Lord of Annihilation

'Should I enter?' thought Olivia, hesitantly. Unease and vigilance wrestled with curiosity and a sense of adventure within her mind.

No matter how much she tried to rationalize the current events it was clearly evident that her current situation was extremely strange. 

Waking up alone inside a stone room situated in the middle of nowhere with her soul power strangely missing. No signs of her teacher, Lucius, or any living thing in the vicinity for that matter. 

A solitary path that started from the stone room and led to a strange dilapidated stone town.

Rather than say her current situation was a product of circumstances, it was more like someone or something was deliberately leading her somewhere.

Remaining outside the entrance of the stone town for a few minutes, Olivia's curiosity eventually won over her hesitance. 

The more time she stood outside this town, the more that feeling of familiarity grew within her heart.

'It's not like there is anywhere else to from here. Might as well check out this town and find out why it feels so familiar.' 

Throwing caution to the wind, Olivia stepped into the town. The moment she took that first step, a sense of relief washed over Olivia's heart and the unease disappeared from her mind. 

With the unease and hesitance gone, Olivia grew bolder with her actions. Curious about the insides of these stone houses, she stepped house nearest to the entrance to take a look.

The state of this house was better than that stone room she previously woke up in, but it was not by much. Broken walls, cracked floors, and decrepit ceilings were a common feature, alongside the green moss that grew everywhere.

If one had to take a guess on the age of this building, one would estimate it to be a few hundred to almost a thousand years old. It was not accurate, but that was the feeling it gave Olivia.

'There's no furniture or any items. Did people live in here?' Olivia wondered.

There were no tables, chairs, bedsteads, or any other furniture commonly found in homes. Apart from the broken fragments of rocks, and the overgrown patches of grass sparsely spread within, the interiors of the house were relatively empty.

There was, however, proper sectioning within the house. It wasn't just a singular, large open space, but a house with clearly defined rooms. Judging from their sizes, Olivia speculated the different rooms to respectively be: living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.

After looking through the entire house and finding nothing, Olivia eventually arrived before the only object of interest within the house. It was on a wall situated in the living room

An entire wall was painted with colorful murals. 

'Hmm, the murals are clearly drawn and a lot of colors were used. It's faded a lot, but I think I still make out some of the images,' Olivia thought to herself, as she carefully observed the murals.

Although the paint had largely faded due to the passage of time, some of the images were still clear to a degree where she was able to make out the individual images, albeit with some difficulty.

For example, one of the images depicted a scene where countless alien-shaped figures gathering around a large golden sphere and kneeling around it, seemingly in worship.

Another scene depicted a large snake swallowing balls of fire with its mouth open. Looking at those balls of fire, the image of stars appeared within Olivia's mind.

Every scene, object, and individual on the mural was painted with a bright color. There was an utter lack of dark colors such as blacks or grays. 

However, there was one oddity to this pattern.

'How strange, all the figures and items on this wall are painted with a bright color. However, this partially faded image towards the corner has a black-colored humanoid figure in it.' 

Leaning in closer, Olivia carefully studied this odd image. 

The scene was rather incomplete and hidden, due to a chunk of stone missing from the wall and the lack of proper light. 

The colors on this image were lighter and more weathered compared to the rest of the wall. However, the black-colored humanoid was rather prominent. 

In this scene, the black-colored humanoid was shackled and being dragged by a large beast. Surrounding him were many other humanoids and strangely-shaped figures in a similar situation, each one having a unique color.

The large beast that was dragging them couldn't be seen due to the missing wall chunk and neither was the destination.

'Why is this figure the only one colored in black and not a brighter color like the rest?' Olivia wondered. However, with insufficient clues, she was not able to make out the reason.

'Also, none of the figures have any features on their face. Their shapes are well-defined but their faces are blank.' This was another strange aspect of the murals. 

The scenes and the shapes of the various creature painted on the mural were well-defined. However, none of the creatures had any facial features apart from the shape of their heads.

'Very weird. Who drew these images?' Having observed the wall in its entirety, Olivia took a few steps back, looked around the house one last time, and then stepped outside the house.

The sun continued to brightly shine in the sky and hadn't seemed to have moved from its initial position at all. Evidentially, not much time had passed since her awakening in this strange place.

'Looks like there is a lot of daytime left,' Olivia concluded. 

She then looked around at the dozens of other similarly built stone houses and thought, 'I wonder if the other houses are similar to this one. Will there be more murals?'

The images depicting various scenes on the mural had evoked Olivia's sense of adventure. Clearly, there seemed to be some story behind each image and Olivia was curious to find more of them.

'Let's just go and check the houses,' deciding so, Olivia marched towards the next house closest to her.

----------

Many hours passed during with Olivia looked through almost all the houses populating this strange town. The stone houses did not differ in properties and were all virtually the same.

Four rooms were present in every house, albeit different in their order. There was no furniture or any traces of people having lived within. At least, not in the recent century.

The ages of each of the stone houses were similar, but the level of damage to their structures differed. Some were on the verge of collapsing while others were relatively fine. 

At first, Olivia chalked it up to their location inside the town with regards to the jungle surrounding them. However, this theory was shortly debunked when she found a few houses at the center of the town, much more decrepit than the ones on the outskirts.

Moving onto the only object of interest within the stones houses- the murals. 

Each stone house had a single wall dedicated to the colorful murals, but the location of this wall differed from house to house.

Some were in the living room, some were in the kitchen, some were in the bedroom, so on, and so forth. In one case, Olivia found a mural painted on the ceiling of the house causing her to almost miss it!

A point of interest about the murals, each one was completely different from the other. 

The scenes depicted were random and did not seem to follow any pattern. They did not have any obvious continuity, and there was not a single case of overlap between any of the images. Common characters were also a rare occurrence.

Olivia had made sure of this point by going back and rechecking some of the other murals from other houses.

Most of the images did not make any sense as they involved strange, convoluted shapes, confusing patterns, and grotesquely-shaped figures doing strange things or being in strange scenes. However, the pattern of using bright, radiant colors still continued.

Humanoid-shaped figures were relatively rare, but were nonetheless present. However, the scenes employing these humanoid figures were also equally strange and impossible to understand without any context. 

Nonetheless, Olivia found each of them to be extremely interesting and intriguing and memorized as much as her mind allowed her to.

Still, the most interesting and exciting discovery wasn't the ones stated above, but the one that follows; the mural within each house had at least one image depicting a scene with the black-colored humanoid figure as its center.

The color black was exclusively used to only depict this one human-shaped figure. He/she was the only recurring character within every single mural within every single house.

One scene showed the black-colored figure, fighting against an endless horde of creatures. 

Another scene showed the black-colored figure walking across a sea of red.

Olivia's favorite scene was the one where the black-colored figure was sitting upon a grey throne at the top of a strangely shaped mountain. Underneath that mountain were an innumerable number of creatures prostrating themselves in reverence to that black-colored figure.

There were hundreds of other images involving the black-colored figure, mostly depicting scenes of death and slaughter.

In fact, Olivia was able to partially sequence these hundreds of images and created a timeline tracking his/her progression. Just from the fact that she was able to partially piece together the various images, it was evident that the imaged involving the black-colored figure had continuity.

Still, her timeline was nowhere near complete and large holes were present in it. The hundreds of images were nowhere near enough to trace the life of the black-colored figure.

----------

Olivia found herself standing before the final stone house she had yet to enter in this town. 

This stone house, situated at the very center of the town, was noticeably larger and older than the other houses. There was as sense of discontinuity between this house and the rest of the town. 

It did not feel like this house belonged to the rest of the town and was rather detached from it

If one were to say the other houses were a thousand-years-old, then this stone house before her was at least a ten-thousand-years-old. Olivia, having noticed this oddness, left the exploration of this house to the end. 

Now that she had finished going through all the other houses, she had come to explore this final one.

Standing before the wide-open doorway, Olivia's face did not contain her previous excitement and curiosity, but was rather lost in thought. 

A single question bounced within her mind, bothering her to no little extent.

'Why was every single mural damaged exactly on the same spot where the image of the black-colored figure was drawn, while every other image was completely fine?'

Every single image that she had seen depicting the black-colored figure was incomplete and was missing one, if not multiple, portions of the wall it was drawn on.

Even stranger was the fact that no matter how much Olivia searched around for those missing chunks, she was unable to find it. 

'It's almost like someone has intentionally destroyed those portions of the wall, rather than the damage being done by natural causes.' 

As she continued to ponder about this question while standing at the entrance of the last unexplored house, Olivia, for the first time since waking up in this place, heard a sound. 

To be exact, it was a voice calling out to her, by her name.

"Olivia…"