Before The Fall (origins)

Carnage

The General bound towards the village gate with speed he never thought he would use again.  The pebbles beneath his feet rose and coagulated into the form of a huge wolf the size of an adult human.  Together, human and familiar sprinted towards what would be the biggest mistake in history.

*

The villagers were panicking.  Having two beams of light cut through their houses was trouble enough.  Now the gate, made of thick lumber, lay in splinters in one shot from an unknown enemy.  But still they stood their ground.  A few decades with the Asura had made them fearless.  And foolhardy.

Yap pressed his hands on the ground, and sent a shockwave into the earth.  A very specific shockwave meant to activate ten separate devices in ten separate hands scattered across the village.  Together, they were the Elite Guard.  Satisfied, he started towards the gate with his wife in tow, along side the resonance of ten other individuals.

All headed towards the explosion.

*

A man that went by Fret got the first, with his trusty broadsword in hand.  This sword had got him through many a patrol, and at the ripe old age of 68, he was prime for retirement as a Guard.  This was supposed to be his last night out.  And so he was there first.

His keen eyes, accustomed to the gloom of night by now, searched through the smoke from the explosion.  What used to be a sturdy lumber gate was now splinters all around the entrance.  Broken from outside.

Fret's eyes narrowed.  The huge resonance that he had felt earlier was gone.  Now, he felt nothing.  But Fret had earned his name in the heat of battle.  He was always fretting in fear of an enemy attack.  So his eyes had adapted to see beyond the normal.  And so he did that night.  One last time.

He saw one millisecond of a black shape zipping through the smoke.  And in the same amount of time, a projectile punctured his armor and pushed his heart of from the back.  He found enough strength to look down at a completely black hand holding a still beating heart in its claws.  His still beating heart.  He raised his broadsword...

And it came crashing down along with his corpse.  The last thing he saw in this world was the sight of a humanoid lump of black stalk off towards the heart of the village.

*

Shiver didn't like tonight.  She was only 26, and yet her bones already ached.  No wind ruffled her short white hair.  Nothing moved in this stagnant night.  It was unnatural.  Like the night itself was dead.

Shiver saw it coming.  With a flick of a finger, a wall of ice rose from the floor in front of her, blocking the black projectile from hitting home.

She didn't expect the ten-inch thick ice wall to shatter like glass.  She braced for impact, but nothing came.  The night was silent again.

She was wary now.  Slowly, she put on the hood of her fur coat and let her Rei seep out from her skin into the night air.  The temperature immediately started dropping, and the ground around her hardened and froze, becoming slippery.  She would be ready for the next pass.

A swishing sound betrayed the approach of a purple-tinged black sword.  The long sword buried itself deep into another ice wall.  Four more blinked into existence and flashed their way towards Shiver.  Three were deflected.  One found itself an inch in front of her face.

And it was gone.  Shiver couldn't move.  Not out of fear.  Not out of awe.  It was just that a dark shape was crouched at her feet holding a blade that went through her abdomen inside her thoracic cavity and out of the top of her head.  The blade dissolved into a million threads of black, slicing and bifurcating the woman vertically.  The two halves of her corpse slid on the floor and just lay there, her face stuck in an eternal frame of surprise.

"Argh shit, it's as fast as you said..."

"Just take the shot."

A duo lay on the roof of one of the many houses scattered around the village.  This one was particularly tall, giving them a good view of the aggressor.  Ark turned to his partner as Rig lined up his arrow with the target.  Ark couldn't see the creature as well as Rig could.  Rig could see things almost as well as Fret.  Ark stroked his beard and activated the Ark Stones again.  The strategically placed gems around the village let him see any threats coming and act as alarms.  Tonight, it let him see the creature kill two of his teammates.  Neither were new, and neither were rookies.  The fact that Fret had been caught unawares made Ark's beard stroking even more intense.

"What is this?" asked Ark.  Rig had no reply.  He was busy tweaked his bow again.  Rig was a tweaker, the closest thing in the village that could pass as a mechanic in that day and age.  Tattoos and markings wound around his thin, lithe body like snakes around their prey.  Similar but more stylized markings were etched onto his bow.  An arrow that glowed a soft green was nocked and ready.

"Firing," muttered the usually quiet Rig.  Ark braced himself.

Slowly, wind gathered around the nocked arrow.  It encircled it, surrounding it with a tunnel of air.  And like that, the sharpshooter released the arrow.  Ark was certain it would hit.  Nothing escaped Rig's arrow.  Even at the age of 12 the young man was an impeccable shot.  Rig's modifications to the bow made him far deadlier.

That didn't prepare the men for the creature.

Ark saw the creature turn.  It took him a split-second to realize the creature was looking at him.  The completely black body topped by an impossibly black head was pivoted to face the duo.  Ark felt his gut twist.  A primal instinct he had developed on the battlefield.  Usually when a mage fired a Rei cannon.  But the creature hadn't moved.

The next second, a funnel of purple-black fire engulfed the two of them, smiting hem and the arrow in one shot.

Four Elite Guard down.  Thirty seconds had passed.

The space around the creature flickered and rippled.  Three stones placed around the beast levitated into the air, and surrounded the creature in a circle.  The space within rippled and distorted itself, like the antechamber of the Catacombs had.  And in a blink of an eye, the creature was gone.  Trapped inside a fragment of time cut away from the rest of the world.  a prison made of Reality itself.

Crow and Yap looked on from a street across.  It was over.  Finally.  Ark's power had rid the world of another evil even as he had died.

But their relief turned to terror as a hand literally broke its way into the world.  The completely black hand stuck out of a crack, like space was just a pane of glass, and the creature had just broken space itself.  The hand put its fingers together, pressing the fingertips into an even vertex.  Black whorls gathered at the space where the fingers met, swirling and convulsing into a dense ball the color of the night sky.

And the ball ruptured, bleeding purple light straight at Crow, erasing his upper half immediately before anyone could even twitch.  Just like the light that had cleaved through the village, this light cleaved a hole through everything it met.  It speared past the remains of Crow and burrowed its way through houses, sops, rubble and villagers before sending a couple of trees to the ground.

In that instant, Yap finally thought, we may fall tonight.