The night ended, and the sun now rose on the horizon of Baja Galandria.
What the sunlight revealed was a terrible massacre that the people of that area would never forget—neither they nor the survivors.
The impoverished buildings of Baja Galandria looked sadder than usual. The square, the place where soldiers had fought the festival-goers, was now a gloomy cemetery.
The remains of the statue that had started the festival were now just a black pile of dust swirling in small vortices in the wind. Around it, the ground was destroyed by Erick's explosions.
Two buildings had also been destroyed by Erick's terrifying ability to make things explode by slamming his fists together.
And amidst all those bodies, there they were:
Zork, Mako, and an angel.
Zork, an orc who had earned his place in the Royal Court through his own merits, was sighing heavily. He had taken the opportunity to tend to his wounds secretly, at least enough to avoid bleeding to death. Or so he hoped.
"It's a shame," Zork confessed as he gazed at the sky, "I honestly hoped Erick would win."
Mako didn't respond to these words. He was, to begin with, completely exhausted. He lay on the ground, arms outstretched, feeling the burn from the cuts on his body.
Mako also looked at the sky, watching a flock of vultures circling.
"Well," said the angel, with a less mournful tone, "I suppose this result works for me anyway."
Upon hearing the angel's words, Mako stopped looking at the sky and turned to look at him.
"What do you mean?" Mako asked the angel, who was staring at Erick's lifeless body.
The angel didn't respond immediately. He turned his head to look at Mako. The angel no longer smiled mockingly as usual. His white wings were folded, and he had a distant gaze, lost in the horizon.
"Honestly, I would have preferred if Erick had killed you," the angel said coldly, "his payment was your head."
After hearing this, Mako stopped looking at the angel and let his head fall back to look at the vultures in the sky again.
He tried to clench his fists, but couldn't. Mako just sighed.
'So his betrayal was always planned one way or another. I couldn't change that,' Mako thought.
Now, he no longer felt that deep void in his soul; he only felt a weight on him that overwhelmed his entire body. But it wasn't just physical. He felt his vision blurring at times, as if he were about to fall unconscious.
Since he saw Polyphemus die, Mako no longer had his super strength or physical endurance. He was now an ordinary human. If he died, if he allowed himself to succumb to this exhaustion, Mako felt that everything could end without fear of going back to the past.
But he didn't.
'I'm really sorry, brother,' Mako thought as he used the small droplets of energy in his spirit to keep from passing out, 'but… my biggest mistake was doubting.'
The vultures flew in circles, spiraling in the sky, and Mako felt hypnotized.
"Why are you still here?" Zork asked with some annoyance, approaching Erick's lifeless body, "I'll take care of it from here, he's a noble, and I must take him to the castle for his funeral preparations."
"N-No," Mako's weak voice said.
He couldn't even stand, but Mako couldn't let that happen.
'I'm not going to let them bury his body,' Mako thought with much bitterness and resentment.
"He lost," Mako emphasized, saying each word with great difficulty, "he's no longer part of the House of the Sun."
Zork clicked his tongue, looking at Mako with hatred.
"You're a bastard and a traitor," Zork said to Mako as he stepped away from Erick's body.
"Alright, alright," the angel spoke.
The angel looked at Erick with great pity. He wasn't lamenting his death but what lay ahead for him now.
"Dead men can't pay debts," the angel continued, "once they die, they're forced to serve us forever."
Both Zork and Mako were stunned by these words.
"Didn't you know? If you die without paying your debt to one of us, well… I can only congratulate you, Mako, you've condemned your brother to a fate worse than death," the angel said bitterly in a low voice.
The angel bent down, lifting Erick's body into his arms.
He didn't look like a noble at all. He was far from the cleanliness of his best days. Erick's clothes were damaged, tattered, and dirty with dust. His face looked strangely tired, with a poorly kept beard. But now, he had another mark…
A red line opened his neck to the sun, a mortal wound made with the broken blade of Mako.
"What's going to happen to him?" Zork asked, watching as the angel prepared to fly away.
"His soul, orc, his soul belongs to us now," the angel replied as his massive white wings unfolded from his back, starting to flap and raising clouds of dust and ash.
Mako didn't say a word.
"I could kill you," Zork said, watching the angel turn into a distant shadow in the sky.
The orc turned his back on Mako. When he turned to look at him, Mako noticed that Zork had a furrowed brow.
"No one would notice, you could have easily died from battle wounds." Zork's words had a very macabre tone as he approached Mako's immobile body.
But Mako wasn't afraid.
"Have you forgotten?" Mako said in a very serious tone, ignoring the orc with his gaze.
Mako continued to be hypnotized by the flock of vultures circling in the sky.
"I can see the future, I can win any battle. You should know it from my fight with Catherine, I defeated Arthur, also Erick… If you take one more step, he will die," Mako said. But after speaking, he couldn't help but spit blood from his mouth.
Zork hesitated, unsure whether to advance or not.
"I'm a noble…" Mako's voice was already so tired, speaking took more energy than it should, "you can't… do anything to me."
Slowly, Mako began to lose consciousness. He couldn't hold on any longer.
'Polyphemus…,' Mako thought as the clouds became blurrier before his eyes. At first, they had blurry shapes, but then they were just white spots in the blue sky.
'Could I have done something to save you? Did you know you were doomed the moment Erick summoned you?' Mako continued thinking questions without answers, since Polyphemus was no longer there to answer them.
Slowly, Mako closed his eyes, watching the vultures fade into the darkness of his pupils. The last thing Mako would see was the shadow of Zork before he fell unconscious.
◇◆◇
Time passed.
Mako woke up in his room at the mansion. He was covered in bandages on all his limbs. He didn't know how long it had been since he fell unconscious.
He looked through the window at the orange light of the sun setting to give way to the night.
'Has a whole day passed already?' Mako thought as he tried to sit up, but the pain in his muscles stopped him immediately.
Mako began to remember, little by little, everything that had happened in the short time since the queen's assassination attempt. Weeks in bed, and when he was finally able to do something, Mako ended up in the same place:
Prostrated in bed, unable to move.
And what was even worse…
'To top it off, I no longer have my abilities,' Mako thought as he carefully looked around the room.
He saw everything from his large bed, the lovely furniture. He could hardly believe that just recently he was in that destroyed square surrounded by corpses.
The silence and calm of the room was, in its own way, deafening for Mako.
"Now I'm a traitor," Mako said quietly to himself.
There was no answer in the room. He was alone.
"You're a traitor," Mako said again, closing his eyes to sleep.