AFK Arena · Hero

Eluard

Catalyst of Fate

☀Lightbearers🔮MageAwakened🔮MagicalBurst DamageAwakened

Lightbearers, Mage

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HP819481

ATK60499

DEF10414

Magic Resist10414

Profile

It had been four days since Eluard arrived in M'Arjie, a village on the southern frontier, but the holy light never came. He had pictured the answer of God more times than he could count. It should have been as the scriptures promised: light pouring down from the dome, washing the altar clean of sin and filth, rewarding the faithful for prayers carried through years of hardship. But in the modest chapel of M'Arjie, as the girl with a water jar was forced onto the altar, the prayers felt like stories from another world. Eluard threw himself between her and the villagers. They closed in around him, silver daggers glinting in the candlelight. He stumbled through the words of a protection prayer. But there was no holy light, nor did any judgment or blessing descend. The words he knew by heart fell dead in the air, unable to reach the distant shore where God was meant to dwell. Then the sigils carved beneath the altar flared. The candle flames stretched into long, warped shadows that slithered over the stained glass, the chapel walls, and the villagers' ankles. The first of them fell, his face still fixed with rapturous zeal, as if even in his final breath, he believed he was basking in the gaze of God. Then came the second. The third. The hymn changed. Prayer twisted into screams from throats strangled by despair. The girl clutched Eluard's sleeve, trembling from head to toe. "Will God... come?" Eluard had no answer. In that moment, a terrible understanding took hold of him. All the prayers in his life had gone unheard, not because God lacked mercy. They had never reached "God" at all. When they stumbled toward the chapel door, the girl suddenly let go. Eluard turned back. She stood alone in the shadows, watching him in silence. The clarity in her eyes was gone. Only the altar's candlelight remained, swaying soundlessly in the dark. The next moment, a blast hurled him through the doorway, and the chapel collapsed into ruin. By the time the Arbiters reached M'Arjie, no other survivors remained. Eluard was taken back to the Temple, where he knelt before the ever-burning candles until dawn. An old monk lit a white taper and offered quiet comfort, telling him the holy light would one day scatter the darkness. Eluard only stared numbly as the white candle burned from night into morning. Its flame was steady. Bright. Warm. But it was just a flame. Ever since then, Eluard never preached again. Instead, he became an exile, wandering in search of so-called "miracles". He crossed the empire's borderlands to forgotten shrines, knelt before offering altars half-buried in desert sand, and stood in drowned mountain temples. Again and again, he found the same thing. The same domes. The same statues. The same inscriptions. Even the marks worn smooth by wind and time seemed uncannily alike. In the fifth year of his exile, Eluard entered a crypt. On the pitch-black stone wall, he noticed a fissure no wider than a strand of hair. Light glimmered from the other side. He leaned closer. Through that crack, he saw another chapel in M'Arjie. At the very instant the silver dagger struck, a blazing holy light poured from the palm of another Eluard. It tore through the dark like daybreak, and the heretical shadows were utterly purged. But the girl with the water jar knelt before the altar, tears streaming down her face as she prayed to her "God". Without hesitation, she drove a blade into her own heart. Eluard stood motionless before the vision. Was it a hallucination? A temptation? A blasphemy some buried evil wanted him to see? He did not know. He only knew that the bright citadel of faith he had spent his life building had collapsed. "At last," came an empty yet terribly clear whisper from the ruin. "You see it." "This world of yours never had a god who could answer." The walls began to tear open. From each split in the stone, countless fragments of light emerged. Eluard saw the dying lift their hands. He saw radiance descend from places no mortal eye could find. He saw grief answered. Sin judged. Repentance received. So this was holy light. "All I believed in... Everything I gave my life to... was false?" "No," the whisper replied, untouched by pity. "God is real. The holy light is real. It is only absent from here. This timeline is a reflection struck from the first world. It kept the shape of faith, but the presence that should have answered them was never copied with it." Eluard shut his eyes. For a long while, he said nothing. Then, in a voice scraped raw, he asked, "Why show me this?" "Only when enough divergences are born can this world become something that can no longer be erased." The light inside the cracks converged, weaving itself into countless fine threads. Each thread was no heavier than dust, yet any one of them held the power to change fate: a letter failing to find its way home, a door left open on the very night it should have been locked, a doomed man straying from the road that had been laid out for his death. When the last of the light faded, Eluard understood everything. A reflection that only copied the original would remain a reflection forever. Only divergence could grant this timeline weight of its own. And so Eluard accepted the whisper's guidance. Unable to know its true form, he gave it a name deep down: Master of Divergence. The Master did not bestow upon him some grand dominion over time. Instead, it opened his eyes to the branching points of fate. All he needed to do was wait before the coming storm, then shift one loose stone out of place. From then on, Eluard became a ghost who wandered ahead of every fork in fate. A scout report that should never have been leaked appeared on a tribal chieftain's desk. A Mauler guard heard a warning half a moment before the assassin struck. A handful of bounty hunters learned, just before departure, of a hidden vault whose riches no outsider was meant to know. Eluard never stained his own hands with blood. He only watched from afar as a crimson knight trampled across the scorched earth, as rebels in the sands raised their banners, as the dead in a coffin dragged a traitor's soul into the dark. Every divergence demanded sacrifice. But each one also pulled them farther from the path already written. And so they ceased to be mere reflections of the original timeline. Then came Pippa. She was an acorn fallen into the wrong gameboard, rolling blithely between two timelines. Somehow, it made two worlds briefly touch, worlds that should never have known the other existed. As long as Pippa could move back and forth between them, this world would become a crack vulnerable to interference. That was not part of Master of Divergence's plan. So the whisper returned. "Find her. Stop her." Under the night of Astral Academy, Eluard found Pippa. One by one, dark mirrors surfaced around her. Reflected were another Astral Academy, another Dark Forest, and another Pippa who was struck on the head by an acorn. Eluard was not here to kill. He only needed to break the exchange before the crossing of timelines sealed shut, to leave that misplaced anchor spinning blind, with no path back to either side. But as the mirrors began to close, time froze. "At last, the proxy reveals himself." Orthros emerged from the frozen toll of a bell. A heartbeat later, Zolrath laughed softly from beyond the mirror. "Ha. Told you. The witch was perfect bait after all." Orthros's gaze moved past Eluard to the lightless mirrors, and in that instant, it seemed he finally understood how this aberrant timeline operated. "You cannot rewrite time," Orthros said. "All you do is place causes that do not belong here exactly where they need to be." Eluard stared at the two figures in mid-air. Strangely, he felt calm. "No. Calamity may leave scars. But scars, too, can become the ground where a new world takes root." Zolrath clapped with delicate delight. "Interesting. That way of thinking is quite to my taste. Still... the one behind you has caused far more trouble than I ever managed." Orthros lifted his hand. From the void above, shackles on time came falling, reaching for the mark Master of Divergence had left on Eluard. Meanwhile, Zolrath made his own move: chaos spread along the rim of the mirrors, searching for the cracks behind the rules. Then, the mirrors were extinguished. Orthros's shackles lost their target. The breach Zolrath had pried open sealed itself in silence. Every observable trace was cut off at once, and the lingering residue of causality on Eluard vanished behind a veil. "It's here." For the first time, Orthros's voice was not steady. "No." Zolrath's smile faded. "It was here all along. Watching us." Darkness slowly unfurled behind Eluard. His torn robe hung in the frozen air, hiding his face from sight. "You are wrong," he said, as though reciting rewritten scripture. "I did not bring pain into this world. I simply made it arrive at the right place at the right time." The toll resumed, breaking the silence into pieces. Eluard vanished into the dark, leaving Orthros and Zolrath facing one another. They had both realized something, and then, they vanished into a field of white. In the center of the magic circle, Pippa collapsed as if waking from a dream. She stared at the lingering runes beneath her blankly, dimly aware that she had opened a forbidden door that should never have been disturbed. On the far side of that door, Eluard was no longer hidden. From now on, every divergence he caused would leave behind a trail, one that Orthros and Zolrath could follow. But their warning did not make the proxy falter. Not for a breath. After countless nights, Eluard would still return, in memory, to the fourth day at M'Arjie, when the holy light did not descend, and when the girl let go of his sleeve. And in another timeline, basking in the radiance, that same girl had made a solemn and stirring decision with her own hands. The endings were different, but neither could be forgiven. There was a time when the holy light had given Eluard nothing but silence. Then Master of Divergence answered. That answer was not redemption, but there was no path back to the man who once knelt in silence. And so Eluard walked on. In accordance with the Master's will, he placed divergences in every reflection destined to repeat the first world. If this world were only a mirror, then he would be the hand that scratched it open. And through those spreading cracks, the people who were never meant to have a future would finally step on roads of their own.