Altus Plateau, Second Church of Marika.
Above the ruins, bloodroses bloomed among broken stone pillars and crumbling walls. Their scarlet petals looked especially stark in the weak sunlight, like new shoots growing from old wounds. The Bloody Fingers firmly believed that the Mohgwyn Dynasty would one day rise from the corpse of the Golden Dynasty, just as these flowers blossomed from the ruins.
Inside the church, Eleonora stood silently. She wore dark Dragon Knight Armor, her face completely concealed beneath a black iron helmet, leaving only an icy gaze visible. She stood straight as a pine, proud and solitary as an eagle. Her eyes passed through the shattered stained-glass windows toward the foot of the mountain, where people were busily rebuilding their homes. The work chants of those hauling stone drifted faintly upward, and cooking smoke curled from makeshift huts. Though exhaustion marked every face, their eyes shone with a vitality long absent.
Hope, that long-forgotten thing, had returned to the Lands Between.
Since the founding of the Five-Party Alliance, the fires of war had gradually died down, order had been restored, and ordinary people could finally look forward to tomorrow. The sight reminded her of the Land of Reeds, her homeland. It had once been just as peaceful, with endless rice fields and clear rivers, its people following the ancient way of the samurai and living simple, fulfilling lives.
Until the appearance of the "Blood of the Undying."
That cursed power had spread like a plague, igniting the deepest desires in people's hearts. Nations clashed and brothers slaughtered one another in pursuit of immortality. By the time she came to her senses, her homeland lay shattered, overrun by monsters. And the source of every tragedy led back to the "Divine Dragon" that had brought the Blood of the Undying.