Chapter 409:War.
Silence filled the ruined throne room. Atheline stood among them without truly seeing any of them anymore.
His mind was somewhere else.
The book, the original story.
He hadn’t thought about its events this deeply in a long time. His arrival had changed too much and his relationship with Lilith had changed too much.
People who should have become enemies were allies. Events that should have happened never occurred while others happened completely differently.
He had stopped viewing the world as a novel because, to him, it wasn’t one anymore. It was simply his life, but this... Atheline looked at Lilith.
The villainess who went to war with the world. The woman everyone feared. The Queen history would presumably remember as cruel, unstable and dangerous.
The book had shown consequences. It had shown actions, perhaps it had even shown enough of her past to make readers understand pieces of her hatred.
But had it shown this?
Atheline looked toward the empty place where the Head Councillor should have been, then toward Zelpher’s exhausted face and Simion’s wounds.
"What exactly am I looking at?"
Atheline whispered but nobody heard him. His first thought was that the ruin was showing him the future but that didn’t make sense. Too many things were already different.
Lilith’s husband wasn’t him.
Yander’s role was different. His own death had happened under circumstances that no longer matched the world he knew, then another possibility emerged.
Atheline slowly looked around.
"What would have happened..."
He stopped.
If he hadn’t intervened. If he hadn’t changed anything. If he’d remained the insignificant extra he had originally been. If Lilith had followed the path written for her.
His eyes returned to the Queen.
"This is the book."
He wasn’t certain, not completely, perhaps it was another possible future. Perhaps an illusion built from his memories. Perhaps the ruin was deliberately showing him the worst outcome it could construct.
But his instincts told him there was more to it.
Atheline stared at Lilith as she sat upon the damaged throne while the councillors reluctantly began preparing for a war none of them believed they could win.
He finally understood something he hadn’t considered when listening to the original story. Maybe the villainess hadn’t simply decided to become everyone’s enemy.
Maybe, by the time the story called her a monster, everyone she cared about had already been taken from her. And perhaps this ruin was showing him the world that should have existed if he had never changed her fate.
.
.
.
The decision was made before the council ended.
There was no dramatic vote and no final attempt at compromise. By that point, the maps spread across the broken table already showed armies gathering from several directions, and Lilith had stopped believing there was anything left to negotiate.
Simion argued until his voice became hoarse, Zelpher attempted to persuade her to at least send one final message to the other rulers, and several councillors begged for enough time to evacuate settlements near the borders before any offensive began.
Lilith granted the evacuations.
She granted time for civilians to be moved deeper into the kingdom, ordered food and medical supplies distributed from the royal stores, and commanded every available defensive formation around the capital to be reinforced.
But she wouldn’t change the decision itself. If the armies surrounding them wanted war, then the Dark Elves would no longer wait quietly for the first blade to fall.
Atheline watched everything from beside the council table, unable to speak to anyone, unable to touch anything, and increasingly convinced that whatever the Unaspected Ruin was showing him wasn’t a simple illusion.
There were too many details he didn’t remember from the book and too many conversations he had never known occurred. Even if this was somehow constructed from his memories, the ruin was filling enormous gaps with information he couldn’t possibly have provided.
Lilith eventually stood before the remaining councillors.
"We’ve spent enough time proving our innocence to people who already decided we were guilty. Move the civilians away from every vulnerable border settlement, call back every force that can be spared from the corrupted outbreaks, and prepare the kingdom for war."
Simion closed his eyes.
"Lilith, once you give that order, taking it back won’t erase what follows."
"I know."
"Thousands could die."
"I know."
"Not only soldiers."
Lilith’s expression tightened.
"I know."
Simion stared at her for a long moment.
"Then I’m asking one final time. Don’t attack first."
Lilith looked toward the damaged windows.
"And I’m telling you one final time that I will not sit on this throne waiting for an army to cross my borders before I’m allowed to acknowledge that they came here to kill us."
Nobody answered.
Lilith turned back toward them.
"Prepare for war."
The throne room disappeared before Atheline even had time to react. There was no darkness between one place and another this time.
One moment he was standing beside the council table, and the next... He smelled blood.
Atheline staggered, his boots landing on broken stone. Wind rushed across his face as screams sounded somewhere far away. Then came the unmistakable thunder of collapsing magic.
Atheline looked up.
The world was burning.
For several seconds, he simply stared.
He couldn’t immediately tell where he was. The landscape had been devastated so completely that there were almost no recognizable landmarks left.
Enormous cracks split the ground, entire sections of earth had been turned black, and shattered weapons lay everywhere among bodies belonging to several different races. There were dark Elves, high Elves, humans, and beastmen.
There were even several enormous corpses in the distance that Atheline couldn’t immediately identify.
The war had happened. The ruin had skipped everything between the declaration and whatever remained afterward.
Atheline slowly turned.
"How long?"
The sky itself looked wounded.
Dark clouds stretched across the horizon while enormous concentrations of Aether collided somewhere beyond the battlefield.
There were still people fighting in the distance, but here, at the center of the devastation, the battle appeared to have reached its conclusion.
Atheline took several steps, then he saw the bodies.
His stomach tightened.
A familiar man lay near a shattered section of stone.
"Zelpher..."
Atheline approached.