Maelor's hand clenched so hard the silver ring on his finger flashed.
"This is not freedom, Edrin. You're slaughtering millions!"
The words seemed to strike at the air, but went nowhere.
Amidst the tension, I look down at the city.
Even from this distance, I could see the rash movements in the streets, tiny figures running between buildings, some toward a gate that no longer existed, others toward the river that cut through the eastern part of the city, in an attempt to cool off their burning bodies.
Edrin watched it all with the calmness of a man observing a view they had crafted.
"You still call it a city," he said.
Maelor stared at him in confusion. "What?"
"You call it a city... when it isn't," Edrin repeated. "It's a cage, a machine, a monument to inherited cruelty."
He turned his head slightly enough to catch the light beaming from the fractured sky on the left side of his face.
"Just because a cage is painted beautifully, doesn't make it any less of a cage."
Maelor's jaw tightened. "So this is your answer?! To burn everything you consider confinement until there's nothing left standing?!"
Edrin finally turned to face Maelor fully.
"You think all I am doing is burning walls for the sake of freedom," he said. "When really I am burning the lie that walls have ever kept anyone safe."
The wind started to rage around them, even more than it already did.
It moved around Edrin as if the air was trying to decide whether to obey him or flee.
My mouth had gone dry.
And even though I couldn't be affected by anything in this world, I knew he was the cause.
The first all-affinity user.
He had to be.
This isn't just a story.
This isn't some fairytale.
This is real.
And if this memory was to be trusted... Edrin was already at a level beyond anything history had classification for.
Maelor took another step.
"Millions are dead!"
Edrin looked at him.
"I'm aware, Maelor."
Its simplicity made my stomach twist.
Maelor's voice broke, not from weakness, but because too much truth was being forced out of him at once.
"Women and children, Edrin. Entire districts. Villages that had no armies or soldiers to defend them. There are mothers digging through the ground with their hands because they can still hear their sons screaming underneath them."
He lifted one hand toward the burning city, and I could see now that the sleeve of his robe was blackened with soot and blood.
"If this is freedom you speak of, then the world itself has been defiled in your image."
Edrin's expression did not change.
"If this world survives", he said, "it survives only by making it a sacred engine of ordained cruelty. It chooses who rises and who falls, who inherits and who is erased by the very laws written against them."
He looked back toward the city.
"Every kingdom becomes a prison for someone. Every order feeds itself with the forgotten. Every piece is purchased with generations born already chained."
His voice remained maddeningly calm.
"As long as civilisation endures in its current form, suffering can no longer be considered an unfortunate accident. It becomes a person's destiny."
Maelor's eyes widened with the terrible recognition of hearing a man say out loud the thoughts he should have never trusted with power.
"So what? This is your mercy?" Maelor asked. "To kill them all before they can be born into shackles?"
"No."
Edrin's face became coldhearted for less than a second.
"This is what remains when every gentler option fails."
Maelor shook his head once, in utter disbelief.
"No, Edrin. You have completely convinced yourself that annihilation is the same as liberation."
Edrin looked at Maelor with something similar to pity.
"You still believe this world can change."
"It can be!"
"No." The word landed heavy like a boulder. "It cannot."
The sky flashed above them, pale and disordered.
Edrin lifted one hand slightly; he wasn't casting, not yet, but the battlefield reacted to his pool of Aether anyway. A line of frost spread over a broken shield half-buried nearby while the corpse next to it smoked at the shoulders. Somewhere behind me, a snapped spearhead rose trembling from the mud, metal humming faintly before falling still again.
There they were.
All affinities.
Not cast as separate arts.
But present in him as a state of being.
Maelor's eyes met mine out of pure coincidence; his eyes tracked the field in front of Edrin with the look of a man who had already tried reasoning, mourning, bargaining, and anger. All of them lead to the same result.
"You think by destroying the world you'll free it," he said sternly.
Edrin did not answer.
Maelor's voice sharpened again.
"What about the innocent? Those who won't take part in your war. The hundreds of noble houses that will come after you in an attempt to stop you."
"What of them?" Edrin asked.
The words weren't cruel. They weren't contentious.
They were genuine.
And that's what made them monstrous.
Maelor stared at him.
Edrin continued, quieter still.
"Innocence has never shielded anyone from the order of the world. It only makes the price more wicked."
"And the nobles... they will share the same fate. Eventually."
I felt cold despite all the heat gathered in the air.
There was something in his tone that told me this wasn't an abstract concept to him. He wasn't theorising suffering. It seemed like he had experienced so much of it that his compassion had become unrecognisable.
A city bell rang in the distance.
Then came a sound I would never forget.
It wasn't a scream.
It was the collective noise of thousands of people realising, too late, that they were about to face something inevitable.
My head snapped toward the city as Aether continued to gather.
Wait— it wasn't gathering anymore.
It was congregating.
The sky above the city mellowed. The fractured clouds bent inward. Wind rushed in from every direction. I felt pressure build in my own ears and chest, even from where I stood ghostlike on the battlefield.
Maelor saw it too.
His face drained of what little composure remained.
"Edrin," he said, and for the first time, there was real fear in it. "Please. Don't do this"
Edrin didn't move.
But the world did.
First came the air.
It left the city in a single, impossible haul, as if the entire district had inhaled its own existence and had forgotten how to exhale. Roofs tore upward. Windows burst inward. People in the streets folded like paper where they stood, clutching their throats, their mouths open, gasping for all the air their lungs could get until they had nothing left to take in. Dust and ash frayed skyward in spiralling columns.
Then the heat.
The fire didn't spread, like mine or Cyril's.
It surged through the streets, as if the demise of the people was already a foregone conclusion.
Whole avenues flashed white-gold for half a heartbeat, and where the light passed, stone blackened, any wildlife left had vanished, all metal ran molten. Human shapes became dark marks on walls and cobbles before even the cries for help could finish.
The city convulsed.
And then Terra followed.
Foundations gave way. Towers folded inward. Brickwork dropped into streets that were already split open by upheaval from below. Entire sections of road sheared sideways and swallowed fleeing bodies into the earth with the wet, cracking sound of structures forgetting how to stand.
Then came the flooding.
Canals burst upward from beneath shattered bridges, but the water did not save anything. It boiled where it touched the heated stone, turning streets into red-brown vapour and scalding mud. Bodies were dragged under collapsing debris, limbs disappearing in churned sludge and steam.
Light flared so bright that for a moment I couldn't see the city at all.
Shadows appeared where light should have been, huge impossible stains swallowing alleys and archways, and people ran blind from one horror into another.
All sound had vanished.
The screeches that were once there had now been used to squash the heads of those who made them.
A pressure wave rolled out from the city centre, and bells shattered across towers. Glass exploded inward. I saw one entire plaza crumble at once, hands flying to ears, mouths wide, blood threading from noses and eyes as vibration tore through flesh and stone alike.
The very existence of life... what was left of it, had been manipulated.
Gardens lining the inner walls burst into grotesque overgrowth, roots punching through paving and ribcages with equal indifference. Vines erupted from collapsed buildings and dragged the dead into green tangles while sections of the city sithered under them, flesh and leaves and timber all turning to brittle ruin.
And beneath all of it.
Aether.
Pure, invisible, overbearing.
Whatever ancient protections the city once had to hold it all together, lit up in one last desperate grid over the rooftops.
Then collapsed.
Not in pieces.
In principle.
The geometry of the city failed. Streets no longer met where they should. Towers leaned at impossible angles before collapsing into smoke and incandescent ruin.
I couldn't breathe, not because I was suffocating.
But because I had forgotten how.
Maelor looked like a man witnessing the symbol of death announce himself to the world.
He stood frozen as the city died in stages, his face illuminated by the different uses of Aether and their impossible reflected colours, and every second of it widened the space between horror and comprehension.
I was no better.
This wasn't a war. I wouldn't even describe it as an apocalypse.
This was one single person using the world as his trinket.
When the destruction finally slowed, the city was gone.
It wasn't entirely physically erased. Some walls were still holding themselves up. Some districts still smouldered in recognisable shapes. But the thing that had made it a city, the living, the structured, the inhabited order of it, had been annihilated.
Smoke covered what remained.
And in that smoke, I could still hear isolated screams.
It was at that point that Maelor made a sound.
Not speech, but an ugly human sound dragged up from somewhere too deep for dignity.
He turned to Edrin with bloodshot eyes and traces of ash in his hair.
"THERE WERE CHILDREN IN THAT CITY. FAMILIES. LOVED ONES," he said.
Edrin looked at the ruins.
"Yes, there were."
"YOU MADE THEM ALL BURN AND WATCHED."
"Yes, I did."
I saw it then. Something inside Maelor broke.
Not his will.
But whatever remained of his hope was that he could still pull this man back into sanity by reminding him of rationality.
He took one slow step forward.
"If you do not want to stop," he said, voice shaking with a fury held together by discipline alone, "Then I will stop you myself."
Edrin turned to face the newly infuriated Maelor.
There was no mockery in his expression.
"You can try," he said.
A pause.
Then:
"But you won't be able to."