order. Brutal. Bare. Irrevocable.

And Elsa, already half-dead, standing by pride more than strength, Elsa who had fought to her last fiber, Elsa who had stood as the final bulwark between monstrosity and oblivion, Elsa... fell to her knees. The weight of pain, the shock of injustice, or perhaps simply that ancient fatigue called dignity.

And she had no time.

Not a second.

Not a word.

The ground beneath her split open suddenly, without prior rumble, without warning. A clean tear, vertical, as if the world itself had judged her unworthy to breathe again. And from that fissure, a scarlet glow burst forth — thick, burning, saturated with intent. A cry of fire. An inverted offering.

In a flash of black flames, she was consumed.

Not killed.

Erased.

Reduced to formless ash, without cry, without memory. A silhouette that didn’t even have the luxury of falling. Nothing remained of her but a burning void, a breath of shadow in the air, an absent place.

And in the stands, no one understood.

Or rather: all understood that something had just been committed. Something too fast to be just. Too perfect not to be monstrous.

A grating, high, distorted voice suddenly rose above the arena, sliding like a shard of metal on glass, too sharp to be human, too vast to belong to a single body. It was a voice made of several voices, speaking at once without ever answering each other, as if a shapeless entity, a being without form or origin, were slowly pouring through the air itself, colonizing the space, infiltrating every ear, every throat, every breath still alive. And in that suspended nightmare, that voice — his voice, the one of the Shapeshifting Sovereign — imposed itself.

— Victor of the games...

Then, silence. Macabre. Inexplicable. As if even time held its breath, as if the spectators, the corpses, the judges, the stones and the sky understood that this was no longer a game.

— The Vampires.

No cheer. No applause. Nothing. The arena did not react. The world, for a moment, was bare. Stripped of meaning. And thus these games ended.

These games which, later, much later, when wounds would still be gaping but words once more available, would be called... the Crimson Games.

For that day, the races of the world had not simply lost. They had not been defeated in a tournament. They had been transformed. They had seen. They had understood. That day, each race had learned — not defeat, but fear. Not pain, but memory.

They had learned to fear the vampires. To dread that species believed extinct, decimated, marginal. They had learned to recognize madness. Not the madness of actions, but the one that hides behind silence, the one that takes the shape of an empty gaze or a bloodstained embrace. And more than anything... they had learned to see. Truly. To see the perversion of desire, the slow, slow and irresistible devouring born of incarnated lust.

It was not a victory.

It was a warning.

A warning screamed in blood.

A warning carved into nightmares.

And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again.