The Radiant Crisis...
The Coronation Breach...
The False Ascension...
Historians will argue over the name of this incident for centuries.
But this is how the legends will tell the story:
When the world was ending...when the sky tore itself open and annihilation poured through.....a single figure ran toward the colossus instead of away.
They will say he moved like something not quite human, dodging spears of radiance that turned stone to glass where they struck. They will say he climbed the ruins of the palace with hands that left no prints and feet that made no sound, ascending toward the goddess of light like a shadow climbing toward the sun.
They will say he reached her heart and bit her neck, and the world held its breath.
And this is what the priests will preach:
They will preach that the false goddess was struck down by holy providence. That the Portal was closed by divine will. That the empire was saved by faith and righteousness and the courage of its noble defenders.
They will not mention the boy who climbed a colossus with blood on his teeth.
They will not mention what he was confronted with inside...
...but I will mention it.
The vessel remembers the moment Yozi arrived.
Diving, almost drowning, deep into her subconscious mind.
In the white place where she had been screaming for three centuries, wrapped in chains of light that tightened every time she tried to move.
She remembers looking up and seeing him there.
A boy made of shadows and scars, standing in her prison like he had every right to be there.
Like he wasn’t afraid of the light.
Like he had come looking for her.
No one had ever come looking for me.
Not in three hundred years.
“You came,” she said. “Someone finally came.”
He tried to speak.
She watched the words slip away from him like water through open fingers. The light was already eating him. Already taking the pieces he would need to survive.
“You’re losing yourself,” she told him. “The light does that. It takes everything and leaves nothing behind.”
Her chains rattled as she reached for him.
“You should go. Before there’s nothing left of you to save.”
He shook his head.
And reached for her chains.
This is what the children will be told:
That a hero came and saved the world. That he fought the darkness and won.
That good triumphed over evil and everyone lived happily ever after.
They will not be told about the girl who had been a prison.
They will not be told her name.
But I had a name once. The vessel had a name.
And parents who loved her. And a favorite tree she used to climb. And a cat that slept at the foot of her bed.
Dreams about what she might become-
The light burned it away piece by piece. Days into weeks. Weeks into months. Months into centuries.
Her name went last.
She whispered it to herself in the dark spaces of her mind, repeating it like a prayer even as the divine presence pressed down and demanded she forget.
And eventually she forgot.
She became Overlord. The Vessel. The Door.
Never anything that suggested she was still a person underneath.
Despite everything, Yozi saw me.
The vessel felt him reaching through the white, searching for the pieces they had tried to erase.
And she felt him give them back.
Her parents’ faces first.
The way her mother laughed.
The roughness of her father’s hands, calloused yet gentle.
Then grass under bare feet...The soothing sound of rain on a roof...
Bread warm from the oven...Woodsmoke in autumn...
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
And her anger.
Bright. Hot. Furious anger.
The last thing they had tried to take.
The one thing she had clung to when everything else was stripped away.
He dug it up.
Placed it back in her hands.
This is the part that no one will ever know:
The cost.
He gave her his past so she could have one.
Memories pouring out of him like blood from a wound. His childhood. His name. The faces of people he loved.
He emptied himself so she would not be hollow.
“Why?” she asked, when the chains lay shattered and the light screamed and she felt her own heartbeat for the first time in three hundred years. “Why would you do this?”
He looked at her with eyes that had already forgotten too much.
.
.
.
“Because someone should have done it for me,” he said.
“And no one ever did.”
This is the part the legends will remember wrong.
They will say the hero closed the Portal through strength and courage and divine favor.
They will not say his memories were scattered across her mind like leaves after a storm.
They will not say he had given so much there was almost nothing left.
The vessel looked down at the boy who had saved her.
At the blood on his chin.
At the emptiness in his eyes.
She looked at the woman reaching for him, terror twisting her face, calling his name again and again.
She thought about what he had given.
What it had cost.
And she made her choice.
They will not say that I made a choice.
Because the means understood the ends.
The Portal fed on emptiness.
On hollow things.
On vessels scraped clean of humanity.
Threehundred years of scraping. Undone in an instant.
The vessel was empty no more.
No. Quite the opposite actually.
I was full.
Full of memories.
Full of anger.
Fully aware of the fulfilling, ordinary 12 years of her childhood and the ordinary name my parents gave me when they believed I would live an ordinary life.
And it made me wonder....
Because I was no vessel anymore I was able to wonder.
I looked down at Yozi.
At the boy who crawled inside my prison and set me free.
At Nyssara, the woman waiting for him with stubborn emotions she didn’t know how to name yet.
At the city of Zetun.
At the world I had been built to destroy.
I raised my hands.
“The Portal feeds on emptiness and servitude,” I said.
My twelve-year-old voice came back to me when I said that.
Mine.
“This makes me wonder what will happen,....” I whispered,
“....when I give it something full instead.”
This is how I ended.
Not as anything the bards will sing of or the priests will preach or the scholars will study.
Something much much, much better. I ended up as myself.
I walked into the light. I reached up and found the edges of the wound in reality, found the silently weeping Tear. I pulled.
The Portal screamed. The cleansers pressed forward, their beautiful terrible faces contorted with denied hunger. The light tried to reclaim me, tried to hollow me out again, tried to burn away everything Yozi had given back.
Nu-uh.
I held on.
Three hundred years of screaming. Three hundred years of being used. Three hundred years of hoping that someday, someone would hear me.
And in the end, I used all of it. Turned all that suffering into strength. Turned all that pain into something that mattered.
The Portal began to close.
This is the last thing I saw:
Nyssara catching Yozi as he fell. Holding him against her chest, his blood smearing across her armor, her mouth forming his name over and over.
The sky healing. The light dying. The stars beginning to shine onto the place where a wound had been.
A world that would keep existing because I chose to save it.
I looked back over my shoulder, one last time, at the people I was dying for.
At the boy who had heard me when no one else would. At the life I might have had, if things had been different.
I smiled.
Vessels can’t smile.
But girls can. Like that girl from a village that doesn't exist anymore. A daughter of parents whose faces I can finally remember. A child who hid in a root cellar and watched her world burn, and who never stopped hoping that someday the burning would stop.
A girl named Alia can.
I was twelve years old when they took everything from me.
I was three hundred and twelve when a boy with shadows in his blood gave it back.
And I was free, finally free, when I chose to walk into the light and close the door behind me shut.
This is not how the legends will tell this story.
But it's the truth.
And my name,
the name I held onto for three centuries,
the one I whispered in the dark even when I forgot what it meant,
the one a stranger gave back to me so I could die with it on my lips,
is Alia.
My name is Alia!
Remember me.
