The Unending Nightmare

The Eternal Nightmare of Rothlung Blacktowers
Recorded in nightmares, witnessed by none, endured by one.

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I. The Falling

Rothlung falls into darkness.

Not the peaceful dark of sleep, but the choking dark of fire and ash.  
A sky torn open above him bleeds red like a dying sunrise, its clouds swollen with smoke and ruin.  
The air tastes of iron. Every breath scrapes his throat raw.

The battlefield stretches before him—endless, burning, collapsing, reforming with every heartbeat.

Men scream.  
Steel clashes.  
Horses shriek and thrash in the inferno.

Fiontann stands amidst the flames, battered but living, shield raised, roaring defiance into a world that has already chosen death for them.  
Basaran is beside him, half-supporting a wounded Dawn-soldier whose name Rothlung cannot grasp—because the man never survives long enough in this nightmare for Rothlung to remember him.

The world burns around them.  
And above it all, she stands:

Caelin.

Her figure is outlined perfectly against the inferno.  
Her hair gleams silver in the firelight.  
Her hands steady.  
Her bow lowered.

She gathers her elves—her own.  
Her chosen.  
Those worthy of her effort.

She does not look toward Rothlung’s men.

Her feet turn.  
She steps into the smoke.  
She leaves them.

She leaves him.

Arrows fall like divine judgement.

“ROTH! SHIELD UP!”

Fiontann’s voice—steady even here, even now—cuts through the storm.

Rothlung raises his shield by instinct.  
The familiar weight grounds him, even as the nightmare twists it into something it was never meant to be.

It is Hardoleth’s shield.  
The crest of the Bloody Dawn burns bright on the metal—  
a crimson sunrise melting into black steel.

It should not be here.  
He did not carry it that day.

The nightmare does not care.

Fireballs crash.  
Arrows rain down.  
Every strike rattles his bones.

Behind him, another soldier screams.

One he never saves.  
One he will never save.

Every night he tries.  
Every night he fails.

---

II. The Betrayal

“Rothlung!” Basaran’s voice breaks through the smoke.  
“We’re cut off—we have to fall back!”

Fall back.  
He remembers falling back.  
He remembers surviving.

But survival in this place tastes like ash.

Rothlung hauls the wounded soldier onto his shoulders. Blood spills down his back, hot and sticky, too real to be dreamed.  
Fiontann hacks through burning debris, forging a path toward safety the way he always has—loyal, unyielding, relentless.

But behind them, always behind them…

Rothlung hears the dying.

Men he trained.  
Men who trusted him.  
Men who followed him.

Their screams stitch themselves into his skin.

Hardoleth appears between the flames—  
but not as he was.

He is taller.  
Hotter.  
His armour glows like molten ore.  
His face is made of ash, hollow and cracked, two ember-pits for eyes.

He raises a finger accusingly.

“You left them.”

Rothlung’s breath stumbles.

“No—”

“You watched them burn.”

The earth shakes beneath him.

“You failed them.”

The wounded soldier slips from Rothlung’s arms—  
not by choice, never by choice—  
and lands face-first in the ash.

Still.  
Silent.  
Gone.

He never moves.

He never does.

“MOVE!” Basaran roars, grabbing Rothlung by the arm.  
“We’re not losing you too—!”

But Rothlung’s legs sink into the ground.

Not mud.

Not earth.

Bodies.

The corpses of men he never saved.

Hands claw upward, grasping his greaves, his ankles, his thighs, dragging him down as if begging him not to leave them again.

Caelin’s silhouette shines on the ridge above.

She watches.

She always watches.

The arrows return.

Fire returns.

And in the moment before the world ends—  
before the screams become one endless sound—  
her voice drifts like broken glass across his mind:

“Eternal life does not bring eternal happiness.”

Something inside Rothlung snaps.

“Then let me die.”

The nightmare refuses.

He wakes to fire.

Again.

---

III. The Cycle Tightens

I breathe in ash.

It breathes back.

The world reforms around me—  
fire first, then bodies, then the ridge, then Caelin’s silhouette.

Everything is wrong.

The ridge is closer.  
The tents are twisted.  
The sky is darker—blackened red, a wound that never scabs over.

Shadows crawl across the ground like starving animals.

The storm above swirls in impossible spirals—  
spirals shaped like Hardoleth’s crest,  
but broken, dripping embers like blood.

I am not meant to leave this cycle.

The air shifts behind me.

A voice.

My captain’s voice.

But twisted.  
Hollow.  
Stolen.

“Rothlung…”

I turn.

Hardoleth stands where Fiontann should be.

Armoured.  
Glowing.  
Eyes empty.

“Captain…?” I whisper.

His ash-face cracks, glowing lines spreading like burning veins.

“You left them.”

The corpses beneath the ash begin to move.

“You watched them burn.”

Hands claw upward, tightening around me.

“You should have died with them.”

The nightmare clenches its fist.

And I fall deeper.

 

---

IV. Beneath the Ash

The fall never ends.

Fire peels away first.  
Then sound.  
Then light.

Rothlung slams into stone.

Cold.

Not earth—never earth—but black rock veined with bone-white fractures, as though the world itself has been shattered and crudely stitched back together. The air here is heavy, stale, thick with old smoke and older sorrow.

Chains rattle.

He knows that sound.

He knows it before he sees him.

Himself.

A younger Rothlung hangs from the cavern wall, wrists bound in chains made of pale, polished bone—elven bone. His armour is scorched, cracked, barely held together. His face is raw with grief and fury, eyes burning with a desperate, untempered hatred.

This is who he was.

This is who he left behind.

The chained Rothlung lifts his head slowly.

“You finally came,” the younger one rasps.  
“You left me here.”

The words hit harder than any blade.

“I didn’t—” Rothlung begins.

“You watched,” the younger self snarls. “You watched them burn. You heard them scream. You lived.”

The chains tighten, grinding against bone.

“Why did we live?” the younger Rothlung demands. “Why them and not us?”

The cavern trembles.

And then—

She appears.

Caelin steps out of the darkness like a ghost carved from moonlight. Her form flickers, distorted, as though the nightmare itself struggles to hold her shape.

Her eyes are calm.

Always calm.

“You survived,” she says gently.  
“I saved who I could.”

The younger Rothlung screams—a sound ripped raw from his throat—and strains against the chains.

“You chose!” he roars. “You chose them over us!”

Caelin’s expression does not change.

“You carry their deaths because you must,” she replies. “You hate me because you cannot hate yourself.”

Rothlung feels the words carve into him.

The cavern closes in.

The chains glow white-hot.

Hatred surges—hotter, sharper, intoxicating.

The younger Rothlung twists, bones cracking, muscles bulging, his form warping under the weight of fury and despair.

“Kill her,” the younger one snarls.  
“Kill them all.”

---

V. The Slaughter

The cavern shatters.

Rothlung is dragged back into the fire.

But now—

Now the battlefield is different.

The elves stand where his men once did.

Silver armour.  
Perfect formations.  
Bows drawn.

Their faces are cold.  
Unchanged.  
Untouched by time.

The younger Rothlung charges.

There is no hesitation.

No mercy.

His spear tears through elven ranks. His shield crushes bone and steel alike. Blood—silver-bright—spills across the ash.

Rothlung watches.

Unable to stop it.  
Unable to look away.

Every strike is driven by betrayal.  
Every kill fueled by memory.

The elves fall screaming now—  
but the sound does not soothe him.

It never does.

Because Caelin stands beyond the carnage.

Untouched.

Watching.

Always watching.

Her voice follows him through the slaughter.

“You cannot kill what you refuse to face.”

The battlefield folds.

Bodies pile.

Blood soaks into the ash until the ground itself screams.

And still—

Still it is not enough.

---

VI. The Loop

The world tears itself apart.

Fire returns.  
Arrows return.  
Screams return.

Fiontann’s voice echoes again—alive, desperate, unwavering.

Basaran’s shout follows.

The ridge reforms.

Caelin turns away.

The betrayal begins anew.

Each cycle is slower.

Heavier.

More fractured.

Rothlung’s thoughts blur. Memory bleeds into memory. Past and present collapse into one endless moment of fire and loss.

Voices whisper from the ash.

“You left us.”  
“We weren’t worth saving.”  
“You lived.”

Hatred becomes everything.

The only constant.

The only anchor.

The nightmare feeds on it—  
shapes it—  
refines it.

Until Rothlung can no longer tell where the dream ends and he begins.

He runs through fire again.

Screaming again.

Breaking again.

And the nightmare waits.

Patient.

Eternal.

 

---

VII. The Breaking

Time loses meaning.

Rothlung no longer knows how many times the fire has returned. The nightmare blurs at the edges, scenes bleeding into one another until past and present collapse into a single, suffocating moment.

He sees Fiontann fall—  
then standing—  
then shouting—  
then gone.

Basaran drags him free—  
then burns—  
then lives—  
then screams again.

Hardoleth dies in a bed—  
then burns on the field—  
then stands in judgement—  
then crumbles into ash.

Each memory repeats, layered atop the last, grinding his mind thin like steel worn down on stone.

He begins to forget what truly happened.

Only what the nightmare insists upon remains.

Fire.  
Betrayal.  
Survival.

The younger Rothlung appears again and again—sometimes chained, sometimes charging, sometimes kneeling in the ash, clutching his head and screaming into the ground.

“You let this happen,” the younger one whispers now, no longer raging, only hollow.  
“You lived.”

Rothlung tries to answer.

He cannot remember what he once believed.

His armour feels heavier. His limbs slower. His thoughts drag like rusted steel.

The nightmare tightens its grip.

---

VIII. The Truth the Nightmare Feeds

Caelin’s voice returns—not from one place, but from everywhere.

“You needed someone to blame.”

Rothlung staggers through the burning ruins of the camp, stepping over bodies that shift and change with every glance—sometimes Dawn-soldiers, sometimes elves, sometimes faces he cannot name.

“You could not hate the dead,” she continues.  
“You could not hate yourself.”

Her form flickers between the flames, always just out of reach.

“So you chose us.”

The words sink into him like poison.

Rothlung raises his weapon, but the strength is gone. The fire dims. The battlefield pauses, waiting.

“You survived,” Caelin says again, softer now. “They did not.”

The younger Rothlung appears beside her—bloodied, shaking, eyes feral.

“I didn’t choose this,” he snarls.

“But you carry it,” she replies.

The world resumes.

Arrows fall.

Fire spreads.

Screams rise.

And Rothlung understands—too late, too deeply—that the nightmare is not punishing him.

It is preserving him.

---

IX. The Eternal Return

The cycle no longer resets cleanly.

Sometimes Rothlung awakens mid-scream.  
Sometimes mid-swing.  
Sometimes kneeling in ash, unable to remember how long he has been there.

The battlefield reforms endlessly, imperfectly.

Fiontann and Basaran always survive—always just out of reach—living proof that escape was possible, that survival was real, that the choice to live was not wrong.

And that knowledge cuts deeper than any blade.

Hardoleth watches from every shadow.

The younger Rothlung fades and returns, breaking further each time.

Caelin never burns.

She never bleeds.

She simply leaves.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Rothlung runs.

He always runs.

Toward fire.  
Toward memory.  
Toward hatred.

The nightmare does not end.

It slows.

It repeats.

It waits.

---

X. The Coma

Somewhere beyond the fire—beyond the ash and screaming and endless betrayal—Rothlung’s body lies still.

Breathing.

Alive.

Unaware.

But within his mind, the battlefield stretches on, eternal and unyielding.

His thoughts fracture further with every passing cycle.

Memory becomes myth.

Pain becomes purpose.

Hatred becomes identity.

And as the nightmare settles into its endless rhythm, one truth remains—unchanging, unbreakable:

Rothlung Blacktowers will relive this moment forever.

Because survival was his sin.

Because memory was his curse.

Because hatred is all that remains to him now.

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And so the fire rises once more.

The arrows fall again.

And Rothlung wakes—

—to fire.