The Monarch’s hand moved. Causally. Almost indolently.

  He merely rotated his wrist a fraction, executing a sweeping, horizontal slash with the gargantuan scythe forged of dead starlight.

  SHIIIING—

  There was no thunderous detonation. Merely the razor-sharp hiss of the atmosphere being cleaved in twain.

  A razor-thin wave of violent violet energy sheared through the ether, dilating instantly to span thousands of kilometers in the blink of an eye. That blinding arc of light passed seamlessly through the necks of the entire titan vanguard without a single microsecond of resistance.

  One second of absolute silence.

  Then...

  THUD... THUD... THUD...

  With a single stroke, hundreds of titans were decapitated.

  Heads the mass of foothills tumbled from their shoulders, impacting the earth with a deafening, seismic roar. The colossal torsos remained standing rigid for a fractional moment, before geysers of crimson blood erupted from the severed stumps, mirroring the simultaneous detonation of hundreds of volcanoes.

  A torrential rain of thick, coagulated blood saturated the valley, mutating pristine rivers into flash floods of metallic-smelling gore.

  Witnessing the unbreakable titan phalanx shatter under a single strike, the ravenous beasts and predatory flora renewed their assault with feral zeal.

  The Death Gate in the heavens seemingly roared its approval.

  The thorned vines that had been previously hacked away regenerated with terrifying, hyper-accelerated velocity. They violently coiled around the headless titan corpses, crushing their titanic bones into fine powder. Savage monstrosities vaulted from the gate, landing upon the still-warm meat mountains, greedily rending the flesh.

  The battle instantly devolved into an absolute slaughter.

  The surviving titans comprising the rearguard did not retreat. They bellowed, stepping over the butchered remains of their brethren, hurling themselves toward the Monarch in an agonizing display of suicidal desperation. But it was akin to ocean waves crashing against a diamond reef. Utterly futile.

  The shrieks and dying roars of both factions clashed in the bleeding air.

  The sickening crunch of splintering bone, the tearing of colossal flesh, the final, desperate roars, and the manic, shrill laughter of the gate's abominations. All of it amalgamated into a singular, maddening cacophony.

  It was a soul-rending aubade. A final requiem for a magnificent, god-like race, composed entirely of the purest notes of absolute violence.

  Amidst that apocalyptic vision, Arka Sagara collapsed to his knees.

  His legs had been entirely drained of the marrow required to bear his own weight. He clamped a trembling hand over his mouth.

  He was weeping uncontrollably.

  Tears cascaded down his ashen cheeks. They were not tears of terror. They were the physical manifestation of profound, unadulterated grief—a primordial sorrow somehow channeled directly through his bloodline.

  He wept for the titans.

  He wept at the absolute cruelty of destiny.

  He wept because the crushing realization struck him that the power of the "Death Gate" he had harbored such pride in... was constructed upon the foundation of this horrific, planetary genocide.

  "Why..." he sobbed softly amidst the roaring din of war. "Why must it be this merciless?"

  Arka felt physically contaminated. He felt he was the inheritor of the blackest sin ever committed upon the face of the earth.

  "Master Gatekeeper..." Arka’s voice fractured, hoarse and desperately weak.

  He buried his face in his hands, mentally incapable of bearing the visual weight of the massacre any longer.

  "...please, skip to the end..."

  His breath hitched raggedly. His chest felt constricted in a vice.

  "I cannot endure watching this any longer..."

  Arka lowered his trembling hands. His eyes were bloodshot, swollen, and stinging. It felt as though his tear ducts had run entirely dry, having wept too heavily for the demise of magnificent beings whose very names remained unknown to him. The sheer volume of grief far exceeded the emotional capacity of a mortal mind.

  The Lantern Bearer offered a slow, solemn nod. His ancient visage was etched with a profound, mute understanding.

  He raised his skeletal arm and gave the lantern a sharp shake.

  Clink... clank...

  The sharp chime of iron striking glass rang out. The pale blue fire within began to strobe violently.

  VWOSH!

  Time was violently violently fast-forwarded.

  The apocalyptic theater before Arka blurred. The shrieking war cries pitched upward until they resembled the whine of a mosquito, before vanishing entirely into silence. The chaotic movements of the titans and monsters smeared into faded, bleeding streaks of color.

  Arka’s eyes locked onto a singular focal point in the center of the sprawling continent.

  There, at the dead center of the titans' final defensive formation, the earth had not merely fractured. It had been hollowed out.

  Arka beheld a canyon of absolute, suffocating pitch-black.

  It was no mere chasm or gorge. It was the literal absence of light.

  Its blackness was so absolute it aggressively devoured every spectrum of color surrounding it. Even the ambient light from the violet suns above could not pierce its depths. The canyon appeared as a rotting, gangrenous laceration slashed across the flesh of the world, impossibly wide and seemingly bottomless, severing the continent in twain.

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  From its unfathomable depths, the canyon exhaled a miasma of pure darkness.

  Arka could physically see it—coiling upward into the sky like thick, oily black smoke. The aura was profoundly malicious. A primordial, ancient evil. An evil that made the hairs on Arka’s arms stand erect and violently churned his stomach, as if he were staring directly into the abyssal eyes of the devil himself.

  And ringing the lip of that hellish abyss...

  Tens of thousands of titans encircled it, forging an impenetrable barricade.

  The tableau was staggeringly colossal.

  They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, layering themselves into a dense, multi-tiered defensive ring. Their obsidian greatshields were interlocked, erecting an impenetrable wall of black iron that scraped the clouds. Their colossal spears were not leveled outward against an encroaching army; they were aimed downward, directly into the abyss.

  They were not attacking. They were containing.

  They were the wardens of the abyss. The final, living seal.

  Arka realized with mounting horror that these titans feared absolutely nothing that flew in the heavens or marched upon the earth. The singular entity they dreaded was whatever the hell was currently attempting to claw its way up from the bowels of that black canyon.

  They were entirely willing to die on their feet, transmuting themselves into a wall of meat and stone, so long as "That Thing" festering in the dark did not breach the mortal realm.

  "What is that..." Arka whispered, his voice trembling as he stared at the black miasma beginning to solidify into shadowy claws at the canyon's edge. "What did they cast down and imprison down there?"

  Had they thrown down the First Monarch? Where was the Death Gate?

  Arka listened as the Lantern Bearer narrated the history, while the colossal vista played out before his very eyes.

  In that epoch…

  The foundation of this world rested upon the broad shoulders of the Ashgada people.

  They were no mere scholars pouring over dusty scrolls in towers of knowledge. Their history originated epochs before the first drop of ink was ever pressed to parchment.

  They were the Children of Men, Beloved by the Titans.

  In the Primordial Age, an era infinitely darker and more brutal, when the suns were frequently blotted out by the ash of cosmic wars, these minuscule humans coexisted alongside the Titans. The giants did not view humanity as insignificant insects, but as little brothers demanding protection—and tutelage.

  The progenitors of the Ashgada dwelled amongst the feet of the giants. They did not study by memorizing Byzantine incantations; they learned through physical mimicry. They learned the art of warfare by driving their bare fists into solid bedrock. They learned to weaponize their own biology to divert roaring rivers. And most sacred of all, they inherited Titan Sorcery—a raw, unrefined manipulation of kinetic energy that relied entirely upon the physical resonance of the body with the universe itself.

  And naturally, the Titans bestowed their blessing. A profound consecration of blood and spirit that allowed the Ashgada lineage to root themselves deeply into Carta’s soil, evolving into humans possessing unnatural bone density and terrifying fortitude.

  Yet, that bond of love was tested upon the Day of Reckoning.

  When the First Monarch vomited indescribable horrors upon the myriad realms, ordinary humans fled in abject terror. But not the Titans of this world.

  Millions of Ancient Titans marched from every corner of the continent.

  At this juncture, they had discarded all forged weaponry. Their very bodies were now the weapons. They massed at the lip of the Black Canyon, forging a monolithic wall of living flesh spanning thousands of kilometers.

  They did not stand as individuals. They linked arms. Colossal arms, thick as baobab trunks, locked securely over the shoulders of the brother beside them. Shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, erecting an impenetrable, living barricade.

  They presented their broad chests directly toward the Black Canyon, actively challenging the overflowing abyss.

  And they sang. Not a dirge of death. Not a weeping farewell. They roared, with deafening, riotous volume, the Aubade of Victory. A choral arrangement thundering from tens of thousands of gargantuan throats that violently shook the firmament—a hymn of absolute pride declaring that they existed, they were unbreakable, and they would not yield a single bloody inch.

  They harbored no fear of extinction. They knew their epoch had reached its conclusion. Yet they smiled, because huddled behind their massive heels, the children of men—the ancestors of the Ashgada—were watching, recording, and inheriting the blazing fire of that "Intent." "We are the impenetrable wall! Humanity is the seed! Root yourselves until the absolute end!"

  Then, the apocalypse arrived.

  Barn'adar Na'sagur.

  The shriek from the absolute bottom of the Black Canyon, where the God of Darkness, the frustrated First Monarch, raged against his inability to breach the living wall. A tidal wave of flash-freezing curses, an abyssal breath capable of assassinating time itself, was vomited from the depths of the Canyon.

  The wave violently struck the phalanx of Titans.

  Their flesh began to rapidly calcify. Their skin transmuted into solid stone. Their blood crystallized into raw minerals. Yet, even amidst the agonizing throes of flash-petrification, they absolutely refused to fall. They utterly refused to kneel.

  They froze solid in a standing posture. Arms linked. Defiant until the very end.

  They even refused to seamlessly meld into ordinary, interlocking mountain stones—refusing to become a standard mountain range that was lush, sloping, and gentle. Their martial souls violently rejected such artificial, serene beauty.

  They consciously dictated their final form. They calcified into what is known today as the Iron Mountains.

  That is why the northern ranges of Carta are forged of pitch-black stone. That is why the cliffs are sheer, unforgiving, jagged, and razor-sharp like spears violently skewering the sky. Those craggy boulders are the furious, petrified bones of the titans. Those jagged peaks are their fingers pointing accusingly at the heavens, swearing to perpetually impale anything attempting to cross.

  They became an eternal monument. The physical, indisputable proof that upon this soil, the light had once stood unyielding against the darkness and absolutely refused to blink.

  Arka’s psychological defenses suffered a total collapse.

  Not from physical assault, not from terror, but from a moral weight that abruptly slammed into his soul with the force of millions of tons.

  Arka plummeted, his face striking the earth.

  His knees slammed into the unforgiving ground—which he now sickeningly realized was the fossilized skin of a titan—with a pathetic, hollow thud. He made zero effort to rise. He abandoned any pretense of maintaining his dignity as the Heir of Sagara or the Master of the Death Gate.

  He was merely a minuscule human who had realized the horrific truth far too late.

  "Hhhkk... hhhkk..."

  A strangled, suppressed sob tore from his throat, sounding exactly like a man actively choking to death.

  Then, the dam ruptured completely.

  Arka wept with violent, heaving sobs.

  He roared, feebly pounding his fists against the fossilized earth beneath him. The tears flooded down, mixing with snot and ancient dust, thoroughly fouling his handsome face, now flushed a deep, agonizing crimson and swollen with grief.

  He looked upon the barricade.

  Millions of titans standing in a ring, shoulder-to-shoulder, forging a wall of their own flesh to imprison the eternal darkness within that black canyon. They did not break and run when the sky was torn asunder. They did not flee when their heads were reaped by the scythe of light. They remained standing, even in death, becoming an eternal tombstone solely to shield their "little brothers" cowering behind them.

  "You fools..." Arka roared through his jagged sobs. "You absolute, magnificent fools..."

  His voice fractured, hoarse from the uncontrollable screaming.

  "Why would you do this for us?"

  Arka clawed at the earth, his fingernails snapping and bleeding against the coarse, petrified surface. He felt so agonizingly microscopic. So utterly worthless.

  Humanity... a fragile, avaricious, and frequently malevolent race... had their survival purchased at this astronomically steep price?

  "Forgive us..." Arka whispered, pressing his forehead against the freezing, ancient stone, prostrating himself before the petrified corpses of the giants.

  "Forgive me... forgive humanity..."

  He was thoroughly disgusted with himself. He was nauseated by the fact that he wielded the power of the Death Gate—the very identical force that had butchered these magnificent, noble heroes. He felt as though his own hands were saturated with their blood.

  His shoulders shook with violent tremors. His breathing was dangerously ragged, as if the oxygen in this realm actively refused to enter his sin-choked lungs.

  The vista of millions of titan backs turned toward humanity, willingly absorbing the lethal thrusts and slashes to contain the abyssal dark, was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most profoundly agonizing sight Arka had ever witnessed in his life.

  There, within that desolate, forgotten dimension, the sound of Arka’s weeping served as the singular, solitary requiem for the forgotten titans. He wept until his tear ducts ran completely dry, until his vocal cords were shredded, until his heart felt utterly, hollowly empty, hollowed out by a grief far too primordial and vast for a single mortal soul to bear.