The revelation hung in the air like smoke.
"The Vault," Nyx repeated, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "It isn't a safe house. It's an incinerator."
"Uncle Kael..." Briar's voice cracked. She gripped the hilt of her sword, her knuckles white. "He wouldn't kill you. He's a scholar. He wants to study you."
"He wants to study the Void inside you," Lyra corrected, her face pale as she clutched her grimoire. "To my father, Nyx isn't a person. He is an infection. If the data suggests the infection is spreading... Kael will excise it."
She looked at Nyx, then at the massive, jagged greatsword resting on his shoulder.
"The Purification Wards in the Vault are set to 'Solar Flare' intensity. If you step inside, you will be vaporized in seconds."
Nyx looked down the dark corridor of the spiral staircase. He could feel the First Shackle humming in his chest. It was agitated. It sensed the trap.
"Then we leave," Nyx said.
"Leave the Palace?" Briar blinked, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. "Nyx, the Obsidian Palace is the most secure fortress on the continent. The walls are three feet of spell-forged iron. The gates are guarded by the Imperial Legion. We can't just walk out the front door."
"We aren't walking out the front," Nyx said. He turned and looked at the wall of the armory corridor.
He raised Requiem.
The massive black blade hummed. The golden crack running down its center pulsed with a dull, hungry light.
"We're making a door."
"Wait!" Lyra yelped. "That's a load-bearing wall! And it's reinforced with Tier-5 Suppression Runes! You can't just..."
Nyx didn't listen. He swung.
He didn't use mana. He didn't use technique. He used the sheer weight of the sword and the hunger of the Void.
BOOOM!
The sound wasn't a crash. It was the sound of reality being unzipped.
The black blade bit into the enchanted stone. The runes flashed gold, trying to repel the attack, but Requiem simply ate the light. The Void edge of the sword devoured the enchantment instantly, turning the magical stone into soft butter.
The wall exploded outward.
Dust and debris rained down on them. When the air cleared, there was a jagged hole leading not to the hallway, but to the Royal Sewers.
"Disgusting," Briar wrinkled her nose, peering into the dark tunnel. "But effective."
"It leads to the river," Nyx said, stepping through the rubble. "And the river leads out of the city."
"Nyx, wait."
Briar stopped him, her hand gripping his arm. The "Charm" was gone, but her eyes were intense, burning with a mix of admire and fear.
"If we go through that hole," Briar said, "there is no going back. I become a rogue Princess. Lyra becomes a traitor to her father. And you... you become the most hunted man on Myriad."
She looked at him.
"This world is big, Nyx. The Humans, the Dragons, the Vampires... they will all come for you. Are you ready for that?"
Nyx looked at her. Then he looked up, past the stone ceiling, imagining the sky beyond.
He thought of the dream. The chains. The beings sitting on his thrones in the High Heavens, laughing as they chained him, betrayed him.
"Myriad?" Nyx let out a low, cold laugh.
He looked at Briar, his golden eyes glowing in the gloom.
"Myriad is just a little world, Briar. There are a billions of worlds like this out there, those you call ancestors are nothing but dust in their eyes. I can remeber it, They are up there, they laughed at me." He spat, letting out murderous intent inside him he didn't even knew he had.
Briar and Lyra stared at him. They didn't understand the scale of what he meant, but they felt the weight of his truth. He wasn't making things up, He was talking about beings so powerful even compared to the ancestors of Myriad.
"Okay," Briar exhaled, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Sounds like a Galactic conquest. Sure. But let's start by not drowning in sewage."
She climbed through the hole. Lyra followed, casting a cleaning charm on her robes before her feet even touched the muck.
Nyx led the way, the massive blade of Requiem resting on his shoulder. The faint, hungry glow from the sword's crack provided just enough light to see the damp cobblestones beneath their boots.
They had been walking for twenty minutes in silence.
Nyx stopped. He turned around, his golden eyes piercing the gloom to look at the two women following him.
They looked out of place. Briar, even in her training gear, wore the fine silks of royalty. Lyra, clutching her grimoire to her chest, looked like a porcelain doll dragged through the mud.
"Stop," Nyx said.
The two princesses froze. Briar's hand instinctively went to her sword. "What is it? Did you sense a guard?"
"No," Nyx said. He rested the tip of Requiem on the ground. "I sense hesitation."
He looked at them, his expression unreadable.
"Up there," Nyx pointed his thumb toward the stone ceiling, "I am a monster. A Void Vessel. A threat to national security. If you are caught with me, you lose everything. Your titles. Your homes. Likely your lives."
He took a step closer to them.
"The 'Charm' you had on me is gone. You aren't being mind-controlled anymore. So tell me the truth why you're going this far for me."
Nyx's voice dropped, echoing off the wet walls.
"Why are you doing this? Why throw away a life of luxury for someone you met yesterday?"
The silence stretched. The rhythmic dripping of water sounded like a ticking clock.
Briar let out a harsh, bitter laugh. The sound scraped against the stone.
"Luxury," she spat the word out like poison.
She stepped forward, the magical light from Ignis illuminating her face. For the first time, Nyx saw the lines of exhaustion around her eyes that no amount of makeup could hide.
"Do you know how many siblings I have, Nyx?" Briar asked.
Nyx shook his head.
"Forty two," Briar said. "That I know of."
She paced in the small tunnel, her energy nervous and jagged.
"My father, Emperor Thorn... he believes in 'Survival of the Fittest'. To him, the Empire shouldn't be ruled by the firstborn. It should be ruled by the one left standing."
She tapped the scar on her cheek, a faint white line Nyx hadn't noticed before.
"Every year, on our birthdays, we aren't given gifts. We are thrown into the 'Proving Grounds'. It's a polite way of saying a pit. I fought my older brother there when I was twelve. He tried to burn my face off because he wanted Father's approval."
She looked at Nyx, her red eyes burning with suppressed rage.
"I broke his arm. And Father clapped. He didn't ask if I was okay. He just nodded and said, 'Good. The weak weed is pruned.'"
She gripped the hilt of her sword until her knuckles cracked.
"I have to sleep with a knife under my pillow. I have to taste-test my own water. The servants are spies for my half-sisters. The guards are bribed by my half-brothers. That palace isn't a home, Nyx. It's a shark tank. And I'm tired of swimming."
She looked up at him, her vulnerability showing through the cracks in her warrior mask.
"You ask why I'm following you? Because you're the first thing I've seen in that palace that isn't trying to manipulate me apart from Lyra and Seraphina, well you did manipulate me at first but you did unknowingly right?, You're just... raw. And dangerous. And honestly? I'd rather die fighting the world with you than die because my sister poisoned my tea, you gave me something I didn't have before Nyx. You gave me courage to escape all of this, you're my savior in a way." She smiled faintly looking at his eyes.
Nyx watched her. He felt a phantom pain in his chest, not from the shackles, but from empathy. He remembered the feeling of betrayal in his dream. The feeling of the ones you trust turning their back on you.
He turned his gaze to Lyra.
"And you?" Nyx asked softly. "Emperor Kael is a scholar. Is his house a shark tank too?"
Lyra hugged her book tighter, looking down at her muddy boots.
"No," she whispered. "My father doesn't believe in fighting. He believes in... optimization."
She pushed her hair back, her hand trembling slightly.
"Do you know why my mother was chosen as Empress Consort?" Lyra asked. "Not for love. Not for politics. It was for her Mana Capacity. Kael calculated that mixing his bloodline with hers had a 64% chance of producing a 'High-Mage' offspring."
She looked up, her blue eyes wet.
"I was the success. My brother was the failure. When my brother showed no aptitude for magic at age five, Father stopped speaking to him. He didn't abuse him. He just... erased him. My brother lives in the servant quarters now. Father walks past him in the hallway and doesn't even blink."
Lyra took a shaky breath.
"I have been perfect my whole life. Top marks in the Academy. Achieved Lunar Realm before 100 years. I did everything right because I was terrified that if I slipped, if I became 'sub-optimal', he would look at me with those cold, dead eyes and erase me too."
She gestured to the ceiling.
"When he ordered the Vault... when I saw he was willing to burn you alive just to 'cleanse' the anomaly... I realized something."
Lyra looked at Nyx, her voice steadying.
"I am an anomaly too. I don't want to be a High-Mage for the Empire. I want to study forbidden things. I want to see the world. And the moment he realizes I can't be controlled... he will put me in a Vault too."
She stepped up beside Briar. The Warrior and the Scholar. Two princesses raised in golden cages, starving for freedom.
"We aren't following you because you're some kind of a God, Nyx," Lyra said. "We're following you because you're the sledgehammer that broke the walls of our cages, you did something for us in few days, no one had ever done for us in our whole life."
Nyx looked at them.
He had thought of them as liabilities. Or maybe assets. But now, he saw them clearly. They were Fugitives, just like him. The chains binding them weren't made of stars, but they were just as heavy.
Nyx shifted Requiem on his shoulder. A faint smile touched his lips, not the arrogant smirk of a god, but the tired smile of a comrade.
"Forty-two siblings," Nyx muttered. "That sounds exhausting."
"It is," Briar let out a breath, the tension leaving her shoulders.
"And being optimized," Nyx looked at Lyra. "That sounds lonely."
"It is," Lyra admitted, smiling faintly.
Nyx turned back to the dark tunnel ahead.
"I don't know where I come from," Nyx said, his voice echoing in the gloom. "I don't know who my parents were. But if they were anything like yours... I hope I ate them."
Briar let out a startled laugh. It was loud and genuine.
"Gods, Nyx," Briar shook her head, grinning. "That's dark."
"It's practical," Lyra added, a small, mischievous smile appearing on her face. "Waste not, want not."
"Come on," Nyx said, walking forward. "The river is close. Once we cross it, we aren't Royalty or Gods anymore. We're just three people looking for a fight."
"Sounds like a vacation," Briar said, falling into step beside him.
"Statistically," Lyra noted, opening her grimoire to check the map, "our chances of survival are less than 12%. But... the variables are exciting."
They walked deeper into the darkness, leaving the palace and their titles behind. The bond between them had shifted. It wasn't forged by magic or lust. It was forged by the shared, desperate desire to be free.