The morning came to Luna City, soft and gray, the sun hidden behind a veil of clouds that had rolled in during the night.
The city began to stir cars humming on distant streets, birds calling from hidden branches, the slow, steady rhythm of life returning to the world. It was a new day, full of new hope and new light.
But for Erza, there was no hope. There was no light. Because her light was still sleeping on the sofa.
She sat beside him, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on his face. He had not moved for hours. His chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm, and his lips were parted slightly, and his dark hair had fallen across his forehead. He looked peaceful. He looked innocent. He looked like he had never known pain.
Erza found herself annoyed.
Not angry.
Not frustrated.
Annoyed in the way that only someone who cared deeply could be. She had been waiting for him to wake for hours now, watching the clock on the wall tick past six, then six-thirty, then seven.
Usually, by this time, Yuuta was already in the kitchen, moving between the stove and the counter with that quiet efficiency she had come to admire, his hands working while his mind wandered, explaining something, anything, to fill the silence.
She missed his explanations.
She missed the sound of his voice, the way he talked about ingredients and temperatures and the history of dishes she had never heard of. She missed the way he gestured with his hands when he was excited, the way his red eyes lit up when she asked a question, the way he smiled, that stupid, earnest, infuriating smile, when he thought he had impressed her.
The memory of his past had taken a full month to witness.
A month of needles and burns and broken bones.
A month of darkness and death and the endless, crushing weight of suffering.
A month of watching the man she loved be taken apart and put back together and taken apart again.
When she had returned, only an hour had passed.
But for her, it had been a month since she had seen his face. A month since she had heard his voice. A month since she had watched him smile and felt something warm bloom in her chest, something she had thought dead, something she had not known she was capable of feeling.
She leaned forward.
Her finger poked his cheek, gentle at first, then harder, prodding the soft flesh with an impatience she could not hide.
"You idiot mortal," she said, and her voice was soft, almost fond, though she would never admit it. "You have the audacity to keep a your queen waiting."
Her finger stopped.
It rested against his cheek, feeling the warmth of his skin, the slight stubble along his jaw, the slow, steady pulse of blood beneath the surface. His face was so innocent in sleep, unguarded and vulnerable, free from the tension that usually marked his waking hours.
She let her emotion influence her.
Her face softened. Her eyes, usually cold and sharp, grew warm. Her finger traced the line of his cheekbone, feather-light, barely touching.
Then she remembered.
Isvarn's words echoed in her mind, cold and final: You must leave him alone. Forever.
Her breath caught.
She pulled her hand back as if she had been burned, her fingers curling into a fist against her chest. She turned her face away, unable to look at him any longer, because looking at him made her want to stay, and staying was not an option.
Isvarn watched from the dining table.
He sat near the balcony, the morning light falling across his ancient features, his book open before him. But he was not reading. His violet eyes, sharp as swords, deep as oceans, were fixed on the scene unfolding before him.
He had just witnessed something he had never imagined he would see.
The most fearless queen in the history of Atlantis. The dragon who had frozen Nightmare Saint and killed Heros without blinking. The woman who had taken a throne through bloodshed and held it through will.
Acting like a newlywed bride.
His instinct, honed by millennia of protecting the royal family, screamed at him to kill the human. The mortal was a distraction. A weakness. A threat to everything Erza had built, everything her ancestors had sacrificed, everything the kingdom of Atlantis stood for.
But he was not angry.
In fact, he was smiling.
His lips curved slightly at the corners, hidden by his beard, invisible to anyone who did not know him well. His eyes, which had been cold and calculating, grew warm.
He watched Yuuta's sleeping form, and he saw something Erza could not.
Aura.
It rose from the human's body in thin, wispy tendrils, red and black, swirling together like smoke from a dying fire.
The red was bright, almost crimson, pulsing with a heat that seemed out of place in the cool morning air. The black was darker than shadow, deeper than the void, the color of something that should not exist.
The aura was small.
Barely visible. Barely there.
Erza, for all her power, could not detect it. She was too strong, too bright, too overwhelming. Her presence drowned out the smaller signatures around her, the way the sun drowned out the stars. She had never learned to look for the quiet things, the hidden things, the things that whispered instead of roared.
But Isvarn had learned.
He had spent millennia learning about cursed humans. He knew how to look for the things that did not want to be found.
That aura he recognized it immediately, the red of chaos, the black of annihilation, the way the two colors twisted together like lovers locked in an eternal embrace. The doctor must had used their blood to create Yuuta. Their essence flowed through his veins, sleeping but not dead, waiting but not patient.
And there was a side effect.
Isvarn had suspected it from the beginning. The Goddess's seal had locked away Yuuta's memories, but it had not locked away everything. But the Unkown blood in his veins reacted to the mana of Nova, but it also reacted to something else.
Emotion.
Fear. Despair. The memory of pain, even when the memories themselves were sealed.
Yuuta was trapped in a nightmare.
Isvarn did not interrupt.
He sat at the dining table, his book open before him, his eyes watching, his smile hidden, and he let the nightmare run its course. It was a mortal affair, after all. The suffering of humans was not the concern of dragons. They lived and died in the blink of an eye, their pain fleeting, their joy brief.
Why should he interfere?
Let her wait, he thought. Let her see. Let her understand.
He is not safe. He will never be safe.
And neither will she, as long as she loves him.
Erza was still waiting.
She sat beside him, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned toward the window. The morning light painted her silver hair in shades of gold, and her profile was sharp against the brightness, the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the full lips pressed together in a thin line.
She did not look at Yuuta.
She could not.
Every time she looked at him, she wanted to stay. Every time she looked at him, she forgot why she had to leave. Every time she looked at him, her resolve crumbled like ice beneath a spring sun.
She believed it was over.
The nightmare of the past.
The suffering.
The pain.
She had sealed his memories, repaired the wheel, watched him sleep peacefully for the first time since she had known him.
She had thought, naively, foolishly, desperately, that the worst was behind them.
She was so wrong.
She did not see the wisps of red and black rising from his body.
She did not feel the subtle shift in the air, the way the temperature seemed to drop when the black surged, the way the light seemed to brighten when the red pulsed.
She did not know that her mortal was trapped in a prison she could not see, fighting battles she could not hear, losing ground she did not know existed.
Even though Erza was not aware of Yuuta's condition, someone else was. Someone who had been watching Yuuta since his childhood from the shadows, waiting for this moment, knowing that the mortal's nightmare had already begun.
The hour passed.
The morning light grew brighter, filtering through the curtains, casting long shadows across the worn wooden floor.
The city outside grew louder, cars and voices and the distant bark of dogs. But inside the apartment, there was only silence, broken only by the soft, labored breathing of the man on the sofa.
Erza began to worry.
She had been patient.
She had been still. She had told herself that he needed rest, that his body was healing, that he would wake when he was ready. But now it was eight-thirty in the morning, and he had not moved. He had not stirred.
He had not opened his eyes.
She knelt beside him and shook his shoulder gently.
"Mortal," she said. "Mortal, wake up. It is already late."
He did not respond. His chest rose and fell, but his eyes remained closed, and his lips did not move.
She shook him harder. "Hey, mortal. Wake up."
Nothing.
She placed her hand on his forehead. It was hot, too hot, burning with a fever. His skin was clammy, slick with sweat, and his face was pale beneath the flush of heat.
"What should I do?" she said, Panic rising from her chest, erza standing, pacing, biting her nail. "There is something wrong with him. Something is very wrong."
Isvarn watched from the dining table, his ancient eyes cold, his lips curved in a smile that did not reach his eyes.
He knew what was happening, he fianlly understood Yuuta condition.
He had seen it before, in other Recorded subjects, in other experiments, in the failed weapons that had been discarded and forgotten.
The blood of the Disaster's children, that came with a price.
Those who received it were fused with ancient power but who failed will suffer plagued by nightmares, visions of the one who had been sacrificed, the being whose blood flowed through their veins.
If the subject fallen in Nightmare. If they did not wake in time, if they could not escape the nightmare, their mind would shatter. They would be lost forever.
Isvarn did not intervene.
He did not warn Erza.
He did not lift a finger to help the man who had stolen his granddaughter's heart.
He was not an evil man.
He had been taught wrong, raised in a world where duty came before love, where the kingdom came before the individual, where the bloodline was more important than the heart. In his eyes, Yuuta was an obstacle. A weakness. A crack in Erza's armor that her enemies would exploit. He did not hate the mortal. He simply believed that he had to be eliminated.
He needed to be eradicated.
And now, fate was offering him a way.
Erza paced faster, her heart pounding, her mind racing. She did not know what to do. She had never been helpless.
She had never been afraid.
But she was afraid now.
She looked at Yuuta, at his sweating face, his labored breathing, his closed eyes. He looked like he was drowning. Like he was trapped somewhere she could not reach.
"Please," she whispered, though she did not know who she was begging. "Please wake up....This is not Funny..Yuuta."
Isvaren watched as Erza's pacing grew more frantic, as she returned to Yuuta's side and shook him again, as her voice cracked when she called his name.
He watched, and he smiled, and he told himself that this was necessary.
What he didn't know, what he couldn't possibly have known, was that fate had already decided to step in.
Then
Knock.
Knock.
To be continued...