Ritual

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In the present, Ren had been fully healed for a while, and Alice and Merrit were kneeling over him.

“Merrit… is Ren ok? Did he get a concussion? I don’t think he actually lost consciousness, he’s just been staring into space for a while…”

“No, he’s just like this. Every once in a while he just blanks out daydreaming about something. If you interrupt him, he gets really mad… so I’d just leave him.”

“... What do you think he’s dreaming about?”

“I dunno… He refuses to tell me anything about himself. And even when I try to get close to talk to him, he always finds some excuse to get away. But I get the feeling he’s been through a lot.”

“I want to know. You do too, don’t you? About him. About the world he left behind.”

“Well, good luck finding that out…”

Her airy demeanor gone, she gave Merrit a serious look, one that he had never once seen on her face.

She hovered her hand over Ren’s forehead, hesitating, but then continued, placing her hand down.

“Alice, what are you…?”

Her eyes were closed for a moment, and then she doubled over in pain, as thousands of memories flooded into her mind. Images, voices, emotions, mismatched, angry, pained, began banging against her psyche.

_

“Sacrifice them? Don’t make me laugh.I won’t see a single one of them die. Even if I have to burn my life away.”

An image of Ren in a battlefield, facing a dragon similar to the one she had just erased.

_

“Ren… don’t forget me, ok?”

An image of a stocky young man, lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

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“DO YOU THINK YOU COULD’VE DONE ANY OF THIS WITHOUT ME?!”

An intense feeling of betrayal, rage, and desperation, welled inside Alice.

_

“You deserve to live, more than I do.”

An image of a red haired girl, skin cracking and bleeding, eyes turning black, pushing Ren away, followed by a sensation of unimaginable guilt.

_

Alice withdrew her hand backwards as if she had been burnt, tears in her eyes.

“Got your fill?”

Ren had opened his eyes, glaring at Alice.

“Yeah, you and I have a lot to discuss. But that can wait for later.”

He got up, stumbled for a little bit, and immediately began sprinting towards the town center.

Merrit began to start after him, but he saw Alice collapse on the ground, her arms held tight around her chest, breathing heavily.

“ALICE! What-”

“I tried… I tried to see inside his head. But it all came through at once… I saw horrible things…”

From what he had seen and heard of Alice, it seemed to Merrit that she had lived a relatively peaceful and sheltered life, wherever the Church she came from was. Seeing-whatever she saw- , was probably a big shock for her.

His hands shaking, he didn’t know what to do, or how to help. Is this all he was capable of doing? Tagging along with two people this strong, and all he could do was sit and watch…

“Think… think!”

Alice saw his pained expression, and suddenly seemed to have a surge of strength.

“I- I’m ok. Totally… one hundred percent- filled with energy!”

With some effort, she got up fully, and her peppy attitude returned.

Merrit sighed in relief. “You’re ok?”

“Yeah… you just had a look on your face like my little sister’s. Whenever she looks like that, I know I can’t be moping around!”

She gave him a wink and a thumbs up, but it had the opposite effect on him.

“I’m so useless…”

_

As Ren was sprinting through the city, a thousand thoughts were spinning through his head.

He was headed towards the place where the center of the circle in the sky would be, which seemed to be somewhere in the town center.

These summoning circles over towns, these attacks, they had started to only appear near the end of the war. He had always been too late to figure out where they came from, no evidence, no humans, just corpses, monsters, and a Demon Lord born in the sky above it.

But now, a girl claiming to be the new High Priest, one who said she wanted to resurrect the Goddess of all things, had just incinerated the entire attacking force. If he wanted to apprehend the perpetrators, this would be his chance, as they would now probably all be in disarray.

As he leaped over walls and jumped over rooftops, he eventually arrived at the town hall. The windows had all been shuttered, and there was a crowd outside, murmuring.

“Where are the officials? They’ve all been shut in there for hours, before the attack…”

“I bet they’re hunkered down in a cozy bunker inside…”

Ren maneuvered his way around to a side entrance away from the crowd, and tried to open the door. Of course, it was locked. But he was never one to be stopped by such things, and kicked the door off of its hinges. Once he walked inside, he froze, stunned.

It was a horrible sight. Rather than a monster attack, this seemed to be some sort of… ritual.

There were robed and hooded bodies everywhere, some intact, most not, but all of them had the same brand on their forehead, one matching the summoning circle in the sky. But what intrigued him the most, was the logo on many of their robes.

During the peak of the war, magical abilities began to become few and far between, as the Goddess began to disappear from the lives of many. To fill that role, a group of talented mages began to pioneer new inventions, leading mankind into a new age of technology, unreliant on magic. Eventually, now named the High Court, they became the de facto rulers of the country, until the day everything collapsed.

But Ren, and the other people he had asked on his travels, assumed that the old government had been destroyed, and some new conspiratorial puppets put in their place, resulting in this hell. But seeing as the High Court crest appeared all over these corpses, it appeared that was not the case.