'Why won't anyone help me?'
The thought crashed through Cel's mind as consciousness dragged him back to a world of agony. His body convulsed against cold stone, a broken sob tore from his throat. Everything hurt - his ribs, his face, his back where fingernails had carved away divine flesh like his father was peeling bark from a tree.
'Mom…'
She'd just stood there. Watched him bleed. Let it happen.
"No, no, no..." The words spilled out in a broken whisper as he curled tighter against the floor. His hands shook violently as they pressed against his mouth, trying to hold back the sounds that wanted to escape. Screams. More sobs. Anything to release the pressure building in his chest like a dam about to burst.
Iron bars swam in and out of focus through his tears. A cell. They'd thrown him in a cell like some wild beast. The stench of rot and waste made his stomach heave, but there was nothing left to vomit.
'This isn't real.' The thought came sudden and desperate. 'This is a nightmare. I'll wake up, Father will apologize, Mom will hold me and—'
But the pain was too sharp, too constant. The stone too cold against his burning skin.
'They'll come for me,' he told himself, rocking back and forth on the filthy stone. 'Father was just angry. Mom will convince him. She has to. She's my mother, she loves me, she—'
The memory crashed back unbidden: His mother - who'd held him when he had nightmares, who'd sung lullabies in her ocean-blessed voice - had watched her husband nearly kill their son and done nothing. Darian, who used to sneak him sweets from the kitchen when they were younger, didn't intervene either. Even little Lyra…
'She cried,' some desperate part of his mind whispered. 'At least she cried for me...'
But crying wasn't enough. Tears didn't stop fists. Didn't heal torn flesh. Didn't make him worth saving.
'Fifteen years...'
Fifteen years he'd tried to be good enough. Tried to make them proud. Tried to earn even a scrap of his father's approval. And the very moment he thought he'd finally succeeded…
Cel's fingernails clawed at the stone beneath him, leaving bloody scratches as his body shook with grief. The Moon Goddess had chosen him. He was blessed by divinity itself, and his father had beaten him unconscious for it.
'Why?' The question burned in his chest, over and over. 'Why wasn't it enough? Why was I never enough?'
But even as he asked it, a part of him already knew the answer. Nothing would have ever been enough. Not for his father. Not for any of them.
The realization seared through his veins like molten metal. Fresh tears burned tracks down his swollen cheeks as reality crashed over him again and again like waves against a drowning man.
A whimper echoed from across the narrow corridor, so quiet he almost missed it through his own ragged breathing. Cel lifted his head, vision blurry with tears and pain. He saw another cell. Inside, a small form huddled against the wall - a child even younger than himself, wrapped in filthy rags.
The sight hit him like another blow. This boy was suffering too. Abandoned too. And Cel couldn't even help himself, let alone anyone else.
"I'm sorry…," he whispered to the motionless child. For being weak. For being useless. For being exactly what his father said he was.
Footsteps echoed from somewhere above - slow and deliberate, growing closer. Cel's entire body flinched against the stone, panic flooding his veins. His father. It had to be his father, coming to finish what he'd started. To carve away more of the mark, or maybe just end it entirely.
'Please…,' he thought desperately, pressing himself against the back wall as light flickered down the corridor. 'Please, I'll be better. I'll try harder. I'll—'
Even now, even after everything, a part of him still wanted to beg for forgiveness. Still believed he could somehow earn their love back if he just tried hard enough.
But the figure that emerged from the shadows wasn't Lord Aldric of House Solmar.
A stranger in deep purple robes stood before his cell, face hidden behind a smooth black mask that reflected the lantern light like a void. The man said nothing at first, simply watched through empty eye holes as Cel shook, bled and tried not to fall apart completely.
Then he spoke with a sickening cheerful voice.
"Ah, you're finally awake, little failure."
The word hit like a physical blow. Cel's body jerked against the wall, every muscle tensing. 'Failure failure failure' - the word crashed through his skull, tangling with his father's voice, with every whispered insult he'd ever endured..
"Not so talkative, are we?" The masked figure's head tilted. "Well, that's understandable. Betrayal does tend to leave one speechless."
"My father—" Cel started, voice cracking. Some desperate part of him still clinging to the hope that this was all a misunderstanding. That his family would come. That they'd realize their mistake and—
"Oh, your dear father?" The masked figure paused, savoring the moment. "He's the one who delivered you to us personally. Quite eager to be rid of his shame, from what I understand."
"You're lying!" His voice cracked on the shout, nearly breaking. But even as the echo died in the cell, he could feel the truth settling like lead in his chest.
"Ah, you poor thing. But fear not. I'm a kind person. I'll explain your situation. Or... perhaps you'd rather not know? Ignorance is bliss, after all."
Cel flinched with each sound, pressing himself deeper into the corner. But the need to understand, to make sense of this nightmare, overwhelmed even his terror.
"Tell me." The words ripped from somewhere desperate inside him.
"Really? Well, I hope you're ready for a shock." The masked figure paused, clearly relishing the moment. "You're now in the possession of the Children of the Voidmother, the greatest cult in the world!"
'Children of the... what? Voidmother?'
The word 'cult' cut through his confusion with terrible clarity. His father had sold him to a cult. Not just abandoned him - deliberately handed him over to these robed fanatics.
"And you have the honor of assisting us in our most important experiments."
The words slammed into his consciousness. He wasn't a prisoner, he was a specimen - something to be dissected and studied like the child across the hall, another broken test subject in this nightmare. His stomach lurched violently, and he doubled over as bile scorched his throat.
'No no no, they're going to—'
"No need to be frightened." The voice kept going, cheerful and horrible. "I know you were seen as a disgrace by others, but to us, you're invaluable. Your divine blood is quite rare, you see. Even from such a... disappointment."
'Divine blood? They want my blood because of the mark. Even though father tried to tear it away, the blessing runs deeper than skin.'
His father hadn't just abandoned him in rage - this had been planned. Calculated. His divine blessing wasn't a shame to be hidden, it was a commodity to be sold.
"That's enough for now." The masked figure straightened, reaching into his robes. "Here's your meal, little failure."
Something wet and putrid struck the cell floor with a sickening splat. The stench hit immediately - rot and decay so thick Cel could taste it. His stomach heaved, but there was nothing left to bring up except acid that burned his throat.
As the lantern light retreated up the corridor, Cel forced himself to look at what had been thrown to him. In the dying glow, he could make out a chunk of meat so far gone it was more mold than flesh, crawling with things that moved in the darkness.
The footsteps faded to nothing, leaving him alone with the stench and the soft whimpering from across the corridor.
From this day on, the cell became everything. Stone walls, iron bars, the constant drip of water somewhere in the darkness. Cel's wounds festered without treatment, angry red lines spreading from where his father's fingernails had carved away divine flesh.
What remained was worse than the wound - a grotesque crater of scar tissue where the Moon Goddess's blessing had once shone.
Hunger clawed at his belly like a living thing. For three days, he stared at the rotting meat, his mind fracturing between desperate hope and dawning horror. 'They'll come,' he told himself even as the stench made him gag. 'Mom will realize what happened and she'll come for me and—'
On the fourth day, his hands shook so badly he could barely lift his head. The hunger was eating him from the inside, his body beginning to consume itself. Still, a part of him waited. Listened for familiar footsteps. For his mother's voice calling his name.
On the fifth day, he crawled to the putrid scrap and took his first bite.
His body convulsed, rejecting the poison. Bile and blood splattered the cell floor as he retched until nothing remained in his stomach but agony. But even as he vomited, tears streaming down his face, he understood what this meant.
'No one is coming.'
The next meal, he managed two bites before the sickness took him. Then three. Then four.
Slowly, horribly, his body learned to accept what wasn't food. His sense of taste died first - a mercy perhaps. Then his stomach stopped fighting so hard. Within weeks, he could choke down entire portions without vomiting, though every meal felt like swallowing death itself.
They came for him on the seventh day - multiple figures in deep purple robes moving with practiced efficiency. One held his arms while another pressed a curved blade against the veins in his wrist, drawing blood in steady, measured cuts.
"Please," Cel whispered as the blade bit deep. "I won't tell anyone. I'll do whatever you want. Just... please don't hurt me."
No one answered. They finished their work in silence and left him collapsed on the stone floor, watching his own blood disappear into the darkness.
Days bled into weeks. The routine ground him down like a millstone - rotten food, blood letting, endless hours staring at damp walls while his mind slowly fractured. His only companion was the boy across the corridor, a child even smaller than himself with hollow eyes and arms covered in fresh cuts that never quite healed.
"Ren," the boy whispered one night when the purple robes were gone. His voice was barely audible, but in the perfect silence of their prison, it carried like a shout.
"Celvian," he whispered back, the first time he'd spoken his own name in weeks.
They never said much - words felt dangerous here, as if speaking too loudly might draw attention they couldn't afford. But knowing someone else breathed in this place, someone else suffered, made the darkness a fraction less absolute.
Until the morning Ren didn't return from his experiment.
Cel pressed his face against the bars, straining to see into the empty cell across the way. "Ren?" His voice echoed off stone walls. "Ren!"
Silence.
The boy's thin blanket still lay crumpled where he'd left it. A crust of bread sat untouched near the cell door. But Ren was gone, as if he'd never existed at all.
That night, alone in the complete darkness, something fundamental cracked inside Cel's chest. Not broke - that had happened long ago. This was the sound of the last piece of his old self finally giving way. The last ember of hope that someone, somewhere, still cared whether he lived or died.
The rage that followed wasn't clean or pure. It was jagged and desperate, born from weeks of betrayal, abandonment, and helpless fury. It started as a whisper in the back of his mind during the endless hours between experiments.
'I hate them.'
Their faces burned behind his eyelids: his father's disgust, his mother's frozen stillness, Darian's regretful look, little Lyra's sobbing. Each memory carved itself deeper into his mind, playing over and over until they became scars on his thoughts.
Sleep brought no escape either - only nightmares that played on endless repeat. Sometimes he relived that morning in the dining hall, his father's fists connecting with his flesh while his mother stood frozen, his brother watching and his sister sobbing. Other nights, he was back on the stone table as masked figures opened his veins, their blades cutting deeper and deeper until he woke screaming.
But the worst dreams were the ones where his family came to rescue him, where his mother held him and whispered apologies, where his father said he was proud - only for Cel to wake in the stinking darkness and remember that no one was coming. Each false hope burned away another piece of the love he'd once felt, leaving only raw hatred in its place.
With each blade that opened his skin, with every drop of blood they stole, with every piece of rotting meat he forced down his throat, the hatred grew. It filled the hollow spaces where love and hope had once lived, burning steady and sure. Without it, he would have simply ceased to exist, becoming nothing at all.
The hatred became his anchor. His reason to endure another day, another experiment, another nightmare. It whispered promises in the darkness: that he would survive this, that he would become strong, that someday they would all pay for what they'd done to him.
It was the only thing keeping him sane.
One day - he'd lost count of how many - the masked figures came as always. But as Cel crawled toward the putrid scrap of meat, something felt different. Underneath the familiar stench of rot was something else - a faint, sweet smell that didn't belong.
His stomach cramped with hunger, overriding any caution. He took his first bite, the familiar nothingness filling his mouth.
By the time he finished, his vision began to blur. A spreading warmth flowed through his veins like liquid fire. The stone walls rippled and flowed, reality becoming fluid around him.
'What did they—'
The thought dissolved as darkness swallowed everything - the bars, the stone, the empty cell where Ren used to be.
When consciousness returned, he was no longer in his cell. He found himself in an unfamiliar landscape - a place filled with ash.