𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀 𝐒𝐔𝐂𝐂𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘. 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐀 𝐑𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.
It's the beginning of a new age when Jaylah Imperatrix seemingly returns from the dead to reclaim her throne. And in perfect timing.
In her absence, evil has be...
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Act 4 Chapter 153 JAYLAH
Jaylah went in with both swords swinging, expecting to have to fight her way to the columns of flames so that she could escape through them and enter the city. Her swords cut through smooth slips of flesh, meeting no resistance. Surely she had not shocked them; they were not blind. She kept moving forward, kept cutting their heads off with mighty, sweeping strokes, thinking one of them would eventually attack her. They were all fitted with great swords across their backs and knives on their belts, which she kept seeing flashes of as she ducked from their way. Why did they not seem to recognize she was there?
She knew the answer immediately: she was meant for her father, and her father only. It was not as if she could run away.
The realization made her lower her swords for a moment, if only to test her theory. They kept marching forward, eerily quiet for there to have been so many of them. Not a single voice fell over the plain.
Jaylah reached out and shoved a man as he jostled against her shoulder. He jerked back with oddly mechanical movements, but she could barely focus on his disturbing behavior once she laid eyes on his face. His skin was mottled by burn scars and seemingly stitched together by ragged black lines like a broken teacup that had been reassembled just well enough to be functional again. Still, something was deeply wrong with them. Perhaps fragments of the god himself had settled into each of these...things. Her father had been able to revive them, but he had not been able to recreate them with that intrinsic aliveness that made humans human.
In her haste to back away, she collided with another revolutionary. A few bees buzzed out of his shirt collar. Her heart jumped. He had the same patchwork of scarring, but his still bled as if it had been done poorly. He did not even notice his face was half falling apart. Zensa had said there was hardly a body still left fully together. Jaylah's stomach tightened when she thought of her father sewing together spare bits of flesh to seal up his gaping corpses.
With nothing left to stop her, Jaylah walked into the city against the exodus of bodies. Fire flickered everywhere, even on enemies she passed, blissfully unaware that their clothes were in flames. Most of the fire had already been snuffed out, it seemed, by the soldiers' relentless feet, but several buildings in the entrance were already reduced to ashes.
There was still no rain, despite the increasingly furious vortex of storm clouds as far as the eye could see. Thin lines of vapor were rising from the sea and being sucked into the clouds. The air was thickening with fog. Every so often, that unearthly lightning cracked at random and the whole world went bright and red. Afterward, Jaylah could see nothing for a few following seconds. It did not feel like she was on earth. This was her home but it was unrecognizable. Perhaps the state of the land mirrored her, its scion.
The wet warmth of the air seeped into her skin and made her shiver. For the first time in a thousand years, there was a god on earth.
This was not real. Jaylah was not in her body. She was watching through someone else's bad dream, as if in another world she could only half access. Her eyes were wet. Why were they wet?
She blinked, barely even aware that she was still walking through the city streets toward the temple. It should have been so easy to fear for her own very mortal life as she continually brushed against her father's monsters, which were now dressed in the bloodstained uniforms of official Navrikan soldiers. But she could not quite grasp the fact that she was about to die. There was no danger around. Danger was everywhere. Her heart thudded dully on.
It was an odd feeling to be watched by everything and nothing all at once. The bodies looked right past her, and it made her feel as though she was the insane one, as though she was not really there at all. Now that there were no eyes on her, she wanted them all back. No, tenfold. Pay attention to me.
Nothing. Maybe they were not bothered by her because she was not a threat. Like called to like. Maybe she was one of them.
Something disconcertingly squishy and round crunched under her boot. Jaylah looked down to see the body of a man with his face cut off, gray brain matter soiling the street. She was trodding over her ruined people just like the enemy. With her world so dim, she was not moved to any strong emotion anymore. She doubted she had enough anger to end her father with. When she arrived at the top, she might just fall to her knees and accept her fate.
She used to think her rage would put her in an early grave, but numbness was the true killer.
Over and over again, lightning crackled into the roofs ahead as Jaylah ascended closer to the clouds. Thunder blasted her ears. An abandoned street vendor's open-front shop crumbled as she passed, though she did not flinch. Nothing could surprise her any longer.
The temple was just ahead, its white walls lit maroon. She knew exactly what would happen within. Horrible. Inevitable. It was the moment she had been praying and begging to get for nearly a year, wanting its glory all for herself. She never dreamed it would happen like this: stepping over the bodies of people she did not have the capacity to care about, being marched on by devils wearing the skin of men, completely alone.
Each step up to the temple's front was an ordeal. Jaylah slowly drew her swords to be prepared for anything. They felt five times as heavy as usual, nearly dragging on the ground as she walked. The swords of Sargon himself? She was not so sure any longer.
A great statue of Sargon was at the temple's front courtyard, peering down through pale, sheep-pupiled eyes. He had watched on as hundreds of thousands of her people were assaulted, tortured and discarded. Still, he wore those cold eyes through it all. Jaylah had half a mind to have the statue struck down. How dare the gods recede beyond the world when she remained there to suffer? They were no better than her.
The mild wind carried a high-pitched noise into Jaylah's ears. She look back only once. And saw that her charging men had been mobilized, the army risen—and already falling. All the dead bodies she created outnumbered her living people so dramatically it was nearly comical. It was pathetic. The enemy was eating away at the mass of her soldiers from every side like ants to a dead animal. They had already won; any time she promised herself she could protect even one of Oceana's citizens was a lie. Other than herself. Alas, that was soon to come to an end too.
Jaylah was either going to kill her father or die. She strode through a crack in the great front doors, too tired to understand that her fate could only be the latter.
