Veldra laughed.
It was hysterical, almost maniacal, an evil sound bursting from him unrestrained, soaked in the full glory of Insanity. Reverberating across the empty air, it clawed at the edges of the world, as though the sky itself had been hollowed and his laughter poured into its emptiness, a sound both jubilant and horrific, celebrating the collapse of all order.
After the death of the mortals, Veldra himself began to cool down, little by little, breath by breath, sanity by sanity. He began to gain back his usual composed demeanour, his detached, cold-spirited self; the self he had surrendered to the intoxicating tides of pure madness, which had pulled him into its infinite whirl of chaotic delight and obscene joy. His head began to clear; the writhing, gnawing sensation of burdened worms that had infiltrated his skull evaporated like smoke in sunlight, leaving a hollow, sharpened clarity. The coldness of reality, once a brittle frost pressing upon him, began to thaw with an almost imperceptible warmth, drying up in withered evaporation like mist retreating from a blackened landscape.
After a few minutes, Veldra sighed.
He looked around the market square, a tableau of lifeless commerce frozen in time, filled with dozens of shops; tiny shops that once smelled of fresh bread and fragrant spices, now drowned in the shadow of their owners' absence; little babies curled in silent torment, children frozen mid-laugh that would never return, adults halted in the middle of mundane acts, old men and women crumpled like broken statues, black, white, young, old, all dead. Dead and gone, with no mercy of fate to carry them into dreams they might have loved, nor heaven, nor hell; only the purposeless fate of an indifferent reality, and the eternal tether of Insanity that held them as children, while Pure Madness preserved them as companions, spectral echoes of a life denied.
Blood was everywhere, pooling and drifting in impossible patterns, like tiny raindrops falling from the heavens themselves, tracing abstract constellations across cobblestone, across wooden stalls, across the faces of those who would never see another sunrise. It was a memorial of horror, a baptism of crimson that drowned the mortals in the weight of their own fleeting existence. Perhaps it was an aggravating sight to behold, perhaps it tore at the conscience of any watcher, but only pity lingered here, mingled with the sharp, corrosive tang of guilt that could not be erased, only endured.
If we were to count how many people died from Veldra's unknown unconsciousness, the fact would remain three hundred thousand souls extinguished in a single, unfathomable instant. Even though only a handful had been described, Insanity did not allow the mind to reconcile with such sight, nor to survive the experience of witnessing a being like himself be seen feasting upon the glorious inevitability of fate, upon dreams fragile and bright, upon the false joy and futile resistances of the weak, pitied mortals. To behold him in that state was to watch the cosmos itself rend its own veil, to stare into the abyss of creation's indifference, where pity and horror merged into a single, undeniable truth: all was meaningless, all was magnificent, all was its.
Veldra himself was broken, crying in bloody tears, throwing himself onto the pool of blood, and yet not a single drop of tear escaped his ears, not a sniff, not an expression that spoke of guilt, pain, or lingering pity for the dead, no solemnness, not even sympathy, empathy, or sadness. Instead, a thin, ugly smile crept upon his face, cold, hysterical, a manifestation of pure, unyielding insanity. Veldra had cooled down; whatever frenzy or unnatural behaviour he had shown was gone. Perhaps Veldra was like this by nature, or perhaps the weight of the sadness had been too immense to bear and had transformed into something else entirely: a thin, ugly, hysterical, and sadistic smile, a mask of madness that hid a storm the mind could scarcely comprehend.
Veldra stood up, his movements deliberate, almost ceremonious, and with a flick of his hand, the blood that clung to his robe dried and vanished, as if it had never been there at all. Yet the blood on the floor, burying the mortals beneath its unholy tide, he chose to leave. It remained a testament to the futility of resistance, to the fragility of life, to the absolute dominion of his existence. It gleamed like liquid garnet under the dim, wan light that filtered through the shattered stalls, each droplet a frozen scream, each puddle a mirror to the madness that had swept through the market square.
Lucien, who had disappeared into the void of existence, now reappeared among the living, stepping into the river of blood that clawed at the air with its metallic scent and viscous weight, striking him with a realisation sharp and unrelenting. He watched Veldra with wide eyes, a mixture of fear and awe, an instinctive premonition guiding him. He knew, somehow, that this was inevitable, that the events before him were not chaos but the inevitable unfolding of something far older, far deeper than his understanding. He rushed to aid Veldra, though every step threatened to stain him with the crimson memories of the dead.
"My Lord, are you alright!" Lucien shouted, his voice slicing through the silence that had settled over the carnage. He ran toward Veldra, who strolled among the corpses as if among gardens of stone statues, his presence both incongruous and terrifying, a living god amidst the remnants of mortals.
"Lucien! What a disastrous event!" Veldra's voice broke the stagnant air, calm yet laced with a tension that vibrated like a low hum in the bones. "How on earth could I have killed so many!" His eyes drifted over the carnage, scanning the pools of blood, the twisted limbs, the silent faces frozen in the final moments of their meaningless existence. "Three hundred thousand is a hysterical amount!" he continued, voice measured yet trembling with a subtle undertone of awe and disbelief. "But it does feel bad for the futile resistances of these pathetic mortals, excluding I was one," he muttered softly, almost inaudibly, ensuring that the words were swallowed by the wind, never reaching the ears of any observer.
"My Lord, do not say such things! We must go and apologise to the ruler of this square market!" Lucien's words rang with an almost naive determination, as though the lifeless corpses and the river of blood could not touch the warmth of his hope. "And I have plans for us, my lord! We can register as a Transcender, if you want to hide your status, or you could register as the Lord of the Forest!" His voice carried profound joy, unshaken by the horror around him, a fragile defiance against the shadow of absolute annihilation.
"UrghHHH," Veldra sighed.