A sudden, sharp pain lanced through Silas's temple, not his own, but a familiar, agonizing echo. He gasped, stumbling back against the cold stone of the cavern wall, his hand flying to his head.
"What… what is this?" he groaned, his voice tight with anguish. "Why does it feel like my mind is being torn open?"
The dragon, El, shifted her great head, her molten gold eyes observing him with ancient pity. "That, child, is not your pain. It is an echo. A wall that stood for years has just been vaporized in a single, violent moment. Your brother… Corbin… he remembers."
The words washed over Silas, the pain receding as a dizzying, impossible hope surged in its place. His eyes widened, a disbelieving laugh escaping his lips. "He… he remembers? Everything? Our childhood? The ten years?" He pushed off the wall, a frantic energy filling him. "Then he knows! He knows why I had to do it! He knows our father was going to kill me! He'll understand now. He'll… he'll come for me. He'll help me get out of here."
The hope in his voice was a fragile, desperate thing.
El let out a low, rumbling growl that shook the very air. She turned her massive head towards the flickering Shadow. "This is the one? This naive, hopeful child who still believes in storybook reconciliations? This is who we are pinning the unmaking of worlds upon?"
The Shadow sighed, a sound of dry disappointment. "He has his moments."
"Why?" Silas demanded, his hopeful excitement curdling into confused anger. "Why can't I have this? Why can't I have hope?"
"Because hope in a lie is a poison!" El thundered, her voice echoing through the cavern. "You think just because he knows the reason, he will forgive the act? You killed his father! In his mind, that will never be justified. It is easier for him, for your mother, for that entire rotting government, to let you be the villain! It simplifies their world! They would rather mourn a monster than reconcile with a son!"
"You're wrong!" Silas shouted, sheer dread clawing at his heart. He couldn't accept it. To have hope offered and ripped away so cruelly was a new kind of torment.
"Am I?" El's eyes began to glow, a shimmering mist forming between them. "Then see for yourself, King of Endings. See the hero who you think is coming to save you."
The mist solidified into a vision.
—
The midnight ceremony's opulence felt like a cage. Corbin stood before his vanity, a statue in fine black and silver robes, as Davina carefully arranged his long hair.
"You look… legendary," she said softly, meeting his eyes in the mirror.
He gave a hollow smile. "A legend feels nothing. I envy that."
Davina hesitated, then spoke lightly, "Speaking of feeling… the staff whisper about Lady Celeste. After you vanished with Ciro, she had quite the outburst in the library. A real, human moment. Some are even saying it was… a fit of passion?" She winked cheekily.
Corbin went perfectly still. The brush in Davina's hand halted. Passion. Not for a person, but for a memory. A terrifying, forgotten truth.
"Leave," he whispered, his voice dangerously quiet.
Davina, startled, scurried out.
Alone, Corbin stared at his reflection as the first tear traced a path through the perfect makeup. "Was it all a lie?" he asked the silent room. The gentle brother, the happy family—all erased by his own hand. The weight of it shattered his composure.
He found Celeste in the grand hall, a vision of cold control as she directed staff with quiet, precise orders. The calm was more frightening than any scream.
"Mother, we need to talk."
"Not now, Corbin. The ceremony—"
"It's about Silas."
The name acted like a spell, freezing the entire hall. Servants halted mid-step. Celeste's hand, adjusting a floral arrangement, clenched into a white-knuckled fist. She slowly turned, her eyes blazing with a fury so deep it was silent. In one sharp movement, she crossed the room, grabbed his arm with surprising strength, and dragged him toward her office.
"Everyone, resume your duties!" she snapped without looking back.
The door to her office slammed shut, sealing them in a silence that screamed with the ghost of a lost son.
—
The world twisted inside out. Macy, Keith, and Dove felt their very beings unravel into a scream of grey static, the grandfather ancestor's guttural chant—"Per iter in tenebris, ad finem viae!"—echoing in their souls before reality snapped back into place.
They stumbled onto a bleak, windswept ledge, the air tasting of ozone and ash. Before them yawned the entrance to a cavern, its darkness so absolute it seemed to swallow the very light.
"Gods, I hate that," Dove groaned, clutching his stomach.
Keith ignored him, his eyes already scanning the cave mouth for threats. "He's in there."
Macy, steadying herself, turned back to the fading, shimmering forms of the ancestors. "If that thing is so dangerous, why is it still drawing breath? Why not just finish it?"
The grandfather's form flickered, his voice a mixture of fear and reverence. "You speak of killing a force of nature. El is ancient, a fragment of the world's dawn. We could not destroy her; we could only build a cage."
A grandmother floated forward, her whisper full of dread. "The cavern is her prison, but the depths are her sanctuary. She guards them with the last of her sacred fire—a flame that does not scorch stone, but devours soul-stuff. Those who trespass too far are… erased. It is not merely rage. It is as if she is protecting something."
The trio fell silent, the implication hanging in the dead air. This wasn't just a monster in a lair; it was a warden.
"Then that's exactly where he'd go," Macy said, her voice firm. She turned her back on the fearful ghosts and faced the consuming dark. "Right into the one place they're too terrified to look."
—
The heavy oak door of Celeste's study shuddered in its frame as Corbin entered, the sound a dull thunderclap in the wake of his simmering rage. Celeste stood by the fireplace, a silhouette of impeccable composure, but the air around her crackled with a storm he had unleashed.
"You will explain yourself," she began, her voice a whip of controlled fury, not turning to face him. "To speak that name, after all I have sacrificed to bury it—"
"Do you remember?"
Her sentence died in her throat. She went perfectly still.
Corbin took a step closer, the plush carpet muffling his steps but not the intensity in his voice. "I asked you a question, Mother. Do you remember the house in the village? The ten years you told me were a happy, simple blur? Do you remember the boy who shared my face?"
Celeste turned slowly, her expression a masterwork of icy denial. "I remember a tragedy. I remember a husband who betrayed me and a son who was stolen. I have no room for other memories."
"Liar!" The word exploded from him, shattering the room's fragile peace. "You look at me and you see a ghost standing beside me! I see it in your eyes! The memory is there, fighting to get out. I felt it break inside me. Did it break inside you too?"
Her mask fractured. A minute tremor ran through her hand where it rested on the mantelpiece. "And if it did?" she whispered, the words ripped from a deep, hidden place of pain. "What would it change, Corbin? Nothing. It changes absolutely nothing."
"It changes everything!" he cried, his voice raw. "It means he wasn't some villain who spawned from the darkness to torment us! He was my brother! He was your son! He mattered! He still matters!"
"That son died when his father took him from that house!" she shouted back, her own composure finally rupturing. A single, perfect tear escaped, tracing a path through the powder on her cheek, a stark testament to a grief she had never allowed herself to feel. "The thing that returned at sixteen was a stranger. A creature of rage and chaos wearing a familiar face. He is not my son."
The cruelty of the statement hung between them, suffocating and absolute.
Corbin felt the words like a physical blow. His voice dropped to a shattered whisper. "And if it had been me? If Father had taken me, and I returned… different… scarred… would you look at me and see a stranger? Would you so easily discard me? Would you tell yourself I had died, too?"
Celeste's eyes, pools of ancient, stone-hard grief, met his. "The six years we lost him… whatever happened in that void… it killed the boy I bore. It forged the weapon that threatens our world now. I will not lose the one I have left. You will bring honor back to this family name, Corbin. My honor, which I let be tarnished by grief. We are Livians. In this cruel realm, that name is our only shield, our only weapon. Survival is the only tribute left to pay to the dead."
She moved to sweep past him, her regal posture restored like armor. As she reached the door, she paused, delivering her final, devastating verdict without looking back. "Silas chose to be the enemy. Whatever hell he endured without us, his choices upon return—the blood he spilled, the rebellion he leads—have consequences. And we must live with them."
The door clicked shut. The silence she left behind was louder than any scream. Corbin stood frozen for a moment before his legs gave way. He crumpled to the floor, the fine fabric of his ceremonial robes a silken pool around him. He buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with silent, wretched sobs. "Why…" he choked out to the empty, opulent room. "Why him… Why did it have to be him…"
In the small antechamber next door, hidden by the door she had cracked open, Davina lowered her hand. A faint, shimmering aura faded from her fingertips—a simple eavesdropping spell. She slid down the wall, pulling her knees to her chest. She stuffed her fist into her mouth to stifle the sound, but her body was wracked with silent, helpless tears for the boy named Ash and the brother who mourned him.
After a long, long time, the sounds from the study ceased. Corbin slowly, painfully, pushed himself up from the floor. He walked to a large, gilded mirror, its surface reflecting a face streaked with tears, eyes red-raw with a pain that went deeper than bone. He stared at the broken boy in the glass.
Then, with a slow, deliberate sweep of his sleeve, he wiped the tears from his face. He straightened his spine, squaring his shoulders. The anguish in his eyes was snuffed out, replaced by a cold, hollow resolve. The mask of the heir was back in place, fused now to his soul.
He looked his reflection dead in the eye, his voice a flat, emotionless whisper that sealed his fate.
"I am the Livian heir. I will bring more glory to our name. So all of the Livians may survive."
—
The dragon's vision shattered like glass, the devastating image of Celeste's rejection and Corbin's shattered resolve evaporating into nothing. For a moment, there was only a ringing silence in the cavern, and a pain so profound it had no sound.
It wasn't about the rebellion. It wasn't about killing their father. It was that he, Silas, was inherently the wrong son. The one who was never supposed to come home. The one whose very existence was a flaw in the family tapestry.
A low, wounded sound escaped his lips. Then, it broke.
A scream tore from his throat, a raw, universe-rending sound that was less a cry of anger and more the birth wail of a star going supernova
From his core, a wave of pure, unfiltered Chaos erupted.It was not an explosion of fire and debris, but of unmaking.
At the cave's entrance, the grandfather ancestor gasped, his form flickering violently. "The seal... he's breaking it! The balance of the ancestry is at risk! We are too late!" He frantically began the guttural chant, "Per iter in tenebris—!" The teleportation spell snatched at Macy, Keith, and Dove just as the wave of chaotic energy crested toward them, yanking them back into the swirling grey an instant before the nothingness would have consumed them.
In the heart of the cavern, Silas was floating, suspended in the eye of the storm he had created.
His gentle features were gone, replaced by a cold, beautiful severity. His eyes were pools of absolute black, twin voids that held no light, no recognition, only an ancient, chilling hunger. His clothes had transformed. He was clad in regal, villainous gold. A high, sculpted collar of burnished gold rose behind his head like a malevolent sunburst. His torso was sheathed in a form-fitting coat of deepest obsidian, but across his chest and shoulders swept a magnificent, intricate mantle of gold feathers, each one seeming to shift and move as if alive. The attire was a brutal parody of royalty, echoing the dark elegance of power,, beauty, and utterly merciless.
The last echoes of the scream faded. The only sound was the soft, terrifying whisper of the void slowly turning back into the world around that was around him.
The dragon, El, observed him, her molten gold eyes showing not fear, but a grim, satisfied respect. She lowered her great head in a gesture of acknowledgment to a new, terrible power.
"Now," she said, her voice echoing in the newfound silence. "With the King of Endings, I shall discuss the next chapter."