Chương 38: Red Snow

In the shade of a tall and twisted pear tree, Alistair sat upon an ancient stone bench. His distant eyes stared down into the pristine stony face of Cyril. While the stone head possessed blank empty eyes, the white stone still somehow managed to capture a heavenly face. Its expression was painful sorrowful. He wondered if it'd been the artist's liberty to have given the ancient Goddess such an expression.

"And it's such a beautiful spot," Alistair muttered as he looked over the beautifully ornated stone brazier. Placed between two wide semi-moon benches, it would be a beautiful sightseeing location.

He looked to his left, where the remains of the statue had remained after he'd siphoned away its stored mana. Before he'd destroyed it to harvest the powerful and ancient mana, it'd depicted Cyril resting sorrowly under the largest pear tree Alistair had ever seen. It'd grown nearly forty-feet tall, it's branches reached out over the benches. The statue had faced the dying sun as it slowly sunk on the horizon. The wind graced him gently, and with it came the smell of the sea.

He did not regret what he had done. Maybe it'd anger the ancient one that he had destroyed the sites. Before they understood the idols, they spent an untold amount of effort to erase what they believed were false idols. His followers had been rabid in their zeal to wipe away the other "false" beliefs. While Alistair had believed this was a great wrong, he'd been in desperate need of faith. As such, he'd encouraged it until the White Dragon Akyryss had razed half his city to the ground a few hundred years ago.

It was only once he'd fought her into a battle of attrition did he find out the statues were no false idols.

It had mattered little to him who the idol was, but with the very real threat of war with the dragons; they no longer officially destroyed the statues.

Alistair looked to the last basket of pears by his feet. It'd been the last batch of fruit harvested before he finished off the statue. Unlike the others, where the sites bore no actual food, the fruit tree had slowly begun to die. The fruits on its branches began to rot and left the entire party in shock. It'd been the first reported instance of something happening in the world after a statue had been destroyed.

The flame in the brazier had died.

The world had come in.

It was an odd sensation, feeling the collapse of the ancient spell. This had been an untouched location, far from any settlement. Only stumbled upon as Alistair had chased after a demon that found its way into the land of light. It had tried to reach the safe zone of the statue. Almost as if it could sense it. Even Alistair found it hard to break the rules within their grounds. He was lucky the demon did not make it in it.