Inside the Drakethorne Palace, a vast, opulent room draped entirely in white sat at the heart of it. A grand canopy bed sat at the very centre of the chamber, its every detail exuding wealth and prestige. The room itself was furnished with enormous wardrobes and a dressing table arranged neatly at one corner, and curtains large enough to swallow a modest one-storey house altogether hung from windows equally grand in their proportion. The room lay dark and cold with the night breeze drifting in through an opened window, making the white curtains curve and billow in beautiful, fluid lines that moved like the ripple of an ocean.
Sera anxiously shifted in her bed. An ominous feeling had crept into her gut and made her body damp with sweat despite the cold of the night, and she had not been able to sleep even though she had been lying in the bed for over thirty minutes. It was not the dress troubling her, for she was wearing one of her night gowns, and she could feel the fabric was soft and perfectly pleasant against her skin. So, the doubt that her dress was making her feel this way was quickly dismissed. She moved her hands slowly over the bedsheets and found them equally smooth, filled with a soft cushion beneath, and then she touched the duvet draped across her lower body and found it too was soft and light. So she ruled out that anything surrounding her was not the cause for her feelings.
She drew a slow breath through her nose and found no unpleasant odour lingering in the air. Her eyes moved carefully around their sockets, searching every shadow and corner for something lurking, but she sensed nothing.
"Still not asleep?" her husband murmured from beside her, still half-submerged in sleep and barely stringing his words together, for she had nudged him so many times within that short window of the night that he had not been able to fully settle into slumber.
"Mm." Sera nodded faintly and rolled onto her left side, her gaze settling on Shane's face that showed the signs of a man nearing his fifties. Though her beloved had reached paragon, he had not made any meaningful advance in level in the past decade, having devoted most of his time to researching the status error problem that plagued their son. And the knowledge that the emperor had already crossed level one thousand had weighed on her husband deeply, so deeply that he had since been pouring himself into training.
She knew it was not the only reason he trained so relentlessly. It was also because he believed he had failed as a father, unable to prevent Alex's future marriage from falling apart. Shane had blamed himself, his face was sullen silence when Alex lay unconscious.
Sera lifted her right hand and let her palm stroke the untrimmed beard of her beloved. He was her first love, and they had not come together through a political arrangement as so many others had but had fallen in love during their academy days. They had been scorned and mocked behind their eyes. Not many liked the fact that Shane married a girl from a baron house when he himself came from a grand ducal house. The difference between their nobility was so vast that it had drawn open contempt.
Yet he had refused to marry anyone else. He was unruly and did exactly what his heart demanded. So, in the end they had married, and though his parents had offered some initial resistance before they met her. But, the moment they laid eyes on her they had given their blessing wholeheartedly. She even vividly recalled Shane's father hammering his broad fist proudly against Shane's back and saying something very close to: I never thought you would find yourself such a beautiful girl. I had been so worried about you because of your behavior, I thought no sensible woman would ever take a liking to you. Those were not the exact words, but the warmth behind them was unmistakable.
And though his parents had relented, resistance had remained elsewhere. Elders and branch families had muttered and even schemed, going so far as to challenge whether the main house should be overturned entirely and control given to one of the more powerful branch families. But the challenges had been extinguished completely as quickly as it had ignited, for Shane had silenced them with his power alone, because no one of his generation had been strong enough to beat him. That had left bitter feelings even until now with branch families as both parties continued to avoid talking and meeting unless very urgent.
"Still worried?" Shane opened his eyes and looked at her. "Close your eyes and count the sheep jumping over the fence. It will put you to sleep."
"Pfft." Sera let out a soft laugh, and her palm moved through his tangled, dishevelled hair before settling against his cheek. "You always know how to make me laugh," she murmured.
But the worry did not leave her. Even with his joke, the ominous feeling had not dimmed by even a fraction. It still curled in her chest like smoke.
Still, she closed her eyes. Her palm rested and felt warm against her beloved's face, drawing comfort from him. She began to count white sheep leaping one by one over a low fence in a lush green field, with great green mountains rising in the horizon.
Soon, sleep found her.
"Kikikiki." The goblin warrior laughed in a manic, grating pitch as it regarded Alex, its enormous hand wrapped easily and completely around his skull, its grip so large that Alex's head sat within it. Its cruel, dark eyes met Alex's dim azure gaze, those once-vivid eyes now stripped of all their light and shine looked dangerously close to that of a person nearing the final breaths. The monster's eyes were stretched grotesquely wide and pulled far to the sides of its face, and a slow, thick trail of drool slid continuously from the corner of its wide opened mouth.
Alex's world was dimming. Everything around him was turning dark and blurry at the edges as blood trickled down from his head and spread across his right eye, clouding his vision in red. He might have screamed from the pain if not for the fact that his focus was dissolving like smoke, and the fact that his entire body had gone limp, every bone reduced to pieces from the direct, crushing impact he had received when he first met his foes.
The goblin warrior tilted its head slowly, studying him with an almost curious cruelty, then reached out and seized Alex's right forearm in its iron grip. Its thick wrist tightened. The already broken bones cracked even more and snapped loudly. "Ahhhh!" Alex screamed, tears spilling freely down his blood-streaked face, the taste of sour liquid and rotten flesh flooding his mouth as tears and blood mingled at his lips.
And the pain did not end there. The monster's lips curled into something like a smirk, its dark tongue dragging across its equally grotesque lips, and then without mercy, it wrenched the arm clean from Alex's body, spattering blood across the ground in a wide arc before tossing the severed limb aside to the floor.
"Aaarrrghhh!" The cry that tore from Alex was raw and ear-shattering and seemed to stretch on far beyond what any human throat should have been capable of. He had been trying to move his broken left hand, which was already swollen and grotesquely deformed from the goblin's earlier assault, intending to press his palm against his shoulder and staunch the blood pouring out like an open river. But the attempt never reached its end.
The goblin warrior seized his left hand in its bulging, muscular grip and in a single tenth of a second tore it free as well, tossing it into the circle of goblins that had surrounded them on all sides.
"Aaaahhhhhhhh!" The second shriek was even louder, the sound stretching wide and raw across the night. It only stopped when his vocal cords cracked and shattered.
"Kaka kitga kitga." The monster looked down at Alex with evident irritation and hurled his half-dead body to the ground at the centre of the circle.
Alex struck the earth with the force of a hammer driving a nail, and the impact rocked through every broken inch of him and sent his body rolling and tumbling across the ground splattering blood over the barren floor. He wanted desperately to stop himself, but there were no arms left to stop himself with.
His body finally came to rest, and the goblins that had been squirming eagerly in a circle around him lunged forward as one, only to freeze at the thundering command of the goblin warrior. "Kirkir hir hir."
What followed was a barrage. Wooden clubs rained down on him from all sides, and even more blood began to pour from every part of him. His vision faded entirely to black. His vocal cords shredded earlier from screaming, he did not make a single sound as the blows continued. He accepted his death.
With each passing second that seemingly stretched itself into infinity, his breaths grew shorter and further apart. His eyes closed. His heart began to stutter and lose its rhythm. His skin turned pale white and cold against the scorching heat.
Sorry.
[Error! Error! Host's vital signs not responding.]
[Error! Error! Proceeding with the immediate next step!]
[Initiating the procedure! Searching for a new Host!]
***
"Nooooo!" Sera jolted upright from the bed, her hands moving so fast that the duvets were hurled clean to the floor. She turned and began shaking her husband with both hands, her entire body trembling, tears streaming freely down her face. "Dear, dear, dear," she called to him in a broken voice, and did not notice that Shane had already sat up and placed his hands firmly on her shoulders.
"What happened?" His brows drew together sharply, his eyes filling with worries as he looked at her.
"A... Alex, he is n... no more..." Before her choking, strangled voice could fully reach him with its meaning, she continued to shake him even more.
"Alex what?" he pressed, his voice low and urgent.
"Alex is no more with us," she growled, her fist driving into the mattress with a force so uncontrolled and so devastating that the bed cracked apart in two and both of them dropped to the floor.
Shane reached a hand toward her hair, his palm moving gently across her azure hair. "It was a dream. You must have had a bad dre..."
Shane's voice never found their way as Sera grabbed him by the shoulders and held his gaze with wild, shaking eyes. "No," she whispered. "It was not a dream." She was already rising to her feet. "The soul lamp. Where is Alex's soul lamp?" she cried, tears still running down her face without pause.
Before Shane could answer, Sera was already moving, and appeared before the doors of the chambers. She burst the doors apart and shattered them to pieces and immediately disappeared into the hallway.
She arrived before an old brown door and wrenched it open, this one not bursting free the way the last had but yielded open with her scrambled push.
With frantic, darting eyes she ran inside, her gaze sweeping across the room, searching for her son's lamp.
She sucked in a shaky breath and fell to her knees. Her body lowered to the cold floor, she started hammering her forehead to the ground, and her fists simultaneously punched against the same cold floor.
"Aaaaahh..." She shrieked like a madwoman and she wept louder with tears falling like a waterfall.
The room shuddered to her cries but Alex's soul lamp remained dark and empty of warmth.
***
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