Consciousness returned like a slow, painful tide washing over jagged rocks. I woke up. Huh… where am I? The ceiling was low, rough-hewn stone. Not my nursery's polished plaster. The air was cool, damp, and carried the faint, metallic tang of deep earth and stale magic.
Memory detonated. Suddenly memories of the crash and unwanted nightmares poured into my head. The coffin. The black, invasive liquid. The drugged hallucination of multiplying hands. The Cardinal's booming condemnation. "Aetherless." "Curse." "Disease." The shimmering isolation bubble.
I jackknifed into a sitting position, a wave of nausea and dizziness making the rough room tilt. I breathed heavily, fighting down the panic, the disorientation. I recovered slowly. My body ached, a deep cellular fatigue, as if it had fought a silent war against an invader that wasn't there. The after-effects of the potion, the Aether-dissolving poison that had found nothing to dissolve.
Is this… the secluded place. It was a cell. Ten feet by ten feet. A simple bed and a washroom. A hole in the floor with a faint, constant trickle of water, and a crude stone basin. No window. The only light came from a faint, sickly green luminescent fungus growing in cracks along one wall. It was the definition of buried alive.
I looked at my hands… They were pale in the eerie light. No marks. No physical damage. Just me. The same me who had trained for nine years, who had memorized libraries, who had solved a world-shattering cipher. Now reduced to a specimen in a stone box. Is this for real?... The absurdity of it was a weight on my chest. I breathed heavily one last time, forcing the air in and out, grounding myself in the simple, miserable reality.
My eyes fell on a small, folded stack of cheap parchment on a stone ledge by the bed. I noticed some papers beside me.
Before I could reach for them, a heavy clunk echoed—the sound of a massive bolt being drawn back. The door, a slab of iron-bound stone, groaned open. A guard stood there, his features obscured by a helmet with a darkened visor. He was clad in Church robes.
He tossed a quill and a small pot of ink onto the floor. They skittered across the stone. His voice was a bored, metallic rasp from behind the visor. "This is a letter. This will be your last chance to say your last message to your loved ones. And this is the first time we are doing this."
Saying this, he left. The door slammed shut, the bolt crashing home with finality.
What? Bastard! I don't have any loved ones… My family is shit! The offer was a cruel joke. A final twist of the knife. Did my plan fail? Lyra didn't do any action… I see. My desperate provocation in the carriage, my attempt to paint myself as a victim of Church sabotage, had come to nothing. She had watched them brand me a curse and drag me away. My gamble had failed. I was on my own.
I definitely provoked her… Hmmm Don't know what happened… Perhaps she'd investigated, found nothing, and dismissed me as a delusional child.
The door clunked open again. The same guard. "Which family member do you want to share your last words with?"
He wanted a name. A target for this performative last mercy. I looked down, buying time. "I will think about it." He grunted and left, the door sealing me in again.
Fuck! What do you mean 'last words'... I am going to jail…and not going to die!?. But the phrasing was specific. 'Last chance.' 'Last message.' The Abyssal AER jail wasn't just a prison; it was an oubliette. People sent here didn't get visitors. They didn't get letters. They ceased to exist. This was a bureaucratic formality before permanent erasure.
After that I sat and looked into the wall for about an hour… The crushing weight of finality pressed down. This was the end of the road. The Extreme Nightmare concluded in a lightless stone box.
My eyes drifted back to the paper and quill. I looked at the paper again… Who would I… … hmmmm….
A spark, weak but stubborn, ignited in the gloom. They were giving me a tool. A connection to the outside, however tenuous, however monitored. I couldn't send a plea. That would be shredded. I couldn't send an accusation. That would be proof of my "madness."
But I could send a puzzle.
Wait… Lyra knows that my 'Aetherless' condition is due to the church… but she doesn't know the reason. And she has no evidence. But what if I provide her evidence… by hiding the message in the letter! The idea was a lifeline. A final, desperate move in a game I was losing.
But I don't know anything about her… I didn't know if she was an ally, an enemy, or utterly indifferent. I had to assume the letters would be read by the Church first. The hidden message had to be undetectable to them, but decipherable to someone with specific knowledge and motivation.
I ran through the family. The heir of the house Theodore—First child… I can't give this to him. Alistair was my father's creature, cold and calculating. He would assess the letter's strategic value and likely discard it.
And obviously I can't give it to my bastard father.
This led to two people- Lyra and Elara. Lyra I had provoked. She had been curious, then dismissive. But the provocation might have left a burr of irritation. Elara was the quiet one, the only one who'd shown a flicker of unpracticed kindness. A long shot, but a shot.
Elara could help… But it's hard.
I needed complexity. And I can't just send the letters… with easy hidden meaning… because it will cause suspicion and the church might find what I'm trying to do. So it must take time to decode… huh…
Time. That was the key. I was being buried, but the outside world would move on. I needed the message to activate later, when the immediate scrutiny had faded.
The maximum time I could spend in that jail without losing my sanity is 3 years. A guess, a hope. A timeline to cling to. Therefore I need to make the decoding time at least 2 and a half years.
A two-and-a-half-year delayed trigger. Half a year extra if they fail to decode. I would write two letters. Bland, grieving, confused goodbyes. But woven into them, using the cipher techniques I'd reverse-engineered from my father's hidden library, I would embed the truth. But I would write parts of the cipher key in Japanese and English—languages that didn't exist in this world. To decode it, they would first have to recognize the gibberish as a language, then painstakingly reconstruct it. It would take a brilliant, obsessive mind years.
I would deliver it to the two sisters. Well, at least one of them will decode it, right? I had to believe that. That one of them was clever enough, curious enough, or annoyed enough by my final taunt to pick at the oddities in the letter until they unraveled.
They will find the meaning, then the church will be prosecuted and I will be released… hahah… What a fine plan. It was a fantasy. A castle built on sand. But it was a plan. It was agency. It was the act of a player, not a piece.
I picked up the quill. The ink was thin, watery. I began to write. I wrote the text majorly in the native language… Farewell, sister. I am sorry for my failure. I do not understand this curse. Remember me fondly. The maudlin, expected words of a condemned child.
Then, I began the real work. In the spacing between words, in the slight flourishes on certain letters, in the repetition of seemingly innocent phrases, I embedded the cipher. Mentions of "superior beings" and "Aether destroying " And finally, the core accusation, split across both letters and encoded in a mix of Japanese katakana and English phonetic spelling disguised as a child's nonsensical doodling of sounds: "The Church is a Dragon's Maw."
It took hours. My hand cramped. The green fungus-light began to dim, signaling some artificial night cycle. When I was done, I had two letters that looked like the rambling, slightly incoherent final thoughts of a scared boy. Perfect.
The person arrived. They took the two letters and set them to delivery. The guard didn't even glance at them. To him, they were trash to be processed. He took them and left.
Alone again in the deepening dark, a moment of quiet followed. And in that quiet, a memory surfaced, unbidden. The first moment of this life. The golden-haired man—my father— holding me, speaking those alien, melodic words.
'Kullim gitat lem… Vreth'an'
For years, I'd had no context. Now, fluent in the language, the translation was immediate. It was Old Aethelandrian, ceremonial. It meant: "The vessel is empty. Perfect."
'PERFECT'... What did he mean by this? I am perfect for what?....
The question echoed as the guards returned, this time in force. The guards came and I was taken to the Abyssal AER jail. No more secluded room. This was the final descent.
It was an underground jail. I was not blindfolded. This helped a lot. I instantly memorised the ways. Left. Down a long ramp. Right. Down a spiraling staircase—seventy-four steps. Straight down a narrow corridor that smelled of wet rock and ozone. A left, then an immediate right. Another long descent by a shuddering platform that hummed with suppressed energy. The air grew colder, thicker. The sounds of the upper world vanished, replaced by a deep, vibrational hum that seemed to come from the planet's bones.
I was put into the deepest part of the jail. The end point. I stood at the terminus of a tunnel. Before me was not a cell door, but a seamless wall of dark, polished stone that drank the light. A jailer touched a complex rune on the wall. The stone flowed aside like water, revealing a small, circular chamber. This jail was like an ant nest. It looked like it was an infinitely branching jail.
They threw me inside. I stumbled into the circular room. After that they put a very strong barrier around the jail I was put in. The flowing stone sealed shut behind me. Then, with a deep thrum, a dome of shimmering, opalescent energy snapped into existence over the sealed entrance, melding with the walls. The air inside the cell grew sterile, utterly still. To ensure that I am separated from the surrounding and my so-called disease doesn't spread anywhere.
The room was hard rock. There was a bed and a toilet. And that was it. Even more barren than the first cell. No fungus light here. The only illumination came from the opalescent barrier itself, casting a dead, pearlescent glow that made everything look like a faded negative.
The hum was inside my skull now. The silence was absolute.
I sat down on the bed… The crushing isolation was a physical force. I was in a sensory deprivation chamber at the center of the world. I started contemplating what my father meant by 'Perfect'…
The vessel is empty.
An empty vessel. A container with nothing inside. No Aether. A biological void where the building block of this universe should be.
The implications began to spiral, connecting to everything: the hidden library, the algorithms, the Church's immediate, violent reaction to my Aetherless state, their attempt to destroy a thing I didn't have.
Suddenly my heart raced…
A terrible, dazzling understanding bloomed in the dark.
I laughed…. It was a dry, hacking, breathless sound in the sterile silence. No… no no no no no no no… no.
Fuck!!! Noooo!
I grabbed my head, my fingers digging into my scalp as if to tear the understanding out. I realised…. That I was…