"But that thing slaughtered one of them."
The echo of my voice spread through the curved walls, filling the vast hall.
The words ended, and I immediately turned my head toward the next mural.
There, we returned once again to the hall containing the great throne, but this time someone was seated upon it, while three figures of different sizes stood around him...
All of them lacked facial features.
I didn’t understand why their faces hadn’t been drawn...
And it irritated me because I wanted to see them.
I truly wanted to.
Before the throne stood the same mist, while the words beneath the mural continued.
"For the first time in humanity’s history, which had lasted for countless years, one of the First Ones stepped into Arcadia and spoke with our ruler."
"The first to react to the disaster, and the oldest among them..."
"The Witness of Everything."
"The embodiment of the past, present, and future."
"The First Anchor of Time."
"No one understood these beings or how they came to exist in the first place. They didn’t even possess a fixed name by which they could be called."
"And despite all the events flooding the universe, even after one of them vanished, they refused to intervene directly... All they left behind was what we and the other races had to do."
"On that cursed day, beneath the throne upon which every Sovereign throughout history had sat, humanity’s fate was declared."
"Extinction."
"An inevitable extinction from which there was no escape..."
"Unless we followed what it said... and we did."
The mural changed, and so did the words beneath it, creating another scene.
A scene I had never seen before, yet somehow recognized.
It was the world of Aetherion itself.
Beneath its beautiful skies stood millions of silhouettes, filling the heavens and blocking out the sun itself.
"The Devourer continued to spread across the universe, while its followers continued to multiply, especially one particular race."
"The wars that engulfed existence itself erupted, led by the entire Pantheon for the first time."
"They were the most brutal wars ever recorded in history... and also the shortest."
"No matter how hard we tried and no matter what we did, we kept losing."
"We were losing at an unreasonable speed."
"The Pantheon dwindled and went extinct one after another, and in the end they managed to reach us, our world, and our homeland... exactly as it had said."
"And on that day, everything was prepared to bring this conflict to an end."
"But it did not come without a price."
"Yes, we were prepared to fight behind our ruler... our light and our guide."
"But we were not prepared for extinction."
"So, by order of the Sovereign, some of us fled here and hid... to this small planet in the farthest corner of the universe."
"We were supposed to remain here in silence... grow once more, and then return stronger and greater than before."
"But just as the First Anchor of Time said, fate had other plans."
"Even after we hid in this distant and unknown place, far from even our closest allies, a malicious trace remained among us."
"A curse... a curse inflicted upon us by those bastards... a curse that followed us even after we fled."
"So under the influence of this curse, we began forgetting our history, and Essence began rejecting us, causing us to lose all our power."
"Even I am forgetting."
"So I write this as the last thing I do before it consumes me. These letters, formed from my life itself, will not disappear and shall endure forever."
The elegant script became deeper and increasingly chaotic, as though it were pouring everything into these final words.
"I’m sorry, my Lord... I’m sorry to every Sovereign throughout our history... even after entrusting me with this final task after paying that price."
"I failed."
"We are falling and losing our power instead of gaining it... Perhaps they won’t find us in this place, at least not until that day."
"The day those shackles break, we will return... Perhaps not us, nor our children, but another generation... a generation of humans far removed from us."
"We will return... Essence will accept us once more, and so will our homeland."
"Existence between the two worlds will shatter, creating a safe passage for us... The remnants of her legacy will guide us and show us the path we forgot."
"We will rebuild our civilization and settle there once again, protected by the remnants left behind by the Great Maker."
"We will rise once more and gain strength... But peace will not last, not as long as that thing exists."
"So to whoever reads this, to whoever found this place, do not forget... Please do not forget. This must never happen again."
"Perhaps they all sacrificed themselves over there, but one still remains, and he will return... He will return, and with him we shall rise once again as one of the great races."
"So to whoever reads these words, fight... Not for glory, not for wealth, nor for status."
"All those things will come to an end and be devoured by the specter of time."
"But for yourself... for your family... and most importantly, for humanity."
"Everything will end—your life, our lives, and even every ruler who led us."
"But not humanity."
I stared at the remaining words upon the curved wall, my eyes refusing to leave them.
By reading this, I understood many things...
And at the same time, I understood very little.
Whether it was humanity’s origin in Aetherion from the very beginning, or the reason no evidence of it had ever been found throughout all these centuries, I understood that much.
But even if it was the Devourer, how the hell could it kill one of the First Ones...?
Perhaps saying it killed one wasn’t even the correct way to describe it.
And even after it did, the others still refused to intervene...
Why, if it was a threat on that level?
And when one of them finally did act, all it gave were instructions on what needed to be done to stop the disaster...
And they succeeded.
But at a price...
And it didn’t take much to guess what that price had been.
Even after the remnants of humanity hid here on Earth, they were followed by a curse that made them forget everything and stripped them of their power, while countless other races and civilizations were completely erased.
As for us, we survived...
And remained on Earth until the day the curse broke and we returned to Aetherion.
But wasn’t returning to Aetherion supposed to be something good and safe, just as it was written here...?
Then why had Earth and all of humanity been plunged into blood and death?
To the point that humanity had nearly gone extinct.
The elegant writing ended, as did the murals covering the curved walls, drawing my gaze toward the very first thing I had seen in this hall.
"Caius..."
I stared at the city called Arcadia...
Could that place perhaps be...
"Caius..."
I felt a hand shaking my shoulder, pulling me from my endlessly chaotic thoughts.
I turned my head to see Elliot and everyone else staring at me with unreasonable intensity, their eyes almost drilling holes into my body.
"Are you alright?" Elliot asked with a frown, while I frowned back, annoyed at having my thoughts interrupted.
"Yeah... Why wouldn’t I be?"
He removed his hand from my shoulder when I said that, yet everyone continued staring at me strangely.
I raised an eyebrow while suppressing the strange feeling inside me.
"Why are you all looking at me like that?"
Elliot scratched his head, while Leona looked toward the wall, and Kyle’s eyes continued trying to bore holes through my face.
Then Izel opened her mouth.
"How the hell can you read this?"