Chapter Eight: The Price of Your Hands (
Scattered Pain & Darkness)
The storm outside thrashed the palace walls like a chorus of ghosts wailing in agony, the wind's howl a relentless dirge that swallowed sound and hope alike. Lightning fractured the gloom in violent white brightness, casting grotesque silhouettes into the candlelit halls.
Lucian moved like a shadow untethered by time, each step measured, heart pounding with cold fury. The bitter taste of revenge was thick upon his tongue, sharp and intoxicating. His hands twitched with dark energy—alive, eager.
At the threshold of Raphael's chamber, Lucian paused. His breath hitched—not for fear, but for the weight of the moment.
Inside, the cruel enforcer sat smiling, squeezing life out of a trembling servant boy for his own amusement. The boy's silent tears scorched Lucian's throat.
"You have no mercy," Lucian murmured, voice cold steel against the storm's roar. "No heart."
His fingers extended, claws lengthening—graceful, terrible—and the shadows curled and thickened around him.
A sudden stillness fell over the room as the candles flickered violently, their flames twisting and jerking before guttering low. The air chilled, a deathly cold spreading fast.
Raphael's smug smile faltered, then vanished into hate as he spun, hand reaching for the sword at his side—only to find it wrenched clean from his grasp by invisible, crushing force.
Lucian's power was silent but suffocating, a crushing weight dragging him close. His grip was vice-like on Raphael's shoulder, bones grinding, skin threatening to crack beneath holy wrath.
"Do you remember me?" Lucian hissed, voice close, a blade slicing between their shared breath.
"The boy whose ribs you broke for stubborn pride? The voice you tried to silence?"
Raphael's eyes, once filled with cruelty, flickered with unease.
"Tonight," Lucian said, his claws raking shadows along Raphael's cheek, "I take your hands."
The first pain was slow, deliberate.
Lucian lifted a filthy, gleaming knife—black as a starless night—its edge a promise of oblivion. He pressed the blade beneath Raphael's pinky, cold and remorseless, before an eruption of fiery agony tore from the man.
Each severed finger was its own symphony of torment: sharp, jagged, bleeding cries echoing through the chamber like the tolling of a death knell.
Lucian whispered, voice dark and steady:
"Where is the finger that struck my brother? Snip."
"Where is the hand that crushed my ribs? Snip."
Between each cut, Lucian's eyes searched Raphael's face, drinking in every tremble of pain, the slow dawning fear, the choking sobs that spilled like poison from his broken lips.
The servant boy outside whimpered softly—his cries drowned by Raphael's screams.
But Lucian did not rush.
The torment was a meticulous half-remembered justice, pieced from every moment of hatred and powerlessness he had ever endured.
When fingers bled into the floor, Lucian's claws shifted to flesh.
He sliced through sinew and bone, audible crunching sounds ripping the air.
The hands—once instruments of pain—soon lay broken and useless. Blood pooled thick, dripping into the antique wood, painting a terrifying tableau of retribution.
Lucian's voice was calm, deadly:
"Pain was your privilege... now it is your sentence."
Raphael begged, his voice cracking—but every plea was swallowed beneath Lucian's cold stare.
"No mercy," Lucian intoned.
"Not for the woman whose spine you shattered."
Lucian leaned close to the broken man, hands glistening with crimson.
"You crushed her hopes beneath your boot. Tell me—what did she beg for you to stop?"
The silence that followed was thick and suffocating.
Then, the blade slashed through Raphael's left wrist, bones snapping with sickening precision.
He collapsed forward, spasming, blood gushing unchecked—his body a vessel turned against itself.
Lucian caught him, holding the collapsing form steady, breath shallow and ragged.
Then, with cruel resolve, he severed Raphael's legs at the knees, one slow cut after the other—the flesh and bones yielding under the knife's cold hunger.
Raphael's screams tore through the chamber—not just pain, but desperate terror at his helplessness.
Lucian's eyes were rock-steady, unflinching as he witnessed suffering born from years of cold violation.
Blood soaked the stone floor, forming small rivers that vanished into the cracks.
But the final act was not swift—it was agony refined:
Lucian brought the blade to Raphael's throat, his hand steady despite blood slicking his fingers.
"Bleed... for her," he whispered.
The blade pressed deep into skin, drawing a slow, crimson fountain. The life ebbing away was slower, crueler—each heartbeat a hammer blow in this grim symphony.
Raphael's eyes, once proud, now glazed and wide, locked onto Lucian in silent accusation and unbearable pain.
Then, life slipped away in silence as Lucian waited in relentless calm.
As he withdrew the blade, Lucian grasped the corpse's shoulders with unnatural strength.
With a savage, final motion, he severed the head from the broken body, the spray of blood a dark halo in the candlelight.
He lifted the severed head, lips cold and whispered the final damnation:
"One gone."
Dragging the mutilated corpse to the doorway, Lucian fastened it to a heavy iron hook.
The head, frozen in an eternal rictus of horror, stared without sight.
Above it, in the dripping blood upon cold stone, the message was clear — a promise scrawled in the language of pain:
"One by one. I am coming."
Lucian felt the demon within roar, hungry for more carnage, voices like shadows clawing at his mind:
"Kill. Burn. Destroy them all."
But Lucian breathed, steady and cold, drowning the madness and promising control.
He passed a window where the storm's fury was muted, and for a moment, thunder illuminated the wild fire behind his eyes—a glance of pain and pleasure hanging together, tangled and indistinct.
That night, the castle trembled not from the storm, but from the whispered rise of a nightmare cloaked in human flesh.