The icy, soundless void of the spiritual world was ripped to pieces by a brutal, terrifying clap of roaring, deafening wind. The transition between the lucid dream and the raw, material reality was so violent that Silarias's stomach took a hard, painful jolt. It felt as if his soul was rammed back into his physical vessel with the weight of an anvil. Gone was the grand throne room, gone was the silver tableware, and gone was the suffocating silence of his inner gods.
Outside in the tangible cloudy sky, Malaka and Jeshua were hurtling through the stratosphere on their magic cloud at a frantic, almost suicidal pace, heading straight for their unknown destination. The wisps of mist and fluttering pieces of condensation shot past them like white, sharp streaks, moving so fast that the moisture froze instantly on their clothing. Jeshua sat with his knees pulled tight against his chest on the very edge of the billowing, gray mass of vapor. His arms rested nonchalantly on his legs and his gaze was frozen. He stared with a deadpan, utterly unmoved facial expression at the motionless, heavily breathing body of Silarias lying sprawled on the cloud.
Jeshua did not shift his gaze a single millimeter. He opened his mouth and let his voice rise calmly above the howling wind. "I think you killed Flamo, Malaka. His heartbeat sounds like a blender is inside his chest, and his eyes are rolled back so far that I only see white."
Malaka, who was standing at the very front of the cloud, straining to steer the magical mass with large, theatrical hand gestures and waving arms, looked over his shoulder with a jerk at the sound of Jeshua's cold remark. His long hair blew wildly into his face as he burst into a broad, somewhat nervous, but loud laugh.
"Hahaha! No way man, quit it!" Malaka roared across the cloud, trying to brush off the concern with a waving gesture. "What on earth could possibly go wrong with a little spiritual introspection? That boy has a skull made of pure granite, so he will definitely survive a trip to his own head! Cheer up, a little faith in our descendant is allowed, right!"
His exuberant laughter was, however, immediately and sharply interrupted by the cold, clinical, and terrifyingly sober tone of Jeshua, who slowly rose and leaned over Silarias.
"Listen to me, idiot," Jeshua spoke, and his voice cut through the cheerful atmosphere like an ice cold scalpel. "If his spirit remains in that lucid depth for too long without an anchor, he can lose his complete consciousness. He could come out severely mentally impaired, like an empty shell that does not even know how to spell his own name anymore. Or worse, much worse, his barriers are currently completely flat. He could be possessed at this exact moment by the ancient, corrupt entities he encounters down there who are taking advantage of his open soul."
Even before Jeshua could expand his terrifying, horrific list of disasters, panic hit Malaka visually like a destructive lightning bolt. His carefree grin froze, his pupils narrowed to pinpricks, and the color drained completely from his jaws in one fell swoop.
"Wait, what?! Why are you telling me this only now?!" Malaka screamed with a hysterical yank on his magical powers.
With a brutal, uncontrolled movement, he threw his arms downward to force the flying cloud to a direct, terrifyingly abrupt stop in midair. The sudden braking was so violent that the entire cloud tilted dangerously forward. The inertia compressed the surrounding air, leaving a thick, pitch black and gray trail of smoke behind in the cloudy sky like a hissing skid mark, heavy with the smell of burnt energy and ozone.
Without losing even a fraction of a second, Malaka jumped over Silarias's motionless body in a large, panicked arc. He landed on his knees with a dull thud in the soft vapor, grabbed the young warrior's heavy robes at the chest with both hands, and began shaking, pulling, and yanking at him like a total maniac, acting as if his own life depended on it.
"LIVE! LIVE! IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING HOLY, WAKE UP!" Malaka roared at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking dangerously from the sheer terror that he had just permanently broken the most important pawn of their entire saga. "Silarias! Come back! Breathe! Do something, you piece of shit, live!"
Exactly at that moment, while Silarias was being flung back and forth and his head lolled and flopped limply against his torso with every hard jerk from Malaka, it happened.
Silarias's eyes snapped wide open with a hard, shocking jolt. The deep, golden flicker of Bansaday and the dark, sharp edges of Lucifer returned to his pupils in one instant with the force of an explosion. He gasped for air with a loud, rattling, deep, and greedy intake, as if he had just been pulled up from the deepest, darkest ocean after hours of drowning. His entire back instinctively arched upward off the cloud. He was finally completely back to his senses, and the heavy, purple haze in his head pulled away with a hissing speed.
Malaka's eyes widened with pure, disbelieving shock when he noticed the boy suddenly looking him straight in the face with a gaze that spat pure fire. The panic instantly turned into a hysterical urge to save his own face. Malaka let go of the robes lightning fast, as if he had just touched a glowing hot steel plate. In a fraction of a second, he turned his entire upper body toward the front of the cloud with a frantic jerk, gripped the magical controls again, and sent the cloud flying forward at breakneck speed to mask his own terror.
"Nothing wrong! See, absolutely nothing wrong!" Malaka lied in one breath with a way too high, forced voice, while his neck and jaws turned blood red under the sweat. "You were just starting to thrash and tremble a little bit strangely, you know! A kind of epileptic dance or something, so I simply had to restrain you physically for a second with brutal, professional force to make sure you did not fall off the cloud! But there is absolutely nothing wrong, everything is going according to plan, hehe!"
While staring straight ahead into the howling wind with a stiff, unnatural neck cramp, he began giving mean little elbows backward into Jeshua's ribcage with short, aggressive, and nervous movements. It was a desperate, command like attempt to force his companion to go along with his ridiculous lie.
Jeshua did not even blink or blush at the vicious pokes against his side. He sat motionless, raised his hands slowly with open palms toward the sky, and made an obvious gesture toward Silarias with his face and rolling eyes that meant he had absolutely no idea what kind of idiotic theater had just been performed here.
However, the three travelers did not get long to think about the bizarre, chaotic resuscitation. The cloud beneath their feet began to tremble and accelerated to an absurd, terrifying speed that defied all the laws of physics. The air around them began to bend, break, and distort into a kaleidoscope of flashing colors until the cloudy sky disappeared completely. Like a launched, heavy blimp, they shot straight toward a suddenly looming, pitch black hole in reality with a deafening, mechanical WHIRR. The hole sucked them inside with brutal gravity.
The absolute darkness inside the crack lasted only a fraction of a second, a breath where all gravity vanished, after which their three figures materialized with a hard, flashing, and metallic jolt right in the exact geographic center of an immense, monumental arena.
The visual and auditory blow that followed at that exact moment knocked the breath right out of their lungs with the force of a sledgehammer. Silarias staggered on his feet and had to grab the edge of the cloud to keep from falling.
"CHEERING! SCREAMING! A HURRICANE OF HUMAN NOISE!"
From literally every direction, from every corner and crevice around them, a deafening, vibrating, and terrifying racket arose that immediately made the stone foundation beneath the materialized cloud tremble. Silarias squeezed his eyes shut behind his hands and instinctively pressed his palms against his ears, but the sound thundered straight through his skull.
The space into which they had been dumped was truly epic in proportions. It was an immense, majestic arena of gigantic dimensions, so unreal and absurdly large that it felt as if five complete, huge Roman Colosseums had been shoved into each other and stacked to form this titanic structure. The massive stands, carved from dark granite, reached upward in endless tiers so frighteningly high that the top rings almost touched the flapping cloudy sky.
And at that moment, the visual spectacle truly exploded in their faces.
From the highest rings of the granite stands, thousands of fiery light spheres shot into the air with a hissing speed, only to burst above with deafening claps into a crazy sea of fireworks. Gold, purple, deep blue, and ruby red light rained down in flashing cascades over the hundreds of thousands of spectators. The sky above the arena was literally ablaze, lit by pulsating stars of magical fire that drove away the shadows with hard shocks.
Along the immense, circular walls of the rings, enormous, magical light displays bloomed. Broad ribbons of liquid, neon like energy flowed through deep grooves carved deep into the ancient stone. As a result, the entire architecture began to glow and pulse as if the arena itself had a living, beating heart that reacted to the bloodlust of the crowd. Everywhere you looked, gigantic flags fluttered, meters high torches burned that spat out roaring jets of flame, and huge, glowing spheres floated that bathed the central sand surface in a spotlight atmosphere many times brighter than the harsh afternoon sun.
Every detail of this colossal structure overstimulated the senses. The air was thick, suffocating, and heavy with the sharp smell of gunpowder, scorched sand, and the pure adrenaline of the millions of spectators who were obsessively jumping in the stands.
Amidst this flashing, violent light show, Malaka began looking around him frantically and nervously. His earlier, comedic panic about Silarias's resuscitation disappeared instantly. His eyes narrowed into two dangerous slits as he scanned the immense crowd, his gaze moving restlessly over the gigantic rings of the stands.
"People already..." Malaka muttered, his voice suddenly surprisingly low, sharp, and deadly serious, almost inaudible through the roaring noise around them. He clenched his jaws so hard that the muscles in his neck tightened. "Mmm... this is bad. This can only be caused by two things. Either we are way too late because of that spiritual trip of yours, or the stakes of this whole mess have just increased eightfold by the high lords."
With an abrupt, angular movement, he raised his arm and pointed with a stiff finger straight across the immense sandy surface, all the way to the far corner of the arena. There, hundreds of meters away in the bright light, a gigantic arch inlaid with sky blue runes marked the absolute finish line.
"Take a good look at that," Malaka added, as a dangerous, icy edge crept into his voice that Silarias had never heard from him before. "It looks like we are going to have a very strange, twisted reunion here."
Jeshua and Silarias exchanged a quick, deeply confused look and then looked back simultaneously with a hard jerk at the deathly serious guide.
"What do you mean by that? What kind of saga?!" Silarias roared above the noise, his voice cracking as he took a step forward on the cloud. He brought his hand instinctively to the soulbound gem on his chest, feeling how the intense, magical tension in the arena resonated wildly with his own runaway, lionlike energy. "Who is over there?!"
Jeshua clenched his fists and stared hard at Malaka. "Talk, Malaka. What are you hiding from us? Who opened those gates? Is this a trap??"
Malaka cut off the flow of questions immediately and decisively with a wild, commanding wave of his hand, his gaze already fixed back on the finish line. "No, no! Nothing! No questions now! Come on, we do not have a second to lose! Let's not waste time and prepare ourselves immediately for what's coming! This is going to get very dirty very fast!"
As he shouted that, the ground beneath their feet began to thunder with a terrifying rhythm, as if an earthquake were moving through the arena. The sand on the floor rose in small, hissing fountains. From literally every corner, hidden deep beneath the dark arches of the arena's monumental gates, groups began to stream in. Heavy, iron gates slid upward in the shadowy depths with a screeching, loudly rattling sound of heavy chains.
Silarias stared with his mouth open and wide eyes as the terrifying silhouettes of rival warriors, clad in gleaming, blood splattered armor and carrying monstrous, heavy weapons, stepped onto the brightly lit sand step by step. Group after group, monster after monster stepped out. The competition flooded in, the arena filled up, and the murderous atmosphere became so thick that it was almost impossible to breathe normally anymore.
One final, all encompassing, visually escalating look across the arena showed the pure, insane scale of the impending slaughter. The hundreds of thousands of frantic throats rhythmically chanting that blood must flow, the bright magical light lines that made the granite glow blood red, the constant, flashing violence of the fireworks that kept the sky in a constant state of explosion, and the deadly threat of the rival armies gathering in the shadows of the starting blocks, ready to tear each other apart.
The arena was ready. The world was watching. And Silarias stood right in the middle, his body still uncontrollably trembling from the unfinished words about his true, hidden origin, while the stopwatch of his life began to tick mercilessly.