The Salom'Sileyu Trilogy 1: The Kult of Salom'Sileyu

Episode 1: Sümol

"...We must not ignore what the Alldweii, the divine scriptures, has written on its pages."

Fires raged into the blackened sky, snarling fiercely as they feasted on the broken homes and buildings of the demolished town. The smell was horrendous; charred flesh mixed unharmoniously with treated wood and burning brick. The flames crackled and whipped violently, threatening to consume anything in whatever direction the wind decided to take it.

In the midst of the chaos and heated destruction, a cimson-haired elfan maiden had fallen to her knees with her arms loosely dangled to her sides. She was distraught, covered in filth and blood that stained her torn white dress and her pale skin, and her red locks were a frizzled mess. Her violet eyes were watery and dumbfounded, leaking over with pained emotion as she looked on at the destruction at what had once been her home.

She'd seen this horrific destruction before, with the man she'd fallen in love with just two years prior.

It came in a storm...

That creature without a form.

And this time...

This time, it was the same as before... She stared at the pile of rubble before her, the pile that had fallen on the girl that helped her learn to love again. Two years of solitude, two years of bitter pain, two years of working so hard to bring her heart to a place where she could open up once again... Just to see it all crushed under burning remains of a vicious attack from beings of higher dimensions.

She buried her face into her palms and let out a mournful wail, and sobbed uncontrollably. Tears poured from her eyes and burned as they mixed with the dirt. The sounds of her cries mixed with the crackling and burning wood, and her body began to shake.

Then, everything froze. The fires stood still, the wind stopped, and everything blowing remained in its exact position as if she were standing in the middle of a paused scene in a film. She looked around, suddenly terrified. Her heart pounded so hard, she felt it in her throat, and her skin began to go numb. She cautiously stood to her feet, breathing heavily and quivering. The sounds of her exaggerated inhales and exhales echoed around, as if she were in a chamber filled with a holographic projection.

A peal of royal-blue lightning flashed in the distance, near the heart of the town, catching her attention. She looked skyward, and felt a flurry of emotions as a pair of bright, massive, glowing eyes glared down at her from the black clouds, casting their blue hue onto everything from above in stark contrast to the orange glow of the flames. She took a step back, nearly falling, and gawked in awe as a symbolic star with six points etched itself into the air above its eyes, glowing with the same intense color.

The aethril, she thought to herself. Even thinking about the otherworldly being invoked anger, pain and fear in her heart. Another flash of lightning struck ground somewhere behind it, revealing a reman-like figure as black as shadow, made from the swirling cloud itself. It defied logic and rationality. She tried to make sense of what she saw, but there was nothing that could explain it in a way that was understandable.

It was nothing.

It was like a shadowy silhouette, as if the clouds masked its true form behind them like a thick fog, and yet it was separate from the clouds altogether. It was illogical and tirelessly formless. It was a nameless horror, a divine agent of a realm beyond reality itself, possessing control and mastery of the material world like a god of ancient times.

"...You..."

Its voice was like thunder, rumbling the ground and the time-struck reality around her. The tears had dried on her cheeks as she gawked, awestruck. There was something different about this aethril. Something about it emulated a deep sense of peace and uncaring, simultaneously existing in the same presence that wrought destruction down on her home.