They were attacking from all sides. The Defencers had abandoned their posts, fleeing the city hours ago along with the rest of the army. The whole world had turned its back on me except the Silversights. They stayed to protect the city—but how could they stand against the Gods?
I stood atop the watchtower, watching as everything I had built over the past centuries crumbled before my eyes. I had failed once more.
From the order I planted, chaos had risen. Fires were catching every corner of my city. Dragons were fighting one another. Arrows were passing the walls, planting inside the heart of my people. At each second, someone was dying.
I was losing, and there was no time left to deny it. The world I knew was crumbling, and there was only one path left to take.
Grabbing my zealot's hand, I ran toward the Chamber. People screamed as they saw me retreating—my desperation only fueled their fear—but there was no other choice, no other way. We had failed. I had failed.
Inside the Chamber, the loyalists were still there, arguing over strategies to push the gods back, to defeat them. They did not understand the power the gods wielded.
I shouted the reality of our failure at them, dismissed them all. It was over. The best they could do was run for their lives.
My zealot trembled—she was young, still a child in many ways. I bound her to the chair, telling her what I was about to do would hurt. She had been devoted to me since the day she was born, just like all the zealots before her. So she did not resist when I burned the back of her skull with a curse, one that would make her compatible with the gods in ways no mortal should be.
She screamed in agony as the roars of the Gods shook the very fabric of the world I had built.
When the ritual was done, I picked her up and stepped out of the Chamber. My eyes could scarcely believe what I was witnessing. Buildings had crumbled into dust. Trees burned like torches. The air was thick with the screams of the dying and the wails of the lost.
The walls. They would not attack the walls—I knew that much.
So I ran west as the sky collapsed and the earth fractured beneath me.
There was an empty space within the walls, a place only I knew existed. I placed my zealot inside and, before sealing her away, I whispered:
"You hold infinity and knowledge no one else possesses. Seek me out and I shall rewrite the world once more."