Elara's world had shrunk to a seamless white cube and the silent, terrifying presence of the boy who had become a god. The obsidian chair waited. The unspoken threat lingered in the sterile air: cooperate, or they suffer.
"What do you want?" she asked, her voice a low, steady thing of ice, refusing to betray the terror that threatened to crack her composure. She would not sit. She would not yield an inch.
Lucian's expression did not change, but she felt a flicker of something in his mind—faint amusement, perhaps, at her pathetic defiance.
Want? his mental voice echoed, cold and clean as the room around them. Want is a mortal concept. A state of lack. I lack nothing. What I am about to offer you is not a negotiation. It is a curriculum.
He raised his hand. The white wall behind him shimmered and became a window, a perfect, high-definition view of the ashen wasteland. She saw the ruin. She saw her friends. Mira and Selvara were huddled together, trying to splint Draven's mangled limbs, their movements clumsy with exhaustion and grief. Draven was conscious, his face a grey mask of agony. Their misery was so profound, so palpable, it felt like she was standing right beside them.
Lesson one, Lucian's voice explained, with the detached patience of a professor. The Fallacy of Strength.
He focused on the image of Draven. She watched in horror as Draven, gritting his teeth, tried to push himself up, his powerful muscles straining. A testament to his unbreakable spirit.
You see that? Lucian directed her attention. His will. The foolish, heroic belief that he can overcome any obstacle through pure physical resolve. A respectable, if primitive, notion. Observe.
Lucian did nothing. He simply... wished. And through the window, Elara saw a small, insignificant pebble on the ground next to Draven suddenly gain the conceptual weight of a mountain. Draven, straining against his own broken body, put a hand down to brace himself, his fingers brushing against that single, innocuous stone.
The effect was instantaneous and grotesque. The amplified weight, the very concept of unmovable, flooded into the stone. Draven's hand, his arm, his entire shoulder, shattered under an impossible, invisible pressure. It didn't just break; it imploded, crushed into a ruin of flesh and bone by the weight of a god's passing whim.
Draven's scream was soundless through the silent window, but Elara felt it in her very soul. Mira and Selvara scrambled back, their faces twisted in terror, having no idea what had just happened, only that their protector was now irrevocably crippled.
Elara stumbled back, a gasp escaping her lips, her glacial composure finally shattering. It was the casual, effortless cruelty of it. The absolute, petty precision of the torment. He hadn't just hurt Draven; he had attacked the very core of his identity. He had used a pebble to prove that Draven's greatest strength was a joke.
The image in the wall vanished, returning to a pristine, sterile white.
Strength is irrelevant when the fundamental laws of reality are a tool for your enemy, Lucian stated, his voice flat. His spirit is commendable. His suffering, from this point forward, is entirely your responsibility. Sit.
This time, it wasn't a request. The obsidian chair was no longer behind her, but she felt an invisible force press down on her shoulders, forcing her knees to buckle. With a small, choked cry of helpless fury, she was forced down into the cold, unyielding seat.
Good, his mental voice said. You are a much better student than he is. Our lessons will continue until you have unlearned all the sentimental filth that has held you back. In time, you will thank me for this.
He turned and walked back toward the wall. "I will never—" she began, her voice raw, but he vanished through the seamless white before she could finish, leaving her alone in her silent, perfect prison, the soundless scream of her friend the only thing left in her mind. She was no longer just his prize. She was his student. And her classroom was the suffering of everyone she had ever cared about.
----
Agony. Pain had become the singular, defining truth of Draven's existence. He lay in the dust, the ruin of his arm now as useless as the hollow space where his power used to be. Mira's desperate, fumbling attempts at first aid were just blurs at the edge of his vision. Selvara's sharp, panicked orders were just noise.
All he could see, all he could feel, was the searing, undeniable truth: they had lost. They were beaten. His strength, the one thing he could always rely on, had not just failed him; it had been turned into the very instrument of his own pathetic, humiliating defeat.
And Elara was gone. Stolen from them while he lay broken and useless.
But through the waves of pain, a single, hard, impossibly stubborn thought began to form. An idea born not of hope, but of pure, spiteful refusal to die. Lucian had left them alive. He had crushed him, dismissed him, but he had not killed him. It was an act of contempt. An insult. A god swatting a fly and not even bothering to see if it was dead.
Good, a new voice whispered in the deepest parts of his soul. A voice that sounded like grinding granite. Let him think I'm broken. Let him think I'm finished.
"Selvara," he gasped, the effort sending fresh waves of agony through his body.
She was at his side instantly, her face pale, her eyes wide with a fear he had never seen in her before. "Don't talk, you idiot. You're—"
"Listen," he interrupted, his voice a low, ragged growl. "He's… toying with us. He left us alive for a reason. As a message… for her." The pieces were clicking into place, the terrible, cruel logic of their enemy becoming clear. "We're his leverage."
Mira, overhearing, let out another sob. "So what do we do? We're just… hostages?"
"No," Draven snarled, his eyes burning with a new, terrifying light, the light of a cornered beast preparing to chew off its own leg to escape a trap. "We're the bait in a trap he thinks he controls. He wants us to suffer. He wants us to be weak. So we will do the opposite. We will survive. We will get stronger. We will make him believe his little lesson worked." He coughed, a spray of blood speckling the grey ash. "And when he isn't looking… when he is so focused on… re-educating her… we will come back. Not as heroes. As ghosts. As an infection. And we will tear his whole damn world down around him."
It was an insane oath, sworn in the ashes of their utter defeat, by a man who was broken in every conceivable way. It was a promise with no hope of fulfillment. But as Mira and Selvara looked at the burning, unbreakable will in his eyes, they felt a flicker of something they thought had been extinguished forever. Not hope. Not courage.
Just a shared, burning, and utterly consuming need for revenge. Their quest was no longer a grand, heroic journey. It was a grim, bloody, and personal vendetta. They would endure any torment, any humiliation, all for the single, distant promise of one day seeing the life fade from their enemy's starless eyes. The first lesson was over, and the survivors had just written their new curriculum.