The Ruins By Scott Smith Novels & Stories

Jason followed him and glanced back once with an apologetic smile while the cold girl named Alyssa stared at Noah for a bit before taking her leave too. Noah, on the other hand, frowned. He didn't know what the man was talking about. To his knowledge, Ruins were sort of like inheritance grounds where a high level Battlesoul master once lived while they were alive. The things found could be weapons, Elixirs, resources or battle techniques. He didn't think that his three-day absence would cost him some valuable intel.

“I can’t meet you again.” “I have to be faithful.” “Victor doesn’t deserve this.” Neither did I. But I won’t say that out loud. I don’t get to. Not when I’m the ruin she keeps crawling back to. Not when I’m the name she never should’ve said in the dark. Not when I’m the truth she’ll always run from, even if a part of her wants to stay. The sky above me is soft now, pale and quiet, like the day hasn’t fully woken up yet. Maybe it knows better than to witness this. Maybe even the sun doesn’t want to see what’s left behind.

the voice said. Then the image — Violet had blond hair now, cropped and precise; the red suit she wore cut into her as if the fabric were armor. Her eyes were thin knives. The girl who once laughed at small things and hid scars under loose sleeves was gone in the way that rain removes dust, she had been cleansed into a different weather.

In a matter of seconds, they were lying on the floor in the pool of their making, and thanks to the loud music and the sex, no one came to cause more trouble for us. I hated spilling blood unnecessarily. “You’re getting better with your shit.” I complimented stepping over the dead bodies and kicking the door open. “I learned from the best.” He replied taking his place by my side, then let out a soft curse when our eyes landed on Liam soon to be fuckin' dead, who had his cock stuffed in some chick’s throat. His hands were on the desk, fingers wrapped around a 100 Dollar note as he inhaled the white powder on the silverware lying around. Upon our intrusion, his minions shot up to try to stop

Her father had broken her with a single sentence, tossed off in a moment of panic, no forethought in it at all. Luca had broken her methodically, deliberately, exactly the way he did everything else, and there was something almost unbearable about the difference between those two kinds of ruin, one careless, one intentional, without either of them offering her anything resembling comfort in return. She fell asleep eventually, still searching anyway, and found nothing there to comfort her at all.

The apartment was a ruin. The elegant, pale hardwood floors were deformed and buckled. Water stains bloomed across the ceiling like hideous flowers. The smell of damp drywall and lost dreams choked the air. The restoration foreman spoke in low, technical tones about industrial dehumidifiers and concrete testing, his words a meaningless hum.

Its voice crawls inside me as the light fades from its corpse. “She’ll burn the world for you,” it says with its last breath. And gods— That almost kills me more than its claws. Because maybe it’s true. Maybe she already has. By the time I stagger into the valley, I can’t feel my legs. My blood’s painting the stones. My lungs taste like rust and smoke. The ruins stretch out below like bones picked clean. Once, this was a city. Once, this was home to a thousand lives. Now it’s a graveyard of blackened spires and broken towers, ash swirling like snow.

Something quieter and older, a landscape I had never seen, arriving with the weight of something that was showing me a real place rather than a constructed one. Black stone ruins stretched in every direction under a sky the color of ash. Not the ruins of something that had fallen recently. No. The collapse was too complete, too settled, the stone too deeply embedded in the earth around it for anything less than generations of weathering. Whatever this place had been it had stopped being it a very long time ago. The remnants of walls rose in irregular intervals like broken teeth, their edges worn smooth by years of cold wind, and between them the ground was dark and scarred in a way that was

It carried the smells of damp stone, wild grass, and over it all the sweet‑rot tang of rituals laid and relaid until the ground itself remembered. They’d brought her to a ruin. An old one. Stone half‑sunken into a low hill, walls broken in places, arches open to the bruised sky. Silver runes crawled across the remaining surfaces—some old, some newer and harsher, Tribunal strokes intersecting Lunaris curves in jarring ways. In the center of the ruin, where once there might have been a hall or a courtyard, a dais sat. It's not as massive as Moonfall. It's more like an altar.

RAVEN The world was quiet after the storm. Too quiet. Smoke still curled up from the ruins of what had once been our home… our territory, our war, our nightmare. The earth was soaked with blood and rain, and for a long while, I just stood there, watching the dawn crawl across the wreckage. The sky bled from black to gray to gold, a slow kind of mercy after the night we’d survived. Kieran stood a few feet away, his back to me, shoulders bare and bruised, his body still trembling from the change. Even like that, covered in dirt, blood, and loss; he looked unbreakable. Unforgiving. And mine.