With a loud exhale he called to the spiders and they coalesced back into a bracer upon his wrist.
"Display sampling and analysis results," Altha commanded.
The projection appeared: (Inconclusive)—for all key data sets.
The study concluded that across an expansive, multi-dimensional spectrum of comparative DNA archives, no correlation could be found. No lineage, no taxonomy that would situate the creature within any known category. By strict implication, he had encountered—and documented—a wholly unclassified species of dragon.
Yet another possibility gnawed at the edges of the conclusion: that the archives themselves were insufficient, their records on draconic biology too fragmentary to offer meaningful comparison.
A sharp, familiar thrum pulsed behind his eyes—pain that had become a constant companion in this accursed place. Always dancing on the edge, just always a step away from complete psyche depletion.
"How does it go again—the laws of trade? Something about demand and supply..." a voice echoed in his head.
He sluggishly picked himself off the cold floor, joints protesting, and fixed his gaze upon the Emberborn Leviathan. The creature regarded him in turn, its eyes burning with an unearthly crimson luminescence, steady and unblinking.
Another wave of pain surged through his skull, forcing him to brace himself against the nearest wall. His other hand pressed hard against his temple, a futile gesture, as though mere pressure could contain the ache clawing its way deeper into his mind.
His stomach growled—long, low, insistent—reminding him of the days he had endured without sustenance.
Summoning his will, he called the red gem to his palm through the thin thread of telepathy he still commanded. It appeared at once, radiating its steady scarlet pulse, within which stirred the faint residue of some chaotic and untamed energy.
Following the memory of what the knight had done upon first arriving in this forsaken temple, he set the gem against his teeth and bit down. Predictably, nothing happened. His teeth barely left a mark on its flawless surface.
He sank to his knees. The walls pressed in. Escape no longer felt improbable—it felt nearly inconceivable.
A flare of frustration compelled him to hurl the useless thing across the room, into the shadows. Soul-Fracts, after all, were worthless to one without Ether.
Yet, mid-motion, he hesitated, arm arrested in the air. Slowly, he lowered it until his palm lay open, cradling the gem, his face obscured behind his fingers. Through the narrow slits between them, he caught it—the Leviathan's eyes, locked on the gem with a predator's fixation, its gaze coiled and tense.
His stomach answered with another growl, louder this time.
"You're hungry too, huh?" he murmured, glancing from gem to beast. "I don't know… something tells me I shouldn't give this to you. A lot could go very bad, very quickly."
The phrase lingered in his thoughts. Could go very bad, very quickly.
Calling forth the immaterial screen—an interface woven into his link with the Spire, he navigated to:
> [Remembrances]
Then to:
> [Scarlet Seedling]
Remembrance-Type: Consumable Athar-Encoded Artifact
Forms: Emberfruit (Consumable Fruit)
Core Aspects: Ash, Fyr, Pyre's Null Cycle
Remembrance-Class: Indelible
Resonance Conditions: Must be fully metabolized by the host.
Psyche-based conduit (Compatible)
The screen shifted, its edges traced with a faint red glow, the gem in his hand pulsing in quiet rhythm with it.
He summoned the fruit into his hand and pondered for a moment, wandering if he should take such a risk. The fruit's description said few dared survive the process of metabolizing such potent energy. How would he fair any differently?
Yet the calculus was merciless. It was death by hunger, or death by surfeit—this decaying temple as the stage for either demise. It was a question of preferred safety or calculated risk.
He exhaled slowly. "Always a question of two evils."
He didn't know why but without invitation, a memory returned to him—his trial in the vision, the still, misty waters, and the silent promise they had whispered. A promise of deliverance from suffering through either comfort or surrender.
Though his body now stood free of that phantom shore, his mind had not yet been released. Something within him still operated under the grim arithmetic of the survivalist—an instinct that had guided him for most of his life.
Like the path of coal and water, both futures were uncertain. However one was more predictable than the other. The water was risk masquerading as the allure of safety and the coals a were calculated risk under the guise of suffering, well predictability had its own form of mercy I suppose.
In truth, it seemed the choice had already been made for him. The diminishing hope of felling a beast that would not dissolve into ash or metal upon death had become a thin thread indeed.
With quiet resolve, he brought the Scarlet Seedling to his lips. Its flavor bloomed instantly across his tongue—sharp, alien, and beyond the limits of his known palate.
He chewed, and swallowed the fruit.
The fruit seared his throat as it descended, and the moment it met the corrosive bath of his stomach acids, the warmth metastasized into a scalding conflagration. It surged upward first—assaulting the brain with a fevered blaze—before cascading through the rest of his body in merciless waves.
A dreadful alchemy began within: bone heated to the brink of combustion, marrow boiling into a pressurized scream within its prison of calcium.
His blood thickened under the heat, each vein and artery a furnace channel, while the water in his tissues transmuted into vapor—yet, defying the laws of physics, refused to escape. The steam was trapped, caged beneath skin and sinew, each pulse of pressure amplifying the sensation of imminent rupture.
He writhed upon the stone floor, limbs striking against it in erratic spasms, teeth clenched against a scream that threatened to tear itself from his lungs. The effort to contain it became its own kind of torture—one born of both pride and desperation.
Without his consent, the bracer on his wrist flickered to life, its cold mechanical voice cutting through the haze of agony:
> (Body temperature: Rising)
(Homeostasis: Failing)
(Code S.L.S'C, conditions met)
(Artificial Thermoregulation: Activated)
A serpentine chill surged through him as the bracer receded into his skin, sluicing into his veins with the invasive precision of a scalpel. It was not relief. It was the weaponized opposite of the heat consuming him, a shock of engineered cold so sudden it felt like shards of glacial glass being threaded through his circulatory system.
His body convulsed as the two forces collided—blazing internal fire against invasive synthetic frost—each competing for dominion over his flesh. The sensation was not balance but war: muscles locking, unclenching, then locking again as the thermal currents fought to claim him.
He could feel his organs recoil against the temperature swing; his lungs burned and froze with each breath, his stomach lurched, and his spine felt as if an invisible hand were bending it backward to its breaking point. The bracer's internal systems pulsed rhythmic bursts through his nervous pathways, recalibrating tissue temperature by forcibly redistributing heat, a process that carried with it the subtle stench of scorched protein rising faintly from his skin.
Somewhere beneath the pain, he sensed the algorithm's cold indifference—it was a machine's idea of salvation, one that valued equilibrium over comfort, and survival over sanity.
Niobe spoke once more, her voice echoing as if multiple Niobes were all speaking at the same time.
> (Artificial Thermoregulation: Failing)
(Organ Failure Imminent)
(Code S.L.S'C, conditions met.)
(Emergency Countermeasure: Initiated)
(Releasing (NAPA-12))
His eyes shot open as a flood of biochemical violence coursed through him. Cortisol spiked to catastrophic levels, adrenaline lacerated his nerves into raw filaments, while endorphins and oxytocin struggled in futility to bind mind to flesh like chemical anchors fraying against the tide.
The experience was not pain alone but the very disintegration of order within the vessel of his being.
Convinced he would shatter under the assault, he summoned the Petalbrand Ring, its passive attribute Fire Emblem affording moderate resistance against Fyr-induced trauma. At the same time he directed the Emberborn Leviathan to enact Phoenix Drain, attempting to siphon and metabolize a portion of the rampant Fyr terraforming his biology. It was a desperate strategy, but it produced results, together the ring and beast blunted the torment by a fractional margin —enough to endure, not enough to ease—
For a while things went on like this, squirming on the ground kicking and flailing. thrashing across the stone as though his body sought any posture that might disperse the torment. His thoughts became fragmented into a litany of pleas—silent, verbal, primal—let it stop, let it end, when, when, when, when, when…
Through blurry vision he saw the Petalbrand Ring fracturing. Jagged cracks traced its surface like veins of molten glass, radiant fissures spilling light that pulsed with each convulsion of his body. Yet there was no space left in him for fear of its destruction; the pain annihilated all considerations but itself.
And then—an agonizing eternity later—he felt the threshold give. The torment ceased not with gentleness but with the brutal suddenness of a blade drawn from flesh. He collapsed into motionless silence, lungs dragging in ragged gasps, every nerve still echoing with the memory of fire.
The ordeal was a grotesque reprise of the earlier vision: the onyx rod, the consuming Fyr, the intolerable heat—all woven together by the single unifying motif of pain, a pain that flowered like some obscene blossom within him, watered by blood, and illuminated by the brilliance of his own restrained screams.
> [Scarlet Seedling: Destroyed]
[Petalbrand Ring: Destroyed]
[2 Echoes: Gained]
[Resonance Conditions Fulfilled]
[New Aspect Gained: Null (Fyr, Ash)]
His cheek pressed against the stone, body draped like a discarded rag on the ancient floors. Time dissolved around him —minutes or hours, he could not tell— and he thought he might remain there forever, surrendering to the comfort of forgetting.
But as if mocking his weakness a grawl echoed throughout the chamber reminding him, giving him a "why" for the pain.
But was that "why" enough?
When he could simply lay there and let time spin it's yarn, and be forgotten in turn.
All this suffering, all this pain, all this torment, and for what?
Would spiting reality truly be worth all this?
Niobe's voice stirred faintly, distorted as though spoken through a wall. Yes, that was it, a wall of pain erected around his mind, to protect him, to shield him, like a weaponized cage.
"What was he fighting for? Truth be told he had never known. He had only ever survived, and survival, it seemed, would once again suffice.
The floor clung to his skin, cold stone slick with the sweat he had poured out in hours of writhing. His body felt hollowed, scoured out from the inside, every muscle too stiff to obey as he lifted himself up, arms shaky. His feet quivered with every step.
Even so he made his way outside the chamber, walked beyond that weathered archway veiled in ivy, made it down the steps, the air cold against his skin, each breeze feeling like a blade biting into him.
He collapsed near the fountain and drank its waters. Drank and drank and drank until his thirst retreated, then mustering the strength to stand again. He climbed the cathedral steps, inside awaited ashes and forgotten bloodstains.
Walking out the other end, he leaned against the exit, hunger threading through him, growing stronger by the second. In a dizzy fit he stumbled onto the bridge. Only metal corpses still remained, a reminder of another threat that yet roamed these temple ruins.
He kneeled down where the red bull had been slayed and cupped some ash in his hands. Hesitantly he brought the ashes closer licking them a bit before fully committing.
Even the eating felt hollow, hollow but useful like his heart. A doctrine once forced upon him so absolutely. He felt it pressing deeper now, an old friend. It was loathsome and promising, it was numbness cradled in his hands, cupped in his hands like this meal he must devour.
He looked up, skyward, but where he saw stars in his vision of the priestess, now only a blurred mass veiled beyond the arcane barrier, just a motionless canvas of violets, navies, and blacks.
Focusing his gaze where the Petalbrand Ring used to be, he sighed, tired, bitter, hollow.
"A pity..."