Elysia
Chapter 28: The Queen’s Descent

In the gleaming Elven capital of Silverwood, a fragile and hard-won sense of hope had taken root. The recent victories against the forces of Malgorath, spearheaded by the four Ascended Heroes, had injected a much-needed surge of morale into the heart of the Alliance. The streets, once filled with the quiet dread of an impending apocalypse, now buzzed with the sounds of life and determined effort. Artisans repaired ancient architecture, merchants hawked their wares with renewed vigor, and children played games of “Heroes and Monsters” in the sun-dappled plazas. The war was far from over, but for the first time in a long time, victory felt possible.

This delicate illusion of normalcy was the first thing to break.

It began not with a sound, but with a profound and unsettling silence. A lull. The cheerful melodies of the elven bards faltered and died. The clamor of the forges and the chatter of the marketplace faded into nothingness. The wind itself, which always whispered through the living, silver-barked trees of the city, ceased its motion. Every creature, from the lowliest street sweeper to the highest noble, felt an inexplicable urge to stop, to hold their breath, and to look up.

High above the central spire of the Royal Palace, the brilliant blue sky began to… unravel. It was not a violent tearing, but a silent, graceful unwriting of reality. A perfect, circular section of the heavens dissolved, its color draining away to be replaced not by darkness, but by a placid, shimmering mirror of pure, silver light. It was a portal, but it was unlike the chaotic, angry rifts of Hell or the frenzied, blood-red tear Nyxoria had opened. This was an act of creation so precise and so absolute that it was utterly terrifying in its perfection.

From the center of this silver looking-glass, a figure emerged.

To the thousands of elves and men gazing up from below, it was the descent of a living god. She was a vision of impossible grace, robed in gowns that seemed woven from the aurora borealis itself, her long, blue-silver hair flowing behind her as if she were suspended in a silent, cosmic sea. Her presence did not radiate heat or malice. It radiated a cold, immense authority that settled over the city like a shroud of starlight. It was a presence that did not crush the soul, but simply rendered it insignificant, a fleeting dust mote in the face of an eternal, unblinking star. The entire city was frozen in a state of profound, instinctual awe.

In the high council chamber, the reaction was far more visceral. Archmage Gideon cried out and clutched his chest, not from a heart attack, but from a sudden, violent reordering of the very mana he had breathed his entire life. The ambient magical energy in the room, which had always responded to his will, now ignored him completely. It had found its true master, and it prostrated itself in silent obedience.

King Theron felt the ancient, ancestral dread he had experienced at the Hell Gate return, but magnified a thousandfold. This was not a chance encounter. This was a deliberate, formal arrival. This was a summons. He gripped the arms of his throne, his knuckles white, his mind racing with a single, horrifying thought: She knows. She knows about the sapling.

Without a word, he and his council rushed from the throne room, climbing the spiraling stairs to the Sunstone Terrace, the highest open point of the palace, where elven kings had been crowned for millennia. They arrived on the vast, circular balcony just as Elysia’s impossibly slow descent brought her to hover a few feet from its edge. Her feet did not touch the hallowed ground. She simply was, her presence a silent judgment on all of them.

Her eyes, the color of dying stars, were not serene. They were burning with a cold, focused fire.

King Theron, the proud ruler of the oldest and noblest race on the continent, immediately fell to one knee, his head bowed low. The rest of the council, including the mighty Commander Borin, followed suit without hesitation.

“Ruler Elysia,” Theron’s voice was strained, heavy with a shame and terror he could not conceal. “We… we did not know. The Elderwood sapling… it was a gift of life, a bridge of respect between our peoples. We had no intention, no possible way of knowing, that it would become a conduit for such sickness. I swear this on my crown and my life. We are profoundly, deeply sorry for the violation of your home.”

He braced himself for annihilation. For a punishment so absolute it would erase his city from the map.

Elysia’s gaze passed over him, her expression unreadable. There was no anger there, not for him. There was only an immense, weary sense of cosmic frustration.

“Your ignorance is noted,” she said, her voice echoing not in the air, but directly in their minds, a sound like a thousand crystal chimes ringing in perfect, cold harmony. “It is also irrelevant.”

She glided forward, her feet still not touching the sunstone, until she stood in the center of the terrace. “A weed has taken root in my garden. Its source is a pestilence that now spreads through your lands. This is an inefficient state of affairs. It must be corrected.”

Her gaze shifted, landing upon Archmage Gideon, who was still struggling to catch his breath in the mana-thin air. “Archmage,” she commanded, the word not a request but an absolute imperative. “Your scrying chamber maps the ailments of this continent. You have been observing this… Crimson Blight. Project its heart for me. Show me the most concentrated source of this filth. Now.”

Before Gideon could even respond, the Four Heroes arrived on the terrace, drawn by the incredible surge of power. They skidded to a halt, their eyes wide as they took in the scene. They saw their king and the entire Alliance council kneeling before the silent, radiant being. They felt their own newly ascended Mythic-grade weapons, the pride of their world, tremble and hum with a quiet, instinctual deference. Luminara, Kenji’s holy sword, which burned with a righteous fire in the presence of any other evil, now felt like a dim, flickering candle in the face of this absolute, sovereign light.

Shaking, Archmage Gideon complied. He raised his hands and began to chant, his magic now sluggish and difficult to command. With a great effort of will, he tapped into the Great Scryer far below and projected a massive, holographic image above the terrace.

It was a living, writhing depiction of the Blighted Foothills of Astor. They all saw the land stained a sickening crimson, the sky thick with a red, hazy mist. They saw the frenzied, mutated monsters, their eyes glowing with a rabid, obsessive rage. They could almost feel the hateful, chaotic energy radiating from the image.

Elysia observed the hologram for a long, silent moment, her analytical gaze taking in every detail. She saw the ugly, inefficient synergy of the two powers she knew so well. The cold, structural decay of Malgorath, now given a rabid, self-destructive fervor by the chaotic, emotional residue of Nyxoria’s power. It was a parasitic, unsustainable form of corruption. An impurity.

She turned her gaze from the image and looked upon the assembled leaders and heroes of the mortal world.

“Your methods are crude,” she stated, not as an insult, but as a simple, undeniable fact. “You fight this corruption with fire and steel, hoping to burn out the disease. You are merely scattering its embers on the wind. This is not a war to be won with swords or prayers.”

She then gave her first and only command to the Alliance, her voice leaving no room for interpretation or debate. She looked directly at Commander Borin, the greatest general of the age.

“General. What is the standard safe withdrawal radius for your troops from an active blight zone?”

The Commander, caught off guard, stammered, “T-ten leagues, Your Majesty. At minimum.”

“Triple it,” Elysia commanded. “Recall your armies from this entire region. Pull them back thirty leagues. I do not want the dust from my work to settle on your soldiers.”

The sheer, casual scale of her implied power sent a fresh wave of terror through the assembled leaders.

Having delivered her terms, she turned away from them, her back to the kneeling kings and trembling heroes. She faced the distant horizon, in the direction of the blighted lands. She raised a single, elegant hand.

The air around her began to hum. It was a low, harmonic note that was felt in the stones of the palace and the bones of every living creature in the city. The light of the sun itself seemed to bend around her, the sky above darkening as impossible amounts of energy, drawn from the very fabric of reality, began to gather in the palm of her hand.

The world held its breath, waiting to witness what a truly displeased god could do.

The air on the Sunstone Terrace grew thin, charged with an energy that felt both ancient and utterly alien. The very laws of physics seemed to hold their breath in deference to the being at the center of the balcony. Every person present—king, archmage, hero, and general—was paralyzed, not by a magical force, but by a primal, instinctual understanding that they were witnessing an event far beyond the scope of mortal comprehension.

From his position on the front line, miles away, a centurion received the most frantic, nonsensical order of his career. The voice of his commander, screaming through the communication crystal, was stripped of all military discipline, replaced by pure, unadulterated panic. "DISENGAGE! PULL BACK! ABANDON THE FORWARD POSTS! FULL RETREAT, THIRTY LEAGUES, NOW! THAT IS NOT A SUGGESTION, THAT IS AN ORDER FROM THE GODS THEMSELVES!" Confused and terrified, the soldiers of the Alliance began a chaotic, desperate withdrawal from a battle they had just been ordered to win.

Back on the terrace, the Heroes watched Elysia, their own immense powers feeling small and insignificant. Kenji could feel his holy sword, Luminara, vibrating in its scabbard, not with aggression towards a perceived evil, but with a resonant awe, like a single violin string humming in the presence of a cosmic orchestra. Aiko, the mage, had tried to activate her [Mana Sense] to analyze the energy Elysia was gathering. The attempt lasted for a nanosecond before her skill overloaded, flooding her mind with a torrent of incomprehensible data and a single, blazing system error: [ERROR: SOURCE BEYOND ALL MEASURABLE PARAMETERS. ANALYSIS IMPOSSIBLE]. She staggered back, clutching her head, a trickle of blood dripping from her nose.

The power in Elysia’s raised hand was not gathering into a chaotic storm of fire or a blinding spear of light. It was doing the opposite. It was coalescing, compressing reality itself into a single, infinitesimal point. The ambient light of the sun seemed to drain from the sky, the vibrant colors of the city muted as if a veil had been drawn, all of it flowing into the singularity forming in her palm. The sphere that resulted was no larger than a child’s marble. It was a perfect orb of absolute nothingness, a pocket of anti-existence that did not radiate light, but consumed it, appearing as a perfect, silent hole in the world. It radiated a profound, deafening silence and a cold that was not a temperature, but the very concept of thermal death.

Archmage Gideon, a being who had dedicated five centuries to the study of magic and the laws of reality, felt tears stream down his ancient face. He was not weeping from fear, but from the despair of a scholar who had just realized his entire life’s work was built upon a child’s understanding of the universe. The energy she was wielding was not mana. It was the source code of creation itself.

Elysia looked at the small, silent sphere of nothingness in her hand. Her expression was one of detached focus, like an artisan examining a finished tool. Then, she spoke, her voice a quiet whisper that every soul in the city heard as if she were standing right beside them.

"Be efficient. Be absolute. Be gone."

She did not throw the sphere. She did not cast it. She simply… released it. Her fingers uncurled, and the point of anti-existence vanished from her hand, leaving no trace it had ever been there.

For a moment, absolute silence reigned. Nothing happened. The world was still.

Then, on the massive holographic image of the Blighted Foothills of Astor, hundreds of leagues away, it appeared. The small, black sphere materialized in the sky, hovering directly over the epicenter of the Crimson Blight.

There was no sound. No world-shaking explosion. No fiery impact.

There was only a silent, expanding wave of pure, silver-white light.

It was not a light of holiness or fire, but a light of pure, conceptual erasure.

The wave expanded from the sphere with impossible speed. Where its leading edge touched the frenzied, corrupted monsters, they did not scream or burn. They simply… dissolved. They ceased to be, their forms unraveling into motes of neutral dust that vanished on the wind.

The wave washed over the land. The bleeding, crimson soil did not heal; it was unmade, stripped down to clean, grey bedrock. The twisted, skeletal trees did not fall; they sublimated into a fine, grey mist and disappeared. The corrupted fortress at the heart of the region, a bastion of Malgorath’s power that had cost the Alliance thousands of lives, vanished as if it had been nothing more than a bad dream.

The silent, cleansing wave continued to expand, perfectly, inexorably, until it reached a radius of precisely thirty leagues. It stopped, forming a perfect, circular border. Inside the circle was a vast, sterile landscape of clean, smooth bedrock. Outside the circle, the world was completely untouched. The "surgery" had been performed with a terrifying, divine precision.

On the Sunstone Terrace, the leaders and heroes of the world were left in a state of absolute, soul-crushing silence. Their greatest generals, their most powerful mages, their chosen, god-blessed Heroes had bled and died for weeks to gain a few blood-soaked miles of that same territory.

She had deleted it. From another country. In less than a minute.

Commander Borin, the hardened veteran of a hundred wars, fell to his knees. He was not bowing in reverence. He was collapsing under the weight of the utter meaninglessness of his life’s work. His understanding of strategy, logistics, and warfare had just been rendered completely and utterly obsolete.

King Theron stared at the clean slate on the scrying image, then at the serene figure before him. A new, final understanding dawned on him. They had not been dealing with a powerful queen or an ancient demon. They had been trying to negotiate with a fundamental force of nature, and they had been lucky to survive the encounter. His fear was now complete, but it was a new kind of fear, one mixed with a profound, terrifying awe.

Elysia lowered her hand, the immense power receding back into her being as if it had never been there. She glanced at the pristine, circular scar on the world map with a brief nod of satisfaction.

"The weed has been pulled," she stated, her mental voice washing over them one last time. She gave the stunned council a final, indifferent look. "Do try to keep your garden clean from now on. My patience is a finite resource."

The perfect, silver portal opened behind her once more. She turned and stepped through it, vanishing from their world as cleanly and silently as she had arrived. The portal snapped shut, and the normal light and sound of the day rushed back in, feeling loud and garish in the sudden, deafening silence.

The leaders of the world were left alone on their high terrace, the terrifying image of the perfectly erased landscape burned into their minds forever. They had been saved from a great threat, but they had also been shown their true, insignificant place in the new hierarchy of their world. They were, and had always been, nothing more than dust motes, fortunate enough to live in the 

shadow of a star.