The Sovereign-V5: C3: Blood Cantata

The Sovereign-V5: C3: Blood Cantata

The obsidian slabs were not just cold; they were absorptive, drinking the warmth from their bodies, the light from their souls, until only the raw, shrieking nerve of existence remained. Akuma stood between them, a connoisseur in a gallery of suffering, the precise, shimmering knife held like a painter’s brush.
“Let us begin the duet,” he murmured, his voice a gravelly caress. He turned to Shiro first. “The alto line, I think. High and desperate.”
The knife descended. This was not the clean line of before. This was a slow, deliberate pressing of the needle point tip into the flesh of Shiro’s shoulder, a slow injection of agony before the cut even began. Shiro gasped, his body tensing, a low whine building in his throat. Akuma dragged the blade downwards, not slicing, but unzipping, a long, deliberate tear that parted skin from muscle with a sound like wet parchment being meticulously separated. It was an intimate violation, a geography of pain being mapped onto his body.
Shiro’s scream was not a single sound. It was a cascade, a sharp, initial shriek that fractured into a guttural, choking sob, which then spiralled into a high, continuous keen of pure, animal terror. His single eye rolled wildly, blind to everything but the white hot fire etching its way down his arm.
“Oh, exquisite,” Akuma breathed, his own breath coming faster, a faint flush of pleasure colouring his brutish features. “The vibrato on that one… just beautiful. Sing for me, little rat. Sing of the mothers who cannot hold you now.”
He moved back to Shiro, who was trembling uncontrollably, his cries reduced to wet, hiccupping sobs. Akuma didn’t cut. He used his fingers, slick with blood, to grip the edge of the flayed skin on Shiro’s chest and pulled. It was a slow, steady, excruciating tension, a ripping away of the self that was a universe away from the quick slice of a blade. Shiro’s body bowed off the slab, a silent, open mouthed scream locked in his throat before it erupted in a piercing, ululating wail that spoke of a sanity fraying into strands.
“Think of her,” Akuma whispered into the space between screams, his voice an intimate horror. “Think of your mothers, kissing your forehead. This is my kiss. Deeper. More truthful.”
He then pivoted to Kuro. “And you, princeling. Did the Sirius whore teach you to analyse pain? Let’s categorize this.” The knife dipped, not deep, but with a meticulous, scribbling motion over Kuro’s hip bone, carving a shallow, meaningless pattern. The pain was a bright, scribbling fire, somehow more insulting than a mortal wound.
“Fuck you!” Kuro roared, spitting a glob of blood and phlegm that spattered Akuma’s armoured boot. “I’ll fucking gut you! I’ll use that same knife and, AGHHHH!” His threat dissolved into a shattered scream as Akuma, without a word, pressed his thumb directly into the freshly carved pattern, grinding down on the raw nerves.
“Your vocabulary is lacking princeling,” Akuma chided, his tone mockingly educational. “Screams are more eloquent.”
Back to Shiro. A new incision, this time along the sensitive inner skin of his bicep. Shiro’s voice was a broken reed. “P…please… no more…!”
“Don’t you fucking beg to him, Shiro!” Kuro snarled, his voice cracking with strain and fury. “Don’t you give this fucking animal the satisfaction!”
Akuma laughed, a sound of genuine, deep pleasure. “Oh, the duet becomes a trio! A chorus of despair! Let’s harmonize.” He moved with blinding speed, delivering a matching cut to Kuro’s own arm. The twins screams merged, a discordant, shared pitch of utter violation. The memory of Lyra’s harmonizing lullabies in the sanctum was now a psychic wound, this shared pain its grotesque, inverted reflection.
The words were a poison dart, striking deep. In the white noise static of his agony, Shiro’s mind, betraying him, flashed to Statera’s cool, gentle hands smoothing salve over his brand. The memory of that healing touch was a fresh brand of its own, thrown into stark, horrific relief by the violating sharpness of the knife. This was the inversion of that love, a touch that did not mend, but unmade; not comfort, but consumed.
As Shiro’s screams reached a fever pitch, Akuma turned, his movements fluid and unhurried. “Now for the baritone. The foundation of our symphony.” He placed a gauntleted hand on Kuro’s chest, pinning him not with weight, but with promise. The knife hovered over his thigh.
Kuro, his jaw clenched so tight his teeth threatened to powder, met Akuma’s gaze. “I will… kill you…” he rasped, every word a victory wrested from the pain.
“I know you will try, princeling,” Akuma said, almost kindly. Then he pressed the blade in, not with a drag, but with a slow, corkscrewing motion, burrowing the tip into the flesh before peeling back a wide, circular patch of skin. It was a deliberate, savouring cruelty. The pain was not a line of fire but a blooming, deep rooted explosion that seemed to tear his very soul from the socket. Kuro’s defiance shattered. His head slammed back against the stone, a raw, ragged roar tearing from his throat, a sound so devoid of humanity it seemed to shake the very foundations of the Black Keep.
“YES!” Akuma moaned, his eyes fluttering closed in ecstasy. “That’s the one! The sound of a breaking world! More! Give me MORE!”
He moved back to Shiro, who was trembling uncontrollably, his cries reduced to wet, hiccupping sobs. Akuma didn’t cut. He used his fingers, slick with blood, to grip the edge of the flayed skin on Shiro’s chest and pulled. It was a slow, steady, excruciating tension, a ripping away of the self that was a universe away from the quick slice of a blade. Shiro’s body bowed off the slab, a silent, open mouthed scream locked in his throat before it erupted in a piercing, ululating wail that spoke of a sanity fraying into strands.
For what felt like a small eternity, this was their existence: a pendulum of agony swinging between them. Akuma was an artist, alternating between instruments, drawing forth a symphony of torment. A strip of skin from Shiro’s forearm, eliciting a choked gurgle. A portion of Kuro’s calf, peeled back with surgical patience, rewarded with a deep, shuddering moan. The air grew thick with the metallic scent of blood and the low, coppery tang of terror. Their world shrank to the cold slab, the bite of the chains, and the smiling, monstrous face of their conductor.
“The symphonies of your scream are just… beautiful,” Akuma sighed, pausing to wipe his brow with a clean part of his forearm. Both boys were now patchworks of raw, glistening meat and pallid, untouched skin. Their voices were gone, reduced to whimpers and ragged breaths. The primal defiance was extinguished, replaced by a bottomless, shuddering dread.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please the violation.
Then, Akuma sheathed his knife. “But all good concerts must have an intermission.”
He walked to the wall and pressed a nearly invisible seam. A section of the stone slid aside, and a figure shuffled in. It was a woman, or the ghost of one. Her hair was unnaturally white, her face a mask of sallow, exhausted flesh. Her eyes were the worst part, not dead, but utterly vacant, as if the soul behind them had been scooped out and replaced with dust. She wore a simple, grey shift, and she moved with the jerky, automated gait of a broken puppet.
She did not look at Akuma. She did not look at the horror on the slabs. She simply approached Shiro first, her movements efficient and devoid of emotion.
“This is Defect,” Akuma said, his tone conversational, as if introducing a mildly interesting tool. “A failed experiment from Ryo’s early… artistic period. But she found her purpose.”
Defect placed her hands on Shiro’s flayed chest. A faint, greenish gold light emanated from her palms. It was not a warm, healing light. It was a sickly, invasive glow that felt like a swarm of insects burrowing into his raw nerves. The pain did not subside; it changed. It was a searing, cellular recompositing, a feeling of meat being knitted back together at an impossible, agonizing speed. Shiro screamed again, a fresh, shocked sound, as new skin crawled over his wounds, pink and tender and horrifyingly new. The brand on his face remained, a cruel testament, but every other strip and patch of missing flesh was restored.
She moved to Kuro, repeating the process. The feeling was a violation deeper than the knife. It was the universe itself forcing him back into a vessel of suffering, denying him the sweet release of unconsciousness or death. The sickly light enveloped his shattered leg, and he felt the bones grind and knit with a nauseating internal crunch. Then the light washed over his face, and the swollen, burning agony in his eye receded. Against his will, the eyelid, which had been sealed shut with dried blood and inflammation, fluttered open. For the first time in what felt an eternity, he could see clearly from both eyes, the horror of the chamber, Shiro’s broken form, Akuma’s smiling face, all in stark, unforgiving clarity. It was not a gift. It was a curse, forcing him to witness the full scope of their damnation.
As Defect turned to leave, Akuma’s voice stopped her. “Wait.” He gestured to the twins. “Look at them. Really look. You both know Defect very well, Shiro. Don’t you?”
Shiro, through his tear blurred vision, forced himself to focus on the broken woman. The lank, unnaturally white hair, not the silver of Statera’s light, but the bleached bone white of something drained of all vitality, a colour that spoke of endless nights and stolen light. The vacant eyes, holding the void of a collapsed star, no spark, no recognition, just a flat, dusty horizon. Then, as she shifted to leave, he saw it. On the exposed skin of her arms, her back, peeking above the neckline of her shift, were tattoos. Not crude markings, but exquisite, celestial patterns. A tapestry of stars, constellations, and nebulae woven into her very skin with an artist's precision. It was a style he knew. A style he had seen on Statera. The style of the Polaris Lumina.
His mind, reeling from the torture, snagged on a specific configuration on her shoulder blade, a tiny, intricate pattern of the Serpent Bearer constellation, Ophiuchus, with a single, deliberate break in its tail, a star intentionally omitted. A memory, sharp and devastating as the knife: his sister Aki, laughing, pulling her tunic aside to show a birthmark. "See, Shiro? My own constellation. But it’s shy. It hides one of its stars from the sky. It’s our secret."
His eyes snapped to the woman’s face, truly seeing it for the first time past the sallow flesh and the profound emptiness. The high cheekbones, so like his own. The shape of the jaw, a softer echo of the one he saw in his own ragged reflection. This wasn’t just some failed experiment. This wasn't a distant cousin.
This was Aki.
His Aki. The sister who had shielded his small body with her own in the freezing alleys. The one who’d hummed fragments of old lullabies to him in the dark, their melody a secret rebellion against the filth that surrounded them. The one whose eyes had always held a fierce, unbreakable ember of hope, a promise that one day, they would find something more. She was the bedrock. The reason he had fought, bled, and survived. The ghost he had chased to the very steps of existence. The one he had vowed, with every fibre of his being, to save in the obsidian throne room.
And now she stood before him. The hope in her eyes had been winked out, not just dimmed, but surgically extracted, leaving behind a hollowed out doll. Akuma’s perfect, broken plaything.
A sound tore from Shiro’s throat, a raw, guttural thing that was beyond a scream, beyond language. It was the sound of the universe breaking in half. “AKI!”
He screamed her name, not a question, but a desperate, primal invocation, a plea for the sister he knew to be trapped inside that shell to
wake up
. “AKI! IT’S ME! IT’S SHIRO! LOOK AT ME! PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER!”
He thrashed against his chains, the raw, newly healed flesh of his shoulders tearing open, blood welling anew, but he didn’t feel it. The only pain that existed was the absolute void in her eyes as she turned her head a fraction, the movement utterly mechanical. There was no recognition. No flicker. Nothing. She was a puppet whose strings had been cut, save for the one leading back to Akuma’s hand.
“YOU FUCKING MONSTER!” The roar came from Kuro, but it was not a prince’s cry. It was the sound of a feral animal, a promise of blood and vengeance spoken in a language older than words. Seeing Shiro’s soul being flayed open before him unleashed something ancient and terrible in his own. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL RIP YOUR GUTS OUT AND STRANGLE YOU WITH THEM! I SWEAR IT ON EVERY STAR I’LL EVER SEE!”
“AKIIIIII!” Shiro shrieked, the words dissolving into a wet, hacking sob, his body convulsing against the unyielding obsidian. “Aki… please… please, remember me… remember the rain…”
Akuma watched their outburst, his smile widening into a beatific grin of absolute victory. He slowly walked over to Defect, to Aki, and placed a gauntleted hand on her head, petting her with a grotesque parody of affection. She stood perfectly still, unresponsive, a tool waiting to be used.
“Oh, I know,” Akuma purred, his eyes glinting with a dark, orgasmic pleasure. “I knew exactly who she was. I was there when the light in her eyes finally went out. It was a more beautiful sunset than any I’ve ever seen.” He leaned close to Shiro, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “She fought for so long. She called your name until her voice was gone. But everything breaks. Everyone learns their place.
He straightened up, his eyes burning with a fervent, religious light. “But enough about that, I am going to extract the hope from your eyes. I am going to make you forget the taste of anything but your own blood and the sound of your own screams. We will prolong your suffering in ways your little mortal minds can’t even conceive. This wasn’t the opening movement. This was the tuning of the instruments. The real symphony begins now.”
He looked at Aki, who stood by the wall, head bowed, awaiting her next command like a dog.
“They can remain chained,” Akuma said, his voice losing its theatrical edge, becoming flat and businesslike. “Let them get acquainted with the view. We begin again in six hours. The composition is far from over.”
As the door sealed, leaving them alone in the silent, blood stained chamber, the true horror sank in, a cold, heavy weight in their guts. This was not a passage of pain. It was a permanent state of being. An endless, repeating cycle of agony and false salvation, designed to annihilate the very concept of hope. They had been delivered from love’s fortress into a hell where the door was not locked but had simply ceased to exist. The slabs were home. And the composer was just getting started.
The room fell silent, save for the twins' ragged breathing. Shiro stared blankly at the ceiling, while Kuro trembled from the exertion of his earlier outburst. The air was thick with blood and fear. Suddenly, a psychic shiver brushed against their awareness, a faint, desperate whisper of their mothers' love, now distant and fractured. But it was real. It was theirs. In that moment, they dissolved into a void of peace. The first day of their new reality was over.

V5: C3: Blood Cantata