(One Week Later, The Eternal Garden, Kaelith’s POV)
Kaelith stood at the edge of the Eternal Garden’s highest cliff with his arms crossed behind his back, as the endless sea below breathed in slow, harmonious rhythms, its waves rising to kiss the stone before shattering into mist that drifted upward and settled gently against his robes, soaking him in fine droplets he did not bother to shield himself from.
*Crash*
*Splash*
The Eternal Garden was beautiful today.
Almost painfully so, as sunlight filtered through the vast green canopies overhead, refracting into soft, layered hues while the air hummed with a quiet serenity only a place this divine could sustain, and yet, standing there at its edge, Kaelith felt none of it.
His gaze rested instead on the two gravestones set slightly apart from one another, carved from the same eternal stone yet burdened with entirely different weights, as one bore the name of his brother and eternal adversary, Soron, while the other carried a name that still refused to feel real no matter how many times he read it.
Raymond.
*Crash*
*Splash*
The sea roared softly below, as Kaelith’s jaw tightened, his expression unmoving while something old and heavy twisted slowly in his chest, because this war had not merely cost him armies or influence, but blood, legacy, and certainty, stripping away pieces of his life one by one until only silence remained.
*Throb*
A dull ache pulsed across his face.
The scar left by Soron’s origin blade stretched from his forehead down across his cheek, slicing through one eye in a cruel diagonal, as although the bleeding had stopped and the flesh had healed, the pain seemed to live there permanently now as though giving him a persistent reminder of the battle that had happened.
’Good luck living..... brother.’
Soron’s last words played in his mind, as he finally understood the true meaning behind it.
’How did you live with your injuries for over two millennia?’
Kaelith wondered, as he recalled how that morning, when he had first awakened, there had been a brief, terrifying moment where the eye had shown him nothing at all.
No light.
No color.
No form.
Only void.
And although divine regeneration had corrected it seconds later, vision rushing back as if nothing had ever gone wrong, Kaelith knew better, as the origin poison had already begun its work, subtle and patient, lodged deep within tissues that would never fully purge themselves.
Over centuries, that eye would weaken.
Over millennia, it would fail.
Blindness was not imminent, but it was inevitable.
And Soron had known that when he struck him.
*Sigh*
Kaelith exhaled slowly, the mist clinging to his lashes as he stared at the gravestones once more, his thoughts heavy and unspoken, because in the end, victory had not come without cost, and this time, the universe had demanded payment in blood he could never reclaim.
’I may have hated my father, I may have hated my brother, but I never hated you.
You..... and your children, are the only people I still consider to be family in this universe.’
Kaelith thought as he stared at Raymond’s tombstone with rage boiling in his heart.
At the time, when he left ’The Pit’, even the possibility of Raymond dying had never entered his mind, as with Soron dead, he simply did not believe that any other warrior even had the means to hurt his son.
However, he was proven wrong, as Raymond was apparently taken down by a mere Monarch.
’Leo Skyshard...’
Kaelith thought, as the mist clinging to the cliffside trembled subtly while his fingers curled into his palms, nails biting into flesh under the mounting weight of that realization, because a Monarch killing a Demi-God was not merely improbable, but a direct affront to the hierarchy that governed existence itself.
’Leo Skyshard...’
The name echoed again, darker this time.
’The man my brother entrusted the Cult to.’
The irony was bitter enough to taste.
As Kaelith’s expression twisted, rage flooding through him in a sudden, violent surge, his divine aura slipped free without restraint, spilling outward in jagged waves that tore through the Eternal Garden’s tranquility, as wind screamed across the cliffs and the sea below responded instinctively, its once-calm surface heaving as massive swells collided violently against the stone.
*ROAR*
*CRASH*
The air itself trembled.
Trees bent.
Mist was torn apart and scattered like smoke.
As for a few heartbeats, the Eternal Garden looked as though it might shatter under the weight of his fury, as Kaelith stood unmoving at its center, eyes burning with a wrath that had nowhere left to go.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he drew it back.
Breath by breath, the pressure receded, the winds softened, and the sea below returned to its steady rhythm, as Kaelith forced his emotions down into something colder, sharper, and far more dangerous.
Control.
Silence reclaimed the cliff.
Only then did Kaelith speak, his voice low, steady, and utterly devoid of mercy as he stared out toward the horizon, toward a future that had just gained a single, unmistakable target.
"For the crime of taking my son away from me," he said quietly, each word carved with absolute intent.
"Your death... won’t be a simple one."
He swore, as he started to plot his attack on Leo Skyshard and his entire bloodline, which he swore to kill in the most merciless form possible.
"I will mourn my son’s death for exactly eighty-three more days," Kaelith said softly, the number spoken with unsettling precision as his gaze remained fixed on the gravestone.
"Eighty-three days to bury grief where it belongs, to let rage cool into clarity, and to decide how the universe will remember what was taken from me."
His jaw tightened.
"After which," he continued, voice dropping into something sharp and absolute, "there will be no restraint, no mercy, and no distinction between enemy and collateral."
A breath passed.
"Leo Skyshard and the Cult will learn what it means to be noticed by a God who has nothing left to lose."