Chapter 3168 — Chapter 3168 Azure Sky

The clear ringing of the bell resounded in the dark cave, straining to escape it. The shadow willed it to stay within the stone walls of his shelter, sensing the sound reverberating through him.

As a peculiar vibration was born in his chest, he remembered.

The courtyard of a dark, magnificent temple that stood under a lightless sky. The rustle of leaves washing over him as a towering tree swayed gently in the wind. The laughter of a young woman who sat on the ground, enjoying a lavish picnic...

The memory came and went, leaving behind a lasting ache. The shadow did not like the feeling, so he put the silver bell down and collapsed back into his natural, formless state.

Fleeing from it.

His thoughts were heavy.

What had come over him, anyway? Taking the form of a human... who would want to be a ghastly being like that?

It was the memories of the two men who died on the slopes of the lonesome mountain, no doubt. The two of them had lived similar lives, but went down entirely different paths. By the end, the gap separating them was as wide as the abyss. And yet, they died on the same day, with only a few meters between them, their blood mixing in the snow.

The shadow remembered being those men. He remembered being the abomination who had slain them, as well.

He even remembered being the worm who had created the abomination, using the mind of a distrustful king as its chrysalis. All those lives, all those deaths... they were there, hidden in the depths of the shadow's mind.

But he did not want to recall them.

So, instead, the shadow cast his senses far and wide, so that the empty state of being fused with the world erased his thoughts. So that he could forget.

Oblivion was the only solace to those who were denied death, it seemed.

Time passed, but no matter how much the shadow tried to return to his previous peaceful non-existence, fragments of memories kept creeping into his mind.

He remembered...

Living as a soldier in a lightless land. The world was besieged by darkness, and in its cold embrace, those who still lived had to fight desperately to survive. He fought for the right to exist, as well...

He was a warrior of the Starlight Legion.

His people were led by seven great heroes who had risen to the heights of power in the endless war against the darkness... as well as the awful beings that dwelled under its tenebrous veil. Under their guidance, the humans slowly pushed the detestable creatures back, coming together to build an impregnable city in the heart of the forsaken land.

The gods were dead, so they had no one to pray to. The sun was gone, so there was nothing to illuminate their path. Even the stars had vanished from the sky, having fallen down like flaming tears.

He did not know what the sun looked like, since he had been born after the darkness devoured the world. He did not know what the stars looked like, either. But he had heard the stories... he had dreamed countless times about their distant radiance, about the sea of silver light shining brightly in the boundless black sky.

He wanted to see the stars before he died. That was the goal of the Starlight Legion.

Death was a constant companion to the soldiers of the legion. Many of them perished on the battlefield, and few survived long enough to leave a lasting mark.

He was one of the few.

He had survived many battles, slain many abominations, and buried many comrades. The longer he lived, the stronger he became. Eventually, other soldiers came to rely on him as their brother...

But death wasn't the worst fate for those who fought under the banner of the Starlight Legion. They spent their lives surrounded by darkness, after all, and the darkness seeped into them slowly, year after year, pooling in their souls.

It began from an itch. A maddening itch that came and went, but could never be entirely chased away. Peculiar thoughts soon started to enter his mind. Sometimes, he caught himself looking at his fellow soldiers or at the civilians back home, thinking how soft their bodies were. How red their blood was.

He was thirsty.

At times, no amount of water could quench his thirst. He felt like he was burning in the middle of the desert, dying in unbearable heat.

He longed to dive into the embrace of a cold, dark sea.

One day, the itch drove him mad enough to shred his forearm in a frenzy. As drops of red, vibrant, fragrant blood fell to the floor, he froze and stared at the gruesome wound in shock and revulsion.

There was something there, hidden in the bleeding flesh.

Reaching into the wound with calloused fingers, he pulled a thin, translucent plate from within his forearm.

It was scale.

There were scales and filaments growing under his skin, propagating slowly. Shuddering, he dropped the scale, took a step back, and tried to suppress the desire to sever his entire arm.

In the end, he bandaged the wound, glanced around his tent, and thought of his modest home back in the city.

He was never going to come home again, it seemed.

Following the oaths, he reported himself to the capellan of the cohort. The rest happened quickly.

He was not the first among the warriors of the Starlight Legion to succumb to the curse of the darkness, after all — far from it. Those like him, the veterans who had been infected by the darkness, were all assigned to a special unit. They lived like lepers, isolated from the rest of the soldiers and hiding their gruesome bodies under layered bandages.

However, they were not quite useless yet. On the contrary, he and the others marked by the darkness were always the ones to take on the most perilous missions, to fight where the battle was most harrowing, to die so that the others could live.

Even if the darkness had seeped into their souls and bodies, they were its most fearsome foes. If one of them died on the battlefield, they celebrated. If one was too stubborn to be killed by the claws and fangs of detestable creatures, and the curse progressed too far... then they would bring their comrade mercy with steel blades.

That blade of his, forged from azure steel, had slain numerous monsters.

It had slain plenty of his brothers, as well... Time passed, but he still failed to die. His body was a ghastly wreck by then, and his face was not worthy of showing to a mirror. He felt like the day when his siblings of the Starlight Legion would have to deliver him a final mercy was approaching soon.

That was when their hero, the Warrior, had come to meet them.

He entrusted them with one final mission... a sacred mission. A harrowing mission that only they were fit to carry out.

On a day like any other — all days were the same in the world without a sun, after all — they came to surround a vast crowd of people. There were warriors of the legion there, but there were peaceful citizens, as well. Men and women, old and young — those whom they had sworn to protect. They surrounded the crowd.

And when the ritual began — one of the seven being carried out across the lightless land — they drew their blades and turned them on the people.

They slaughtered them all in a great hecatomb. They killed until the world itself was painted red, until their arms fell limp from exhaustion, until there was no one left alive.

Until no trace of azure remained on the surface of his loyal sword.

The Warrior was there, as well. He was the last to die, sacrificing himself on the altar of his ardent mission.

Of an oath to return light into the lightless sky.

...When everything was over, he swayed and leaned heavily on his sword, looking in a daze at the corpses littering the bloodsoaked ground. He was tired. He was overcome with sorrow.

He mourned the death of his people.

He mourned himself, as well.

And, most of all, he mourned the death of his hero.

Overcome by grief, he looked up...

And saw the sun being born in the black sky.

Ever since he was a child, he had heard countless descriptions of the sun. He knew that it was round. He knew that it was so bright as to appear white — like the purest of flames. He knew that it illuminated the world, making colors vivid and all things clear.

But no description could have prepared him for how brilliant the sun was.

For how beautiful the world was in its blinding light.

Its radiance chased away the darkness, and suddenly, the black abyss above was not black anymore. It was a clear, vibrant blue. And below it, on the ground, the blood was suddenly unbearably red.

As he looked at the radiant sun, blinded by its incandescent brilliance, tears flowed down his face.

"A star... it is a star..."

A star was burning in the sky.

He finally saw it.

However, he did not feel joy.

He only felt shame and sorrow.

In the blinding radiance of the newborn sun, the darkness that dwelled in his soul only grew more impenetrable. All around him, his fellow soldiers suddenly convulsed and screamed.

He screamed, as well.

He fell to his knees, shrieking, his body bending and breaking.

Thick plates of chitin covered his skin, encasing him within an impenetrable carapace. Scythe-like limbs tore his flesh apart, piercing the ground like fearsome blades. His figure twisted, expanding, transforming...

Until there was nothing of him left.

The last thing he saw before the darkness swallowed him was his sword, lying in the filth on the ground, its azure blade desecrated and painted dark crimson by blood.

He knew that one day, soon, all memories of him would be erased from the world. All traces of him, and the Starlight Legion as well, would be gone, and everything they had done — both their valor and their sin — would be forgotten.

Only steel would remain.

Only steel would remember.

At the end there, he felt regret.

He thought that his poor, loyal sword deserved to forget as well...