The Sovereign-V5: C1: Mother… Please… Save Us

The Sovereign-V5: C1: Mother… Please… Save Us

The procession of the Cyanelle Ecclesia was a wound in the mountain, a circular chamber of weeping obsidian where the light of judgment was meant to be absolute. But for the four women forced to stand within it, there was no light left to judge them by. The silence that had followed their children’s screams did not fade; it thickened, crystallizing into the cold, formal air of the chamber where their fate, and the fate of everything they loved, would now be decided. They were ghosts in their own palace, standing before the triumphant, hateful faces of the court that had shattered their universe mere hours before.
Nyxara stood, but it was not the Queen who stood. It was a statue of ash and void. Her multi hued light was gone, extinguished. In its place was a palpable darkness, a cold so profound it seemed to suck the heat from the very air. Her eyes, once swirling constellations, were now flat, black pools, reflecting nothing, seeing nothing but the phantom images of her stolen son. The memory of Kuro’s broken leg, his scream, was a brand on her soul, and the brand was festering, turning from grief into something colder, harder, and infinitely more dangerous.
Beside her, Statera was a shattered monument. Her Polaris glow, the steady beacon of truth, was a dead thing. She trembled not with fear, but with the seismic aftershock of a core truth being violently disproven. The world had proven that love was not a shield. It was a target. Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, nails digging into her palms, as if she could physically grasp the ghosts of her children.
Lyra was silent. Her silence was not peaceful. It was the silence of a string snapped at its highest tension. Her form, usually fluid and melodic, was rigid, a frozen scream given shape. The song of her heart had been torn out of her throat, and in its place was a harmonic void that threatened to collapse in on itself.
Lucifera was the most terrifying. There was no calculation in her eyes, no Sirius sharpness. There was only a flat, dead landscape. The love that had so recently thawed her had been flash frozen into a glacier of pure, undiluted rage. She was a weapon with the safety off, waiting for a target. The void where her sons had been was not an emptiness; it was a forge, and it was hammering her into a new, terrible shape.
Mavros of Scorpio stood before them, his face a mask of smug victory barely concealing his venom. “The Ecclesia will reconvene at the zenith of the false moon to decide the formal disposition of the Nyxarion throne,” he announced, his voice dripping with silken malice. “But fret not, former Queen. You will have your… whelps… returned to you shortly. They are merely being… prepared for transfer to a more secure location within the mountain.”
The lie was so blatant, so thick in the air, it was a physical presence. It was a hook baited with the last shred of their hope, and they were too broken, too full of a rage that was curdling their very souls, to see the barb.
“Liar,” Nyxara whispered, the word scraping from her throat like stone on stone. It held no fire, only the absolute cold of a dead star. “You have broken what was mine. There is no ‘secure location.’ There is only the dark you have created.”
“Your hysterics are noted,” Umbra’zel intoned from the shadows, his void like form seeming to drink the little light that remained. “The boys are political assets. They will be treated as such. Your reign was one of emotion. Ours will be one of order.”
What the court, in its triumphant arrogance, did not know, what the mothers, in their catatonic grief, could not possibly perceive, was the deeper, more profound betrayal festering beneath the surface. In the deepest, most lightless chambers of the Scorpio quarter, a pact had been sealed not with ink, but with shared malice. Umbra’zel’s Algol hunger and Mavros’s thirst for vengeance had found a common, greater ally: King Ryo Oji himself. In return for delivering surrender of Nyxarion and its deposed queen, they had been promised a seat at the table of the new empire, the Tenebris Imperium, a fusion of Nyxarion and Astralon under Ryo’s iron rule. But the true price, the one they hid even from their own allies, was the final, personal gift to the coming king. They had not just captured his enemies. They had retrieved his lost property.
Hours before the Ecclesia held the mothers, another scene of more intimate, visceral horror was unfolding in a stark, windowless cell deep beneath the Scorpio dominion.
Kuro and Shiro were not being “prepared.” They were being dismantled.
Mavros stood over them, his face alight with a father’s twisted love for his own wounded son. “For Antares’s wrist,” he hissed, and a gauntleted fist slammed into Kuro’s ribs. There was a sickening, wet crunch of cartilage giving way. Kuro gasped, a wet, bloody sound, unable to scream as the air was driven from his lungs. He was held upright by two guards, his broken leg dangling uselessly, a puppet with its strings cut.
“For his pride,” Mavros snarled, and the back of his hand caught Shiro across the face, the impact splitting his lip against his teeth and sending a fresh sheet of blood cascading down his neck to soak into his tunic. Shiro cried out, a weak, broken sound, his broken arm hanging at his side like a piece of discarded meat.
But it was Umbra’zel who was the true artist of this horror. He did not beat them with fists. He did it with cold, impersonal efficiency, his Algol nature allowing him to administer pain as a clinical procedure. He produced a rod of null stone, a substance that deadened nerve endings even as it caused trauma. “For the stain of Astralon,” he whispered, and touched the rod to Kuro’s good eye. There was no bruise, no cut, only a wave of nauseating, deep tissue agony that felt like his optic nerve was being individually unravelled. Kuro vomited a thin stream of bile onto the floor, his body convulsing. “For the corruption of our bloodlines,” Umbra’zel murmured, and pressed the rod against the shattered bone in Shiro’s arm. The pain was so absolute, so silent and deep, that it bypassed Shiro’s nervous system and went straight to his soul. His vision whited out, his mind fleeing into a blessed, temporary void, but not before he felt a distinct, internal grinding as the bone fragments were subtly shifted.
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They were not just beaten. They were unmade. Their bodies became a cartography of pain, a testament to the hatred of two men who saw them not as children, but as symbols of everything they despised and had now sold for a seat at a tyrant’s table. The air grew thick with the coppery scent of blood and the acrid smell of vomit, a small, contained atmosphere of suffering.
Semi conscious, bleeding from a dozen new wounds, they were dragged from the cell, through twisting, dark corridors, and unceremoniously thrown into the back of a heavy, black carriage waiting in a secluded grotto. The door slammed shut, plunging them into a darkness that smelled of old blood and despair. The carriage began to move, its wheels crunching on the gravel, carrying them away from the mountain, towards Astralon, towards the father one of them had never known, and the hell both of them had once called home.
As the carriage lurched into motion, its wheels crunching on the gravel, a final, desperate energy born of absolute terror seized them. Shiro, his face a mask of coagulating blood, pressed his forehead against the cold, slatted wood of the carriage wall. He could see a sliver of the outside world, a sliver of the mountain that had been his home, growing smaller. A low, guttural sob wracked his broken body. "Mother...!" he whimpered, the word a ragged, wet tear in the silence. "MOTHER... PLEASE... SAVE US!"
In the darkness beside him, Kuro, every jolt of the carriage sending fresh agony through his broken leg and cracked ribs, dragged himself toward the same sliver of light. His one good eye, swollen and burning from Umbra’zel’s touch, fixed on the receding peaks of the Corona Regis. He didn't beg. He screamed. It was a raw, primal thing, torn from the very core of his being, a sound that had no words, only a name. It was a psychic shriek of pure, undiluted need for the woman who had become his anchor. "LUCI!"
Their cries, one a weeping plea, the other a shattered roar, bled out from the confines of the carriage, two tiny, desperate frequencies lost in the vast, cold air of the mountain.
At that exact moment, the mothers were being escorted from the Ecclesia under guard. The path took them across a high, arched bridge overlooking the very grotto from which the carriage was departing.
Nyxara’s dead eyes, moving without thought, passed over the scene below. A black carriage, unmarked, moving down the winding road away from the Corona Regis. It was nothing. A supply wagon. An envoy. A speck in the vast, dark tapestry of her grief. It registered as nothing more than a minor shape in a world that had lost all meaning. She did not feel the ghost of Kuro's scream, a vibration that should have shattered her soul. The part of her that was tuned to his frequency was simply gone, leaving a hollowed out receiver that picked up only static.
Lucifera saw it too. Her analytical mind, now a broken tool, offered no data. It was Irrelevant. The only thing that was relevant to her was Kuro's weight in her arms, Shiro's blush but they were gone. The carriage held no interest. She did not hear the echo of her name, screamed with a finality that could have moved stars. To her, it was just noise, and all noise was now the same: the meaningless hum of a universe that had taken her heart.
Statera and Lyra, walking like sleepwalkers, didn't even see it. Their senses had turned entirely inward, to the howling void where their children had been. The world outside their pain had ceased to exist.
"Pathetic," a guard said, his voice hollow in the vast, cold corridor. "The Ecclesia will decide the fate of your rule at the zenith."
Nyxara did not respond to the guard. She turned from the high window, from the sight of the disappearing carriage that held the last embers of her warmth. As she walked, the void inside her began to crystallize. The grief was not softening; it was undergoing a terrible, fundamental transformation. It was becoming a new kind of stellar object, not a star that gave light, but a black dwarf, infinitely dense, cold, and dead. The love that had been her kingdom was now a fossil, and the weight of it was crushing her into something else. Her silence was no longer broken; it was calculating. She was measuring the depth of this betrayal, the length of this new darkness, and finding it infinite. And in that infinity, a plan began to form, not of reclamation, but of reciprocation. If they wanted a world without light, she would give them one. She would be the final, eternal night that fell upon Nyxarion.
Beside her, Statera’s trembling had ceased. In its place was a stillness more terrifying than any quake. Her Polaris truth, which had always been a guide, had been twisted into a single, immutable fact: The world is hate. This truth did not flicker. It did not waver. It was a fixed, frozen point in the spinning chaos of her mind, and everything now would be navigated by its cold, merciless light. The gentle mother who sang lullabies was dead. In her place was a Lumina of Absolute Zero, and her love for her sons was now a cryogenically preserved thing, a weapon she would one day unleash as a blizzard that would scour the flesh from the bones of those who had taken them.
Lyra’s harmonic void was not empty. It was a resonant chamber, amplifying a single, new note that had never been part of her symphony before the frequency of pure, undiluted rage. It was a dissonant, screeching pitch that threatened to shatter the vessel containing it. Her song was not gone; it was being rewritten into a threnody of vengeance, a single, repeating chord that promised a crescendo of ruin. She would no longer weave melodies of comfort. Her music would become a psychic plague, a screaming vibration that would unmake the minds of her enemies from the inside out.
Lucifera was the most changed. The flat landscape of her despair had been surveyed, mapped, and found suitable for a new purpose: a fortress of wrath. The void was no longer passive; it was a resource. Every memory of Kuro's laugh, every ghost of Shiro's blush, was no longer a source of pain, but a brick in the wall of her fury, mortar made from the ashes of her dead heart. She was no longer a mother who had lost her children. She was a principle of retaliation. She was the promise that for every tear she had shed, a star would be extinguished. For every moment of their suffering, a civilization would be unmade. The love was gone, and in its place was a cold, clean, and infinitely more powerful engine of hate.
They walked on, four pillars of a fallen world, their hearts now black holes of malice, pulling all light, all hope, all future into their crushing gravity, leaving only the promise of an ending.

V5: C1: Mother… Please… Save Us