The Library

Epilogue

A Few Days Later...

Ithilion stood outside The Temple of Light overlooking the fallen god's body . He felt lost, an alien emotion to him, his entire life he had followed the directions of his deity, first as the captain of the guard and then as The Speaker. Now that very being that had directed him lay dead below him. As if that wasn't enough he had not even gotten to fully process this before he had learned his daughter was dead as well. He was no longer The Speaker, he was no longer a father. The only two things he had cared about had been stripped away from him in the course of two short days.

"All because of that monster..." Ithilion thought.

He couldn't think of it as anything else anymore.

The sound of feet walking quickly towards him snapped him out of his thoughts.

"Speaker, we-"

Ithilion cut him off the young Altean researcher, "I am just Ithilion now. I have no one to speak for but myself."

"Of course sir," the researcher continued, unperturbed. "We ran some initial tests on Atlas-," seeing the look on Ithilion's face the researcher quickly corrected himself, "on the monster. It seems that when we found it it was in a heavily damaged state due to ingesting pure silver. Yet despite that it was only a matter of time before it expelled the silver from its system and was able to heal from its wounds. Remarkable really, nothing we have tried has been able to truly kill it. Injuries by ordinary means are healed instantly and while it is severely weakened by sunlight and silver, it will always recover eventually. Based on our preliminary research we think we can keep it docile by feeding it, as while it is kept fed it will maintain its physically weaker Altean form. When we don't feed it however, a feral state takes over the monster, transforming to be physically stronger in order to gain sustenance."

"So you're telling me there is no way to kill it?" Ithilion questioned, barely holding back the anger in his voice.

"Perhaps with more time we could find a way, but as for now there does not seem to be a way to permanently destroy it. How would you like us to proceed?"

Ithilion paused for a moment to consider and as he did his eyes were drawn to something in the center of the dead god's wound. Despite the black blood flowing from its body he saw a small patch of green in the epicenter of the god's largest wound, alive despite the death around it. A small sprout of hope.

"We will become the guardians of this place. I do not know what the future holds, but I think one thing is clear, we must never let that monster loose on this world. Build a prison it will never escape from and continue your experiments."

Ithilion paused for a moment as he let the events of the past two days run through his mind.

"And researcher, one more thing...make sure it suffers."