The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

What settled over the capital was not silence.

Silence is the absence of sound. This... was the absence of everything.

In the heart of the City of the Black Rose—where the taverns had roared only hours earlier, where the markets never slept, and where the alleys carried the tread of a million feet—the Black Rose had lost one of its petals.

And that petal had vanished completely.

In its place was a crater.

A colossal, irregular crater, as though some exalted being had pressed a finger into the earth and scooped part of it away. No rubble lay inside it, no shattered walls, no bodies... not even ash.

Total erasure left no ash.

Only at its edges did the remnants of the old world begin: half-houses sliced away with terrifying precision, a street that ended abruptly at the void, and a stone staircase whose final step hung over nothing.

Even the birds refused to fly above it.

Along the perimeter, the City Guard strung ropes between barricades formed from overturned wagons, while torches were driven into the ground like teeth of flame. The soldiers stood pale-faced, turning their backs on the crater whenever they could, because staring at it for too long did something to the soul... something akin to standing at the edge of a towering rooftop while a small part of you whispered: Come closer. Look.

At one of the barricades, a young soldier vomited for the third time that night.

No one reprimanded him.

”Hold your positions!” a captain screamed, his throat raw from shouting. ”No one enters the perimeter! No one—”

His voice faltered when he saw what was approaching the barricades.

The families.

A woman held up a lantern and called a single name in a voice worn so hoarse that it had become little more than a whisper. An old man clutched a small child’s shoe in both hands, asking every armored figure who passed him the same question. Dozens came, then hundreds, pressing against the ropes, begging, threatening, weeping... all of them asking the same question in different words:

Had anyone come out?

And the answer remained the same:

No one had come out.

At a wooden table hastily erected near the northern barricade, registry clerks sat with ink-stained fingers, recording names on lists that never seemed to end. The list of the confirmed dead was nauseatingly short—the dead required bodies.

But the list of the missing...

It grew faster than the ink on its pages could dry.

That night, the capital learned that something could be crueler than death:

For nothing of the dead to remain to bury... not even a place beside which their families could mourn.

...

The surrounding districts had not been erased, but they had been devastated.

When the center swallowed itself, a violent wave burst from its heart and swept over everything around it. Roofs collapsed onto sleeping families, walls leaned like drunkards, and fires sprang from overturned hearths, forcing human chains to pass sand and water from hand to hand until dawn.

Healing stations rose in temple courtyards, while warehouses were thrown open and transformed into shelters where people slept on sacks of grain. A baker handed out his final loaves, then sat weeping on the threshold of his cracked oven. Servants from noble houses dug through the rubble with bleeding hands alongside members of the City Guard, and no one stopped to ask anyone else’s name.

But the nobility, as ever, did not share a single heart.

Some continued to pursue their own interests even in the midst of tragedy.

Mansion gates were bolted shut and their guards doubled, while eyes watched the calamity from balconies as though it were a theatrical performance. One low-ranking noble—whose name history would not remember kindly—distributed bread to the stricken with one hand while, behind him, his scribe recorded the names of the grateful, his family’s banner fluttering high above the grief of others.

In the soup lines, rumors bred faster than flies.

”It was an attack by one of the Sons of Sin! I swear I saw a gray shadow before the flash!”

”No—destructive magic slipped free from the grasp of some mad sorcerer...”

”Heaven’s punishment. The city drowned in its sins, and Heaven grew weary.”

Then, spoken in far lower voices after a glance to the right and another to the left, came the word that made the elderly spit three times upon hearing it:

”...A Taboo.”

...

On a rise in the eastern district, however, the gates of House Veyla’s estate stood fully open.

Grand Duke Alexander Veyla stood upon the marble steps—a broad-shouldered old man whose stature had yet to bend—and his calm voice cut through the chaos like an oar through still water.

”Open every grain store. Send the healers to the outer ring, where the need is greatest. Use the eastern wings for the wounded... and the stables for those who have lost their roofs.”

The head steward hesitated a step behind him.

”My lord... commoners and nobles alike? Perhaps the nobles should be placed in the wings, while the commoners remain in the stables—”

”Not today,” the Grand Duke interrupted without raising his voice. ”Anyone who talks too much or objects to my decision—throw them out.”

He then turned toward the distant pale glow, where the crater lay beneath its birdless sky, and his aged eyes narrowed.

Unlike many within that city, he was not asking:

What happened?

He was asking:

What happens next?

...

On the western bank of the river, the tracking team was still alive on the third day.

When the wave swept over them three nights earlier, nothing had stood between them and destruction but layered walls of ice, a battered shield wrapped in wind, and five people—five backs pressed together, five wills that refused to become dust.

Today, those same five backs were bent over the rubble, searching for survivors.

Kael Crowe was lifting a wooden beam from the leg of a man who had been trapped since dawn, the muscles in his arms trembling as he snarled through clenched teeth:

”Pull him out... now!”

Elias returned from a scouting round through the collapsed alleys with a little girl resting on his shoulder. He had found her asleep from exhaustion inside a wardrobe—the only thing left standing amid the wreckage of an entire house.

As for Evelyne, dark circles ringed her green eyes as she bound the wound on the arm of a woman who would not stop trembling, humming a quiet tune to her as one might soothe a frightened child.

A few steps away, Isabelle Dmitri stood before a City Guard officer holding a notebook.

Her back remained straight despite three nights without any real sleep, and her voice carried the discipline of someone who had learned that reports did not tolerate trembling.

”Isabelle Dmitri, squad leader of a border unit attached to the Tenth Battalion. I am currently commanding a border tracking team under orders from the fortress command near the City of Light,” Isabelle said.

”Noted. Now tell me what you felt that night, Commander,” said the officer—a man who had not slept in three days either, having worked alongside his colleagues to gather every fragment of information they could find about the catastrophe.

Isabelle closed her eyes for a moment.

”Moments before the explosion... a spiritual pressure descended upon that district unlike anything I had ever felt before. It was not merely weight. It was... a presence. Something that crushed the very idea of resistance out of the air.”

She opened her eyes.

”And immediately afterward came something that felt... like a soul. A single soul, detonating. Do not ask me how I know it was only one. Anyone in this city with a sufficiently refined spiritual sense would have recognized it.”

The officer’s throat went dry as he continued writing.

Then he asked the question he had been ordered to ask:

”And the fugitive you were assigned to track? Where did the trail end?”

Isabelle fell silent.

She remained silent long enough for the officer to raise his eyes from his notebook.

Then she spoke the sentence that would climb the ladder of command faster than she could have imagined.

”The trail led there.”

She gestured with her chin toward the distant emptiness.

”Into the district that... no longer exists.”

...But how could Isabelle possibly know that?