In the endless vault of night, thunder murmured like a god brooding in slumber.
Lightning tore across the heavens, its silver fangs briefly revealing the world below—a city cloaked in ruins and rain, steeped in silence and solemnity.
This was the City of Silver.
An ancient and isolated city, that is forever eternal.
It stood still beneath the mourning sky, as if time itself had forgotten it. Encircled on all sides by the yawning vastness of the Forsaken Land of the Gods, it was a candle struggling against the wind—a fragment of civilization left to dream amidst a wasteland of divinity's corpse.
To the east, the land ended not in cliffs nor sea, but in something far more impenetrable.
A gray fog, both sky and soil, horizon and abyss. It blanketed all like wool pulled over the eyes of the world. No wind stirred there, and no light pierced it.
Some called it a boundary, while others said it was a grave.
But among the few who still dared to speak of it, there lingered an old belief: That the fog was placed there by God himself.
Back into the City of Silver, the constant lightning strikes illuminated a young couple pacing their way up the desolate and abandoned area of the city.
One of them was equipped with a dagger on the side of his belt buckle, and a long spear hooked onto the back of his vest. In his pockets were mystical healing potions for the injured in battle.
To the left of him, was a gorgeous young lady with flowing blonde hair - that seemed like a running river of pure gold.
Her eyes carried an indescribable beauty, but also the look of alarm and impending sense of danger. "Gareth, they will kill her. There has to be another way". Lara pleaded with her husband, grabbing his arm as they trudged through the broken road.
"If the entity that has taken control of her was smart enough to fool chief Collin, then there's high chance she is as good as dead anyways right now." As Gareth said this, he fought back the urge to cry as to not show any weakness in front of his wife.
"Don't you dare say that! There has to still be a way! Maybe we can take her to a priest and ask the Creator to dispel whatever curse or abnormal affliction she's fallen unde-"
"No!"
Gareth shouted as he pushed her hand off of his arm. "Don't you see Lara, God has abandoned us, that is why this whole thing happened in the first place. If I would have swore to her - not under the premise of some false deity, than our little girl would have grown up and live a good life."
Tears started to stream down his battle-hardened face as he looked at the ground. "This is all my fault. If I would have done a better job protecting her, instead of being away from home with the exploration team then..." He trailed off as he lifted his face to look at his wife's.
Before they could lock eyes with each other, a smack reverberated off into the distance, and a hand print was etched onto the right side of his face.
Gareth's eyes widened in shock that his sweet and gentle wife had actually struck him.
"Don't you keep sprouting this nonsense. You have been a great husband, and an exceptionally great father. This is not your fault! I would rather blame anybody else but you. The blame could fall on me, or even fall on God himself for that matter. But it is NOT, your fault."
As Lara said these words teardrops started to slide down her cheeks also, and Gareth realizing the error of his self-condemnation, tightly embraced Lara.
In the shadows, the dark silhouette that was watching had a huge smile plastered across it's face. But in contrast to its smile, a tear-drop slowly made its way down her cheek, before gently falling onto the stone ground.
After embracing for a couple of more seconds, Gareth pulled away and solemnly gazed at Lara. "What are we going to do then. If we report this matter to the council, they definitely will kill her or lock her away for the rest of her life."
Lara, breathed a deep inhale and said with a resolute tone, " We don't report it. As of right now she has not harmed anybody, and the entity possessing her has not harmed Capella either. So, we just do nothing."
Lara spoke with a conviction at first, but towards the end of her sentence it sounded like she didn't even believe what her own self was saying.
"Well, I wouldn't say that is completely right, but I honestly would not like to kill you both so we can just go with that story."
A child's voice rang out behind them—soft, sweet, and unmistakably familiar.
Both Gareth and Lara turned.
Two silhouettes stood upon the fractured road, framed by the sickly glow of the dying streetlamps. One was a little girl—blonde-haired, barefoot, and dressed in garments too crude for her age. Twin, chitinous orbs, like swollen bee abdomens stained black and violet, jutted grotesquely from her back, pulsing with some unknown rhythm.
Capella.
And beside her stood—
"Mila…?"
The name escaped Lara's lips, barely audible, more breath than sound.
Her body turned cold. Something primal and old clawed at her chest. Gareth said nothing. His eyes, locked on the figure beside their daughter, trembled slightly—not with recognition, but disbelief curdling into horror.
Mila's face remained hers—soft, familiar, and eerily serene. Yet the illusion unraveled the moment one's gaze descended.
From the waist down, her form had been replaced with the sinuous, coiled body of a golden serpent, each scale glistening like onyx under the pallid nightsky. Her skin shimmered with an oily sheen, as though constantly anointed in some unholy ichor. Two black horns—crooked and ridged like ancient roots—jutted from her forehead, their presence warping the space around them subtly, as if rejecting the natural order.
Her entire form exuded a dangerous allure—one not born of beauty, but of something older, darker. It was a charm that gnawed at the edges of rational thought, seductive not in flesh, but in temptation. Forbidden and profane.
Lara began to shake. Her legs felt hollow. The rapid pounding of her heart drowned all coherent thought. When her knees buckled, she collapsed to the ground with a hollow thud, her fingers clawing instinctively at the dirt as if it could anchor her to reality.
Gareth remained upright, but trembled—not in fear, but fury. Rage bled into his voice as he stared at the thing beside his daughter.
"You… You turned her into a monster... You demon, bitch! I'll kill you!"
Gone was the trembling father. What remained was a wrathful knight.
With a wordless growl, he tore his spear from the harness on his back, and a pale silver glow erupted around him. It spread in spiraling runes and blooming patterns, coalescing into armor wrought of Dawnlight—gauntlets, breastplate, and helm, radiant yet cold.
Dawn Armor. A power restricted to those who had traversed into the middle sequences of the Twilight Giant pathway. And Gareth, the quiet father and husband, stood revealed as a Beyonder of Sequence 6.
Capella did not flinch. Her face betrayed neither guilt nor amusement—only silence. Her fingers elongated, twisting into talons two meters long, glistening with a slick, iridescent sheen.
Gareth charged.
The cobbled street cracked beneath his feet. A silver corona burst from his spear as he lunged, aiming directly for her heart.
The spear struck.
Talons shattered. The shaft pierced her torso, exiting through her back in a spray of dark ichor. A concussive shockwave exploded outward, bending trees and shattering glass. Capella staggered.
Then she smiled.
Her body stitched itself together before his eyes—bone first, then tendon, then skin.
What emerged from the wound was no longer a girl.
Her flesh churned, twisted, and elongated. Scales rippled into existence, slick and glimmering. Her torso coiled into the shape of a gargantuan serpent, its mouth wide and fanged, its yellow slitted eyes glimmering with hunger. The girl was gone—replaced by a creature that eclipsed buildings and cast long, undulating shadows beneath the stormy heavens.
Gareth said nothing. He let his spear fall with a clang.
In its place, he summoned a new weapon—one crafted entirely of light. A blade forged from condensed Dawn essence, gleaming with divine clarity.
He raised the sword overhead, assuming a stance etched into his memory by years of discipline. The wind obeyed. It gathered around the blade, howling in a spiral. The sword pulsed—once, twice—then ignited like a fallen star, searing the darkness.
And still, Capella watched.
With eyes that remembered everything—and forgave nothing.
Capella—no longer a girl, no longer anything that bore resemblance to a child—reeled backward, fangs gleaming with venomous sheen, eyes wide in serpentine hunger.
The beast coiled once, then surged forward like a tidal wave of scale and sinew, jaws opening impossibly wide. She moved with unnatural speed, intent on swallowing Gareth whole.
But the knight did not retreat.
Instead, he lowered his stance.
His lips moved in silent prayer—words older than any current faith, syllables steeped in primordial reverence.
And then, he roared:
"Hurricane of Light!"
This was the strongest attack accessible to the sixth-sequences on the Twilight Giant pathway. Only accessible to them every two-minutes.
The sword he held flared to life with an intensity that blinded even the night. In the breath that followed, the world seemed to pause—only for the air to erupt in a cataclysmic vortex.
Wind, sharpened like blades. Light, condensed to the purity of a saint's wrath.
The hurricane spun outward from Gareth's blade in a deafening spiral of luminous destruction. It howled with the fury of a thousand storm-swept tempests. Trees bent and snapped. Stone shattered. The very earth beneath him peeled back in strips as though fearing divine judgment.
Capella's monstrous serpent body was caught mid-lunge.
The vortex tore into her flesh, light searing and wind carving. Her elongated form thrashed and howled in a voice that blended childlike agony with something ancient and inhuman. Then—with a sickening crack—her snake-body was cleaved in half.
A moment of silence.
Then movement.
From the gaping wounds, they came.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of smaller serpents burst forth. They slithered from her entrails, trailing dark fluid, each one no thicker than a wrist yet pulsing with corrupt vitality. They darted across the ground in all directions, forming a swarm of living madness.
Gareth's brow furrowed. He raised his palm skyward and uttered more sacred words:
"Light of Dawn."
A silver sun was born between his hands.
Radiance exploded outward, bathing the battlefield in argent brilliance. The fog receded. Shadows screamed and retreated into crevices. The very air shimmered under the pressure of the incantation.
Gareth stood taller—four inches more, and the air around him shifted like that of a giant. His shoulders broadened, muscles bulging under the strain of power made flesh. His Dawn Armor crackled with energy, runes burning into the air around him like the seals of ancient gods.
A circle of runes formed around him—twelve in total—rotating slowly in the air.
From each rune, a weapon emerged.
Spears, swords, glaives, halberds, and hammers—all forged of pure dawnlight. They hovered in the air like divine sentinels before launching forward in blinding arcs.
Each weapon found its mark, skewering the serpents mid-slither. Some were impaled, others obliterated in bursts of light, their shrieks evaporating into a silence that stung the ears. Still more came, and Gareth met them with a whirling barrage of summoned armaments.
Then came a pulse from the legless creatures.
The surviving serpents, twitching and writhing, began to slither toward each other, ignoring Gareth entirely.
In the center of the street, they converged.
They coiled together, tighter and tighter, forming a pulsating sphere of flesh and scale. Black mist poured from it. Bones snapped. Flesh knitted. A silhouette emerged from the fusion—rising, breathing.
When it stepped forth, Capella stood once again with her hands spread outward, like she had made an appearing trick in a magic show.
"Ta-da!" She said in a childish attitude.
No blood stained her form. No wound marred her flesh. Her eyes were the same cold gold Gareth remembered from her birth—yet something unholy shimmered beneath them now.
She flexed her fingers. Flesh bubbled and shifted.
From her right arm, barbed tentacles slithered out like steel whips. Her left turned into a jagged maw lined with shark-like teeth. Her legs morphed into insectoid appendages, chitinous and sharp. From her back, wings—leathery, crow-feathered, and skeletal—spread wide.
Capella surged forward, arm-tentacles lashing at impossible speeds. Her foot gouged the earth like a blade. Gareth raised his arm, calling down a tower-shield of pure light. The blow struck and rang like a bell, sparks flying in all directions.
She lunged, her maw-arm snapping.
Gareth dodged and retaliated, summoning a light-wreathed glaive that cleaved her wing in half. She hissed and shifted again, wings sealing shut, wounds healing over with thorned vines that sprouted from her flesh.
She leapt.
He met her mid-air.
Sword against claw. Good against evil. Father against daughter.
Each clash sent tremors into the air. Each movement wrote scripture into the battlefield.
In the City of Silver, beneath the thunder-wracked sky, amidst ruins and ash, the light of a righteous titan struggled against the blasphemous miracle his daughter had become.