The Sovereign-V5: C2: The Symphony of Screams

The Sovereign-V5: C2: The Symphony of Screams

The walk from the high bridge was a funeral procession for their own souls. The guards, their faces hard and impersonal, did not need to use force. The four women moved as automata, their bodies obeying the directive to proceed while their consciousnesses remained fractured, adrift in the silent, screaming aftermath. They were led not to their sanctum, that violated nest of furs and memories, but to the heart of the mountain’s cold, judicial power: the Cyanelle Ecclesia.
The chamber was a wound. Hewn from a single, colossal geode of weeping obsidian, it was a perfect sphere, its curved walls glistening with a perpetual, oily dampness that caught and distorted the light from a single, source less beam illuminating the central dais. The air was heavy, cold, and tasted of ozone and ancient verdicts. It was a relic from a more brutal and bloody time, a chamber built not for debate, but for condemnation. It’s one purpose was to adjudicate the fitness of the ruling sovereign, and its summoning was not a meeting; it was an indictment, a prelude to execution. It had not been invoked in over fifty years, not since the mad Queen Cyanelle had tried to plunge their entire civilization into a singularity in a fit of stellar grief. To stand within it was to feel the weight of absolute judgment, the cold breath of a universe that had decided you were a flaw to be corrected.
The mothers were arranged on the central dais, a stark island under the pitiless light. They were not bound by physical chains, but by the crushing gravity of their loss. Around them, in tiered obsidian benches that rose into the gloom, sat the full Starborn council. The Algol, voids of sucking hunger; the Sirius, shards of cold logic; the Leo, embers of boastful fire; the Scorpio, vessels of venomous intent. A hundred pairs of multi faceted eyes, cold and gleaming, reflected the broken forms on the dais. The humming silence was a physical pressure, a collective, psychic anticipation.
Mavros of Scorpio rose, his form a sinuous shadow against the glistening wall. His voice, when it came, was a silken poison dripped into the silence.
“The Ecclesia has heard the charges. The evidence is uncontested. The verdict is unanimous. Nyxara of the Falak line, you are hereby deposed. Your reign is ended. The council shall assume regency until further notice.”
The words, which should have carried the weight of a world ending, landed on Nyxara like ash. She did not flinch. She did not look at him. Her dead, black eyes swept slowly over the assembled faces, the victorious, the smug, the hateful. When she spoke, her voice was not the rich, commanding tone of a queen, nor the cooing cadence of a mother. It was the sound of tectonic plates grinding, the voice of the mountain’s deepest, darkest core.
“You have taken my title,” she said, each word a chip of flint. “A word. A meaningless syllable. You have broken my family. You have torn the hearts from my sisters and called it justice.” Her multi hued light, once extinguished, now flickered to life, not as a warm aurora, but as a corona of black fire, a negative energy that seemed to bleed the colour from the very air. “I am no longer your Queen. You are correct. I am something else now. I am the mother of a stolen storm. I am the keeper of a silenced song. I am the anchor of a lost truth. And I am the blade of a love you have twisted into hate.”
She took a single step forward, and the obsidian beneath her feet frosted over, the cold radiating outwards in a visible wave. “We have only one request. One demand. The only thing that matters in this cosmos or the next.” Her gaze, flat and terrible, pinned Mavros, then Umbra’zel, then swept across them all. “Bring. Me. My. Sons.”
Lucifera’s voice cut in, a shard of frozen lightning, each word a precise, surgical incision. “Return them to us. Whole.” The lie of ‘whole’ was a palpable thing, a desperate, impossible wish against the screaming certainty in their souls. Her brilliant white eyes were no longer pools of analysis, but the focused lenses of a superweapon. “You have numbers. You have laws. You have this… chamber. I have the fundamental architecture of reality. I will unpick the threads of your bloodlines, one by one. I will find the equation for your existence and I will set it to zero. Your children’s children will be born as screaming paradoxes, their very DNA a testament to your folly.”
Statera’s voice was the polar wind, the absolute zero that promised no life, only a cessation of motion. The gentle mother was gone, leaving a Lumina of pure, unforgiving Truth. “You speak of contamination. You fear the Oji taint? You have not seen contamination.” Her light did not blaze; it intensified into a single, needle thin beam of cold, blue white fury. “I will freeze the blood in your veins. I will still the neurons in your brains mid thought. Your final, conscious moment will be an eternity of knowing you failed, that your ‘order’ is a fleeting joke before the cold, final truth of a mother’s wrath. Your souls will be preserved in ice, forever screaming in a silence I create.”
Lyra did not speak at first. She opened her mouth, and a single, dissonant note emerged. It was not a melody. It was the sound of a universe being un tuned, a vibration that promised to loosen the bonds of reality itself. The obsidian walls of the Ecclesia themselves seemed to shudder, a faint, harmonic crackle spreading through the stone. When her voice came, it was a fractured chorus, a thousand shattered lullabies given a single, hateful purpose. “You wanted silence from my sons? I will give you a symphony of madness. Your dreams will be a cacophony of their names, screamed forever. Your every thought will be accompanied by the rhythm of their heartbeats, slowing, fading… and you will never, ever find the melody to make it stop. I will compose your damnation, and you will sing it for me until the stars burn out.”
The council recoiled as one, a physical shudder passing through them. The bravado of their victory faltered, then crumbled, before the raw, undiluted menace radiating from the four pillars on the dais. They were no longer broken women. They were elemental forces, wronged, and promising an apocalypse of retribution that was both personal and cosmic. The Ecclesia had ended a queen’s reign, but it had birthed four vengeful goddesses, each a different flavour of oblivion.
Nyxara took one last look, her black fire corona burning the image of their terrified faces into her soul. “The choice is yours. My sons, or your extinction. There is no third option.”
The guards, their faces pale and hands trembling, hurried them from the chamber. The verdict was passed. The law was satisfied. But as the weeping obsidian doors sealed shut, a new, more profound terror had been seeded in the heart of the court. They had not pacified a threat; they had unleashed one, and it was waiting in the dark, thinking only of its children.
The four women were marched through the serpentine corridors of the Corona Regis, not as prisoners of war, but as avatars of a coming storm. Their silence was no longer broken; it was a honed edge. With every step, the gravity of their malice seemed to increase, making the very air thick and difficult to breathe for their escorts. They were deposited at the threshold of their former sanctum, the great door woven from dying nebulae now shimmering with a hostile, alien energy, its patterns shifting into sharp, defensive geometries. The guards did not wait to see them enter; they fled, the sound of their retreating boots a frantic staccato in the overwhelming quiet.
Inside, the sanctum was a tomb. The hearth was dead ash. The Celestial Tapestry hung limp, its woven horrors muted. The nest of furs where they had cradled their sons was a cold, empty monument.
Nyxara walked to the centre of the room and stood perfectly still. Her black fire corona had subsided, but the void it left behind was somehow more absolute. She was not grieving. She was calculating the retribution she will unleash .
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; any sightings.
Statera stood by the dead hearth, her hand resting on the mantel. The stone beneath her fingertips did not warm; instead, a rime of absolute zero frost spiderwebbed out from her touch, creeping up the rock with a silent, inevitable crackle.
Lyra did not hum. She stood with her head tilted, as if listening to a frequency only she could hear, the dying echo of her sons' voices, the phantom rhythm of their heartbeats. Her fingers twitched at her sides, composing not a lullaby, but the opening bars of a requiem that would shatter minds.
Lucifera went directly to the divan. She did not sit. She knelt, and with a hand that did not shake, she traced the faint impression left in the furs where Kuro had slept. Her brilliant white eyes were not wet with tears; they were dry, burning deserts, scanning an infinite internal ledger of vengeance. Every memory of his stubborn pride, every ghost of his reluctant smile, was now a variable in a final, devastating equation.
They did not speak. They did not need to. Their shared purpose was a psychic resonance that filled the room, a silent, screaming chord that promised a reckoning beyond any law the Ecclesia could comprehend. They were a single entity now: a weapon being loaded, aimed at the heart of the cosmos that had dared to steal from them.
And as their will solidified into an unbreakable lattice of intent, a psychic shiver, faint and desperate, brushed against the edges of their awareness. It was not a sound, but a feeling, a twin sensation of searing cold and a sickening tear.
Nyxara’s head snapped up. Statera’s frost stopped its spread. Lyra’s silent composition halted. Lucifera’s hand froze on the fur.
It was gone as quickly as it came, a phantom limb of agony, too distant and fractured to pinpoint. But it was real. It was theirs.
A low, guttural sound, the antithesis of a lullaby, rumbled in Nyxara’s chest. It was the sound of a universe deciding to fold in on itself.
"Soon," she whispered to the empty air, the word a vow etched in antimatter.
Far away, hurtling through a nameless void between nations, the sensation was anything but faint.
Hours had bled into one another in the jolting, lightless confines of the carriage. Time became a meaningless metric, measured only in the throbbing of broken bones and the slow, cold seep of despair. The carriage finally shuddered to a halt. The door was wrenched open, and rough hands dragged them out, their bodies screaming in protest as they were hauled across a familiar, blighted courtyard of jagged black basalt, under a sky the colour of a fresh bruise.
They were in the outer bailey of the Black Keep of Astralon. The air, thick with the smog of forges and the psychic residue of countless torments, was a vile perfume they had prayed never to smell again.
Before them stood a figure that was the embodiment of this place. A shape that haunted the lowest levels of their nightmares. Akuma Shibotsu.
He was built like a siege engine sheathed in obsidian, his armour polished to a malevolent gleam that seemed to ripple like oil on water. His face was a brutal sculpture of granite hard planes and old violence, his nose a mashed ruin, his eyes small, deep set pits that held the cold, dead light of a broken galaxy. He stood with a predator’s unnerving stillness, his gauntleted hands, thick plates of blackened steel capable of crushing skulls, clasped behind his back. A slow, wide smile split his features, a gesture that held no warmth, only a cavernous, hungry delight.
“Well, well,” his voice was a gravelly avalanche, a sound that promised crushing weight. “Look what the void coughed back up.”
Kuro, leaning heavily against the guard who held him, lifted his head. His one good eye, swollen and burning, fixed on Akuma with a spark of defiant fury. “Akuma,” he spat, the name a curse.
Shiro flinched, trying to make his broken body smaller, the memory of the Plaza, of their desperate, victorious stand against this monster, now a cruel irony.
Akuma took a slow, deliberate step forward, the air growing colder around him. “The little slum rat and the broken princeling. I’ve missed you both. Truly.” His gaze crawled over Shiro’s branded, blood caked face, then over Kuro’s shattered leg. “I’ve thought about our last meeting often. The way you scuttled away to your new mommies. I must admit, I’m impressed. You actually made it. You found a soft place to land.” His smile widened, a horrific sight. “And now look. Delivered right back. It’s almost poetic.”
He leaned in close, his breath a foul heat against Shiro’s cheek. “We are going to have so much time to catch up. Ryo is… eager to be reunited with his son. But first, he’s given me a little time by a little I mean eternity he never wishes to see you again.”
He straightened up and gestured. They were dragged, struggling weakly, into the bowels of the Keep, down winding stairs that smelled of rust and old fear, into a place where the very stone seemed to pulse with a dull, agonized rhythm. The Black Vaults. A place where hope was not just broken but systematically extracted.
They were thrown into a sterile, circular chamber, its walls lined with tools of gleaming, alien metal that seemed to move and shift at the edge of vision, as if alive. In the centre were two obsidian slabs, stained with shadows that no light could cleanse, the stone seeming to drink the very warmth from their souls. They were chained to them, spread eagled, the cold metal manacles biting into already bruised wrists and ankles, the unforgiving stone seeping into their broken backs.
Akuma selected a knife from the wall. It was not a crude blade, but a thing of terrifying precision, long and thin like a surgeon’s tool, its edge seeming to shimmer with a faint, hungry light that pulsed in time with the low thrum of the Keep. He held it up, admiring its lethal elegance.
“You defied him,” Akuma murmured, his voice a lover’s whisper in the terrifying silence. He paced between the slabs, a predator inspecting his trussed prey. “You ran. You spat in the face of his glory and fled to the comforts of those stellar whores.” He traced the flat of the blade down Kuro’s chest, not breaking the skin, a promise of what was to come. “Did they sing you lullabies? Did they tell you; you were safe?” He let out a low, wet chuckle that was more terrifying than any shout. “And now you’ve been delivered right back to the mouth of the beast you were rebelling against. It’s… beautiful. A perfect, closed circle of pain.”
He positioned himself over Shiro first. The initial defiance was there, a fire in Shiro’s single eye, a gritting of his teeth. “Go to fucking hell bastard,” Shiro rasped, spitting a glob of bloody phlegm that landed on Akuma’s greave.
Akuma didn’t flinch. He smiled, a slow, wide expression of pure delight. “Oh, I’ve missed this spirit. It makes the breaking so much sweeter.” His first cut was not a slash. It was a surgeon’s incision, a precise, shallow line from Shiro’s collarbone down to his sternum. It was a line of pure, white fire, so sharp and clean it took a moment for the brain to register the violation. Then the pain arrived, a bright, shrieking star that blossomed into an inferno. Shiro’s body arched against the chains, a guttural, choked scream tearing from his throat, a sound that was all animal terror, all primal, uncomprehending agony. It was a high, wavering keen that cracked into a sob.
“Listen to that symphony,” Akuma breathed, his eyes closed in ecstasy as if Shiro’s scream were a sublime chord in a symphony only he could hear. “The song of a broken thing. It’s been too long.” He made another parallel cut, then began the meticulous work of peeling back a narrow strip of skin from the centre of Shiro’s chest. The sound was a wet, tearing whisper, a grotesque counterpoint to the screams. Shiro thrashed, his head whipping side to side, his cries becoming wordless, frantic pleas. “P…please… stop… mother…!”
“She can’t hear you, little rat,” Akuma cooed, his voice thick with pleasure. He held up the strip of skin, glistening and raw, between his thumb and forefinger. “See? A souvenir. The first of many.”
Kuro roared, pulling at his chains until the metal ground against bone, his vision swimming with pain and fury. “LOOK AT ME, YOU FUCKING CANCER! I’M THE ONE YOU WANT! ”
Akuma turned his dead galaxy eyes to Kuro, his smile never fading. “All in good time, princeling. Patience. I have to make sure you’re both equally… broken. He moved to Kuro next, the knife hovering over his thigh. “Your turn. Don’t worry. I’ll make it last. We have so much to catch up on.”
The blade bit in. This pain was different, deeper, a searing violation that felt like his very essence was being flayed. It wasn't just skin; it felt like the memory of Nyxara’s warmth, the solid safety of Luci’s arms, were being physically carved out of him. Kuro’s roar of defiance shattered into a high, ragged scream that joined Shiro’s in a dissonant symphony of suffering. He clenched his jaw, trying to stifle it, to deny Akuma this victory, but the pain was an absolute dictator. A second cut, intersecting the first, and he felt the skin begin to separate. A low, continuous moan was torn from him, his body shuddering uncontrollably against the cold stone.
Akuma stood between them, his face a mask of rapturous concentration, the bloody knife held delicately in his gauntleted hand. The chamber echoed with their ceaseless, agonized screams, a cacophony he conducted with small, appreciative gestures.
“Ohhhhhh, slum rat… princeling…” he purred, the words a vile caress. “We are truly going to have some fun. This is just the greeting. The conversation is yet to come.”

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V5: C2: The Symphony of Screams