The Sovereign-V5: C9: Im Theirs, Not The Voids

The Sovereign-V5: C9: Im Theirs, Not The Voids

The void woven path was a trial of the spirit. It was not a road, but a suffocating suture between worlds, a place where the light of reason died and the raw, gibbering stuff of the cosmos pressed in. Lucifera did not walk; she was a needle of intent drawn through the fabric of unreality, the thread attached to her a singular, desperate prayer.
The whispers began almost immediately. They were not voices, but insinuations, slithering into the cracks of her grief.
Let go,
they hissed without sound.
The pain is too vast. Let it become nothing. Become the void, and the void will welcome you.
They showed her a still, grey plain where the ache of loss could be quieted, where the memory of a child’s warmth was just a forgotten dream. It was a peace of absolute zero of nothingness. The temptation to lie down in that silence was a physical weight on her shoulders.
No.
The word was not spoken, but felt, a hard, small stone of defiance in the vast ocean of despair. It was followed by a sensation, a ghost of pressure against her chest. The solid, trusting weight of Kuro’s head as he finally, completely, surrendered to her carry.
“Aunty Luci… I can’t… walk.”
He trusted you to carry him,
a voice within her, her own yet not her own, spoke into the silence.
He laid down all his pride, all his strength, and asked you to hold his weight. Is this how you carry it? By dissolving into the dark?
The memory was a rune of fire etched into her soul, burning away the void’s chill. She clung to it, to the sacred responsibility of that weight.
The whispers shifted, offering a different, sharper solace: the pure, clean flame of rage.
Very well,
they seemed to say.
If not nothing, then let it be fire. Let the love curdle into an inferno of hate. It is a stronger fuel. It will cauterize the wound. Become the blade. Feel nothing but the need to destroy.
The image rose unbidden: the Corona Regis in flames, Mavros’s face a mask of terror, the satisfying crunch of bone under her heel. It was a sweet, dark fantasy.
And then Shiro’s face surfaced from the depths, not in pain, but in a moment of perfect, flustered humiliation after she had invented the "Strapped In Star Baby" protocol. His single amber eye was wide, his cheeks blazing crimson.
“The hand holding! We’ll do the hand holding! Please, Mommy Luci, never… never even mention that other one again!”
He called you ‘Mommy’,
her inner voice whispered, this time with a tenderness that was an ache in itself.
In his moment of pure, ridiculous terror, it was your name he chose. Not a weapon’s name. A mother’s name. Would a mere instrument of vengeance remember the sound of that?
The memory of his helpless, sputtering protest was a pinprick of light, a reminder of a world that held colour and warmth and ridiculous, beautiful embarrassment. She could not become mere fire. Fire could not appreciate a blush. Fire could not remember the soft, silly cadence of baby talk that had once felt like a chain and now felt like a lost scripture.
“I am their mother,” she whispered into the formless dark, the words a tangible shield. “I am the one who braided his hair. I am the one who made him blush. I am the one he trusted to carry him when he was broken.” She repeated it, a litany against the void. “I am not a void. I am not a fire. I am Luci. And I am theirs.”
This was her lodestar. This was the map through the madness. Every memory of their grumbling acquiescence, every echo of their sleepy sighs, every phantom sensation of a small, calloused hand in hers, these were not weaknesses to be purged. They were the foundations of her will. They were her infants. Her brilliant, blushing, infuriatingly perfect infants. And they would not want their Mommy Luci to return to them as a monster stripped of everything but hate. They would want the mother who threatened high chairs with a deadpan smirk, who held them with an anchor’s certainty, the mother whose love was so vast and terrifying it had rewired her very soul.
She was not falling into darkness. She was moving through it, a hunter following a scent only she could perceive: the unique resonance of their souls, a frequency composed of stubborn pride and fragile trust. She would find them. She would walk into the mouth of hell itself, and she would walk out with them in her arms, or she would not walk out at all. But she would not return to her sisters empty handed. She would return with their location, a name, a direction, a single, solid truth to shatter the terrible uncertainty. This was her vow, sworn not on vengeance, but on the memory of Kuro’s reluctant sigh and Shiro’s shy, blossoming smile.
The path ended as abruptly as it began. One moment, the formless chaos; the next, the cold, familiar scent of wet stone and deep earth. She stood in a fissure in the mountain’s flesh, a forgotten wound weeping black water. Before her, blotting out the bruised sky, loomed the immense, serpentine sprawl of the Corona Regis. Its twisting spires were no longer the architecture of a home, but the jagged teeth of a beast that had swallowed her heart.
She had arrived. The journey was over. The hunt was now begun.
Her form, a wisp of concentrated shadow, blended into the deeper gloom of the lower districts. The court’s psychic miasma, a fog of ambition, fear, and petty hatred, was a distant buzz against her shielded mind. She ignored it. Every sense was turned inward, focused on the fragile, glowing tether of memory that led her forward, and outward, towards the lair of the serpent who had set this tragedy in motion.
She would find Mavros. She would slip into his chambers, a ghost in the machine of his pride. She would sift through the psychic residue of his treachery and peel the truth from his mind if she had to. She would learn where her sons had been taken.
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And then, the real storm would begin.
But first, far far from the cloying darkness of the Corona Regis, in the heart of the independent Citadel, a different kind of power was being summoned. The Conclave of the Ten Clans did not meet in a hall of gold and light, but in the Chamber of Roots, a place that felt less built and more grown, or perhaps excavated. It was a vast, subterranean cavern, the air thick and cool, smelling of loam and petrified time. In its centre, the colossal, spiralling remains of a primordial tree formed a natural table, its stone hard wood veined with phosphorescent fungi that pulsed with a slow, sickly rhythm, like the heartbeat of a buried god.
The clans gathered as living constellations, their very forms whispering of distant, alien skies. The Cygnus envoy was a sculpture of folded, star lit wings and sorrow. The Lyra representative seemed composed of woven sound and shifting notation. The Grus delegate stood tall and gaunt, a funereal silhouette, while the Corvus emissary was a hunched, insightful shadow, eyes gleaming with stolen knowledge. The Pavo envoy shimmered with a vain, hypnotic splendour, and the representatives of Ankaa, Tucana, Apus, and Sagitta were sharp, avian, and alien in their stillness. And at the heart, the piercing gaze of Altair, embodied by Aquilina.
Into this arena of primordial stellar forces, the four exiled mothers walked. They did not come as supplicants. They processed as a funeral cortege for their own former lives, a phalanx of walking wounds. Nyxara led, her multi hued light not bright, but deep and smoky, a nebula of grief that absorbed the chamber's faint luminescence. Statera’s Polaris glow was a shard of frozen starfall, so cold it seemed to still the very air around her. Lyrathiel moved in utter silence, a harmonic void that threatened to swallow the faint, natural sounds of the cavern. And beside them, Aquilina of Altair stood as their anchor and their blade, the infant Caelia a stark, living reminder of what had been stolen, swaddled and silent against her chest.
Aquilina did not wait for ceremony. Her voice, sharp as a flensed bone, cut through the murmuring silence. “The Falak line calls upon its debts.” The words were not a request, but a pronouncement, echoing off the petrified roots. “Not for gold. Not for land. The Scorpio, fanged worms that they are, and their allies, have broken a law older than your lineages, older than the stone of this mountain. They have stolen children from the nest. They have torn sons from a mother’s arms and delivered them into the maw of the unknown.”
The Lyra representative, an ancient man whose skin seemed woven from sheet music, spoke, his voice a resonant, disapproving cello note. “The song of Nyxarion has always been one of discordant chaos. Why should the Citadel, which values its independence, involve itself in its final, screaming coda? The rot is theirs. Let it consume them.”
Lyra did not let Nyxara answer. She took a single step forward. She did not sing. She opened her mouth, and from the depths of her being, she pulled forth a sound. It was not a melody, but the memory of a melody shattered. It was the harmonic representation of a lullaby torn in half, of a cradle song violated. It was a single, pure note of absolute, cosmic sorrow that vibrated not in the ears, but in the soul of every being present. The phosphorescent fungi in the roots flared, then dimmed. The very stone of the table seemed to groan in sympathy. The note held, stretching into an eternity of pain, before fracturing into a silence that was somehow louder and more terrible than the sound itself.
When she finally spoke, her voice was the whisper of dust settling on a grave. “That is the silence they have created. That is the song they now own. Is that a discord you wish to hear echoing at your own gates?”
The Corvus envoy, a hunched figure whose feathers were the colour of a starless midnight, let out a dry, cawing laugh. “We are observers of ends and beginnings. We are not hounds to be sent sniffing for lost whelps on a sentimental errand.”
Nyxara’s head turned with the slow, inevitable grace of a celestial body altering its orbit. Her eyes, those swirling galaxies of light, were now pits into which one could see the cold, dead space between stars. The playful queen was a fossil. What remained was the imprint of her rage.
“You speak of sentiment,” she said, her voice so low it was a vibration in the floor. “You mistake me. I do not ask for your armies to rescue infants. I am not here to plead for their soft, wittle cheeks or their sleepy sighs.” The baby talk, in this context, was a blasphemy, a horrific juxtaposition that made several of the envoys flinch. “I am here to offer you a front row seat to an extinction.”
She took a step forward, and the smoky aura around her intensified, casting long, twisted shadows that writhed across the faces of the Conclave.
“The kingdom of Nyxarion is a corpse,” she hissed. “It breathes only through habit. The Scorpio and the Algol have sold its heart to who knows, to the Thing that gnaws at the roots of reality from the place where Ryo Oji learned his trade. They think they are building a new world. They are only digging a mass grave. I will burn it. I will pull down its spires with my bare hands. I will unmake its foundations and scatter the dust of its people to the screaming winds of the void. I will salt the earth with the ground bones of my enemies until nothing, not even a memory of their hate, can ever grow there again.”
She smiled, a terrifying rictus that held no warmth, only the promise of the event horizon. “The Falak line calls its debts. You will stand with me. And in the ashes of the old world, you will have your share of the spoils. Or…” Her gaze swept over the Corvus envoy, and the figure seemed to shrink into its own shadows. “Or you can try to stand in my way. And you will learn what happens when a mother’s love is refined in the furnace of grief into a weapon that can break time itself.”
The Chamber of Roots was utterly silent. The concept of ‘sentiment’ had been annihilated, replaced by the scale of Nyxara’s promised vengeance. This was not a political manoeuvre. It was an apocalyptic certainty. She was not asking them to join a rescue; she was inviting them to witness, and partake in, a divine punishment.
Aquilina finally spoke again, her voice cutting the tension like a knife. “The Altair stands with the Falak. The nest has been violated. The eagles will go to war.” She looked down at Caelia, and her voice, for a fleeting second, softened into a coo that was more terrifying than any shout. “We will make the sky safe for all the little stars, won’t we, my love? No nasty, icky shadows will be allowed to dim your light.” The return to the intimate, maternal language amidst the talk of genocide was a masterstroke, a reminder of the profoundly personal cataclysm they were witnessing.
One by one, the other clans gave their assent, Cygnus, Lyra, Grus, Pavo, Ankaa, Tucana, Apus, and Sagitta, not with cheers, but with grim, guttural pledges. They were not moved by pity, but by the chilling calculus of power and survival. To stand with Nyxara was to stand with a force of nature. To stand against her was to be swept away.
The Conclave was united. The storm was now official. And far away, in the belly of the beast, a shadow moved, its purpose honed by the same love that was, even now, mobilizing an army to tear the world apart.

V5: C9: Im Theirs, Not The Voids