PROPHECY'S BLADE

CHAPTER 15 - THE APPRENTICE'S FOLLY

In the subterranean tomb, the Midnight Guardian stirred. Millennia of slumber had woven into its bones, but Jarad's bumbling apprentice, Fike, had unwittingly plucked awake its monstrous hunger. The earth shivered with its awakening, a seismic tremor of ancient wrath.

Jarad, a grizzled sorcerer etched with the passage of countless eons, cursed under his breath. Beside him, Jayden, the heir to Fike's clumsy magic, gripped his staff, eyes wide with youthful terror. Even Alex, a fledgling barely versed in the Arcane, sensed the encroaching darkness.

"Fike, you blasted oaf!" Jarad roared, emerald fire spitting from his fingertips. "Open a portal, now!"

But Fike's face contorted in frustration. "Master, my aura..." it sputtered out, thin and wispy as cobwebs. "It's gone."

The earth split open as the Midnight Guardian rose, a leviathan of obsidian wings and eyes that bled crimson fury. The air thickened with an oppressive aura, a black tide threatening to drown them whole. Alex, eyes wide with the raw fear of a fawn before a wolf, choked, "Dad, I can't..."

Jayden, a flicker of defiance in his youthful eyes, stepped forward. "Hold on, Alex! I've got..."

Before his incantation could take form, the barrier at the tomb's mouth shattered. The Midnight Guardian, a hurricane of fury, swept down upon them. Fike, ever the pragmatist, yelped, "So this is how I die?"

Jarad snarled, "Shut your maw, Fike! No one dies on my watch!" But even his seasoned bravado felt hollow in the face of such monstrous power.

But then, the unexpected. Alex, the novice, the terrified boy, did something no one could have foreseen. His eyes, once blue as a summer sky, flared with an alien black, an echo of the Midnight Guardian's own abyss. And from him, a power, raw and untamed, pulsed outward.

The Midnight Guardian, in its furious descent, faltered. It landed, bewildered, before this strange child who now emitted an aura as dark as its own. Jayden, Jarad, Fike – all witnesses to this impossible shift – stared, fear wrestling with disbelief in their eyes.

"How dare you," Alex's voice, once meek, now echoed with chilling authority.

And just like that, the unstoppable force, the harbinger of oblivion, knelt.

Before anyone could fathom this shift, Alex, overwhelmed by the torrent of unknown power, collapsed. Jayden, with the reflexes of a seasoned warrior, caught him. As Fike, his aura miraculously restored, tore open a portal, they fled, leaving the stunned Guardian behind, its crimson gaze fixed on the fading figures, a question burning in its ancient eyes: who was this child, he reminds me of that man.

This was just the first chapter in their perilous journey. The awakening of the Midnight Guardian was a tremor, a harbinger of a darkness yet to unfold. Alex, the unwilling vessel of an unknown power, had become the fulcrum on which their fate, and perhaps the fate of the world, balanced. Their escape was merely a reprieve, a pause in the storm that now raged within the boy and without. The question hung heavy in the air: would he be savior or doom, a star against the encroaching darkness or a harbinger of oblivion?

Only time, and the trials to come, would tell.

HEYYY!! THANK YOU FOR READING THAT'S THE END OF CHAPTER 15!!