The world didn't move when the book opened.
It vanished.
It didn't shift away. It didn't break down.
It full on vanished, like the library, the shelves, the lamps, and the cold hiss of the west wing archives had all been some hallucinatory memory, wiped away in a single sweep.
For one impossible instant... there was nothing. No floor. No sound. Not even my own body.
The only thing I could feel was pressure between my eyes and the feeling of being sucked into something far too narrow for a person to fit through.
Then reality returned with a sharp violence.
Wind tore across my face.
Ash struck against my skin.
And then smell— the horrible smell that hit me immediately. It was a combination of burned ground, molten stone, wet iron, and something far worse beneath all of it... the bitter-sweet stink of too many bodies that burned too fast.
I wobbled instinctively, only to realise that I didn't actually wobbble. My legs had moved, but the ground underneath them didn't. There was no weight in my step, no resistance. Every step I took left no imprint on the blackened mud beneath my boots.
I looked down and saw it.
A battlefield.
A theatre of war that stretched so far that not even my eyes could comprehend what it was seeing.
Broken buildings.
Shattered roads.
Severed bodies.
Chunks of bronze, black iron, and carved stone lay half-sunk into the earth, ruins of what looked like ancient war-engines, their composition twisted and fused into the ground by heat so violent that it had turned the soil into dark gunk.
In the distance, I could see broken towers and stone buildings beaten into crooked angles, some snapped clean through, others split and hollowed by whatever force had hit them.
They looked less like grand monuments now and more like wrecks. Ruined structures that were left standing long enough to show how hard the entire area had been hit.
And beyond all that...
A city.
Or what looked like the remains of one.
The outer walls were still held in place, though sections had been crushed inwards, leaving significant damage to the stone layering. Fire moved through the trees in glowing symmetry, threading between collapsed roofs and broken towers. Smoke climbed into the sky in dense pillars; they were dark and looked heavy. It was as if the city were still burning for the world to witness.
The sky above it was all wrong.
It wasn't storm-dark, the type that I was used to back in my old world.
No.
This sky was fractured.
Pale currents of Aether ran behind the clouds like light trapped between curtains, splitting the heavens from within. Silent lightning moved across them in a slow and unnatural rhythm.
It was too deliberate to be considered weather, too elegant to appear by chance.
The clouds did not look like clouds at all.
They looked like the sky trying to mend a wound that it did not know how to close.
I turned in place, the pulse in my neck thumping hard.
The Codex didn't appear.
There was no blue-gold text.
No clean overlays.
No information labels.
No usual comfort.
"Codex?" I said sharply.
Nothing.
The wind raged past me and took the words away.
I tried again, but this time louder. "Codex!"
Still nothing.
The silence that followed wasn't true silence, but it was worse. It meant that I was alone.
Although... that wasn't entirely true.
I might be alone, but it doesn't seem like my existence affects anything in this place.
It's as if I were allowed to witness what was happening but not interact with it.
I stepped forward, and my body passed through the tattered edge of a ripped-up banner as if the fabric were smoke.
My breath got caught during my phasing.
I reached for it, slower this time.
My hand slid through it.
No contact.
No friction.
No effect.
I turned toward the nearest corpse. An ancient soldier in cracked armour, half-swallowed by mud and ash.
I knelt beside him.
Up close, he looked less like a man and more like charcoal. His cuirass was split open. One arm leaned at the wrong angle. Mud had settled into the depths of his throat and eye sockets like the world had been slowly filling him in.
I reached out... but my hand went through his shoulder.
A sharp, animalistic cold ran the length of my spine.
And before I knew it, I was flat on my feet before I had even understood that I had moved.
This wasn't a memory or a vision.
It was a haunting one that would leave an everlasting impression on me for the rest of my life.
I was standing in the middle of a grave, with dead bodies around me, and none of them knew it.
"Edrin."
A voice carried out through the wind
One word.
That was all it took to make the whole surrounding area acute.
I turned around toward its direction.
Then I saw them.
Two figures stood on a raised ridge of broken stone that overlooked the ruined city.
One faced me, while the other had his back half-turned.
The first man, the one who had spoken, wore robes too polished for a common soldier, though the battlefield had dragged them toward ruin. It was deep blue, threaded with silver, a long coat tailored with precision that belonged to courts and command centres, not trenches and ash. The outer layers were split for movement rather than ceremony. However, there was still something immaculate about its design, as if the war had only left a dent in its elegance, failing to erase it completely.
The man had dark blue hair that was striking even under the dead sky. It was swept back from his face in controlled, calculated lines, with only a few loose strands falling out of place. He had the kind of face that should have looked too relaxed for the destruction of a city. Fnie-boned, calm at first glance, sharp the longer you looked. His expression held exhaustion, but not disorder. His posture did too; it was straight, measured, with every inch of him still arranged by years of habit and will.
There was intelligence in the way he stood. Not just any intelligence, but certainty. He had the eerie stillness of someone who had spent his life standing half a step above everyone else and had never once needed to prove why.
The second figure stood several paces away at the lip of the ridge, looking down at the burning city.
He wore no armour. No ceremonial mantle. No mark of House I could make out.
Just a dark coat, battered by wind and war, hanging open at the throat. It looked heavy with rain and ash, torn at one sleeve, scorched at the hem. He stood like he was holding himself together by will alone, broad-shouldered, solid, not graceful in the first man's way, but dangerous for the opposite reason. There was something raw about him, something bruised and unfinished, like a blade still being hammered into shape while it was already cutting people.
His hair was dark and unkempt, thrown loose by the wind. His face should have been young. It almost was. But whatever youth belonged there had been burned down into something harder, his jaw tight, eyes fixed on the city with a grim, dull kind of focus that made him look less like a man watching destruction and more like someone who had agreed to become part of it.
Then he spoke without looking back.
"I'm surprised to see you here, Maelor," he said, voice low and steady, worn thin at the edges like it had been dragged through too many battlefields. "Are you sure it is wise to leave House Veyrannis unattended during the war of succession?"
The name landed before the meaning did.
'So he's the Head of Veyrannis, but I'm pretty sure Ryn said that the current Head is a female— wait... if it's Veyrannis, then maybe this is a memory, as the Codex said. Does this mean I'm in the past? If so, then why? I really wish I had the Codex with me right now to help me decipher through all this.' I thought.
Maelor didn't answer immediately. He only kept staring at the city below, silver and blue hanging from his shoulders in ash-streaked ruin, as if silence itself were something he'd mastered long ago.
And beside him, the other man stood against the breeze like a threat the world had failed to eliminate.
The ground near his feet was split and dried, looking like faint dust. Tiny hints of green struggled to shoot upward through the blood-dark mud as if life and death had both received instructions, neither side willing to concede.
The air around him distorted in slight pressure changes. Light was caught oddly at the vertices of his silhouette, and his shadow fell where no shadow should.
It was as if the rules of the world had all gathered around him, but were confused as to which ones should apply.
The figure did not turn around when Maelor spoke again.
"Edrin," Maelor repeated, but this time the name carried anguish.
It didn't sound like fear.
Or anger.
But grief... with shades of regret.
"I implore you. Stop this madness."
The man at the ridge did not move.
For a few stretched-out seconds, there was only the gust of wind and the distant noise of something else collapsing within the city.
When he finally answered, his voice was quiet.
"It's too late, Maelor. The time to stop happened a long time ago."
"No!" Maelor's reply came immediately. "You still have time; you can stop all this from continuing. Right here. Right now."
The man turned, and as soon as he did, a name popped up in my head.
'Alaric Edrin.'
"Huh— why does it feel like I know him, and why do I know his name?" I whispered.
I didn't know how I knew, but the name struck me with the same cold certainty as Maelor's had... as if some buried part of me had been waiting for this thread between us to tighten.
Alaric— no, Edrin's face was calm.
That was what made the whole situation menacing.
There was no madness in his eyes. No rage. Not an ounce of fanatical ecstasy.
Just a stillness.
He looked tired, burdened by some decision too large to survive unchanged, but there was no hesitation in him. No sign of a man still choosing which side to pick. Whatever line he had crossed, he had crossed it long before this moment.
And he was alluring in the way disasters sometimes are.
He wasn't handsome or anything. It was more to do with the harmony of his expression and the horror around him that made it impossible to look away. Like a martyr placed in the middle of a scorching city, and was told to smile.
Maelor took a step closer.
"Can't you hear them?" he asked.
Edrin's eyes shifted back toward the city. "I do."
"There are children in that city."
"I know."
"There are healers, innocent old men who never picked up a blade. Women fleeing to hide in cellars while your war reduces the city to ash."
Edrin said nothing.
Maelor's voice sharpened.
"Edrin, this isn't a battle anymore."
Still nothing.
"This is a massacre."