The Lord of Wetwood held the dying Half-Elf in his arms. Of all the ways for their union to end... this had to be one of the worst. He could feel his heart breaking in two as the Half-Elf struggled to wipe the tears from his cheeks.
She was saying something. Whispering her last words in this world for the Lord to hear. But he couldn't hear them. He could only hear their world's last hope of stopping the Elven Curse. After spending her entire life researching, dedicated to fixing the problem her people had created. This was how it ended.
The world was ending. Not just for the Lord of Wetwood. The sounds of crying were muted, as if the Lord was drowning underwater and the rest of the world was not.
The Lord of Wetwood could only stare at the Half-Elf's shaking fingers. Her hand was falling away from his face. Her bright and vivid green eyes like the blossoming spring grass dimmed. Her face turned, fell downwards as she lost even the strength to hold her own head up.
The Lord of Wetwood moved. He had been holding her for so long that his limbs had fallen asleep. Numb arms caught the Half-Elf's dipping chin and cradled her close.
The Half-Elf gazed up into the Lord's grey eyes with an unfocused gaze.
"..." The Half-Elf was trying to speak. But the Lord heard nothing.
She looked up at him with one last desperate pleading look before the end.
The Lord wished he could promise her...
But he couldn't, not even in her last moments.
Maybe the Half-Elf would have nodded. Maybe she would have laughed and smacked him over the head with one of her arcane books. If she had the strength. She didn't. She was dying of weakness.
The Healing Potion he had used to stop her bleeding and mend any injury had been of a higher caliber than most. Yet it, like all Healing Potions required the body to strain to heal itself. And after everything the Half-Elf had just been through... her body just couldn't hold up.
It was so damningly stupid.
The Lord wanted to rage and call the banners. But who could he rally his soldiers against? God? Which one? Who did he blame for this terrible mistake.
The answer came easy. The Lord of Wetwood blamed himself for this whole situation. If only he had never... maybe if he had... or what if...?
His world was ending and the world itself would soon follow. She had been so close, they both knew it. So close to putting an end to the Elf Curse.
It wasn't fair.
The Lord of Wetwood held the Half-Elf close as she died.
The Elf Curse would only grow bigger with time. She had taught him that much of her studies. One day if left unchecked, the Elf Curse would consume the world in darkness and death.
And as the Lord of Wetwood felt the life go out of the Half-Elf in his arms... for that brief moment... the Lord of Wetwood couldn't find it within himself to care.
His world was ending for the second time in his life.
___
The Lord of Wetwood's world was ending for a third and final time in his life.
Nearly two decades since the last great calamity in his life.
The Lord grit his teeth and slapped bloody hands across the stone floor of his hall. One hot and sticky red soaked hand grasped a hold of one of the few surviving Health Potions from the blast.
Someone had cast a spell right into his Lord's Manor. The explosion of wooden splinters and stone debris had sent the Lord and several of his Servants and two Guards flying. One of the Lord of Wetwood's legs had been pulverized by a large stone. He was bleeding everywhere.
The Lord didn't have time to uncork the potion. He smashed it against the floor. A red and viscous liquid poured from shattered glass onto the floor. The Lord scooped his hand under as much of the liquid as he could and he drank it. He tasted bitter magic and blood. He even swallowed a couple shards of glass. It hurt. The glass shards dug into his tongue, mouth, and throat. But the Healing Potion was a Tier A type of potion and it healed every injury his body had.
The bloody mess that had once been his leg slowly grew and reformed. All the cuts inside of his body from the glass slowly closed. The Lord of Wetwood grit his teeth as the Healing Potion pushed the glass out of his body, through organs and skin. Low Tier Healing Potions couldn't do that.
Within half a minute all of the Lord's injuries were healed.
The Lord looked around at the bodies and grimaced. Only one of his Servants and one of his Guards had survived. The Lord scooped up some more of the Healing Potion and made his way towards his subjects. When they were both healed he had instructed them to do as they willed. The Guard ran from the ruined Manor and towards the village with spear and shield in hand. The Servant girl just sat there in the ruins crying over one of the other Servants, her mother.
The Lord had not time to console the girl. Somethings were just too important.
___
Within the town of Wetwood was a boy. A boy who was struggling and pulling his heart and lungs out trying to lift the fallen support off of the woman who had raised him.
Bandits and fire was everywhere.
And the boy realized that he was still just a boy. For so long now he'd been begging people to start calling him a man. He was old enough for it. Seventeen years of age. But here and now, he felt like a boy. A child.
Useless.
Powerless.
Hopeless.
That was when the Captain of the Lord's Guards found the boy, weeping over the body of an Barkeeper.
___
The Lord made sure to lock the research room with one of the few spells he knew how to cast. One of her spells...
With that done. There was only one thing left for the Lord of Wetwood to do...
The Lord marched up the stairs from his manor's dungeons and stalked the halls of his ruined home. The Servant girl must have fled for she was no longer there.
The Lord walked through what had once been an ornate hallway.
He stepped over ruined carpet and winced at a memory.
It was a stupid memory.
She had wanted a magical carpet. Very expensive. Too expensive for them after they began construction for Wetwood. Walls weren't cheap. And neither were enchanted carpets imported half way across the world from the School, the only magical institution in the world. Being the only people who could enchant the carpet just the was she wanted...
It was too expensive. She had been very wrathful when one day the Lord had brought home an imported plain old green carpet from the port town of Stonewood.
Then she had been sullen.
And in two years time he had finally brought home the carpet she wanted. It had been very expensive.
Something so stupid. Such a silly little thing to fight about when Bandits and Goblins performed raids, when the seasonal flooding arrived, and when...
The Lord of Wetwood walked over the carpet and felt a surge of it's magical energy. The enchantments had been broken from the damage. This would be it's last act.
The Lord of Wetwood walked taller with a Lord's confidence and his mind cleared. The magic roamed his body, giving him the extra energy he'd need for this task.
The Lord excited the manor and stared at the flames for only a second before continuing forwards.
He had to fight. So the Lord of Wetwood unsheathed his Moonsteel blade and walked through the burning ruin of his town and under the dark shadow from the moon above.
The first Bandit held a club in her hands. She was a small thing. Certainly no child but she was still small. She noticed him walking through the ashes and stepping over a charred corpse that reeked of something foul. The Bandit charged at the Lord and the Lord sidestepped her downward swing. The blade was barely discernable even in this fire light it was so dark and mystical. The Bandit's eyes widened in recognition, she tried to step back, tried to bring the club up for another swing- and the Moonsteel sword cut right under her ribs and kept going, cutting through skin, meat, blood, and even bone.
The Bandit dropped to the ground with a bloody cry. She dropped the club and grabbed at her torso, trying to hold herself together. But her blood was leaking everywhere and she didn't want to die. Not like this. She didn't choose this way of life. She was born into it. And she didn't want to die in it. She had dreams of a cottage one day. A cottage on a hill with a good enough husband and a baby girl that wouldn't be born into a Bandit's life. She couldn't die here not like...
The Lord of the Ashes drove his sword into the Bandit's throat and twisted.
It was painful. It would be quick. Quicker than the Lord of Ashes would have liked. She deserved to die screaming, all of these Bandits and Pirates deserved nothing less than to rot on the Isle of Demons.
Another Bandit noticed the Lord and notched his bow.
The Lord blurred as an arrow came streaking past his head. In an instant the Lord was behind the Bandit-Archer and his blade was through the Bandit-Archer's back.
The Bandit-Archer grabbed at the blade but every time his fingers came away bloody. This was a sword forged from Moonsteel.
The Lord kicked the Bandit-Archer off of his legendary sword and moved through the blazing fires. He found children and pointed towards collapses gates and broken walls. He lifted a burning beam off of a pregnant Miller who just wanted to die. The Lord of Ash and Bone spotted the boy being saved by his Captain of Guards, Ronan Kobler. Kobler was in a bad way, one of his arms was missing, but he was still fighting. The boy held a trembling practice sword in his hands behind Kobler staring fearfully at the Bandits.
The Lord supposed the boy was nearly seventeen years of age.
He didn't care for the boy. He didn't want to see the boy who dreamed of one day becoming a Knight, a Hero. The boy who liked to run about in the forest and help old Alabaster the Alchemist. The boy who was sweet on that Baker's daughter even after she went and got knocked up by one of Wetwood's Watchmen. The boy who the Lord could not stand to look at.
But he could not let the boy die.
The Lord walked across a field of ashes and burning debris. His lungs were filled with poisoned smoke and he wanted to hack and cough it out of him. But he didn't. Instead, the Lord breathed it all in and raised his Moonsteel sword in both hands.
Their must have been at least fifteen Bandits surrounding Kobler and the boy. Bandits, Bandit-Brawlers, Bandit-Highwaymen, a Bandit-Bleeder, and one Bandit-Chieftain.
The Lord aimed for the Bandit-Chieftain and lunged forwards. There must have been thirty feet between them but distance didn't matter, not to the Lord of Wetwood.
The Bandit-Chieftain paused his taunting of the one armed man and quivering boy when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, raised his axe just in time to catch black steel. He blinked at the sword suddenly very close to his face and then roared.
One of his Bandit-Highwaymen charged at the newcomer from the side with a halberd. The blade was aimed to bury itself deep inside of the man's guts.
The Lord of Ashes and Bones stepped away from the Bandit-Chieftain and brought his Moonsteal blade downwards and cut through the halberd's handle. The Halberd's blade went flying off into a pile of burning ash, the handle snapped backwards.
The Bandit-Highwayman blinked at the stick in his hands and the Lord of Ashes and Bones decapitated him.
The Bandit-Chieftain was ontop of the Lord with a flurry of blows from his axe. Sparks of metal on metal flashed between the two men.
A Bandit-Archer aimed for the Lord's back when the boy kicked him from behind the knee. The Bandit-Archer fell to the ground and cursed as the boy began to beat him with a practice sword. The Bandit-Archer let go of his bow and caught the practice sword in between his hands. "Got you!"
The Bandit-Archer pulled the practice sword from the boy's grip. And made to swing at the boy's head to smash his brains out when a strange smelling powder was thrown in his face. The Bandit-Archer screamed and clawed at his eyes.
The Alchemist of Wetwood, Alabaster stood over the kid with one hand in his ingredients pouch. "Let's get out of here, kid."
The boy looked up at Alabaster and then back towards the fighting. Kobler had slain four Bandits with his single arm but was slowing. The Healing Potion had stopped the bleeding but the Captain of Guards was tiring. Lord Mathias was clashing with the Bandit-Chieftain occasionally parrying an oncoming strike from one of the many Bandits around him.
The boy looked around at the ruined town of Wetwood. The burning buildings. The broken walls. All of the bodies...
The boy dashed away from the Alchemist, picking up the practice sword and charging to Kobler's rescue.
It wasn't much of a rescue. The boy had helped Kobler kill three more Bandits before an arrow took Kobler in the chest. The Captain of Guards was laying down in the ashes, coughing on smoke and blood. In his last moments he pressed his sword into the boy's hands.
Wetwood was in ruins.
The Lord of Wetwood killed the Bandit-Chieftain with a deep slash across his torso from his shoulder to his groin. The Lord of Wetwood was covered in bleeding wounds and was limping, favoring his right leg.
For a brief instance the boy and the Lord's eyes met. And then the Alchemist pulled the boy away from the burning town with Kobler's sword in his hands.
The Lord watched as Alabaster carried the boy off into the darkness. Alabaster was a good man. He'd treat the boy fairly.
Lord Mathias coughed up blood.
His world was ending all around him. The town that he had built and lorded over would soon be ashes in the wind...
Mathias held his sword high and swung at another Bandit.
He would kill them all.
He would die before dawn.
But he would kill them all. Every last one of them.
And so the Lord fought and fought his heart out against waves of Bandits until they broke against him. Some fled into the night and others just stayed out of the Lord's way. He couldn't move much anymore. And when the dawn came, Lord Mathias of Wetwood collapsed into a pile of burning wood. He felt the flames surround him and lick at his skin.
The Lord clenched at a pendant, a gift from long ago.
The fire began to burn away at his body.
He couldn't scream. He would have if he could.
The heat from the flames broke the pendant and something leapt outwards. Another searing wave of heat engulfed the Lord, only it wasn't red. It was green flames, green flames that cut him deep and filled him with sorrow and regret. Feelings and actions he could never take back.
And at long last as the Curse Magic consumed him, Lord Mathias felt at peace. He would see her again. His world had ended. This world was ending. But he would see her again...
Lord Mathias died from the Cursed Magic that had broken free from the melting pendant in his grip. When the burning green blaze had flickered out and died, only a black sword lay buried in what ashes remained.
___
Far away an Alchemist and a boy walked in a trail of death.
But something reached for the boy's heart. Something cold and something warm. Something cutting and something soothing.
The boy turned to look back at the direction the feelings were coming from. He and the Alchemist had walked far from the town. But was it his imagination or could he see green flames in the distance?
Edwin shook his head and carried onwards, following the Alchemist. He didn't think he could cry any more tears. But to his surprise he still could.