Tales of Zestiria: The World Beyond

Chapter 31

(Authors Note: I've taken down the version of this on the fan fiction site because it was doing everything horribly. Updating anything was a hassle and the thought of updating all 30 chapters while I was fixing things was too much. And I couldn't respond to feedback. Unless it figures out how to not kill people who do regular updates and lets us respond to reviews, I'm not going to bother. That's why all my fanfictions are off that site.)

"They stripped away everything that made us human, our talents, our personality, our flaws. For what? To make us perfect, to make us pure. I hated that. But painting myself as some tragic hero is only a waste of breath. I killed them because I wanted to because I wanted them to suffer as I had. I wanted to show them just how much I wanted them dead. They tortured me all my life and it was finally time to take my revenge. I told them what they wanted to hear, and they ate it up, then, I slaughtered them all. Who cares if I'm the last of my kind? I did it all for my hunger for power and I don't regret a single thing."

Those words struck Arthur when he was trying to sleep, he awoke to hear them ring in his ears and opened the window to see what outside. To his surprise, the entire sky was pitch black, like something was blocking the star's light from reaching the surface. Arthur woke up the rest of the group and they all looked up to see the same thing. Laphicet had worry written all over his face, the world was out of balance, and the stars disappearing was just one sign of that.

Vanessa went through Arthur's translation of the Requiem to see if there were any notes about the sky, when she couldn't find anything from there, she looked at the section for Lucilius' journals. The eternal darkness was a sign that the worlds were about to become one, and once they did, they would devour each other. It was a slow process in the beginning, then accelerated once the worlds destroyed what they deemed to be a threat. Lucilius wrote that it was how his world was created, the ancients combined many worlds and created one, but destroyed the previous inhabitants in the process.

Laphicet ran to Lucilius' temple with Velvet right behind him, there was something he needed to see for himself. He kept running until Velvet grabbed his arm, he was just about to fall into a hole that looked like it never ended. Vanessa helped Velvet pull Laphicet away and looked at the hole, it was right where the temple was and when Celica sent a gust of wind to see how deep it was, the wind disappeared before it even hit the bottom. Edna dragged a rock with her and tried that instead, but it either burned away from the fall or the bottom was deeper than they thought because there was no sound for minutes.

Sorey thought a temple that big couldn't have vanished without anyone seeing, so he went off to talk with the people who were around. None of the people knew what he was talking about, some said that the temple never existed. Vanessa also went around to ask if anyone knew about the mysterious happenings going on in town, and she got no answer either.

"You can't prove anything," were the words that echoed from the hole, as if the voices of the temple didn't leave. Laphicet was the most disturbed, he knew what the temple's disappearance meant and how much time they had to stop it. He took off again, heading for the boat that waited for them on the shore, he pointed towards the distance and said that was where he wanted to go. Velvet agreed to help him and got the others to follow Laphicet's directions.

The place he wanted to go wasn't an island, he pointed right at an empty spot in the ocean, and despite Eizen's attempt to tell him there was nothing there, he demanded to go. The rest of the group convinced Eizen to follow through, Arthur said that if it wasn't an island Laphicet wanted to see, then it was either underwater or in the sky. He knew from experience with the machines of his world that a map wasn't reliable when it came to anomalies.

"Arthur," Velvet said. "Are you sure you want to go through with this?"

"Why do you ask Vel?" Arthur asked back.