"Mother..." Vane's voice left a hollow echo in the suffocating silence of the Censored Floor, a place reeking of mold and rotting leather. His eyes were glued to the horrific description on the parchment.
His mind violently snapped back to the hellscape of his awakening. He remembered the excruciating agony, the sensation of his bones being ground to dust, and—amidst that terror—a delicate silhouette bathed in a hazy purple light in the corner of the room. He recalled the fresh blood seeping from Elara's fingers, how it suffocated the golden radiance of the blade, and the ancient, desperate whispers spilling from her lips. Back then, he had written it off as a fever dream, a hallucination born from unbearable pain.
But now, as his thumb traced the coarse, jagged texture of his dagger—the rust forged from his own mother's blood—every missing piece clicked into place like a lethal clockwork mechanism. It wasn't a hallucination. His mother had woven her own lifeblood into his soul as a seal, a "rusted plug," to keep that cannibalistic void from devouring him from the inside out.
Under the flickering, sickly glow of the gas lamp, Vane stared at his trembling hands. His cold, calculating mind immediately began analyzing the possibilities, setting them up like pieces on a chessboard. Questions battered his consciousness like silent sledgehammers: If my mother had hidden this terrifying power, how much did King Vorian know?
His gaze locked onto the dust motes dancing in the gloom. He recalled Vorian's stone-cold, calculating glare back at the palace—the eyes of a blacksmith assessing a raw ingot. Wait... Did the King know everything from the very beginning?
An icy shiver crept down his spine, entirely numbing the throbbing pain in his bandaged arm. It was a horrifying prospect, but Vane's strictly rational mind refused to dismiss it. Did the King throw him into the Obsidian Academy not to protect him, but to violently awaken the monster sleeping inside? Was he intentionally tossed under Caelum's crushing axe and pushed toward Julian's scorching flames?
Was the royal Pillar blood flowing through his veins serving as a literal hammer, waiting for external attacks to shatter this rusted seal?
You never intended for me to survive, did you, Father? Vane thought, his chest tightening. You want me to absorb their blows until I exceed my limit. You want me to detonate right in the center of the other Pillars eyeing your throne, wiping them off the map as a living suicide bomb.
Instead of collapsing in despair, this terrifying realization crystallized into an ice-cold clarity. Vane leaned back against the heavy wooden bookshelf, straightening his posture. Who could he trust? The answer was as absolute as the pitch-black darkness surrounding him: Absolutely no one. He was not a son. He was just an invaluable, yet entirely expendable, pawn on the King's chessboard.
"So, you might be forging me into a bomb," he whispered to the abyss, a razor-sharp smirk creeping onto his lips. "But a weapon can always learn to turn its barrel against the hand that holds it."
Exactly at that moment, a sound slithered from the deepest recesses of the Censored Floor, creeping out from the shadows of the heavy oak shelves. It wasn't a physical footstep. There was no flesh and bone treading upon the stone. Instead, it was the chilling whisper of an invisible entity bending the physical world around it, dropping the room's temperature to freezing in a heartbeat.
Then came a rhythmic, ethereal resonance: Crack... Crack... Crack. An ice-cold fracturing, like an ancient silver mirror slowly shattering, echoing directly inside the confines of Vane's skull.
From the depths of the shadows emerged that familiar, velvety female voice—the very same one that had scraped against the walls of his mind during that first encounter back at the palace. It drifted somewhere between a sinister whisper and an amused chuckle:
"Finally... That tedious seal is cracking." The voice was laced with dark mockery. "Tell me, little pawn; does the truth taste sweeter than the bitter cold of betrayal?"
Vane felt the fresh cut across his right palm throb violently. But this time, it wasn't just pain; it was an awakening. The moment he summoned his soul weapon, the heavy dagger materialized, trembling as it rested in his grip. As he raised the gas lamp toward the shadows where the voice originated, his eyes widened in disbelief.
Back in the arena, Caelum's colossal axe—a violent surge of aether that could melt solid stone—had failed to leave a single scratch on this rusted surface. That seal had never once splintered under an external blow.
But now, starting exactly from the point where it made contact with the blood seeping from Vane's open wound, that thick layer of brown rust was splitting. Hairline fractures were spider-webbing across the dark metal.
The ancient darkness imprisoned within had finally found a crack to bleed through.