Chapter 36:
Orion - Victory of the Dark Lord
A golden hush settled over Gigas.
The wind carried no song, only silence and smoke – not smoke from destruction, but from the magick healing from the battle, from mountains split open like clay, from the wounds of the cosmos that had barely begun to close. The suns hovered above the broken lands like a distant god, cold in its beauty, heavy in its light.
Orion stood at the edge of a cliff, the wind pulling gently at the long red scarf draped across his shoulder. Below him stretched the great valley of his kingdom – now quiet, eerily still, as though the buildings, the castles, the churches were holding their breaths. His leather armor bore the scars of the ordeal: cracks, blood, ash, the faint shimmer of magic that had not quite healed. The Starheart within him pulsed like a slumbering star, warm but still, not yet ready to rise again.
Behind him came the sound of soft, labored steps through the crumbling dirt and brittle grass.
Son of the earth, Terran.
The elf was ragged. Blood painted the side of his face, and one arm hung limp at his side. His remaining sword was sheathed, not in surrender but in acknowledgment. He did not come to fight. Not now.
Orion didn’t turn, keeping his arms folded, for he already knew it was him.
Terran stopped several paces away and let the silence stretch between them like a thread worn thin by years of battle, betrayal, and something older – old goodness, jaded by exhaustion.
“What we have,” Terran said, his voice rough but steady, “will last for eternity.”
There was no pride in it, no bitterness either – simply a statement of fact. Spoken with the gravity of one who had finally seen the truth at the end of all things.
“But for now…” he added, his gaze drifting toward the same sun Orion was watching. “Rest. Pray. God will deal with the both of us.”
Orion glanced back at him.
The two stood there for a moment, weathered silhouettes etched into the stone of a dying cliffside. No more words were needed.
He nodded.
And that was enough.
Terran turned and disappeared into the forest’s shadows, his pale form slipping between the trees like a fading dream. The world swallowed him whole.
And Orion remained.
He exhaled slowly, the wind tugging strands of his white hair across his face. The burden within him still burned – with pain, yes. But also with questions. He had taken the Evil back into himself. He had expected the crushing weight of it, the madness, the devouring cold. The ultimate coronation of the greatest Evil none before or after could be compared.
But it never came.
He did not feel ‘good,’ no. But neither did he feel any more Evil than he had in the days before. Somehow, that darkness no longer ruled him. It was still there, nested somewhere deep within, but quieter…
As if…
The Starheart had outshone it.
And perhaps that was the answer.
The fire of the Starheart still burned. Brighter. Wilder. Unchained.
And for the first time since he walked this broken path… he felt it.
Hope.
This king closed his eyes, tilted his face slightly to the sky, and whispered – softly, a name sacred to his soul. One he would never forget for the rest of time:
“Emi.”
The song of his voice left his lips, not meant for the ears of men or gods, but for a single girl across infinity.
And the wind took it.
Through clouds and starlight, over mountains and oceans, across the seam between worlds, it traveled.
And traveled.
And traveled.
And traveled.
Until finally…
On Earth, beneath a quiet spring sky, Emi walked alone in a grassy field behind her house. The breeze stirred the cherry blossoms nearby, and she lifted her face to feel the wind.
Then she heard it.
A voice. A whisper.
Her name, spoken in a tone that wrapped her heart in light and longing.
And she stopped walking.
Eyes wide.
Heart beating.
Tears already beginning to fall again – not out of grief this time, but something else.
She clutched her chest, as if to hold the echo of his voice inside her, willing to wait forevermore.
“Orion.”
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