She woke up inside a clear, hollow space surrounded by towering white bookshelves and the impossible purple grass. Her clothes, the blue silk dress, were tattered, and someone had bound her hands tightly behind her back.
"Oh... look what we have here..." A voice, sharp and icy with scorn, spoke.
She looked up, fear registering briefly in her eyes before she forced it down.
"Sir Silas didn't disappoint," the voice continued.
"Now... up."
It was Miguel of the Fenshore house. She recognized the silver hair, the coldly handsome features. A flicker of desperate, formal hope sparked in her chest. "Miguel, from the House of Fenshore... right? Please, listen. The matter at hand has grown dire. We need to gather all forces—"
"What matter?" he interrupted, his tone bored.
Others around them, black-clad figures she didn't recognize, snickered.
"Hah... 'matter'..."
"Our Highness has a martyr's attention to drama," Miguel said, waving a dismissive hand.
As she saw a member of a house her royal family had trusted so much acting this way, something in her snapped.
She yelled, in a raw sound of agony and pain. "AUGH!"
The silver-haired man looked down at her, Miguel's expression one of clinical curiosity. "It hurts, doesn't it?" he mused. "Your thread of fate is corrupting, Your Highness. Such misery. What shall we do?!"
They laughed. The princess, now held in a rough man's grip, cried out, her body shaking with quiet, broken sobs. She looked down at her right arm. It hurt. It was deforming. The skin was darkening to a bloody purple, and something seemed to move beneath it, squirming. It scared her. It looked so wrong.
Miguel crouched in front of her, inspecting her like a fine specimen. "Ah, there she goes... the future queen, the heir of Vex, becoming an Unfaithful. How fitting. It's similar to our late young prince... and queen..."
She looked up, her eyes widening in furious recognition.
"Tsk. What's that look for?" He slapped her. A red mark bloomed on her cheek. "Isn't it your pop's fault? Or King Henry, whatever his name was."
"You do not have the right to—" Her voice was cut off by another, sharper smack that hung in the air.
"Don't raise your voice at me, girl. Or rather, Your Highness." His voice dropped to a venomous whisper. "Why am I doing this, you ask? Turning vile, betraying the kingdom for no reason?" He leaned closer. "Let me tell you one thing. This isn't just me. This is the whole of Vex. Do you know how many detest the royal rule? How many in the highest offices, in the military, even a great deal of professors in your precious academy, hold nothing but disdain for you and your bloodline?"
"That's right..." A new figure walked out from between the white shelves. Pink hair, sharp bangs, red eyes. Professor Anya.
"Oh my, oh my, Your Highness," Anya said, her voice a raspy mockery of concern. "What could have warranted such... results?"
"Professor Anya, please, signal the headquarters of the cadets and—" Elara began, a final plea to authority.
"Mggh!" She cried out, crunching forward as a blinding pain exploded in her stomach. Miguel had kicked her, the force driving the air from her lungs and leaving her gasping, writhing on the ground.
"You thought she was with you?!" Miguel yelled, a snarl twisting his features.
Everything hurt. The corruption in her arm was growing, creeping up toward her shoulder. And then the world itself seemed to collapse. The pristine white bookshelves shimmered and dissolved into swirling orange luminescence. Thick, acrid smoke billowed from the ground. The tranquil, alien library churned and melted into a hellscape of molten orange light. The purple grass blackened and turned to ash. The heat was sudden and oppressive, making it hard to breathe.
Miguel let go of her, and she fell onto the hard, white stone floor, now glowing with internal heat.
"They spoke of 'rift caliber,'" Anya observed calmly, as if lecturing.
"Yes," Miguel said, looking around at the inferno. "We are inside a Beta-class rift now. A Beta rift is almost always sourced from a person... unless their thread of fate is corrupted or killed, it will remain open."
"Now, about the other matter," Anya said, turning her red gaze toward Miguel. "Lucid. That young boy."
Miguel's lips curled. "Oh, that bug. I'll crush him this time."
Anya managed a thin, satisfied smile. "Good. I will enjoy it. I'm looking forward to it."
It was hopeless. Everything was hopeless as she lay there, her body actively transforming into something Unfaithful.
They hauled her up. In the middle of the round clearing where the burning shelves formed a ring, they took both of her arms and drove a long, cruel iron nail through each palm into a hard, blackened tree that have lost its colour and leaves long ago. The metal pierced her already-warping purple flesh. She screamed. A scream so horrible, so full of pure agony, it felt like it deafened her own ears. It hurt. It was an agony beyond anything she had ever imagined. She hung from the nails, blood streaming down her arms, a grotesque parody in the center of the molten hell.
***
Frederick supported himself against one of the few remaining white shelves that hadn't yet burned, putting his hand against it and leaning his back against the warm surface, looking up at the orange, smoky sky.
Lucid stood a few paces away, watching him. He knew Frederick was a proto-knight, and that the princess probably meant something to him, but he didn't know how close they were. He just watched, his own body aching, the mist around his face swirling in the superheated air. The knight's face was a mask of grim exhaustion and a fury held in check by sheer will.
"Let's move..." he commanded
Lucid and Frederick kept walking. The pristine white world was gone, replaced by a roaring inferno. The shelves were pillars of fire, the purple grass was ash, and the air was thick with choking smoke and oppressive heat. They found a group of second-year students, silver badges, trapped beneath a collapsing, burning bookcase. Lucid's first instinct was to look away. They weren't his responsibility. They were just more variables in a failing equation.
He set the instinct aside. He didn't choose the opposite, a heroic rush to save them. Instead, he acted with a detached, mechanical efficiency. He braced himself against the heat, used a half-formed chain of heart to reinforce his grip, and levered the burning mass just enough for them to scramble free. They coughed, cried, and thanked him through sobs.
He didn't acknowledge their gratitude. He turned to Frederick, who was watching, his face smudged with soot. "Telling the teachers won't work," Lucid stated flatly, his voice raspy from the smoke. "The signaling threads are gone. This isn't the Epsilon rift anymore. It's a Beta-class. Higher. We're stuck until the rift's objective is met or its source dies." He recited it like a morbid fact from a manual.
Frederick's composed mask fractured for a second. A raw, bleak sorrow flashed in his blue eyes before he clamped down on it, his jaw tightening. It was the look of a man who had just been told the only door out was sealed forever.
Lucid saw it. His first impulse was to offer some empty comfort, a pat on the shoulder, a hollow "we'll figure it out." He hated that impulse. It felt weak, fake. He didn't want to be that person, especially not with this knight who was all duty and sharp edges.
He set it aside. He didn't choose silence either. Instead, he looked away from Frederick's pain and busied himself with a practical assessment. "They're under our care now," he said, gesturing vaguely at the shell-shocked students. "We move. Staying here is death." It was leadership, but of the coldest, most logistical kind. It shared no pattern with pity or with ignoring the problem.
Alice spoke in his mind, her tone uncharacteristically soft. 'Lucid. Treat him… as I would treat you.'
He was confused. 'How do you treat me?' he thought back.
'With presence. Without demand. As an anchor point in the chaos.'
Lucid almost laughed, a bitter sound in his throat. He teased her inwardly, a defense against the strange intimacy of her advice. 'So, annoy him silently and occasionally save his life? Got it.'
He gestured forward, and their grim party moved through the burning maze, a knight, a shrouded enigma, and six terrified kids. They pushed further into the heart of the molten hellscape, the objective a terrifying unknown.
Then they found it.
Lucid stopped walking. He saw them first. His brain refused to process the shapes, the colors wrong against the orange and white. He took a few more steps, his boots scuffing the hot stone, as if getting closer would change what his eyes reported.
Brian. His large body lay broken, his head separated a few feet away, his friendly face frozen in a final, quiet surprise. Mary was on her side, her old patched up glasses shattered nearby, a deep wound in her chest, her blood a dark pool staining the white stone beneath her lips, which were parted as if in a soft, unfinished word. Garfield was a tangle of limbs at impossible angles, his theatrical poses made permanent in a cruel, final joke.
Lucid's knees gave out. He didn't choose to kneel; he simply fell, hitting the hard ground with a force he didn't feel.
'Lucid, listen to me,' Alice's voice cut in, swift and urgent. 'I believe the properties of the rift has changed, they were unlucky, do not let this moment ruin you. You are strong and unwavering... Lucid.. please what matters is that you are still alive... they are not, but you still are...' She was trying to reason, to pull him back from the edge with logic.
Fredrick looked from the bodies to Lucid, kneeling. The knight's face, for the first time, showed pure, unguarded understanding. He didn't see a monster or a mystery in that moment. He saw a person shattered by loss. He knew that look.
Then the voices came. They materialized from the swirling smoke and heat, mirroring the bodies on the ground.
"It's because of you, Lucid." Mary's voice, but flat and cold. She wasn't looking at him from where she lay. A spectral image of her, clean and unbloodied, stood beside her own corpse, her head tilting with an uncanny smile. "You led us here. Your path."
"You were supposed to be strong," Brian's voice boomed, mournful and accusing. A shimmering form of him shook his head. "You just ran ahead. Left us behind."
"Eureka," Garfield's spectral form sighed, striking a pose of tragic despair. "The grand adventure. Led to a dead end. By you."
"No…" Lucid tried to speak, but his voice was a wrecked whisper. He shook his head, his hands clenching into fists on the hot stone. "I didn't… I was going to…"
Mary's phantom image took a step closer, her uncanny smile widening. "Going to what? Save us? You can't even save yourself."
The scream inside Lucid built again, but this time it had no sound. It was a vacuum of horror, swallowing the world around the three accusing phantoms and the three broken bodies that were his fault, his failure, his end.