His skull was a vessel cracking from within.
Lucid thrashed on the ground, both hands clamped over his ears as if he could physically block out the pressure building behind his eyes. It was not pain from a wound. It was not the sharp, clean agony of a blade or the burning ache of healing flesh. This was something else. Something that lived inside his head and was now trying to push its way out.
"ALICE!" He screamed her name like a prayer, like a curse, like a child calling for a mother who would not come.
Nothing.
No green glow. No soothing warmth. No gentle voice smoothing the ragged edges of his panic.
He focused inward, reaching for the Chain of Heart. It pulsed weakly, a distant echo of its usual rhythm. He pushed. He willed it to heal him.
The pain did not recede. There was nothing to heal. The agony was not in his flesh. It was in the part of him that had witnessed something no mind was meant to hold.
He pressed his fingers against his eyes. Harder. Harder still. His nails broke the skin. Blood welled, warm and sticky, running down his cheeks like tears of rust. He pushed until the pressure in his skull found release, until his vision swam red and then black and then something else entirely.
The pain receded.
He opened his eyes.
Blood still flowed from the shallow wounds he had carved into his own face. He blinked through it, watching the world stain crimson and then clear. His breathing was ragged. His hands trembled against his thighs.
He had seen her life.
Not fragments. Not impressions. The whole of it, compressed into a single, unbearable moment that had detonated inside his skull. The girl. Elena. Sara. Whatever name she had claimed in her final breath. He had watched her childhood, her training, her first kill. He had felt the cold emptiness where her family had been before the Chapeu erased them. He had experienced the hollow, mechanical obedience that replaced her capacity for joy.
And he had seen him.
A man in black. Pale skin. Slicked-back hair. A voice like oil on water. That same person, who was his first encounter of violence ever since coming to this world.
"Kill the silver badges. Let House Fenshore consume their threads. When the ritual for the princess is complete, eliminate the survivors. Be wary of an individual with fogged features. Report him to me. He is of great interest to the Chapeu."
The words carved themselves into Lucid's memory, each syllable a brand.
He saw the princess. Suspended from the obsidian tree, her body a grotesque diptych of beauty and corruption. Her left eye, still lucid, still hoping. Her right side, a pulsing, purple tumor of twisted flesh.
He saw it all.
"Alice?" His voice was raw, scraped clean of its usual flatness.
No answer.
She was gone. Not her power, he could still feel that, a distant reservoir behind his sternum, but her presence. The constant, watchful pressure at the edges of his consciousness. The voice that mocked and soothed and demanded in equal measure.
It was silent.
He thought of her. Not as the entity that shared his skull, but as the broken figure he had held in that impossible green realm. Her blindfolded eyes. Her mutilated hand. Her heart, chained and bleeding light. She had been willing to die with him. She had offered him her essence, her power, her very existence, and called it devotion.
And he had manipulated her.
The memory of those words, his own voice begging for survival while she wept against his chest, made him sick. He had looked fate in the eyes countless times and refused to blink. He had walked through death and emerged on the other side, again and again. And yet, in that moment, he had begged. Pleaded. Bargained with a deity who acted like a petulant child when she did not get her way.
He pushed the thought aside. There was no time for shame. There was never time for shame or guilt.
He tried to manifest the status screen.
A white, shadowy substance flowed from nowhere, coalescing into a shape like clouds or smoke. Black letters formed within it, arranging themselves with cold precision.
***
Enlightened Title: The Divine Maiden
Name: Alice
Rank: Primordial
Fate Essence: ∞
Trait: [The Chain of Heart] [The Pierced Spine] [The Silenced Throat] █████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
Description: Lost in time and space... Error... Error... This message cannot be revealed further.
***
Everything was normal. The screen existed. Her powers were accessible. Which meant she was still there, somewhere in the depths of his consciousness.
But she was not responding.
'Can a ghostly divine maiden even sleep? he wondered.'
'What does she do when I'm a sleep?'
'Does she just... sit there? Wait?'
None of these questions would provide answers. However valid they were time was a luxury he could not afford.
His eyes drifted to the Traits section.
Three names. Three traits binding her to a state of eternal suffering. Three instruments of torture that he had been wielding as weapons.
The Chain of Heart. He knew this one. It was his most reliable tool, his get-out-of-jail-free card. He could perceive fate essence, regenerate fate essence, heal from huge wounds. Every use felt like tearing something loose from his chest, but the usefulness of it was undeniable. He had never questioned where it came from.
The Pierced Spine. He had glimpsed it in the vision. The spear that pinned her to the tree, driven through her back to ensure she could never rise again.
The Silenced Throat. The bruises. The crushed windpipe. The voice that demanded nothing because it could demand nothing.
They were not weapons. They were imprisonments. Acts of violence committed against her that she had somehow transformed into abilities he could borrow. And they reminded him of her state, each name a reflection of what she had gone through... Lucid felt that there had to have been more.
'Why was fate essence leaking from her naval? The veil... it didn't cover anything, and her eyes.... her eyes... they have to have been hallowed beneath that...' He scratched that thought aside.
His fingers trembled as he reached toward the screen. He knew, by experience, that pressing on a Trait would reveal its description. He had done this countless times with the Chain of Heart. But he had never pressed the others. He had never wanted to know.
He pressed.
***
Trait: [The Pierced Spine]
Description:
The sin of Wrath hollowed her resolve. Though she chose mercy over judgment, her restraint was answered with cruelty. Those she sought to spare mistook her stillness for weakness. In their fury, they shattered her will and pierced her spine, so she would never again rise against them.
Trait Rank: F
Attribute:
The wielder of this trait possesses the spine of a fallen divine maiden.
Grants: The spear of the Pierced Spine, Weak Pain Resistance, Weak Resolve Manifestation, Weak Physical Reinforcement.
Passive: [The divine Wrath]
When the user chooses not to retaliate after suffering harm, Wrath accumulates within the fractured spine. Upon reaching its threshold, stored Wrath forcibly manifests, briefly restoring the body to its unbroken state and amplifying all physical capabilities until the surge exhausts itself.
***
He stared at the words.
'So she would never again rise against them.' Every time he called upon the Chain of Heart, he was not borrowing her power. He was re-enacting her imprisonment. Ripping open wounds that had never been allowed to heal.
His jaw tightened. His vision blurred. He blinked, and moisture tracked down his cheeks, whether blood or tears, he could no longer tell.
He pressed the second Trait.
***
Trait: [The Silenced Throat]
Description:
The sin of Sloth stole her voice. Not the sloth of idleness, but the sloth of those who would not listen. Her guidance required effort. Her wisdom demanded will. Her commands necessitated action. And so her followers grew weary. They did not strike her in hatred. They did not act at all. They simply ceased to hear. When she continued to speak, they silenced her with refusal. They crushed her throat with their indifference, until her voice could demand nothing. Sloth kills with the refusal to act.
Trait Rank: F
Attribute:
The wielder of this trait possesses the throat of a fallen divine maiden.
Grants: The Contract of the Silenced Throat, Weak Authority Imposition, Weak Truth Perception, Weak Binding Enunciation.
Passive: The Divine Voice of memory
After forming the Binding Contract of the Silenced Throat, if the user is proven innocent and truthful, they gain access to the memories of the opposing party who entered the contract.
These memories are not partial or distorted, they are received exactly as they are. This effect only triggers if the user has upheld the contract without deceit. If the user lies or breaks the terms, the ability remains dormant.
***
Lucid read the words three times.
The game he had played with the girl, the nameless assassin who had stabbed him seventeen times and still could not kill him—had not been his invention. It had not been Alice's intervention or some spontaneous manifestation of his own power.
It had been this. The Silenced Throat. A trait born from being ignored so thoroughly, so completely, that existence itself became a form of revelation.
Lucid carried that crushed throat inside his own. Every question he had forced from the girl, every truth extracted under threat of strangulation, had been a reenactment of the crime that had broken Alice centuries ago.
He sat down. His legs crossed. His hands rested on his knees. The white, shadowy status screen still hovered before him, its cold letters arrayed in perfect rows.
He had never considered the consequences of his actions. He had taken what Alice offered, what he had ripped from her, piece by piece, and used it without once asking what it cost her. He had called himself her accomplice, her partner, her anchor. But he had been something else entirely.
A parasite. A thief. Another follower who took and took and never thought to give.
The screen flickered. The black letters seemed to waver, as if the entity maintaining them was struggling to hold form.
He looked at the three Traits. The Chain of Heart. The Pierced Spine. The Silenced Throat.
Three imprisonments. Three sins committed against a being who had only ever wanted to be heard, to be followed, to be loved.
And he had told her he loved her. Not as a worshipper. Not as a servant. As himself.
Had he meant it?
He did not know. The line between manipulation and sincerity had blurred so thoroughly that he could no longer distinguish one from the other. He had said the words to give her hope, to secure her cooperation, to survive. But in the moment of speaking, they had felt true.
Perhaps that was the cruelest manipulation of all.
He closed his eyes. The pain in his skull had subsided to a dull, persistent throb. His fingers were sticky with drying blood. His throat ached where the contract's chain had bitten into it.
He opened his eyes.
He pressed the screen. Not to read further, but to dismiss it. The white shadow dissolved, the black letters scattering like ash in wind.
He stood.
His legs were steady. His breathing was even. The blood on his face had begun to dry.
He did not know if he could save the princess. He did not know if he could stop Miguel. He did not know if Alice would ever speak to him again.
But he knew one thing. Lucid stepped forward. His reflection wavered in the burning glass, mist-veiled, bleeding tears, more ghost than man.
Coward. Monster. Cursed.
Whatever names they gave him, he would continue.One step at a time.
he gritted his teeth.
"Lucid."
Someone came.