Chapter Text
Palamecia, “a land of hope unbound,” is probably one of the most dangerous planets to live. New arrivals lose their memories and they're thrust into events that either paint them as the hero, the villain, or as cannon fodder for the sake of the grand tale the planet's trying to play on repeat. All to produce hope, ship it off to other planets, and leave the survivors to sink into despair and forget their recent history before the cycle started all over again.
Considering how broken the system was, not only was Palamecia not living up to its title at the moment, it also wasn’t doing a very good job of holding itself together.
In fact, this could be worse than the last time a certain someone broke the cycle the planet was trying to keep going.
That certain someone being me, by the way. Hi. Name’s Wol, local “Warrior of Light.” Didn’t pick the title, Palamecia forced it on me.
Although titles don’t really matter at the end of the world.
I glared up at the deep red sky looming overhead. Meteors were constantly falling in every direction, which probably would’ve been a pretty sight on a dark night. After several days of this, it was starting to become an eyesore.
“You really couldn’t hold it together after we brought down the Tower of Hope, huh?” I spoke into the air. “You’d think the planet would be better put together than that.”
Something rumbled near my feet, and I quickly moved away as a spring erupted from the ground. Dark purple, toxic liquid bubbled up where my feet had been a moment ago — darkness, chaos, despair, I’ve called it all three. I’ve learned it’s Palamecia’s way of trying to get back at me.
Yeah, well, good luck with that. I’d been dodging springs of dark despair for the last several days. Sure it was turning the landscape into a swampy, corrupted mess, but that was happening everywhere regardless.
A small, bright sphere circled my head. “Wol! Stop antagonizing the planet! We’re in enough danger as it is!” The sphere popped, and a little blue-winged figure wearing white and purple twirled in place in the air before fixing me with a disapproving glare. “I thought you were better than this.”
I glanced past the faerie as I watched the darkness spring turn the grass and earth under my feet into a purple toxic mess. I stepped away before the corruption could reach me. “Relax, Echo. I’m keeping its attention on me so it doesn’t go after the others.”
“I’m pretty sure Palamecia doesn’t need encouragement from you,” Echo replied. She put her hands on her hips — or, what passed for hands. Faeries kept them hidden in large mitts that went up to their elbows and didn’t look the least bit useful. Why, Echo never told me, and I’d never asked.
“You’re the Warrior of Light — or, you were, before this whole mess kicked into high gear,” Echo added. “Now I’d probably call you the Warrior of Disasters.” She wagged a large, mostly-white mitt in my face like she was trying to scold me, but I knew that look in her eye meant she wasn’t mad at me. Exasperated, maybe.
I just shook my head at her and looked at the collapsing wooden cabins nearby.
The village of Omega had definitely seen better days, but at least we’d managed to get as many people out as possible. With the darkness starting to flood the villages and turn the ground into a muddy quagmire, what once was a safe haven was quickly turning into a trap for everyone on the planet.
And to think, this all happened just because I didn’t want to play along with Palamecia’s goal of gathering hope to siphon off to other worlds. Shame it didn’t think it could keep going after we broke the cycle.
The screeching call of a fiend drew me away from my thoughts. I caught sight of the bat-winged, humanoid-shaped, red-skinned almost skeletal monster coming around one of the collapsing cabins. The remains of a dress clung to it like grime that would never come out no matter how hard you scrubbed.
“Warrior of Light…die!”
The fiend lunged, claws extending forward. Whatever human it had been, it was safe to say there was nothing left to save.
I shifted into a ready battle stance and raised my sword. I almost called for whatever elements were around to give me a defensive boost, but aborted that a moment later.
There was nothing here but the darkness of despair and that was not something I wanted to play around with.
The fiend screeched and lunged, claws first. I almost rushed to meet it, only for it to get peppered with arrows by someone standing behind me.
“Brother, are you all right?”
I turned at the voice and met the gaze of my blond, almost orange-haired adopted sister, and the large bow in her hands. “I’m fine, Sarah. Just checking to see if anyone else was left in Omega.” I nodded back to the fiend, which exploded into the purple-black particles of chaotic despair. “Looks like we’re the last ones here.”
Sarah looked past me at the slowly flooding remains of the village. Her expression flickered between sorrow and anger before settling on something more resolved. “Then we should get back to the others. Eco believes she’s found where the next rift may open, but we haven’t much time.”
I nodded. “Right. Let’s go.”
“About time!” Echo flew around our heads, then back up the path that led out of Omega. The ruined trees and small gardens we passed by just made the place feel more abandoned than corrupted. “I know the way!”
“Just don’t lead us through any more fights,” I said.
“Trust me, that’s the last thing on my mind right now! I don’t know about you, but I want to survive, too!”
Which would be difficult, for a faerie. Echo and her “little sister” Eco were a part of Palamecia’s system, broken as it was. They had enough control over themselves to keep us safe and out of harm’s way, but I had a feeling that luck was going to run out eventually.
Not to mention the question of whether or not they’d survive a trip through one of those rumored rifts.
I kept my red and black blade Ragnarok in hand as we stepped out into the wilds. More springs of darkness erupted in our wake, turning what remained of the once-peaceful landscape into even more of a swampy, despair-infested mess.
I’ll give Palamecia this much, it sure knew how to have a temper tantrum. Having red skies instead of the purple I’d been expecting was almost a nice touch, except it made me feel like killing more fiends instead of waiting for the next rift to supposedly show up. Like killing them would make the skies go back to normal.
It didn’t. I tried that for the first two days. And then the beginnings of the Dark Flood 2.0 picked up and people started turning into fiends and…well. What happened to Omega happened everywhere else.
The path quickly rose up a hill and out of the woods around what was once Omega, giving us a view of the growing damage that was building across the land of Palamecia. The ground was erupting upward in places, and the air was thick with clouds of purple. Walking into those was as good as a death sentence, or worse. Either you came out the other side without any of your memories, or you were turned into a fiend. I didn’t plan to take my chances with either.
“Wol, Sarah!” One of the figures standing at the top of the hill waved her club of a weapon over her pink-haired head. “Up here, come on! Eco says it’s almost ready!”
“We’re coming!” I called back. Sarah and I climbed the hill in quick strides, the ground erupting a few steps behind us as it tried and failed to catch us. “Nothing left in Omega. We got here too late.”
“Shame,” said the only other man in our group. Graff sighed and shook his head, his long dark hair shifting over his shoulders. “They were good people, even when Vox had his teeth in them.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to think about any of that, so I didn’t. I looked past the others at the faerie with them, holding her mitt-covered hands out to the air in front of her. “Any luck, Eco?”
Echo’s lookalike, dressed in a hooded red outfit, growled in frustration. “I’m trying! But it feels like something’s keeping it from opening!”
“Probably Palamecia, considering the circumstances,” remarked the dark-haired woman in our group. Other than Sarah, Meia and I knew the most about how Palamecia operated, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her guess. “It wants to destroy us and is destroying itself in order to do it. Of course it wouldn’t give us the chance to leave.”
“Like I’m going to believe that!” The pink-haired teenager put her hands on her hips and leaned forward to look at the rest of us. The wide grin on her face didn’t quite reach her eyes, but there was the slightest hint of a golden spark that said otherwise. “We’re going to get out of here whether Palamecia likes it or not. We got a lot of other people off the planet, so we can, too!”
Just like Sophie to speak with confidence. She’d had enough hope to alter reality before, so maybe—
Something howled behind me, and I turned sharply, raising my blade. More fiends were coming up the path, wearing the shredded remains of their old lives. Clothes and armor hung limply from the demon’s forms, like it would fall off the instant it was given a chance.
It was a small army — more than the number of people who’d lived in Omega.
“We need to give Eco time.” I shifted into a ready stance. “Don’t let them break her concentration!”
“I’ll help her out!” Echo said quickly. “So be careful, all right?!” She flew over to next to her twin and mimicked her stance. “We’ve got this!”
“Y-yeah!” Eco agreed with a quick nod.
The army of fiends stopped a short distance away, throwing their heads back with a unanimous roar before lunging forward.
I lost himself in the fight almost immediately, dancing between and around lunging attacks from the bloodthirsty fiends. Graf jumped in from time to time, fighting back-to-back with me before leaping away to another part of the makeshift battlefield. His rapier slashed through wings and claws with all the ease of a knife through water.
Sophie, too, leapt in and out, but with much less finesse than her adopted brother. The giant club wasn’t a finesse weapon like Graff’s rapier, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous. The amount of force she had behind her hits for someone her size and age was more than enough to make up for any lack of skill.
The hail of arrows and burst of magic and summoned beings that rushed around and above my head from Sarah and Meia helped whittle down the number of fiends that were left, but that would only hold them back for so long.
A second wave of fiends quickly replaced the first, forcing us to standing back to back with each other in a circle as the ground bubbled and shifted under our feet.
We were trapped. We needed to move.
A skeletal fiend shrieked and lunged forward. I raised my blade to meet it.
The ground stiffened suddenly beneath my feet.
“Got it!” Eco declared.
I heard a loud whip-crack, the fiends hesitated, and the ground crumbled, sending us tumbling into the dark.
- - - - -
She saw them shoot across the sea like falling stars, too far to reach but close enough to catch the aetherial trails they left behind.
- - - - -
Something was tickling my back.
I shifted with a groan and turned over, only for my face to hit dirt.
Not the first thing I was expecting to feel, I’ll be honest. Some part of my brain was expecting my bed, maybe, or the rough worn-down feeling of a bedroll or a cot. Not dirt.
It was enough to get me to wake up a little faster.
I opened my eyes and pushed myself up to a sitting position, then to my feet as I looked around. Anything could be waiting to get the jump on me and I wasn’t going to let them get close.
I was surrounded by…. Trees?
I squinted at the underbrush. No fiends of any kind in sight, which was more than odd. The tickling feeling I’d felt against my back must’ve been the grass, then, and not anything nefarious. At least that meant I had a moment to get my bearings. Better than letting something get the jump on me out here. No matter how serene this forest clearing looked, there had to be fiends hiding in the underbrush somewhere, and I wasn’t about to let them get the better of me.
Leaving my back open had to be the worst idea Palamecia ever had with the armor it liked giving me. Echo always said it was encouragement to not turn my back on an enemy. Meia figured Palamecia wanted to show off the tattoos for some reason.
I didn’t really care except when something tried to use it as a weak spot.
The random train of thought made me stand straighter. My memories were still intact? How was that possible? Dark Floods wiped people's memories, and we were almost in one last I remembered. How could the planet look normal when I could still remember?
Think about the planet later. I needed to make sure my mind was intact first.
As I scanned the forest clearing again for anything potentially recognizable, I ran through a checklist in my head, starting with personal information and working my way forward through what events I could remember.
My name is Wol. My earliest, clearest memory is waking up on one of the shores of Palamecia, where chaos and darkness took root around a corrupted water source. I was shoehorned into a story where the planet wanted me to be its “Warrior of Light” for a while before killing me with the avatar of Chaos so that it could pick its next sacrifice. All it wanted me to do was go through the story, accept what it was making me do, and then go fight Chaos and either die immediately after killing it, get the chance to leave, or be killed while fighting it.
It tried to make me love a princess too, but Sarah’s more like a sister than a girlfriend. Tough luck for the planet’s cycle. Not every Warrior of Light is gonna fall for a random girl dropped in their path.
It tried to make me…I dunno, hate Meia? Distrust Meia for being a heretic? Good luck with that, she’s probably as close as Sarah, although I wouldn’t call her my sister. Friend, at least.
Palamecia tried to make me fight Chaos and then boot me off the planet for not following its pretty little story, but then I killed the man Chaos used to be and forced the planet to seal me away while it tried to figure out what to do with me.
It tried to make me into the next Chaos with some convoluted plot involving fake stories from runes concocted by Vox, the planet’s very vocal narrator. Pulled Graff and Sophie into it, too. But I got my sense beaten back into me and then we beat Vox ourselves.
With its second attempt at a hope-despair cycle taken down, the planet held on for a bit, but not for as long as we liked. Corrupting springs started popping up all over, turning people into fiends as it turned the land into a dark-infested swamp. The Dark Flood that caught us by surprise last time was coming in stages this time, and for some reason it turned the sky red, not purple.
I put a hand to my chin in thought as I finished scanning the forest clearing. The trees were dense enough here that I couldn’t make out much through them, just a nearby cliff’s edge that led out to open sky a few trees to my left. Nothing about them actually looked familiar.
Did we make it through the rift Echo and Eco had sensed? How far away was I from the corrupting destruction around Omega, if everything here looked fine?
My memories went a little fuzzy around the point where I was getting in a fight with some humans-turned-winged fiends with the others, trying to keep survivors alive for a little bit longer. Maybe a portal opened in the middle of that fight and took us all out.
If Palamecia decided that none of us humans were worth keeping around and booted all of us when the sky started falling in preparation for another Dark Flood, then good riddance. I just hoped the others managed to get out alive.
But did Palamecia just…drop me through a rift, seal me in crystal, and then release me on a different part of the world when it was done resetting? Or did it actually send me to another planet?
I glanced towards the cliff’s edge. Maybe that would give me a better idea for where I’d ended up. Maybe it’d tell me if Sarah and the others were nearby, too.
It didn’t take much to push past the trees and out to the edge of the cliff. I was expecting something like the Highlands, maybe the shattered remains of the Tower of Hope after the corruption of darkness and despair was done tearing it apart.
I was not expecting a large, lush green valley that sloped away from the cliff and out towards some big orange-colored monument in the distance.
I squinted at the monument. Was that all crystal? That did not look like anything on Palamecia that I was familiar with. And I was familiar with a lot of Palamecia. One advantage to being shoehorned into a story is that it gets to take you all over the place and see all kinds of stuff.
But I hadn’t seen…well, this. It looked more lush and lively than I remembered any part of Palamecia looking like.
“Either that formed during the Dark Flood when I wasn’t looking, or I really am on another planet,” I muttered under my breath. “Great. Let’s hope this one doesn’t shoehorn people into positions they don’t want.”
All things considered, this was probably an entirely different planet that had snatched me up.
If this planet was looking for a Warrior of Light, it better not be me. I’d had more than enough of that from Palamecia. A destined hero I am not.
On the other hand, I wasn’t looking forward to finding a place to live and settle down. That would be boring, and I knew how well that went the last time.
As nice as Omega was, that village got dull after a while.
But finding a village or even just a camp would be a good place to start. I needed to figure out if I was the only human on this planet. Everything else could come later.
I looked down at the sharp cliff in front of me. It looked like something had sheered off a chunk of ground at some point, and I wasn’t feeling reckless enough to just jump down and found out if I could survive the landing. So back into the woods it was.
Hopefully I’d find people before any fiends found me.
I moved back into the woods, leaving the cliff and that view behind. Sarah and Meia would probably want to get a closer look at the crystal monument, but they weren’t here right now and I couldn’t afford to go looking when I didn’t know what I was dealing with.
…Echo probably would’ve sent me out there whether I wanted it or not. But she isn’t here. She’s a part of Palamecia’s system, like all the other Echos. And Eco.
I’m…probably never going to see her again.
Something rattled a nearby bush, pulling me out of my head immediately. I reached for the sword Ragnarok resting against my back—
A small rodent with a large, fluffy tail jumped out and landed between the trees in front of me.
I blinked. That…wasn’t a fiend. Or at least it wasn’t one I’m familiar with.
The rodent — marmot, my brain provided — shook itself, looked up at me, then bounded off into a different set of bushes. When nothing else came at me, I relaxed my arm.
Wait. Where did I pull marmot from? There wasn’t anything like that on Palamecia that I knew about. Was there a mute narrator somewhere feeding my brain information or something?
…no, that couldn’t be right. Pretty sure after my experience with Vox, my instincts would tell me if there was a disembodied golden voice box hovering over my head somewhere. And besides, the name of a rodent isn’t gonna be enough to turn my destiny in one direction or another. It just means I know what to call a thing now. That’s it.
I’d need to keep an eye out for more blips like that. But first I needed to find people, and get my bearings.
There had to be a village somewhere nearby…time to strike out in a random direction and hope I get lucky.