The Sovereign-V5: C10: The Knife That Eats Memory

The Sovereign-V5: C10: The Knife That Eats Memory

The cheers after the Conclave’s united front was a lie. It was a held breath, a vacuum soon to be filled with screams from a chamber buried deep in the weeping stone of a different world altogether.
The door to the obsidian cell slid open with a soft, final hiss. Akuma stood framed in the doorway, not as a jailer, but as a patriarch visiting his children. His brutal features were arranged in a wide, welcoming smile that did not touch the dead galaxy of his eyes.
“Good morning, my sons,” he crooned, his voice a gravelly caress. “Did you rest? I do hope so. You will need all your strength for today’s lessons.” He paced between their slabs, his armoured boots clicking a gentle rhythm on the stone. “We have covered the skin. We have explored the eyes. But these are merely the canvas. Today, we begin sculpting the masterpiece beneath. Today, we learn about foundation. About structure.”
He stopped, looking between them with a paternal pride that was more terrifying than any snarl. “This is only the beginning, my boys. Each sunrise I grant you will be a descent into a new and more exquisite circle of understanding. I promise you that.”
From a cart, he selected a new tool. It was not a blade or a needle, but a heavy, blacksmith’s hammer carved from the same weeping obsidian as the slabs. Yet, it was intricately etched with spiralling sigils that pulsed with a faint, violet light, drinking the room’s gloom. He hefted it in his gauntleted hand as if testing the weight of a sacred relic.
“The Talon’s Grip,” he mused, stopping before Kuro. His voice was a conversational drone, a professor beginning a lecture. “The foundation of the Altair line. A legacy of strength, of ownership. To grasp the world and declare it yours. A beautiful, potent lie.” He placed the flat, cool head of the hammer gently on Kuro’s shin, a lover’s caress. “All strength is conditional, princeling. A collection of calcium and phosphorus, a latticework of tiny, brittle struts. All it takes is the right pressure in the right place to reveal the truth of your frailty.”
He raised the hammer. There was no wind up, no theatrical pause. Only a swift, precise, and utterly efficient descent.
The impact was not a clean crack. It was a wet, grinding
SHUDDD CRUNCHHH
that seemed to vibrate through the very stone of the slab and up into the marrow of Kuro’s teeth. The pain was not a line of fire; it was a supernova, a white hot, expanding sphere of pure, shrieking violation that consumed his entire leg, his entire universe. It was a feeling of fundamental architecture giving way; the very concept of ‘leg’ being rewritten into ‘shattered thing’. A roar was torn from him, so raw and vast it felt like it was stripping the flesh from his throat. His back arched, his chains snapping taut as his body tried to flee an agony that was now a part of its core structure.
“There,” Akuma breathed, his voice brimming with the satisfaction of a connoisseur. “The first lesson. You are not unbreakable. You are a collection of fragile sticks waiting for the right wind.”
He did not pause. He moved an inch down the tibia. The hammer rose and fell again.
CRUNCHHHHH SPLINTERRR
. This time, the bone did not just break; it splintered internally, a million tiny daggers of white hot pain exploding outward into the muscle, shredding it from the inside. Kuro’s roar shattered into a high, guttural shriek, his vision swimming in a sea of red and white sparks. The hope that had been a flickering ember in his chest, the hope of fighting back, of standing on his own two feet, that hope fractured with the bone.
“Your fury is so loud, princeling!” Akuma called out over the noise, his tone almost jovial. “But what is it now? It is the sound of a bird with shattered wings, flapping against the ground. It is the most meaningless noise in the cosmos.”
He shifted his attention to the knee. He positioned the hammer with the care of a sculptor. “The hinge that allows the eagle to land. To strike.” The hammer fell. This pain was different, deeper and more complex. It was the sensation of a universe of gristle and ligament being pulped, of the very socket that allowed motion being turned into a slurry of ground cartilage and screaming nerve endings. It was a thick, nauseating agony that made Kuro vomit a thin stream of bile onto his own chest. The hope of running, of evasion, of ever again feeling the solid ground beneath him without this fire, that hope was hammered into dust.
He moved to Shiro. The boy’s eyes was wide awake, fixed on the hammer, his breath coming in ragged, terrified hitches. He had endured cuts, burns, needles. This was a different category of violation altogether. This was the destruction of the vessel itself.
“And you, little rat,” Akuma said, his voice softening as if speaking to a frightened child. “So light on your feet. A survivor of the slums of Higaru. You know how to run, to scuttle, to hide. But survival requires a foundation, does it not? A structure upon which to place your fleeing feet.”
The hammer hovered over Shiro’s femur, the thickest bone in his body, the pillar of his ability to stand. Shiro squeezed his eye shut, a low whine building in his throat. “P…please… don’t…”
The hammer fell.
The sound was a deep, resonant
THUDDD CRACKKK
, like an ancient oak splitting at its heart. The pain was so immense, so all consuming, that for a moment, Shiro felt nothing at all, his nervous system simply short circuiting into a blessed void. Then the feedback hit, a tsunami of agony so profound it bypassed his scream and left him gasping, his body seizing, his eye rolled back into his head. It was the pain of a world ending, the foundational certainty of his body being proven a lie.
“Please… no more… no more…” he begged when he could finally draw breath, the words slurred and wet with tears and spit. The hope of ever walking hand in hand with his mother’s again, of feeling the solid safety of the sanctum floor under his bare feet, that hope shattered into a million glittering shards.
“Your pleas are a form of music so profound…I…,” Akuma said as if taking pleasure from there screams, as he positioned the hammer over Shiro’s other femur. “The music of futility. A timeless melody one I will cherish.”
CRUNCHHHH
. This time, Shiro’s scream was a piercing, ululating wail that spoke of a sanity being stretched to its absolute limit. He felt the break travel up the bone, a fissure of white fire that threatened to unmake him from the inside out.
Akuma worked with a dreadful, methodical patience. The delicate bones of the ankles were next, crushed with quick, precise taps that produced a sound like gravel being ground under a boot. Each small
POP and CRUNCH
was a universe of pain, erasing the hope of balance, of nimbleness. The wrists followed, the complex architecture of carpals destroyed, eliminating the hope of grasping a weapon, of forming a fist, of holding onto anyone ever again. The radii and ulnas were splintered, the humeri cracked like old china.
With every blow, a piece of hope died. The hope of defiance. The hope of escape. The hope of a body that was whole and their own. It was being systematically hammered into a fine, bloody powder.
But one piece remained. One indestructible shard that not even the obsidian hammer could touch. As Kuro felt his arm break, his mind did not scream of the pain, but of the memory of Lucifera’s cool, strong hands braiding his hair, her voice a low, sure thrum. As Shiro’s wrist shattered, he did not think of the splintered bone, but of Statera’s gentle fingers tracing the lines of his palm, her light a blanket around him. It was the memory of their love. The memory of being someone’s son. That was the final, unbreakable bone. It was the core of them, and it would not fracture. It was the only thing they had left to hold onto as their bodies were unmade around it.
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When he was done, both boys were nothing more than trembling, screaming heaps of broken architecture, their limbs lying at grotesque, impossible angles, a testament to the total destruction of their physical autonomy. The air was thick with the coppery scent of terror and the faint, chalky smell of pulverized bone.
Then, the signal. Aki shuffled in, her vacant eyes seeing nothing, her hands already glowing with that sickly, green gold light.
“And now, Mother,” Akuma said warmly, as if calling a wife to dinner. “To put the toys back together for another round.”
Aki’s hands descended on Kuro’s shattered leg. The healing was a fresh violation, a horror that rivalled the breaking. It was not a soothing warmth, but a searing, cellular re composition. He felt the shards of his bones grinding against each other, pulled by an invisible, agonizing force, fusing back together with a nauseating series of internal clicks and grinds. It felt like his marrow was being injected with molten lead, the shattered pieces soldered back into a mockery of wholeness. He screamed again, not from the breaking, but from the horrific, unnatural making. It was a pain that promised this could, and would, be done again. And again. The body could be healed, but the memory of its destruction was a brand on the soul. And the hope that had been shattered? It remained in pieces, with only that one, luminous shard of a mother’s love left gleaming in the wreckage.
Once they were whole, their bodies slick with the cold sweat of traumatic healing, Akuma did not let them rest. He studied their trembling forms, their chests heaving with ragged breaths, and a new, more intimate smile graced his brutal features. The silence in the chamber was no longer just an absence of noise; it was a held breath, a canvas waiting for a new masterpiece of suffering.
“Now,” he purred, his voice a low, vibrating hum that seemed to crawl over their freshly knit skin. “For a change of tempo. You have been so very, very loud. Your screams, your pleas, your roars… they are a beautiful symphony, but even the greatest concert must have its moments of silence. Let us now explore the beauty of that void. Let us unmake the world of sound.”
His new tool was not a hammer of brutal force, but an instrument of vile precision. It was a slender, coppery probe, its surface etched with the same pulsating sigils, tipped with a resonator of polished quartz that hummed with a low, dissonant frequency they could feel in their teeth. He approached Shiro first.
“You have one good ear, little rat,” Akuma murmured, his breath a foul warmth against the side of Shiro’s face. The boy flinched, his single eye wide with a terror that eclipsed even the bone breaking agony. This was a different kind of violation, an attack not on his structure, but on his connection to reality itself. “Let’s not leave it lonely. Let’s make it a perfect pair.”
He inserted the probe.
The initial sensation was a pressure, a cold intrusion into the most delicate of canals.
Then, Akuma activated the resonator.
The pain was not an impact. It was an invasion of a different dimension. A high pitched, screaming vibration, far beyond any audible sound, drilled directly into the heart of his auditory nerve. It was not a feeling in his ear, but inside his mind, a shrieking, metallic frequency that felt like needles of ice and fire were being driven into the very core of his consciousness. It was the sound of his own sanity being shredded. His skull became a resonant chamber for this internal scream, his brain vibrating in a nauseating jello of pure, neurological fire. He thrashed, his head whipping side to side, a wordless, soundless shriek locked in his throat as the world of sound around him, the hum of the chamber, Akuma’s breathing, the ragged sound of his own panic, began to distort, to warp into a hellish caricature of noise. It became a roaring, tearing static, a cacophony of breaking glass and screaming feedback that existed only inside his head.
A hot, wet trickle of blood and clear cerebrospinal fluid ran from his ear, tracing a warm path down his neck. The external world began to fade, muffled as if he were sinking deep underwater. The roaring in his head grew distant, replaced by a ringing, a single, pure, agonizing tone that was the death knell of his hearing. And then… nothing.
A profound, absolute silence fell over him. It was not peaceful. It was a vacuum, a sudden and terrifying amputation of a sense. He was plunged into an abyss of quiet so complete it was a physical pressure on his new reality. He could see his own scream, feel the raw, tearing vibration in his throat and chest, but hear nothing. Not a whisper. Not a breath. He was trapped in a glass coffin, watching a world he could no longer hear.
Akuma’s lips moved. Shiro saw the shapes they made, saw the cruel, paternal smile stretch his features, but the words were ghosts, meaningless movements in the void. He was alone in a way he had never been before, even in the deepest solitude of the Astralon gutters.
Akuma then moved to Kuro. The prince saw what was coming, his one good eye blazing with a fury that was now tinged with a primal, helpless terror. He strained against his chains, not to fight, but in a futile instinct to protect his head, to protect this last, vital connection to a world that contained his mothers’ voices.
“No… don’t…” Kuro’s voice was a hoarse rasp, a sound he could feel but not hear.
The copper probe slid in. The violation was the same: the pressure, then the awakening of the internal hell scream. For Kuro, whose mind was a fortress of strategy and analysis, this was the ultimate defeat. There was no logic to fight, no variable to calculate. This was the systematic destruction of an input channel, the scrambling of data into pure, meaningless pain. The vibration felt like it was unspooling his thoughts, turning his brilliant mind into a tangled knot of screaming static. He felt a similar, hot trickle from his ear, and then the world collapsed into silence. The defiant roar he tried to muster was a silent, pathetic tremor in his chest, a seismic event in a soundless world.
Akuma stood back, admiring his work. The only sound in the chamber now was the click of his own boots on the stone, a sound only he could appreciate. He made an exaggerated gesture, waving a gauntleted hand slowly back and forth in front of their faces. They flinched, the movement their only input, their only connection to a reality that was rapidly shrinking. He saw the dawning, abject horror in their eyes as the full weight of their new prison settled upon them. This was not a pain that would be healed. This was a permanent state.
He then picked up a slate and a piece of chalk. The screech of the chalk on the slate was a vibration they felt through the slabs, a ghost of a sensation that only emphasized the void where sound should be. With slow, deliberate, almost artistic strokes, he wrote a message, holding it up for them to see.
THE WORLD IS QUIET NOW.
NO ONE IS COMING. THEIR VOICES WILL NEVER REACH YOU.
YOU ARE MINE.
GET YOUR REST, MY SONS.
TOMORROW, WE REMOVE THE EYES. WE TOUCHED ON IT BEFORE, BUT TOMORROW, I PLUCK THEM OUT LIKE I PROMISED I WOULD.
ONE SENSE AT A TIME, UNTIL YOU ARE NOTHING.
A SHELL. LIKE AKI.
He gave them a final, benevolent smile, a silent performance for his captive audience, and left. The door sealed with a hiss they could not hear, plunging them into a silence so absolute it was a physical presence, a weight pressing in on them, suffocating and complete.
They did not speak. They could not. The silence was a wall between them, thicker and more impenetrable than any stone. They were utterly alone in their private, soundless hells.
Kuro stared into the darkness, and his mind, his brilliant, strategic mind, became a single, looping, silent prayer. Not to gods, but to a memory.
Lucifera. Mommy Luci. Your voice. I need to hear your voice. Just once. The way you said my name when I finally mastered the Talon’s Grip. That specific tone. Please. I’m sorry I fought you. I’m sorry I hated the carrying. I would give my other eye, I would give everything, to hear you call me your ‘wittle storm’ just one more time. Just to know that sound exists.
Hot, silent tears carved paths through the grime on his cheeks, their falling a sensation without a soundtrack.
Shiro wept too, his body shaking with silent, shuddering sobs that were grotesque pantomimes of grief. He thought of Lyra’s hum, the harmonic blanket that had once woven a fortress around his soul in the Refractorium. He would never hear it again. He thought of Statera’s soft, praising whispers.
My brilliant boy.
Gone. Swallowed by the void. The memory of sound was now a torture in itself, a haunting melody of a life he could never return to.
Mother. Mommy Tera. I’m so cold. I’m so alone in the quiet. Please. Your Rain Baby is drowning in the silence. Please come find me before the dark takes my eyes, too.
They wept in unison, two broken vessels in a soundless, lightless ocean, their only hope a desperate, silent scream into a cosmos that had gone utterly deaf and blind to their suffering. The final, unbreakable shard of hope, the memory of their mothers love, was now under a new, more terrifying assault. For how could you hold onto the memory of a voice, when the very world you occupy had been stripped of all sound?

V5: C10: The Knife That Eats Memory