Chapter 216: Avalon
“Young visitor, you came bearing the beacons, accompanied by the remnant soul of a Sacred Beast, and entered this place forgotten by time. All of this points to one possibility—you may well be, after this long wait, the one worthy of hearing the truth, and perhaps even… the one fit to carry a few sparks of hope.” Serandil’s voice grew more solemn, and in his golden eyes there seemed to drift the dust of history itself.
“Are you willing, for a time, to set aside your doubts and listen as I tell you of the true origin of the Philosopher’s Stone, of the Catastrophe that extinguished the glory of the Elf Race, of why this land is steeped in contamination, and… of why we built this experimental station in the first place?”
The pure white space began to change subtly with his words.
The even light rippled like water. Countless shadows and blurred fragments seemed to rise and sink within its depths, as though a scroll of history long sealed away were about to unfurl.
Ryan stood in that white void, looking at the elf across from him—ancient in aura, sorrowful in expression, and seemingly privy to every secret. He felt the closeness and confusion Syl was sending him from his shoulder, and he thought of how all the good fortune he had encountered along the way really did seem to stem from the Philosopher’s Stone Serandil had described…
Without his noticing, the balance in his heart had already begun to tilt.
The pure white space twisted and shifted in silence.
Serandil raised a hand, like the finest conductor in the world, and gave an almost imperceptible wave with an invisible baton.
Then the light ceased to be a uniform plane. It began to flow, gather, and condense, constructing before Ryan’s eyes—or rather, at the center of his consciousness—one vivid, overwhelming three-dimensional tableau after another.
The first image was a forest beyond the reach of language.
The trees towered into the clouds, their silvery-white trunks gleaming with a luster that seemed part metal, part jade. They were so massive that each one resembled a mountain in its own right.
Their crowns were not merely green. Color flowed through them like a rainbow in motion. New leaves gleamed with emerald brilliance. Mature foliage shone like molten gold in sunlight. Older leaves had deepened into rich crimson or dark violet.
The light did not come from the sky. It came from the trees themselves, from the vines twined around them, from the glowing moss that carpeted the forest floor. It was soft, warm, and full of surging life.
Tiny motes of light drifted through the air like stars, dancing in slow spirals on unseen currents.
And the forest was full of inhabitants.
There were countless elves there, in all manner of bearing and form. They built their homes among the colossal branches, and those homes grew in perfect union with the trees themselves, as though the trees had shaped themselves into dwellings of their own accord.
They danced in the open glades, their steps so light they seemed untouched by dust. Each footfall landed upon floating motes of light, sending rings of radiance rippling outward.
They gathered beside crystal-clear springs and sang songs with melodies ancient and ethereal, their voices weaving together with the wind, the water, and the rustle of leaves until it all became the harmony of nature itself.
Deep within the forest, a city emerged.
It was not something dead, piled up from brick and stone like a human city. It was a living miracle.
Vast ancient trees intertwined into bridges that spanned the heavens. Thick vines wove themselves into winding streets and corridors. Countless exotic flowers bloomed all at once, forming grand palaces and soaring towers.
Waterfalls plunged from the edges of tree crowns hundreds of meters above, only to be shaped in midair by magic—or perhaps by nature itself—into rainbow bridges that arched across the city.
The elves lived, studied, researched, and created within that city.
With a mere trace of their fingers through the air, intricate runes flared to life and transformed into practical Magic: lighting lamps, kindling flame, sending messages, even assisting in delicate alchemical operations.
They spoke to plants through song, coaxing crops to grow and guiding vines into whatever shapes they required.
They lived in perfect harmony with every living thing in the forest—the gentle moonlit deer, the swift skylarks, the proud silver wolves. They could even hold profound and unhurried conversations with the ancient trees, with the silent stones.
“This was Avalon,” Serandil’s voice said from beyond the tableau, calm, yet heavy with nostalgia and pride that ran all the way to the marrow. “The homeland of the elves. The place where all things began. It was also… the first true source and highest expression of all magical concepts. Here, magic was not an outside force that had to be painfully negotiated with and beseeched. It was our breath. Our blood. A part of us as natural as our own hands and feet.”
Ryan stood before the phantom of that magnificent civilization and felt a shock beyond description.
It surpassed any game CG, any written description. Even the cutscenes he had seen while playing, all those fragments of the game’s elven lore, did not amount to even one ten-thousandth of what was now being shown to him.
Syl remained perched on his shoulder, his body of green light trembling faintly as he let out a low, mournful cry, as though this vision had awakened a homesickness buried in the deepest layers of his shattered memory.
“But behind perfection,” Serandil said, his voice sinking lower, “destruction always lurks.”
The tableau changed abruptly.
At the edge of the forest, the sky had turned a baleful dark red.
Then a host of colossal beings tore through the clouds and descended.
Dragons.
They were nothing like the winged, fire-breathing giant lizards Ryan knew from this world.
Their bodies were longer, leaner, more fluid, covered in thick overlapping scales that shone with the dull metallic gleam of cooled lava or congealed foul blood. They had no wings at all, yet their vast bodies swam through the air against all reason, swift and unnatural, as though the sky itself were their sea.
Their heads were long and narrow, with protruding snouts. Their eyes were pure black, without the slightest trace of light. The longer one looked at them, the more it felt as if the void in those eyes might swallow the soul whole.
The dragons glided in silence into the skies above Avalon.
There was no roar, no declaration. They simply existed.
And the instant they entered the bounds of the forest, a sight of utter despair unfolded.
The giant trees nearest them, which had once radiated soft light, began to dim and die before the eye could follow. Their silvery-white bark lost all luster and turned dry, gray, and lifeless.
The rainbow-hued leaves in their crowns curled, yellowed, and withered, as though they had suffered the erosion of centuries in a single instant.
The floating motes of light in the air scattered like startled fireflies, only to be captured almost at once by an unseen abyss and vanish into the moving shadows that surrounded the dragons.
The elves reacted swiftly. Brilliant magical barriers rose throughout the city, and innumerable arrows, beams of light, and elemental blasts—each carrying immense magical force—rained down upon the dragons like a storm.
But a deeper despair followed.
When the magical arrows struck the dragon scales, there was no explosion, no penetration, not even the faintest scratch. They simply shattered soundlessly into the most basic particles of light, which were then absorbed into the dragon scales.
Binding vines of Magic, shackles of ice, gravity fields—all of them collapsed and dispersed the instant they came into contact with the dragons’ bodies.
Explosive flames, lightning, even high-order Magic imbued with the power of laws—all of it crumbled before impact, as though smashing into a wall that denied the existence of all things. The dissipating energy was likewise devoured greedily by the space around the dragons.
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