Chapter 53: Silver Eyes [Act 2 Prologue]

The smell of ash and lightning hung in the air, even as Lune was dragged away from the ruined battlefield by the nightmarish knights of the Wild Hunt.

The Eldarin Princess struggled to breathe, black ice clogging her lungs and the gaping wound on her chest. The sword wound left previously by her father had been sealed with blighted frost, preventing her death by blood loss.

But only just. The pain was agonising to behold, no doubt an intent from her accrued custodian.

The shackles on her neck, wrist, and ankles were freezing. Raw iron — the bane of fae flesh — burned against her skin each time they rubbed against her.

She tried to maintain her dignity, to walk with a semblance of pride and defiance even as the knights dragged her in chains to a fate worse than death.

In a way, she had achieved it. Lune could still feel the Wild Hunt’s leers from their skull helms; hear the rasping laughter made distorted by their corrupted forms. But the weight of their pervasion was lessened by the musk of fear hanging in the air.

Not of her, of course. However, Lune took a savage joy in how her actions had brought terror to the spectral knights of the Hunt.

Behind them, the Stag King’s rage was still acutely felt, roiling like a thunderstorm ready to erupt and bring the end of worlds.

Great had been her father’s rage in the aftermath of the battle. Woden — King of the Wild Hunts and Tyrant of all Fae — had not taken to the death of his prey well. Such was his raw fury that two of his closest knights had died from his murderous screams alone, the storm above responding to the King’s blood-curdling furore with violent squalls and lightning. It had torn apart all those around the King, ripping both nightmare steeds and riders to chunks of ashened meat even as they begged for forgiveness.

Only Lune had been spared the King’s wrath, though no one was under the illusion that such a choice was performed out of mercy or familial affection on the King’s end.

In the epicentre of the storm, where the fulcrum of the King’s anger lay, the mutilated corpse of a demon bore the impotent hate of its tormentor, uncaring and unfeeling.

The white-haired human — the woe named Axel Roukin, the source of her father’s uncontrollable ire  — was dead. He died at Lune’s hand, who destroyed his heart to spare the soldier from her father’s promised torture and degradation.

Axel… A pang of rueful regret rushed through Lune’s mind at his name. She had not known him for long, but the man’s existence was one of fascinating madness and perplexing sorrow. 

A killer with no equal among his kind. The man had been swallowed into the Great Game — an interdimensional death gauntlet controlled by a multiversal, God-entity known as the System — along with the rest of his species. 

Yet, unlike his peers, who were promised riches and power to those who piled the corpses of other competitors at their feet, Axel’s very existence had been marked for ‘disposal’ by the System from the very start. 

He was sent into a Dead Zone. The man had been alone, unarmed, and unmoored from his very reality. Void of allies or weapons, alien monsters and strange phenomena had surrounded him, leaving him with no course for escape or survival. 

And yet, he had persevered. Not only that, he had thrived — progressing in power at a staggering rate unseen in all of the Great Game’s history. 

One opponent after another. One Boss after another. Trial after impossible trial, all who fought him died and became fuel for that grotesque thing he called a soul, turning his murderous hand into an instrument of truest death.

Within a single day, he had taken over an entire Zone, killing fae and beasts alike, cementing his moniker of ‘Demon’ forever in the hearts of all who witnessed his laughing, unstoppable madness. 

Lune had met him earlier that day. They had fought each other briefly. She had not thought much of him then: a murderous psychopath, like so many she had met before.

However, they had then worked together in pursuit of mutual goals. 

He had tried to kill her, yet he had also saved her from injustice and humiliation when the call arose.

Axel Roukin fought for her in a way no one had in a very, very long time.

And now, he was dead. He died trying to defy impossible odds, as he had been doing ever since he was forced to participate in the Great Game. He fought against her father, who came to the Zone personally to subjugate the Demon to his will.

The King now had no way of torturing the demon who brought so much devastation to his subjects. Lune’s father could not appease the humiliation to his pride through an unfeeling corpse.

But he still had his daughter, the subject of the demon’s desperate protection. She was a poor substitute for his rage, but she would have to do.

Every depravity. Every degradation. As promised.

However, her punishment would not be delivered here, in this violated Zone of the Fae. The System quarantine on the Dead Zone would soon be lifted, and the Wild Hunt would return to the capital territory of the Fair Folk such that her sentence could be carried out in public.

Lune forced herself not to think about her future. If she did so, the terror would grip her whole and render her mad. 

She had seen before the cruelty of the King. It was a well that knew no end to depraved creativity.

Under the malignant embrace of black frost and storm, Lune breathed out painfully. She could not kill herself; she had already tried. The chains clasped on her body prevented her from accessing her inventory. The knights surrounding her detested her, but they would ensure her life more preciously than their own, for the King’s punishment would fall on them should his wrath not be sated through his daughter. 

There would be no opportunity for a suicide, either by conventional or unconventional means.

And so all Lune could do was lament her fate. As the time to the Quarantine’s expiration counted down to its final minutes, the Eldarin looked back upon her decisions.

Would it have been better to simply submit to her life as a political tool, to serve as a slave to disgusting trolls for the rest of her existence? Shameful and degrading as that life would have been, there would still have been moments of scant freedom, pieces of warmth shared with her handmaidens.

Now she had nothing. Nothing but an eternity of suffering ahead, and the fire of her rebellion dying in her heart.

In the end, it had all been for nothing. All but one of her handmaidens were dead. Ymir, the last Giant, was dead. Axel, the sorrow-bound warrior who could have been a champion to his species, was also dead.

All of them died for a chance at Lune’s selfish freedom — a freedom that she would now never have.

Lune thought she would cry. But no tears came. 

There was only that heavy, lingering regret in her heart, suffocating her sorrow and rage.

Her time was almost up. The last remnants of the Wild Hunt gathered behind their King. Of the eighteen riders that came through the portal into the Zone, only seven were left. Most were killed by Ymir the Giant. Some died at Axel’s or Lune’s hand, others to the impotent tantrum of their King after the battle.

Despite their losses, the knights stood still as statues, the signs of grief entirely absent from their faces and posture. That pack of killers cared nothing for brotherhood or companionship, only the satiation of desires and bloodlust.

Their King, Woden, stood at their head. Stilled like ice, the rage within his form was nonetheless felt by everyone within that valley. The black frost at their King’s feet was thickest, cracking and reforming under the weight of sepulcral hate. Though he no longer had his eight-legged steed, the presence of the King was undeniably the heaviest, even compared to the greatest of his knights.

Tyrant of Fae. Once the bane of distant stars, Woden wielded the Sword of Lost Roads — a greatsword that violated space and time, creating warp rifts and portals — allowing his cavalry to stalk the invisible pathways between solar systems and subjugate all life into slavery or death.

A powerful blade, but not one that could transgress the laws of the Great Game. The Quarantined Zone should have been beyond Lune’s father’s ability to breach. He should never have been able to reach her and her companions.

But he did. That meant someone of greater power had allowed him to do so, flagrantly breaking one of the unspoken rules of the Great Game.

All just so that the King of the Wild Hunt would hunt down and kill the Demon in his garden.

But why? Lune thought numbly. Why would the Admins of the Great Game hate Axel so much?

Or perhaps… It was not so much hate as fear that drove their desperate actions?

It no longer mattered, she supposed. The human was dead, despite how hard he fought. Faced with one unfair fight after another, it was little wonder he eventually fell. 

In the end, not even the madness of a Demon could stand up against the inviolable might of the Admins.

Giving in to weakness, the Eldarin Princess looked behind her, back to the torn battlefield. Impaled upon a cross of spears and lances was the mangled body of Axel Roukin. Mutilated and defiled, his half-torn corpse was held stretched, arms wide and lower torso missing. A trio of knights stood around it, tasked under their King’s orders with transporting the carcass back once the portal was open.

Looking at him like this, Lune suddenly remembered the unshakable resolve of that man and the broken words he had spoken to her a while ago.

“So your people do burials for the departed, too? That’s so strange. Can you give me a gravestone as well? Write something nice for me: ‘Here lies Axel. He died as he lived: Yelling at things ten times bigger than him.’ ”

Always defiant… Despite everything, Lune found herself smiling.

“Looks like I can’t keep my promise,” she whispered lightly. “I would have made you a grave fit for kings.”

And then, right as she finished her words, as the last seconds of the Quarantine ticked to zero, and the thunderstorm over them turned black as night in preparation for the King’s portals to open…

The body upon the cross twitched.

Lune blinked. She froze in place, unfeeling, even as the chains on her neck went taut and the knights leading her growled for her to move.

She did not. Her purple eyes were transfixed on the corpses, begging for just another sign of movement.

Another twitch. A finger. Then two. 

Then the right hand of the savaged corpse curled into a fist.

Axel Roukin raised his bloodied head, silver eyes blazing with life as he stared into Lune’s purple gaze…

And smiled.

[WARNING: THE DEMON HAS ENTERED THE ZONE]