Elysia-Chapter 45: The Weight of Dust

The geography of the mortal realm was a tapestry of inefficiencies. Mountains rose only to be ground down by wind; rivers carved paths only to dry up in the heat. It was a cycle of construction and erosion that Elysia found chaotic, yet strangely hypnotic in its persistence.
She had walked for three days since leaving the cliffs of the Earth Goddess. She moved not with haste, but with the inexorable momentum of a celestial body. She did not eat. She did not sleep. She simply processed the data of the world around her, letting the silence of the wilderness wash over the static of her memories.
Her path led her into the Barrens of Orogoth, a vast, canyon-scarred wasteland in the west that Terraris had alluded to. Here, the war with Malgorath was not a distant rumor; it was a scar etched into the earth itself.
The sky here was a bruised purple, stained by the residual mana of ancient skirmishes. The ground was littered with the rusted husks of siege engines and the bleached bones of beasts long dead. It was a graveyard of ambition.
Elysia walked through the center of a dried riverbed. The wind howled through the canyon walls, sounding like the wailing of the damned she had left behind in the Ninth Circle. She adjusted the acoustic dampenings around her ears. She did not wish to hear ghosts today.
As she rounded a bend in the canyon, she came upon a scene that made her pause.
It was not a grand battle. It was the aftermath of a small, insignificant skirmish. A patrol of human soldiers had been ambushed by a pack of Malgorath’s scavengers—twisted, hyena-like creatures infused with shadow magic. The fight was over. The scavengers had moved on, leaving only silence and the dead.
Elysia walked among the fallen. She stepped over broken spears and shattered shields with the grace of a phantom. She looked at the faces of the men—young, terrified, frozen in their final moment of realization that their story was ending.
Fragile, she thought. Carbon-based structures. Limited lifespans. Driven by chemical signals of fear and loyalty. Why do they fight with such ferocity for a blink of existence?
She was about to move on, to leave the dead to the vultures as nature intended, when her sensors picked up a faint, irregular rhythm.
Heartbeat. Weak. Arrhythmic. Origin: Ten meters north.
She walked towards a pile of rubble near the canyon wall. There, half-buried under the debris of a wagon, lay a young man. He could not have been more than eighteen cycles. His armor was rent open, and his lifeblood was pooling in the red dust, turning it black.
He was dying. The probability of survival was absolute zero.
Elysia stood over him, her shadow falling across his face. He blinked, his eyes unfocused, hazy with pain and approaching death. He looked up and saw her—a figure of pristine silver and white standing amidst the gore, her face a mask of unearthly beauty and terrifying indifference.
"A... angel?" he wheezed, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips.
Elysia tilted her head slightly. "No. I am not a messenger of your gods."
"Then... represent... death?" he managed to choke out. He tried to reach for his sword, a reflex born of training, but his hand was too weak to lift it.
Elysia looked at the sword. It was a cheap piece of iron, notched and dull. "In a manner of speaking," she replied.
She knelt. She did not heal him. To heal him would be to interfere with the causal weave of this timeline. It would be to play god, and she had promised herself she was merely a walker. But to leave him to suffer for the remaining eleven minutes of his life... that was inefficient. Cruelty served no purpose here.
"Are you... afraid?" Elysia asked. Her voice was the only sound in the canyon, cutting through the wind.
The boy stared at her. Tears streaked through the dust on his face. "Yes. It... it's cold. I don't want... to go to the dark."
Elysia nodded. She understood that fear. She had lived in the dark for nine thousand years. She knew the texture of it better than she knew her own name.
"The dark is not empty," she said softly. "It is merely quiet. There is no pain there. No war. Just silence."
She removed her glove, revealing her hand—pale, flawless, glowing with a faint starlight. She reached out and placed her hand gently over the boy’s eyes.
"Close your eyes, soldier. Your watch is ended."
She did not use a spell of death. She simply accessed the concept of Pain within his nervous system and set its value to zero. Then, she accessed the concept of Fear and deleted it.
The boy’s breathing hitched. His body relaxed. The grimace of agony smoothed out, replaced by a look of profound wonder. Under her hand, he didn't see the canyon or the blood. He saw what she projected into his fading mind: a vast, endless ocean of stars, calm and beautiful.
"It's... bright..." he whispered.
And then, he was gone.
Elysia held her hand there for a moment longer, ensuring the transition was complete. She felt the tiny spark of his soul detach from the biological vessel and drift away into the ley lines of the world. It was a microscopic event in the grand scheme of the universe, utterly insignificant.
And yet, as she stood up and brushed the dust from her dress, she felt a strange sense of satisfaction. It was not the triumph of winning a war. It was the quiet, sombre satisfaction of closing a book that had been left open.
Rest, she thought, looking at the silent battlefield. Your noise is finished.
She turned away from the dead. She did not bury them; the earth would do that in time. She resumed her walk, her boots making no sound on the gravel.
As she left the canyon, the wind picked up, carrying the scent of rain. Elysia looked up at the gathering clouds. The world was cruel, messy, and short. But in that shortness, there was a peculiar kind of gravity. Because their time was so limited, every second these mortals spent held a weight that her eternity lacked.
She adjusted her coat, the collar rising to meet the wind. She was an immortal walking through a graveyard, a ghost of starlight in a world of dust.
And for the first time since leaving the palace, she felt the solitude not as a burden, but as a privilege. She was the witness. And that was enough.