The mists receded again.

Black smoke collected under the clouded sky and spread out like a stain, growing larger and larger. All the flowers in the garden courtyard had wilted, their brittle brown stems warped and bent until the heads of the dead flowers touched the dry soil. Broken leaves scattered across the flowerbeds and the dull marble walkways, crunching under the feet of the hundreds of people that were crammed into the courtyard and surrounding walkways.

Their clothes were dirty and torn, just as dirty and wild looking as the people who wore them. Everyone held some form of weapon, even the very few children were sporting daggers. Unfortunately, those weapons looked just as worn and dull as the clothes.

I looked around at the people, enduring the sharp pains I felt every time I moved, recognizing their looks. Their expressions. Grief. Pain. Hopelessness. Despair. Denial. Anger. Fear. It was all there. It was the look of a people on the verge of extinction.

In the middle of the group sat Goddess, but not the Goddess I knew. The only reason I knew who she was, was because I recognized the white dress and color of her hair. She’d aged from a gorgeous young woman to an old crone. Thin skin sagged on her face and bagged under her tired, grief-stricken eyes. Her arms were like sticks wrapped in skin, and her shoulders dropped with despair. There was nothing vibrant about her, not even her hair or dress were moving. She literally looked like she was ready to die.

Young King Terra was at her side. He didn’t even look any older, still a stretching adolescent youth. He’d lost obvious weight and his circlet. A familiar kindjal hung at his hip. Instead of the crystal blade glowing with power, the blade was mostly steel with only a sliver of crystal in it — just like the kindjal I received when I first gained the System. The happy youthful gleam in his eyes had been smothered. He looked around at the panicked people, eyes serious, trying to organize them.

“Warriors! Surround and protect the people,” he ordered. “We are not dead yet! As long as even a single person is alive, we will keep fighting.” He was shaking and his adolescent voice broke, but he kept trying to put on a strong show.

His voice was drowned out by screams.

“The monsters are coming!”

“They’re here!”

“We’re going to die!”

People jostled and pushed each other, trying to get to the back of the crowd. They didn’t seem to care who they stepped on, be it man, woman, or child. Other people simply dropped their weapons and sat in the dirt.

“What’s the use? Everyone else is already dead.”

“I just want to join my husband in death.”

“Why fight? This is the end.”

King Terra drew his kindjal. “Don’t give up! We will survive another day!” he yelled for all he was worth over the sounds of his people. “Warriors at the ready!”

The ground started to shake. Dust fell from the thousands of cracks that marred the marble columns around the garden. A huge shadow appeared, completely covering the people and the surrounding building.

Everyone started to scream, no matter their age.

Terra’s eyes widened and his arm holding the kindjal went slack as he stared up at whatever was making the shadow. The brave face he’d been holding cracked into an expression of terror and disbelief.

I turned and gasped up at the monster.

It was over a hundred feet tall and more than twice as long. It had the torso of man and a mostly human-ish face, both a sickly gray. The bottom half of its body was a steel-colored scorpion with eight huge, armored legs, two powerful pincers, and a huge scorpion tail, tipped with a deadly stinger. The mostly human head with bald, with oversized bug eyes and insect-like pincers coming out of its mouth. Its extra-long human fingers were tipped with claws.

I knew it was a vision, but my heart still pounded with terror and shock. I’d seen a lot of horrifying monsters and this one ranked up at the top five.

The ground shook as the monster stepped closer and closer, shrouding the terrified people in its shadow. The monster stopped and opened its mouth, the insect limbs twitching. A long, low roar pummeled through the air; it rattled into the chest painfully and nearly burst the eardrums.

The people screamed and covered their ears in pain.

Out of the group of terrified people, a slender white figure slowly rose into the air. Goddess was like a tiny speck compared to the monster, a brittle piece of glass ready to break. Even so, she stared at the monster with disgust and disdain. “You will not touch my people,” she said. Her voice was like the wind, a breathy gust that was over too soon.

She lifted her hands, palms toward the monster and fingers spread wide. A ball of power grew in her hands, getting large and larger. The light swirled like mist, so bright it was hard to look at.

The monster roared; the loud, deep sound vibrated painfully in the chest and hurt the ears. Its pincers rushed out to snap the small white figure in half. Goddess jumped higher in the air, right over the giant pincers. They clamped shut where she used to be with a boom. The ball of power grew bigger still. When it was the same size as her, it exploded into a beam of light that smashed into the monster’s chest. It pierced its left pectoral where the heart was and cut to the side. The monster screamed as its massive left arm was cut off and dropped to the ground in an earthshaking crash. Black blood gushed onto the ground and flowed into the entrance hall of the palace, staining the white marble.

Goddess bent over slightly, breathing hard. Even more wrinkles appeared on her face, and her hair faded from silver to a muted gray, as if the shine was starting to diminish.

The monster roared and swung its remaining hand and both the pincers. Goddess dodged the pincers again, but she couldn’t get out of the way of the hand. The monster swatted her at full force. She didn’t even make a sound as she shot down into the garden courtyard.

People screamed and scrambled out of the way as Goddess smashed into the marble. The white stone cracked and indented around her, dust exploding into the air.

“Goddess!” King Terra yelled in horror and rushed to her side.

The people clammered around her, but they were too scared to touch her.

A hundred men and women in armour just like mine turned their backs to the crowd in the courtyard and drew their swords at the monster. They were like ants to a giant, but that didn’t stop them from charging.

“For Vapria! For Goddess! For King Terra!” They cheered as they ran at the monster. Mist surrounded them and they jumped into the air, trying to get high enough to reach the monster’s face. Ten of them died before they even reached the monster’s waist.

It was amazing to see the full potential of the Warriors of Mist for the first time. To see how they moved together with the mist, as if it was a part of them, an extra limb they could morph at their will. But it didn’t matter. It was a one-sided bloodbath. Even so, the Warriors didn’t give up.

Finally, I had to look away. This was a memory. No matter how much I wanted to charge to help them, I couldn’t even freely move. I just couldn’t watch their sad end.

Goddess lay in the hole, breathing shallowly through her thin, parted lips. Her eyes cracked open and she looked weakly around at the crying crowd. “I’m … sorry,” she whispered. Tears pooled in her eyes and leaked down her withered face. “My beloved children. I’m so sorry. I can’t … save you.”

It was like a heavy blanket settled over the people. The crying stopped and terror faded. They knew at that moment it was over. There was nothing they could do. If even the very soul of their planet gave up, there really was no way out of death.

I swallowed hard, staring at the scene ahead of me. The absolute despair. For a moment, the pain that had been wracking me continuously faded and all I could feel was heartbreak for a people I didn’t even know. Or maybe it was because I understood the self-loathing and anguish in Goddess’s eyes.

Another earthquake shook the ground. Pillars cracked and fell, crushing people under them. This time, no one screamed. It wouldn’t change anything.

It had nothing to do with giant scorpion-man. The monster was still fighting the last of Warriors of Mist, who were slowly forcing it back even though they were on the losing end.

The cloudy sky shattered like a mirror. The pieces of the sky vanished, revealing a bloodred starry sky, just like what Gate Vale looks like at night. In the middle of that bleeding sky was a huge planet made completely out of glowing, bright blue crystal. It didn’t have any water or land — after all, it was a parasite of death, not a giver of life. It was actually a beautiful picture, straight out of a fantasy art book, with how the colors contrasted and complemented each other. The fact that so much death was so pretty was disgusting.

I stared up at the parasite, unable to take my eyes off it. I’d heard so much about it and seen the effects that it had on my world, but this was the first it felt as real as the situation was. I finally had a visual on the thing that was trying to kill my planet -- the thing that I was deteremined to kill myself.

The sheer size of it was oppressive. How was I going to find the weak spot on that planet? How long would I have to run around its surface just to get there? The parasitic planet was sure to feel me moving. How long would I be able to survive on it before it overwhelmed me with monsters?

Goddess gaped up at the sky with the rest of her people. There were still sounds going on — like the thundering steps of the monster as it backed away from the palace and the scared whimpering of the remaining people, the wounded Warriors that were still alive and in pain — but the noise was muted. The calm before the storm.

Bright lights winked in the red sky then started to move. The shooting stars fell to the ground, aiming at the palace where the people hid.

I gasped when I finally saw what the falling stars were.

Energy crystals rained down onto the people. They pierced into the people’s chests and stayed there. People swung at the crystals with their weapons, trying to hit them away, but the energy crystals zoomed around the weapons and buried into their chests anyway. It was chaos, people screaming and swinging wildly, trying to protect themselves and their loved ones.

King Terra stood over Goddess, protecting her with everything he had. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t stop an energy crystal from piercing into his chest. He gasped and stumbled back, away from Goddess. I waited for one to target her, now that Terra no longer protected her. But none came. The energy crystals weren’t interested in Goddess, just the people.

“Little king!” Goddess gasped in horror and struggled to sit up. “My children!”

An ear-splitting thunderous sound, like nothing I’d ever heard in my life, rumbled in the air. The ground broke apart like a glass plate under a hammer.

Huge slabs of earth ripped away from each other and lifted into the air as gravity stopped working all together. The beautiful marble palace fell, cracked and broke into pieces, the dull white mixing together with the deep brown rocks, bits of dead vegetation, and the sandy blocks from the large city that used to exist next to the palace. The rocks and vegetation started to dissolve, turning into particle flecks that funneled up toward the glowing parasitic planet looming overhead. As the ground dissolved, it revealed the black void of space beneath it.

In the middle of it all, the remaining people floated before me. They gasped and cried in a new sense of fear at the endless black depths under their feet. They reached for each other, but unless they were touching before the ground split, the more they reached, the more they were pushed apart like magnets repelling each other.

With each fleck of her planet the parasite absorbed, Goddess aged. She was literally withering away before my very eyes. But it didn’t stop her desperate struggle.

She’d lost the holiness that her white glow gave. Now she just looked like a ghost, the black void of space below her and the red tainted light surrounding the parasitic planet above her. Her skin-and-bones arms flailed in the air as she reached for her people, struggling against an unseen force that kept her in place. Tears rained from her eyes as she screamed their names. “Terra! Olivia! Jordan! Lillie!” On and on, she wailed their names until her voice cracked. Even then, she kept screaming.

King Terra, pressed a hand to the bleeding hole in his chest and reached back for her. “Goddess!”

Others did too, begging her to save them.

But no matter how she struggled and writhed, she couldn’t reach them. She couldn’t save them.

My heart broke watching the desperate struggle. I didn’t know what hurt more, my body or my heart. I couldn’t resist reaching out to the closest person to me. I knew it was a mirage, I knew my hand would pass through the pitiful man — and it did — but I wanted to help. Somehow. Only I couldn’t.

Then, the first person started to change.

A child clutched onto his mother’s clothes, soaking her stained shirt with blood from the hole in his stomach and sobbing in terror. When her hand slipped off his back, he looked up into her face. “Mom!”

She wasn’t even looking at him. Her eyes were out of focus, staring up at the giant crystal planet overhead. Slowly, her mouth dropped open in a silent scream and her body went rigid.

“Mom!” the boy cried in a new wave of fear.

The begging and pleading for Goddess to save them died out as one by one, the people stopped moving and stared up at the parasite above them with gaping mouths. Then their bodies started to fade away, as if someone was draining the color out of their very cells. It wasn’t just their color, the solidity of their bodies started to diminish as they faded into ghosts. As they faded, their bodies began to stretch, warping their features into frightening image.

I looked back at the little boy, the youngest person in the group, my heart bleeding for him. He must have been so scared to see this happen to his mother. But his face was blank, fading away and stretching like the other people. He wasn’t holding his mother anymore. His arms were limp at his side, like hers, and they drifted away from each other as if they were strangers.

My hands trembled as I covered my mouth in horror.

The Warriors of Mist were the last ones to change, starting with the weakest and most badly wounded.

Terra, floating in the dissolving world debris just ten feet from Goddess, still reached out to her with his blood smeared hands. “Goddess!” he yelled. Tears poured from his eyes and drifted in the space around him. He looked around at his people with grieving eyes then back at Goddess, pumping his arms like he was trying to swim through space to her.

“Terra!” she cried, desperately reaching for him — the last one left of her people. “My baby! Terra!” She glanced at the phantoms her people had turned into, anguish and horror in her wide eyes. “Why?” she screamed. “Why!”

“Goddess!” Terra’s arms started to stretch, his already slender fingers elongating into stick-like claws. He gasped and screamed in pain. His eyes glazed over and the expression dimmed from his face. Then he gasped and shook his head, breaking out of the spell.

“No!” Goddess wailed. “No! No! Terra!” She groped at the air, whimpering. “Terra!”

He reached back for her. His mouth opened, but no words came out. He was screaming her name with his lips, his eyes, every fiber of his being, only there was no sound. The color of his skin leached away, then his hair, then his clothes. He was still reaching for her as his body began to stretch.

“Terra!” Goddess screamed. “TERRA!”

The expression died from his ghoulish face. His hands fell limp and his face turned away from her, staring up at the parasite. Any speck of the handsome young king was gone. All that was left was the king of the Blood Mists.

“NO! NO!” Goddess clawed at the air, wailing and weeping for her people.

Only they weren’t her people anymore.

A huge glass orb, like a mini transparent moon, appeared behind Goddess. She, the particles left of her planet, and the Blood Mists were sucked into the orb. The particles of earth collected back together and formed a flat stretch of land in the orb. On one side of the land, a familiar city, the one the Orcs inhabited now, was formed. The Blood Mists were sent there. On the other side, Goddess was hurled to the ground. The rubble remains of the white palace landed in a pile on top of her, exploding dust into the air.

I clutched my chest as another wave of heartbreak offset the physical pain that still wracked my body.

The orb lifted up and floated over to the parasitic planet. It was then that I noticed hundreds of other orbs in the airspace around their parasite. The remnants of other planets looked like cats-eye marbles, their flat lands floating in the middle of round clear orbs. Vapria, Goddess’s beloved world, joined their ranks.

Just another remnant, another victim to the parasite.

“This is Earth’s future,” Goddess said slowly in my mind. “If we don’t stop the parasite.”

*****