Blood bloomed across the ancient, porous stone like an ink stain on parchment. El-Mond buckled, one knee striking the grit with a hollow thud. His breath was a ragged, whistling thing, each inhale a serrated blade scraping against the raw puncture in his chest. "Why…?" The word was a wet shadow of a sound, crimson threading from the corner of his mouth. "Brork… we were forged in the same fire. We were brothers." Through a vision that pulsed and blurred, El-Mond forced his gaze upward. Brork stood silhouetted against the indifferent moon, his sword lowered, a mocking curve carved into his features—less a smile and more a scar of long-held resentment. "Brotherhood is a sentiment for the weak, El-Mond," Brork said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly tender register. He stepped closer, the gravel crunching beneath his boots like breaking bone. "You always walked as if the world owed you its light. You never truly looked at what was rotting in your own shadow." Beside him, Luna stirred. She didn't stand apart; she leaned into Brork with a casual, practiced grace, her fingers tracing the embroidery of his tunic. The laugh that escaped her was light—a silver bell ringing in a graveyard.
"The wedding night you hold so sacred?" Brork's voice dripped with a dark, syrupy amusement. "While you lay in a wine-dark stupor, dreaming of a life we had already stolen… we celebrated your union in the only way that mattered."
The world tilted. The air in El-Mond's lungs turned to ash. "The ceremonial wine…" he wheezed, the realization hitting him with more force than the steel had.
"Bingo," Brork whispered, snapping his fingers. The sound was deafening in the silence of the cliffs. "You were a convenient ghost in your own home. A placeholder for a throne you weren't ruthless enough to keep." Brork reached down, his fingers calloused and cold as he ripped the golden plaque of the Storm Blade Sect Leader from El-Mond's belt. He held it up, the moonlight catching the gold, turning it into a flickering eye.
"I have tasted the ceiling of the Seventh-Level Marquess for twenty years, El-Mond. My hair is graying, my marrow is cooling. The Phoenix Sect offered me a Heaven-Tier Stone to replace a stagnant leader with a hungry one. To reach the Duke Realm, I would have burned a thousand brothers. You just happened to be the one holding the match."He leaned down, wiping a stray spray of blood from El-Mond's shoulder with the back of his hand, a gesture of mock-grooming."Don't look so shattered. You had the strength of a lion, but the soul of a sheep. And as for our 'old fool' of a mentor? Don't worry. I'll ensure he finds his way to the afterlife shortly after you.""DON'T YOU TOUCH HIM!"The roar tore from El-Mond's throat, a final, desperate spark of a dying sun. He lunged, fingers clawing for the hilt of his fallen blade, but his core was a hollowed-out husk, drained by the Ascenders' venom.Brork didn't even draw his sword. He simply pivoted—a dancer's move—and delivered a singular, crushing kick to El-Mond's chest.As El-Mond tumbled into the roaring abyss of the cliffside. The wind roared past El-Mond's ears, stripping the last of the warmth from his skin.
The Ascenders…? he thought, the bitterness thick as the copper in his throat. I never even knew them…
The sky above him shrank, a rectangular bruise of violet and grey, until the stars themselves seemed to go out. What does it matter now? Born an orphan… and dying like one.
A broken, bubbling chuckle escaped his lips, lost to the gale.I guess… I was never meant to be loved.
As the abyss reached up to swallow him, his thoughts turned unexpectedly gentle. I'm sorry you were dragged into this… Old Lu…
His eyes drifted shut. Darkness claimed everything.
Blackness. Cold. Silence.
The void was absolute, a heavypressurized weight that pressed against his spirit until, with a violent jolt, the world returned.
El-Mond's eyes snapped open.
Water flooded his vision—not as a drowning force, but as an emerald shroud. Before a coherent thought could form, a primal terror seized his chest.
I'm… I'm underwater.
Panic ignited. His mind screamed for his legs to kick, for his arms to claw toward the distant, shimmering ceiling of the world. His heart thundered—a frantic, rhythmic drumming that vibrated through his very skin.
I have to breathe. I have to reach the surface!
He surged upward, but the ascent was wrong. It was too effortless, too swift. He wasn't swimming so much as he was propelling, cutting through the depths like a silver bolt. Bubbles trailed behind him, a galaxy of fleeting stars birthed from his own wake.
Then, the frantic momentum of his soul slowed. A cold, sharp realization pierced the panic.
Wait. How am I not dead?
He had fallen from the Star-Cutter Cliffs. He had been gutted by a brother's steel and hollowed out by poison. By all laws of the heavens, his lungs should be burning, his throat collapsing in a final, desperate grab for oxygen.
But there was no fire. No suffocation.
Instead, he felt a rhythmic, cooling flow—a systematic pulse of energy entering through slits in his neck and filtering through his being. It was as natural as the wind had once been. El-Mond froze, suspended in the sun-dappled gloom.
He tried to lift his hands to rub his eyes, to wipe away the nightmare. But no fingers appeared. No scarred palms. No familiar callouses from decades of swordplay. Only the shimmering, refracted light of the water where his humanity should have been.
His pulse spiked, a frantic vibration felt in his midsection rather than his chest. Slowly—dreading the truth—he turned his head.
The world shattered.
Reflected faintly in the side of a polished underwater stone was not the face of the Storm Blade Sect Leader. There was no noble brow, no defiant jaw. There were only scales.
A sleek, unfamiliar form rippled where his limbs once reigned. A powerful, translucent tail swayed behind him, twitching in perfect synchronization with thoughts he hadn't yet learned to voice. The "hands" he reached with were nothing more than delicate, sweeping fins.
A scream built in his throat, born of a lifetime of dignity and a moment of pure cosmic horror. It burst forth, but the air did not carry it. It manifested as a frantic, silver stream of bubbles. I—I'M A FISH?!
The silent cry was swallowed by the indifferent blue. El-Mond stared at his new, glittering reflection, suspended between a life of betrayal that lay sinking in the silt below and a future that had suddenly become very small, very wet, and very dangerous.