Shades of the New World

Chapter 158: The advance of the Undying

"Accursed mad dragon" Evin cursed, idly looking at the horizon, feeling like the incoming army would appear at any moment now. 

Suddenly, her focus shifted slightly and a vision of an elderly woman with white hair and silver eyes looming over her appeared inside her head. 'Veidrakar', 'an Authority of a World', 'fucking overpowered' Random strings of thoughts and words appeared along the image as well.

"Urgh" Evin groaned and fell to her knees with a stumble, trying her best to memorize the words that appeared in her mind. She then pulled out something wrapped in paper and opened it up. Inside, was a caramelized golden ball, covered with bits and pieces of nuts, stuck on a wooden stick.

Evin wrote the words down the paper like she always did, munched down on the candy, and began playing around with it inside her mouth. The candy helped her calm down, but she was a bit worried as it was one of the few she had left. No one seemed to have the time to make caramelized honey after all.

"Another vision... one from the second world..." he muttered as he wrote.

Since she was born, Evin was able to see mysterious visions in her head sometimes. As she aged, it became increasingly frequent. While in the past, she would have had maybe two visions in an entire year, all of them extremely blurry and cryptic; just the previous month, she had two very clear ones, like the last one.

She divided them into two categories. The first category was a weird world, where no one could use magic, but where everyone instead utilized all kinds of weird and bizarre machinations. She hated these the most, because she would always feel extreme loneliness and madness inside them. All the visions relating to this world were always followed by severe depressive episodes as well.

During these incidents, she would become unbelievably clingy, going almost crazy when she was left alone, reacting in an awfully unreasonable manner if she thought that someone was ignoring her. 

Most of her lovers were put away by this behavior after living with her for some time. At the end, after almost a hundred years, Evin was left with no significant other, and no children to love and nag to. 

'But something tells me that even without these memories and episodes, I would still be alone Hmm...' 

In any case, the other category was of a World where there was magic, but it was much too different from how the Magi and the Hexes cast magic. Instead of the Divine Essence, there were things called World energies, which could be derived from something called mana.

In those visions, Evin could tell that she was a young child, since every time they happened, Evin would be looking upwards. Weirdly, she was very, very mature and knowledgeable for her age in these memories. 

Thankfully, these memories didn't induce any extreme reactions in her, but they were very confusing at times. And as she grew older, Evin learned to ignore these most of the time. She once tried to perform cast the magic that these memories showed, but quickly found that they were absolutely useless. 

She then mentioned it to her master, but the other didn't really know much about it, only saying something superficial, like how some of the Hexes being born special and all. Well, he was a Mutant Magi, who specialized in strength and speed, so he really wasn't the best person to ask about strange memories and visions.

But there was one things that was very terrifying to Evin. She felt like her personality was most of the time, very similar to the one inside the memories: experienced, cynical, rather selfish, and even cold sometimes. This made her think that these memories were of her past life, or something along those lines... but weirdly, the things she did in her own life, here on Alvox, were... how should she call it... very different from her personality?

For example, when she was learning to be a Hex for the first time, she would find herself making the same stupid mistakes all the time, even though she clearly understood how it worked in her brain. Like her body would almost automatically perform these mistakes for her, which gave her the feeling like she was almost out of control of her life.

Another example would be how she would act in a way she didn't mean to at important parts of her life. The biggest example of this was when she noticed some young magi chasing after her. She clearly saw all his bad spots: his manipulative personality, his irresponsible conduct, his generally asshole like temperament... but when the man actually came to propose her, instead of rejecting him, she immediately agreed! Her tone even sounded excited to herself, even though her head was in complete disagreement with her words.

And for whatever reason, Evin was then forced to stay with someone she didn't have a smidgeon of feeling towards, constantly having to deal with his shit. Evin still felt disgust when she remembered these parts of her life.

These moments made her feel like she was just a spectator in her own life. Evin supposed that normally, thoughts like these would terrify someone to death. To think that every one of their life important life choices would be made automatically, like some kind of 'fate', or 'destiny' was imposed upon her. But Evin really didn't feel too overwhelmed with the idea.

'At least I'm alive,' she would think and try to forget about the matter. At times, she would even feel glad that most of her important decisions would be made without her concern. 

Ironically, whatever she was trying to do here, awaiting the army of undead, knowing full well what they were capable of, this also felt like something she wouldn't do normally.

Evin sighed and shook her head while shrugging, with an almost unnoticeable half-smile on her face. At some point, this had become her go-to gesture as of lately. 

From what she understood, her latest lover really liked this particular way she shook her head. He even told her that he first fell for her when she was shaking her head like this at some ball, going so far to call it his first case of love at first sight.

'And weirdly, he was the best of the bunch by far Too bad he died in the war...' Evin thought with some regret. She really felt like she would grow old and have children with him... But unfortunately, the magi was conscripted as part of the Hexmagi Alliance in the first major battle that sparked the Age of False Champions, one that happened between the Alliance and the Geger Theocracy. 

The Alliance won, but the Geger Theocracy's Hero, the Child of the Stars, performed his most deadly sacrificial art, Meteor, to deal a heavy blow to the army of the Alliance. Evin's lover had been caught in this attack and was killed in action. 

Hearing the news, Evin expected herself to be heartbroken, but for whatever reason, she was extremely calm. It wasn't like she was completely emotionless, but it was almost like she was used to such deaths happening to her, even though she never experienced the death of someone close to her before that point. The only person she could call herself close to was her master, but the old man was still alive and kicking, no sign of getting a day older. As for her parents, she had never seen them since she was raised in one of the Alliance's special orphanages for young mages. 

Thankfully, that was before the Hexmagi Alliance were able to create the Oaths (also before they were mad enough to actually use them), or else Evin would've become one of the Alliance's loyal dogs, or even worse, one of the Slave Hexes and would have no choice but to die in the final clash between the Hexmagi Alliance and the Princess of Denial. 

Evin was positive that said clash would happen sooner or later. She remembered how the Princess' army of undead had begun to relentlessly invade the other countries without even bothering to stabilize its control.

'Well, she really didn't leave anyone alive to rule over, so...' Evin thought cynically.

Evin remembered how two of the Nosk Empire's three heroes tried to perform a sudden attack on the Von, but no one would have guessed that the Princess would actually come out on top. Not only that, she reanimated the two dead Heroes to do her bidding and invade the Nosk Empire, turning all the able Hex and Magi into undead. 

After the Princess absorbed Nosk, she had decided to invade outwards, her first target being the Holy Land of Sun. Her army destroyed everything in her path, methodically killing every single person and then razing the cities, every undead hellbent on hunting down every single living being and then turning them into one of their own. Everywhere they went, only the dead remained.

The first time Evin 'witnessed' this 'conversion', she couldn't stop herself from vomiting. The undead dug up every little place that someone could have hidden in and killed everyone in the most brutal way possible.

Probably the fastest and easiest to die were the children and the newborns. The Divine Essence users would either simply blast them into smithereens with their powerful magic. But the others did not get to feel such luxuries.

Men were thrown towards sharp metal spikes that were pulled out of the ground, all of them hoping to hit their heads on the spikes and join the children as quickly as possible. If they somehow survived, they would be left on stakes with the occasional vultures and ravens feeding on their flesh, all whimpering from the unbearable pain.

Slowly dying from the blood loss and shock, they were forced to watch as the women were slowly and meticulously skinned by the undead... The cause of death for the women could be anything from blood loss, hypothermia, or infection, but the time of their death would always exceed an hour at the least. 

But they didn't have it the worst. The worst that Evin saw through her ability were the elderly. They would be put inside a box with agitated rats, bound and gagged, as they could only make muffled grunts, as the rats would have their way with their insides. 

As these atrocities happened, Evin would look at the faces of the undead, expecting to see revelry and sadism, but she instead only saw acceptance and grim resolve. 

Shuddering from fear, Evin's determination began to waver at the thought that the same army that was committing these atrocities were about to appear on the horizon. But she had no other choice. 

Evin was sure that the Princess planned to wipe out life on Alvox. She didn't know why, but she was convinced she was right. Evin had fled from the Nosk's borders all the way to Khemon here, and every place she left a piece of her soul, she only saw the relentless destruction and death.

'But there were exceptions. There were definitely exceptions. And I fall into those exceptions,' Evin thought resolutely.