Taste of ash clung to Wren’s tongue. Metal and dust. His good eye, the left one, burned, stinging from the gritty air. On his right, a milky haze obscured everything, a permanent nothingness. He had once seen colors through it, vibrant greens and blues, but no longer. It was just another tax, another burden for the unique gifts he carried.
Every breath brought a sharp, searing pain. His ribs, a cage of broken bone and sinew, screamed with each expansion. Wren barely felt it anymore, the constant thrum of agony. His skin, a roadmap of shimmering, malformed patterns, pulsed with residual energies. He was a living gallery of borrowed burdens.
Ragged cough tore from his throat, splattering crimson onto the cracked, dust-laden floor.
*Damn.*
It was a quiet curse, lost in the rumbling crescendo of the Veil’s Descent. Sky above Veridia, once a testament to humanity’s forgotten grandeur, bled a sickening violet, showering flakes of incandescent ash. Towers of crystal and carved stone, remnants of the Old World, fractured and fell, groaning under the unseen weight. Creeping Blight, a slow, inexorable decay, was finally consuming everything.
Wren, a name once whispered with pity, then scorn, now carried a grim resonance. Wren Valerius. A descendant of a lineage stripped of its Ardent Talent, reduced to the Ash-Born masses. For a time, he had stood among the Ascendants, the celebrated few chosen to combat the Blight. A bitter joke.
He had struggled for their acknowledgement, starved for it. To be seen as something more than a vessel, a garbage bin for unwanted Talents. His fervor, fueled by a desperate hope, had only paved the path to this ruin.
Now, only silence remained where the opulent Enclaves once stood. World was being unmade, piece by agonizing piece.
He turned his head, a slow, grinding motion that sent new aches through his neck, towards the figure nearby.
"What… do we do now?" Wren’s voice, a raspy whisper, felt raw, sandpaper against his vocal cords. Question, however, held a sharp, undeniable edge.
Lyra Alaric, her luminous, silver hair catching the dying light like a halo, gazed upwards. Even amidst the dust-choked demise of the city, her features remained impossibly serene, an almost unfair beauty. She was the Champion of the Enclaves, the fabled Lyra, whispered about in hushed tones, revered as the City’s last hope.
Her words, when they came, were a casual ripple in the storm.
"It’s over, Wren. Cycle concludes."
Casual. As if millions sacrificed, uncountable lives poured into her impossible crusade, were but trivial offerings. As if the death of Veridia held no bearing on her flawless, untouched soul.
"And you say that?" Wren’s good eye narrowed, burning. "How many trusted you? Believed in the ‘Champion’?"
"Silence, Valerius! Lyra did everything!"
Seraphina Thorne’s voice, sharp as a whetted blade, cut through the air. Her indigo hair, usually meticulously braided, now fell around her, framing a face contorted with fury. She was the Scion of the Enclave of Thorne, a prodigy of devastating combat talent, and Lyra's most ardent devotee.
Deep furrow creased Wren’s brow. He knew that anger well.
"Everything?" Wren managed a ragged, mirthless laugh, sound grating. "Thorne, I absorbed the Blight’s grasp from your sword arm after the First Fall, remember? One that left you half-blind to its true form, but still clinging to your precious Lyra. And now you command me to silence?"
Seraphina’s eyes, usually a cold steel, flashed with pure contempt. "How dare you speak to me of consequences, Ash-Born? To me, Seraphina Thorne?"
"Consequences?" Wren spat, a fleck of blood joining the crimson on the ground. He threw his left hand skyward, a desperate, defiant gesture against the crumbling firmament. "World ends! Who cares for consequences? Your precious Enclave of Thorne, your heritage, it’s all dust, gone with the Veil’s Descent! Your father’s legacy, scattered like ash!"
Seraphina recoiled, her face paling, a flicker of raw, disbelieving pain in her eyes. Tears welled, but Wren only felt a cold, bitter satisfaction.
She had been a viper, always. Treating everyone beneath Lyra with open disdain, especially Wren. He, the Valerius who had lost his family’s Ardent Talent, a mere Ash-Born, compared to her, the pinnacle of the Enclaves.
Their history of animosity traced back to the Lyceum Spires. Seraphina, the dazzling combatant, the favored scion, the embodiment of every expectation. Wren, merely a member of a fallen house, devoid of any ‘natural’ Talent, mocked and ostracized, a ‘disgrace’ to his own. Whispers of ‘talentless’ and ‘void-born’ still echoed in his memory.
He had endured it, convinced she was essential to the Ascendants, to saving their fractured world.
"I was so blind…" Wren muttered, pressing a scarred hand over his useless right eye.
But it was over. City-state had fallen, Enclaves crumbled, Ash-Born masses wiped away in the Blight’s relentless crawl.
"If I had known this, I would never have taken the Malign Ardent Talent from that madwoman’s eyes," Wren snarled, his voice laced with the venom of decades.
"You are nothing but a thief!" Seraphina shrieked, her own Ardent Talent flaring around her, a faint, icy blue aura. Her hand instinctively went to the hilt of her blade, the legendary Sky-Silver Edge, its chill radiating across the crumbling ground.
Wren sneered, a bloodied grimace. "A thief who knows nothing but stealing, eh?"
"Yes, that's right," he rasped, another cough wracking his frame.
---
Wren detested his power. It felt less like a gift and more like a curse, an eternal burden.
[**Ability: Resonant Absorption**]
* **Effect:** Resonates with and absorbs the intrinsic ‘Ardent Talent’ from others, making them his own.
* **Conditions:**
1. ‘Ardent Talent’ must be perceived by its owner as a burden, a drawback, or a liability.
2. ‘Absorption cost’ is proportional to the perceived value/detriment of the Talent.
It was an ability granted not by a deity, but by the very fabric of his forced reincarnation, a twisted second chance. More detrimental an Ardent Talent was to its original wielder, easier it was for Wren to absorb its debilitating effects, making its ‘cost’ paradoxically low for the target, high for him.
He had absorbed Malign Ardent Talents, corrupted aspects of power that no other Ardent Healer or Weaver could mitigate. That unique, agonizing advantage had granted him a place among the Ascendants.
Now, hundreds of these absorbed Talents festered within him, a silent, screaming legion. One in particular, a fragment of an ancient, potent ward, prevented his permanent death, but at the cost of perpetual wakefulness, a ceaseless, torturous vigil. He should have died long ago, his body a mausoleum of broken power.
*I thought I’d reach a thousand by now.*
Veil’s Descent had come too soon.
Every single Malign Ardent Talent within Wren’s mangled form had been absorbed from an Ascendant.
Lyra’s ‘Echo of Dread.’
Seraphina’s ‘Perpetual Twilight.’
Kaelen’s ‘Voice-Snare.’
Elias’s ‘Truth-Bound Aspect.’
He had taken them all, even from those now vanished into the ash. Corrupted Talent, a drawback, was seen as a burden, not a blessing, by its owner. Thus, Wren’s Resonant Absorption found its grim utility.
"Without me," Wren rasped, a surge of pure, acidic anger flickering behind his good eye, "none of you would have even reached this far…"
"Is that right, Kaelen?" He turned his head, the slow movement of his neck muscles audible, towards the slight figure still huddled against Lyra’s leg, her body shaking with silent sobs.
Kaelen Varr, Lyceum Spires’ greatest prodigy, the legendary Ash-Weaver, and an Ascendant. She had ridden with Lyra through every desperate skirmish, every crumbling ruin.
"Lyra, what do we do? Oh, Lyra…"
She didn’t even glance his way. Ever since the Veil’s Descent had begun its final phase, Kaelen had done nothing but cling to Lyra, dissolving into ceaseless tears.
*Typical.*
She had always ignored him, turning away when he arrived at the Lyceum Spires, wracked with agony from a newly acquired Malign Talent, only to be denied entry. That humiliation was but one among many. He had long since severed any emotional connection to her.
"You can’t cast your precious weaving spells because of the Talent that stole your voice, Kaelen," Wren coughed, "but you cry well enough, don’t you?"
Yet, she had shamelessly demanded he absorb her ‘Voice-Snare Talent,’ a corrupting aspect that rendered her mute, but amplified her raw elemental power to dangerous, uncontrollable levels. To this day, the residual essence of that Talent scratched at Wren's own vocal cords, provoking his constant coughs.
"Just stop with your pathetic display, Valerius."
Another voice, deep and resonant, cut through the weeping.
Elias, Thorne's Blade, stood a few paces behind Lyra, a silent, imposing guardian. His jet-black hair fell around his chiseled face, his towering, powerful frame draped in scarred leather and dark metal. To Wren, Elias was just another burden, another source of countless absorbed Talents.
"Strongest Spear of Thorne," Wren scoffed, title a bitter mockery. Elias’s self-regard was nauseating, leading him to plunge headfirst into suicidal engagements with the Blight, only to accrue more damaging Talents – which Wren then had to absorb.
"Pathetic? Bullshit. Do you not recall how, desperate to hide your foolish infatuation with Lyra, you were struck by a ‘Truth-Bound Aspect’ that forced you to speak only the naked truth? And how you begged *me* to absorb it?"
Memory was still vivid. Elias, stripped bare of his usual stoicism, blurting out his secret devotion. And Wren, absorbing the burden, feeling the insidious compulsion to speak nothing but truth for weeks afterward.
And very next day, after the Talent was lifted, sight of Seraphina and Lyra entering the same room, deep in hushed conversation, had been utterly maddening. Wren had missed a crucial rendezvous he’d promised, a meeting that now, like everything else, was pointless.
"So all you can do is spout such nonsense?" Elias growled, his hand tightening on the hilt of his immense claymore.
"I can’t, can I?" Wren rasped, a fresh fit of coughing seizing him. "Because remnants of your cursed Talent still linger on me! It claws at my tongue, even now!"
Had not the myriad of absorbed Talents within him, a chaotic cacophony of conflicting energies, somehow canceled each other out in the most unexpected ways, Wren knew he might have said far worse.
"At the very least," Wren breathed, a ragged exhalation, as if giving up all remaining fight, "you could have saved the world, right?"
He turned his gaze fully to Lyra. Ultimate disappointment.
Lyra, who had never once seemed to falter, never shown a trace of doubt. She always acted with an uncanny foresight, managing every crisis with effortless grace, bending situations to her will.
Yet, in the end, she had panicked. And now, she knelt, fallen.
Despite everything, Wren had stayed by her side, a loyal, if bitter, shadow.
Everyone around Lyra was a fool, blinded by her radiance. But Lyra, at least, had understood his utility. She might not have openly encouraged their aggression towards him, but she certainly hadn't discouraged it either.
Wren had remained with the Ascendants, becoming this broken husk, because he believed he was needed. He was useful.
"You had a knack for it, didn’t you?"
He remembered what Lyra had murmured just moments ago, gazing at Veridia’s slow, agonizing collapse.
"It’s all over."
Spoken with such detached finality, as if merely closing the book on an entertaining but ultimately trivial saga. Those casually uttered words had rendered all of Wren’s suffering, his sacrifices, his endless pain, utterly futile.
"Yes. But in the end, we failed this time too."
As Lyra spoke, she slowly pushed herself up. Beneath the silk tunic, a crimson stain bloomed and spread across her chest. That was why Kaelen had clung to her, weeping ceaselessly.
Lyra was dying.
Like all the others, she had failed to stop the world’s final collapse.
*This time, too?*
Wren’s mind snagged on those peculiar words. Lyra had said them with an air of knowing, as if hinting at a previous experience, a forgotten cycle.
"Don’t worry. This time…"