The silence shatters.
"I want to take the sword trial,"Ezmelral declares, her voice steady, unyielding.
Raiking meets her gaze, her deep blue eyes blazing with conviction. A flicker of something unreadable—pride, doubt, warning—crosses his face. "Very well," he says, his tone low and final.
With a sweep of his hand, the air rippled. A sword materialized, descending slowly, its blade catching the light before halting just above the ground—its tip poised to pierce the earth.
Ezmelral stepped forward. Her fingers brushed the hilt.
The world convulsed.
Darkness swallowed her whole.
When her vision cleared, she stood within a cruel reflection of her past—the night of the first Praexer outbreak on Planet Exar. The night her mother's eyes turned hollow, her voice replaced by the snarling hunger of corruption. The night her father's blood painted the floor, his trembling hands pressing a final gift into hers before his breath failed.
The memory is frozen, achingly pristine in the moments before the horror:
Little Ezmelral sits at the dinner table,swinging her legs. Her mother hums in the kitchen. Her father kneels in the living room, piecing together a wooden gift.
A whisper, cold as a blade's edge, slithers into her ear. "So, this is that moment."
Ezmelral's lookalike steps into view, circling the frozen memory of her home. Time is thick, syrupy with dread.
"Are you sure you can overcome the trial?"the lookalike asks, her eyes—Ezmelral's own eyes—gleaming with intimate knowledge.
"I can." Defiance, a spark in the oppressive dark.
The lookalike's smile is a subtle, cruel curve. "I share your thoughts. Your feelings. Just as you share mine."
"So what?"Ezmelral's grip tightens on the sword.
"I know the strength of your conviction,"the lookalike's voice softens, a velvet-wrapped barb. "And I know its limits."
"Are you saying I'll fail?" A tremor betrays the sharpness of her words.
The lookalike steps closer, her presence suffocating. "What are your thoughts on the Seed of Corruption?"
"A just system," Ezmelral replies, the practiced answer coming automatically.
"Oh?" A single, disbelieving syllable. "Then why do you blame it for your parents' death?"
"Both truths can exist!" Ezmelral counters, her voice rising.
"But which truth carries the weight?" the lookalike presses, relentless. "The one in your mind, or the one that breaks your heart?"
Ezmelral stands silent, her jaw clenched, her gaze a locked gate holding back a storm. The shadow realm hums with the pressure of unshed tears and unspoken truths.
The lookalike extends a hand. The sword vanishes from Ezmelral's grip in a shimmer of darkness, reappearing in her double's palm. She studies the blade, turning it so the edge catches a sliver of phantom light.
"When you drive this sword into your enemy,"she asks, her voice deceptively soft, "what guides it? The cold steel… or the heat of your conviction?"
Ezmelral's lips part, but her voice is a trapped thing in her throat. The lookalike tilts the sword, its polished surface reflecting their faces—one fierce with denial, the other serene with cruel insight.
"The Seed of Corruption isn't what you truly hate,"the lookalike continues, her words drilling into Ezmelral's soul. "It is merely the mirror. What you cannot forgive is the ugliness it revealed beneath your mother's flawless image."
With a contemptuous flick, the lookalike tosses the sword back. Ezmelral lunges on instinct, her hand snapping out to catch the hilt mid-air. Her fingers curl around it, white-knuckled.
But the lookalike is already gone,dissolved into the shadows from which she came.
Only her final, echoing words remain, colder than the steel in Ezmelral's hand:
"If you cannot unravel that truth,you will never pass this trial."
Silence floods the room, heavy and suffocating as a shroud.
Ezmelral's gaze is dragged toward her mother, frozen forever at the kitchen stove. That face, once a universe of warmth and safety, is now a monument to a lie. The love she remembers now feels like a beautiful, fragile shell hiding a rotten core.
"Who were you?"The whisper is torn from her, ragged and broken.
Her eyes fall to the sword in her hand. It is no longer the imagined blade of a child playing at heroism. It is real, heavy, and deadly. And her hand holding it—it is not the small, soft hand of the girl who lived in this cottage. It is the hand of a woman, marked by calluses and scars, shaped by battles fought in worlds far beyond this memory.
A sharp,painful breath hitched in her throat. The realization was a physical blow. She had been grieving a ghost, a perfect illusion. The real wound was the shattering of that illusion.
"Or does it even matter who she was," she murmured to the hollow air, "when I can no longer remember who I was before I learned the truth?"
Before the thought could fade, Time snapped forward. Her chest seized—she knew what came next.
The rhythmic chop of her mother's knife filled the hut. Steady. Then faster. A heartbeat spiraling into madness.
Her father's grin died. He rose, boots scuffing the floor, drawn by a primal dread.
At the table,her younger self froze, the promised cake turning to ash in her mouth.
A single, crimson drop hit the earth. A dark flower blooming on the dirt floor.
Her mother turned.
Skin,leached of life. Eyes, hollow and feral. A husk.
Ezmelral's breath vanished. The sword was a live wire in her hands.
Her father stepped forward, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.
"Mother?"the child whispered, the word a tiny, breaking thing.
A jagged screech ripped the air. The knife rose, and the husk lunged.
Her father dove, overturning the table with a splintering crash. Palms slammed to the ground—earth and mud erupted, weaving a desperate cocoon around his daughter.
Safety.For one single, fragile heartbeat.
A crunch. The knife-tip punched through the earthen dome.
Blood sprayed inward—a hot,metallic mist across the child's dress and face.
Ezmelral's grip on the sword was bone-white. Her father's roar filled the air, choked and wet. The dome bulged, cracked—then exploded into a shower of dirt and shattered promise.
He knelt, trembling, staring up at the hollow thing that wore his wife's face.
The blade flashed again,carving a red canyon across his chest. He collapsed—but even then, his hands shot out, locking around its wrists, holding death at bay for one more second.
His eyes found his daughter.A final, silent scream.
The husk shoved him aside like rubbish. He did not move again.
Slowly, with terrible inevitability, the void-black eyes pivoted.
They fixed on the child.
The knife dripped,a slow, deliberate metronome.
What will you do? Her lookalike's voice was a serpent in her mind. Deny the reality, or accept the truth?
With every dragging step the husk took, Ezmelral remembered. Every previous time, at this exact moment, the part of her that refused to accept the truth would scream into action. She would leap, a human shield, blocking her younger self's view and taking the brutal blow herself—perpetuating the lie that the child could still be protected.
The husk of her mother raised the knife high, the steel catching a gleam of nonexistent light. The world narrowed to that descending edge.
And as it fell, Ezmelral made a choice that would defy and define her for the rest of her life.