The glintstone light of the celebration faded. In the Carian royal city, the invited guests witnessed the coronation of Rennala, placing the lunar crown upon her daughter, Ranni's, head.
Holding the lunar scepter, clad in the royal raiment of Caria, she stood upon the high platform. Though her stature was slight, her noble bearing still inspired awe.
The guests applauded and cheered; the crowd was abuzz with excitement for a time.
A bard had participated in the ceremony. His recent ballad, "The Eagle and Griffith Facing the Darkness," had been so warmly received that it became a topic of after-dinner conversation for many.
The bard conceived an idea to compile a book of poetry. Niđhöggr was very supportive, so he helped bring it to fruition.
Besides organizing the poems he had written before, the bard also recorded moments he considered very significant, including the ceremony formally installing Ranni as queen.
Being a versatile bard and a skilled artist, he used that talent to depict this grand ceremony in one of the illustrations within his poetry collection.
Niđhöggr also noticed that among the other attendees, one who had previously harbored doubts seemed ready to set aside some of his arrogance due to Farnese's pact with the Flower Elf, and he went along with Schierke and Farnese.
Sorcery and incantations would become a new topic for this group of little witches. Neither Flora nor Grandmother Wohl would hinder or distort their new direction.
As for Grandmother Wohl, she currently had no time to care for her apprentice. The body of the Scarlet Rot-infected individual previously brought to the Fairies' Island had captured the attention of many mages, including her, as a "Cursed Woman."
Scarlet Rot, cursed arts—Grandmother Wohl perhaps intended to use the Scarlet Rot as a form of magical medium.
Although the research was dangerous, another path was better than none. Since there was no way to completely deal with the Scarlet Rot, she might devise something new, so everyone followed her lead.
Niđhöggr intentionally remained for the ceremony.
The next day, he bid farewell to everyone and summoned his new comrade-in-arms, "Glintstone Dragon" Adula. Mounted on the flying dragon's back, he flew towards the Empire of Yoda in the northern sea.
---
Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Midland. The once revered Tower of Conviction, a place where great sages had once suffered, was now the largest encampment in the vicinity and a gathering point for many refugees.
Taking advantage of the darkness, a skeleton rider approached.
He stared at the tower, and a certain premonition washed over him, but as always, he did not turn back. He rode on towards the tower.
Here were veterans of the Hundred-Year War, the homeless displaced by the Kushan Empire's invasion, and patients afflicted with the plague... Hundreds of people who had lost hope had gathered here, like carrion crows.
Perhaps the priests of the Tower of Conviction gave them a certain amount of food and water, but as the number of refugees grew, such charitable offerings inevitably seemed meager.
To maintain order, the knights and soldiers grew increasingly weary and prone to conflict.
Hunger brought spiritual chaos and emptiness, which created fertile ground for cultists. A man dressed in a goat-headed guise became the object of worship for this group of cultists.
And so, on dark nights, in a deep cavern, at the ritual fire of the goat-headed man, many people, willingly or unwillingly, shared food and their bodies with one another.
Sometimes they would offer up a devout believer, a captured Holy See knight or soldier, as a complement to the opening ceremony.
Joy, ecstasy... until it reached its peak. The specter of a seductive woman's corpse swayed faintly in the flames, and strange wings unfurled as if to envelop everything here.
People forgot hunger and thirst, hatred, shame, ugliness—they continually drowned and decayed.
But when light came, they had to return to the pain of the mundane world's sawing of flesh and bone.
So tonight, at a certain moment, when it had all become unbearable, darkness naturally descended, surging in from all sides like a tidal wave.
Like a living beast, the darkness devoured the people gathered beneath the Tower of Conviction. Like a shepherd, it drove the blind flock with fear, cramming them behind the meaningless walls of the Tower of Conviction.
An egg with slender limbs crawled to the top floor of the Tower of Conviction and headed for its highest point.
He felt not a shred of guilt for this tsunami of darkness he had caused. All the cries of pain and whispers of despair that reached him were, in truth, a single will; the thoughts of all converged.
This was resonance.
He had never possessed a human identity. For as long as he could remember, he had lived in the trash heap beneath the Tower of Conviction. When he first saw so-called "fellow beings," a group of people drove him away as a shaky, trembling outsider.
He had to return to living in the trash heap, and he was quickly forgotten.
One by one, corpses were thrown down the mountain, piled up, burying his dwelling, pressing him deep down to the bottom.
His existence seemed meaningless.
However, he always found his own meaning, for he had met five angels from whom he learned his true mission and was prepared to give everything for it.
He became an apostle.
Finally, under his intentional or unintentional pressure, the emptiness and chaos beneath the Tower of Conviction grew greater and greater.
No matter where they came from, what ethnicity they belonged to, or what position they held, everyone ultimately desired one common wish.
They wanted a perfect world.
The Egg Apostle believed that he had achieved this.
At the climax of this ritual of the Dark Tsunami, he would sacrifice his entire surrounding world in exchange for the destined angel.
Closing his eyes, he believed that the perfect world would arrive.
Boom——
Within the suffocating crowd, a large, dark hand reached towards the sky, holding a dark moon.
The Tower of Conviction collapsed.
Countless people who had taken shelter continued to fall, one after another uttering their final cries before death. Countless corpses piled into mountains.
Everything became the same sound of a collapsing sky.
Who knows how much time passed, but finally, everything was still.
The once towering Tower of Conviction and the refugee camp were razed to the ground. An unknown number of bodies lay buried beneath the rubble of the collapsed wall.
However, there were still a very few people who escaped this catastrophe.
In the end, the Skeleton Rider, as countless times over the past thousand years, could not halt the thread of causality.
Yet, as countless times before, some struggling fish, willing to fight to the end, were saved by him.
In particular, a woman named Luca, who sold her body to survive, possessed an unimaginably calm and resilient spirit.
In the despair of the dark tsunami, in the trampling of countless people, she did not hesitate to save girls who shared no blood relation with her, but who simply lived the same kind of life as she did.
Pippin, Puck, and Luca survived the raging waves until the Skeleton Rider appeared.
It was a pity that Luca still had someone who was like a sister to her—Liana. But she was a young girl who shared a complex relationship with Liana, and she was buried in that dark tsunami.
The night finally faded. The light of dawn broke through from the sky, incredibly dazzling.
Everyone felt a premonition and looked in the same direction.