Chapter 1125. He Wasn’t the Type to Lose Himself to Madness

Chapter 1125: 1125. He Wasn’t the Type to Lose Himself to Madness

The commotion at Aethelgard’s main gate began not with a crash, but with a sharp, uncertain shout from a sentry perched atop the eastern battlements. "Movement on the eastern road!"

"Two figures approaching!" The call rippled through the guard posts like wind through wheat.

Within minutes, the massive iron-reinforced gates had become the focal point of a growing crowd of curious onlookers, merchants closing up stalls, and battle-hardened soldiers who sensed something unusual in the way these two strangers approached.

As the travelers drew closer, the murmur of the crowd shifted from idle curiosity to a startled, collective gasp. When the faces became clear enough to recognize beneath the grime and exhaustion, a wave of surprised recognition swept through the assembled guards.

Elliot Von Starlight and Evelyn Astralight looked like ghosts returned from the dead. They bore the unmistakable mark of those who had spent months surviving on the ragged edge of civilization.

Their traveling clothes, once fine and practical, were now worn thin at the seams, patched with mismatched leather and stained with the salt of countless miles. A thick layer of road dust clung to every visible surface of their skin and fabric, embedding itself into the creases of their faces.

More than their appearance, however, it was their movement that drew attention; they carried themselves with the coiled, hyper-alert tension of predators who had learned through repeated necessity that danger rarely announces itself before it strikes.

Throughout their journey back, they had collected fragments of news like broken glass, disjointed rumors whispered by terrified merchants in roadside taverns, half-truths traded between frightened caravan guards, and cryptic warnings from traveling monks.

But nothing—absolutely nothing—had prepared them for the raw, unfiltered reality that began to pour from the mouths of the gate guards once they had been ushered past the threshold and into the relative safety of the inner courtyard.

"You don’t understand," one of the veteran guards said, his voice rough with a mix of awe and lingering trauma.

He gestured vaguely toward the northern district, where the skeletal remains of scaffolding still rose like broken ribs against the sky. "Tremor... he didn’t just attack!"

"He descended like a plague!"

"He tore through the defenses like they were made of parchment!"

"Nearly leveled half the city before Apollo and half the Apostle network managed to drive him off!"

"The screams... you could hear them from the outer walls."

The guard paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed hard. His eyes darted between Elliot’s increasingly pale features and Evelyn’s expression, which had gone from exhaustion to a razor-sharp, deadly focus.

"And that’s before the dragon incident," the guard continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "and before—"

He hesitated, a shadow of genuine horror crossing his face. "Before what happened with Theo."

The air seemed to grow colder, the ambient noise of the city fading into a dull hum as the weight of that unfinished sentence pressed down on them.

"What happened with Theo?" Elliot repeated slowly.

The words felt foreign in his mouth, heavy as lead and twice as poisonous. His mind raced, trying to connect the dots of the rumors he’d heard, but the silence that followed the guard’s hesitation was more telling than any explanation.

The guard delivered the rest of the account with the careful, rehearsed cadence of a man reciting a funeral dirge he had memorized long ago. The story had smoothed itself into an official narrative, stripped of its raw horror and polished into something digestible for the traumatized.

Theo Von Nightwing, the boy who should have been a pillar of their generation, had somehow acquired an Apostle of Time designation, a power that seemed to have unraveled his very soul.

He hadn’t just malfunctioned; he had turned. He had attacked the city he had sworn his life to protect with a temporal ferocity that defied comprehension, nearly slaughtering Apollo Brightsoul before the onslaught was finally broken.

Then came the end: Theo dying in the confrontation that followed, his body broken and his legacy shattered.

There had been no formal funeral, no prayers whispered over a grave, because the household and the city had classified his actions as criminal rather than tragic. He was not a fallen hero; he was a traitor to be forgotten. ℯℯ𝘭.

The guard mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Rex Rexilion had been the one to finally end the confrontation, the same Rex Rexilion who had apparently also played a heroic role in stopping Ignivara’s dragon and had been present, in one capacity or another, at nearly every major crisis the city had endured over the past several months.

Rex was everywhere.

Rex was the constant.

Rex was the one who held the crumbling world together while everyone else fell apart.

Elliot stood unnervingly still throughout the entire recounting. His expression underwent a slow, agonizing transformation: disbelief curdling into something far heavier, something that looked like grief arriving decades late to a funeral it had missed entirely.

He had known Theo. Not with the intimacy of blood, but with the easy, unspoken familiarity of noble circles: the shared glances during training exercises, the nods across formal ballrooms, and the quiet acknowledgment of two young men being groomed for greatness.

Theo had always been the steady one, the responsible one, the kind of person Elliot had privately assumed would still be standing, unshaken and uncorrupted, long after more volatile personalities had burned themselves out.

"I don’t understand how this happens," Elliot said quietly when the guard finally moved off to attend to other duties.

His voice sounded hollow, as if it were coming from somewhere deep underground. "Theo, of all people."

"He wasn’t reckless."

"He wasn’t the type to lose himself to madness or power. He was... he was the anchor."

Evelyn stood beside him, her silhouette rigid. Her face carried a complicated cocktail of shock and something far more private, a shadow in her eyes that Elliot couldn’t quite parse.

"People break in ways you don’t expect, Elliot," she said finally, her voice carrying the weary weight of someone who had seen too many cracks form in good people. "Especially when the pressure comes from directions nobody’s watching."

"When the weight becomes something you can’t hold alone."

"We should have been here." The words tore out of Elliot with more violence than he had intended, raw guilt threading through every syllable like barbed wire. "We’ve spent months chasing ruins and monster nests halfway across the continent because I wanted to test my Heroic Strike against progressively harder targets."

"Because I convinced myself that growing stronger was the responsible thing for a hero to do."

"I thought I was preparing for a future war." A bitter, self-loathing laugh escaped his throat. "And the entire time, this city, our city, was hemorrhaging."

"We were out playing soldier while the real atrocity was happening behind our backs."

"We didn’t know, Elliot," Evelyn said, but her voice lacked conviction.

It sounded like a lie she was telling herself just to keep from breaking. "Neither of us could have predicted a cascade like this."

"Doesn’t matter whether we could have predicted it." Elliot ran a shaking hand through his hair, sending clouds of road dust cascading down his shoulders.

He turned to look back at the long, winding road they had traveled, staring at the horizon as though the distance could somehow be measured against the devastating distance of their failure.

"What matters is that when the blood started flowing, when the bones started breaking, when the people we loved were screaming for help... we weren’t here."

His jaw tightened, his eyes darkening with a desperate, helpless fury. "Diana’s my sister..."

"Lily’s my sister..."

"And I wasn’t here for any of it..."

"I wasn’t here when it mattered."