Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

The light stopped burning Raizen's eyes.

Shapes settled.

Color didn't.

Ahead, the land opened into what must once have been a forest. The ground dipped gently, sloping toward something like a shallow basin.

Everything was gray. It wasn't the dead brown you see on normal withered trees.

Not burnt black.

Gray.

He straightened slowly, boots crunching on something that looked like dust but didn't feel like anything at all. It didn't feel like soil. It didn't even cling to his soles properly. Just flaked away.

The nearest tree should have been alive.

Its trunk was thick, its roots sunk deep into the ground, its branches spread wide like any other forest giant.

But the bark had no color. No brown, and what was supposed to be green moss looked like grayscale mush. Just a flat, dull gray, like someone had pulled all the paint out and left the shape behind.

The few leaves left hanging from its branches were the same. Gray. They hadn't fallen, hadn't rotted. They just sat there, thin and brittle-looking, preserved but with no life in them.

He raised a hand and touched one.

The leaf crumbled under his fingers. No smell. No stickiness. Just a dry collapse into something that looked like ash blown away.

It felt like a satisfying crunchy leaf. But that was the only satisfying thing around.

Behind him, Elin climbed the last stretch of tunnel and stepped out onto the surface. She stretched once, rolling her shoulders, then stood beside him. Too close for his comfort.

He heard her breathe in slowly, then let it out.

"This is the part Ukai doesn't put into their brochures" she said.

Raizen turned his head.

The wasteland reached as far as he could see.

Once, this had probably been a full forest - a continuation of the lush, impossible jungle he had flown over on the dragon. He could see the long, gentle waves of terrain that usually meant roots and undergrowth and hidden animals.

Now it was all shades of the same dead color.

Trees with a few gray leaves. Bushes in weird shapes, brittle and colorless. Brambles curled around rocks in crooked spirals.

The rocks themselves looked wrong too. Their edges were sharp, their surfaces intact, but any little hints of color - rust, lichen, streaks - were gone. Just gray.

Farther ahead, he saw what must have been a pond or a small lake once.

Now it was a weird crater in the earth. Dry. No water, or even some kind of mud.

The bottom looked like cracked stone, but when the wind brushed across it, a faint puff of pale dust lifted and settled again.

None of this looked cut, or burned.

None even looked… Destroyed by human hand.

It was as if everything here had been paused mid-life and then… Emptied.

"What happened here?" Raizen asked quietly.

Elin didn't answer. Again.

"Come with me" she said instead.

She stepped forward, down the slope. He followed.

The powder on the ground shifted under his boots, trying (and failing) to behave like dirt. Small gray weeds stuck up in places, their shapes familiar and wrong at the same time.

He tried to find signs of human hands.

But there were no stumps. No chop marks. No scorched trunks or collapsed pits. No blast patterns. No claw gouges like the ones he had seen outside the Sky Domain or on the training platforms.

Just a stretch of land that looked like someone had turned the color off.

Beside him, Elin moved lightly, eyes calmly ahead. She walked close enough that their shoulders almost touched. Once, when he stepped toward a cluster of low shrubs, she reached out and firmly caught his sleeve.

"Not there"

Raizen looked.

"What's wrong with that spot?"

Her gaze dipped to the ground, then away. "N- Nothing! Nothing you need to worry about!"

"Ha?"

"Keep walking."

She let go of his sleeve and continued.

He felt the ghost of her grip on his arm as clearly as he had felt the red particles sink into his skin earlier in the cave.

They reached the dry lake.

Up close, it was worse.

The cracked "stone" at the bottom wasn't really stone. When Raizen crouched at the edge and touched it, the surface broke like thin tinted glass and collapsed into fine powder.

No moisture. No coolness from below. Just layer after layer of faded nothingness.

He stood again, throat tight.

"This used to be water" he guessed.

"Yes" Elin replied.

"And now it's… This?"

"Mm."

They skirted the old shoreline and kept walking.

A gust of wind moved through the dead trees. Branches shifted. Gray leaves murmured against each other, dry and weightless. The sound should have been comforting.

It wasn't.

No birds called. No insects hummed. No skitter of small paws in the underbrush. There was no underbrush.

The silence pressed around them.

Raizen pushed it back with questions.

"These weren't Nyxes" he said. "They can't… They don't do this."

"No" Elin agreed. "They don't."

"And it wasn't heat" he went on. "Nothing's burnt."

"No."

"No disease. Nothing rotting."

"Very good. Your observing skills are sharp, as always" she approved.

Her tone wasn't mocking.

It was closer to proud, which somehow made him feel more uneasy.

"So what did this?" he asked.

"Later."

"Every time I ask you something important, you say that."

"And yet you keep asking" she pointed out.

They walked in silence for a little while longer.

They reached the points exactly where the gray stopped. Their trunks were dark. Their leaves were green. A few flowers showed through the foliage. They were half withered, half healthy.

At their roots, the ground changed.

Color didn't creep back in slowly, blending the 2 opposite environments together.

It started all at once, as if something had drawn a line and ordered the world to be alive here, not there.

"Elin?"

"Mm?"

He pointed.

"Why does it just stop?"

She followed his gaze to the line where living forest began again.

"Because… This is just as far as it needed to go" she said. "Then it got what it needed."

"What did?"

"You really do like going straight to the middle of problems" she murmured. "Most people would just stand here and cry."

"Is that what Ukai did?" he asked.

"No."

"Then what did they do?"

"Later, Raizen. You're tiring me with all these questions."

His jaw clenched.

He let it go.

They walked parallel to that line for a bit, one foot in the dead zone, one almost next to color. The difference was dizzying. On one side, every shade was muted into gray. On the other, the jungle was just… itself. Bright. Chaotic. Loud, even if he couldn't hear too much from here.

"They don't cross" he said.

"No. They don't."

"Why?"

"Because they don't want to. They remember."

He turned to look at her.

"You are saying the trees remember?"

"I am saying" she replied, "that life knows where death is. Life knows where it stopped existing. Even if it doesn't know why."

The way she said it made his arms prickle.

They reached a cluster of stones half buried in the gray.

They were smooth enough to have once sat at the edge of a real lake, worn by years of water and feet. Now they were dull and flat, between light and dark.

Elin hopped up onto one and sat, legs dangling.

She patted the stone beside her.

Raizen joined her.

From here, the view hit harder.

The dead land wasn't endless. It was a wide, ugly wound surrounding all of the rainforest, as far as he could see.

The wind blew again. Nothing moved.

He swallowed.

"What happened here?" he asked again, softer.

Elin watched the border between dead and living forest.

"Alright. Now I can finally tell you everything."

"Finally."

"So… Everything started around eight years ago."

He did the math.

"Around three years after Velarion fell."

"Yes."

"So everyone was still… Broken."

"Everyone's still broken, even today" she said. "But back then, it was fresh. Ukai was starving. They couldn't farm on the ground without Nyxes shredding everything. Topside farms in the trees were failing because the soil was thin and everyone was panicking. So what do you think they did?"

"Hunting" Raizen said.

"Right. Like true beasts."

"In the rainforest."

"Right again."

He pictured Ukai's tamers, beasts like the ones on the stairwell portraits, moving through the jungle. He imagined normal animals running, being chased, caught.

He glanced at Elin.

"And you lived here."

"I live here" she corrected. "Present tense."

He squinted at the cave entrance in his memory, at the glowing plants, the hybrids, the balanced chaos.

"So you watched them hunt" he said.

"For a while" she replied. "It was survivable. Ugly. Necessary. Then they got greedy. They started treating this place like a pantry instead of a forest. You know how people get when they think they are entitled to everything that still breathes. When they get greedy."

Her voice stayed calm, but the words did not.

Raizen could picture it.

Humans from Ukai coming back again and again. Taking more. Never asking what it meant long term. Assuming the forest would just keep giving.

"So you asked them to stop?" he guessed.

"I tried."

"Tried?"

Her mouth tugged to one side.

"Turns out, no one likes being lectured by a stubborn girl with more power than manners" she said.

He could see that, very clearly. But he decided to shut up, for once.

She went on.

"Then what did you do?"

"I told them it wasn't sustainable. That if they kept killing every normal living thing in the upper canopy, nothing would regrow. No pollinators. No seeds spread. No little lives filling the spaces between. Just emptier and emptier hunts until they pushed farther and farther until there was nothing left."

"Did they listen?"

"Does it look like they listened?"

She gestured with her chin at the gray stretch.

Raizen looked out over it again.

"So why are you the one hiding in a cave?"

Her eyes slid to him, then back to the line where green began.

"Because Ukai doesn't like what I did about it" she answered.

"You are a Sovereign" Raizen protested. "Sky Sovereign. You have more mastery than anyone, apparently. Shouldn't they be begging you to help them? To fix things? To defend them?"

"They don't want help from someone who doesn't obey" she replied. "I don't take orders. I don't pretend their system works. I don't smile and clap when they make speeches about sacrifice and resilience while chewing through everything."

Her hands rested on the stone on either side of her. Her fingers stayed relaxed.

"And" she added, "I did something they can't forgive."

He waited.

She did not speak for a few breaths.

In the distance, a green bird landed on a living tree. It stayed on the safe side of the line, feathers bright, head turning warily toward the gray.

"Elin" Raizen said quietly. "What did you do?"

She glanced at him.

"Short version?" she asked.

"Good starting point."

She shifted her weight, turning fully to face the ruined land.

"When talking fails" she said softly, "you only have two options left. Leave. Or fight."

She smiled then.

It wasn't a happy smile.

It was small, lopsided, with a tired pride tucked behind it.

"So," she finished, almost lightly…

"I declared war on Ukai."