The Sovereign-V5: C13: Curses At The Gods

The Sovereign-V5: C13: Curses At The Gods

The silence that swallowed their screams was the final, absolute truth. There were no answers. No divine retribution for their curses, no cosmic hand to stay their torment. The universe was a vast, uncaring machine, and they were two broken cogs being ground to dust within it. When exhaustion finally pulled them under, the dreams that came were not sanctuaries. They were battlefields.
There was no sight, no sound, but the emotional landscape was a seething maelstrom. In the formless dark of his own mind, Kuro did not seek the memory of Lucifera’s arms. He confronted a phantom of her, a silhouette of failing light.
Why aren’t you here? He raged, a silent explosion of intent. You called me your reason! Your anchor! Was it a lie? A pretty story for a pet? I’m drowning in the dark and you’re not coming! YOU’RE NOT FUCKING COMING! I HATE YOU FOR MAKING ME NEED YOU! I HATE YOU FOR EVERY COMFORTING LIE!
Shiro’s dream was a twisted inversion of the sanctum. He felt the ghost of Statera’s hand on his hair, and instead of leaning into it, he recoiled with a psychic snarl.
Your ‘unwavering truth’ is that we were abandoned! You promised your light would be my path! WHERE IS IT? I’m lost! I’m so lost and you left us here! I HATE YOU FOR MAKING ME BELIEVE IT! I HOPE IT HAUNTS YOU! I HOPE OUR FACES ARE THE ONLY THING YOU SEE WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES!
They did not seek solace. They lashed out. They blamed the mothers who had taught them to hope, the love that had made them soft, the very concept of salvation that now felt like the cruellest taunt. They screamed at the gods they knew did not exist, because the sheer, meaningless injustice of their suffering demanded a target, a face to curse. They ended their own dreams not with self destruction, but by actively, viciously, tearing apart the memories of their mothers love, holding up the tattered, bloody shreds as proof that nothing was sacred, and no one was coming.
They awoke not to peace, but to the familiar, hated vibration of the door. Akuma’s presence was a blot in their void, a concentration of the malice that ruled their reality.
He did not use the slate. He simply began, his voice a silent vibration they could feel through the slab, his words formed by the cruel shapes his lips made against Kuro’s ear, a tactile mockery.
“Good morning, my sons,” the vibration said. “I heard you screaming in the night. Such beautiful, honest music. You are finally learning the only prayer that matters. The prayer of hate.”
Kuro, his soul scraped raw, latched onto the vibration. It was a thread, the only one left. He poured all his fractured, boiling fury into a response. “FUCK YOU! YOU AND EVERYTHING THAT MADE YOU! YOU COSMIC FUCKING CANCER! YOU FESTERING SORE ON REALITY!”
Shiro, from his slab, echoed it, his voice a higher, sharper shard of glass. “I HOPE YOU DREAM OF THIS! I HOPE YOU FEEL EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE A THOUSAND TIMES OVER! I HOPE THERE IS A HELL AND YOU BURN IN IT FOR ETERNITY!”
Akuma laughed, a series of sharp, percussive vibrations against Kuro’s skull. He seemed delighted. “Yes! Give it to me! That is the spirit! That is the fire that will keep you warm in the cold I bring. Hate me. Hate your mothers for failing you. Hate the stars for ignoring you. It is the only thing you truly own now.”
He wheeled a new device into the chamber. To their deadened senses, it was a presence of shifting energies, a locus of wrongness. He called it the ‘Wheel of Seasons’. It was a disc of pitted, dark metal, and as it began to slowly rotate, its surface cycled through terrifying extremes.
He started on Kuro’s chest. He started on Kuro’s chest. The first pass was Heat. But it was not the clean, sharp fire of a brand. It was a deep, microwave agony that bypassed the skin to boil the flesh beneath. It felt like his pectoral muscles were being slowly poached in their own juices, the fat rendering out, sizzling against the inside of his skin. A low, guttural moan was forced from him, his back arching as much as his paralyzed body could manage. The heat built, and built, a crescendo with no release, until he could feel his own heart labouring against the cooked tissue around it, each beat a thick, painful thud in a constricting, oven like cage. The air from his lungs felt scorching as he exhaled a silent scream, his mind conjuring the scent of his own roasting meat.
Just as the pain became a white hot universe, threatening to consume his very consciousness, the wheel turned.
The Cold that followed was not an absence, but an aggressive, invasive presence. It was a piercing, absolute zero that felt like a thousand needles of solid nitrogen were being driven into his pores, freezing his blood in his veins, crystallizing the marrow in his sternum. The shock was so violent it was a different kind of pain altogether, a breathtaking, paralyzing agony that made his heart stutter and seize. The previously seared flesh now screamed with the brittle, shattering sensation of flash frosted meat, the nerves confused and alight with conflicting signals of scorching and freezing. He gasped, a ragged, soundless inhale that felt like breathing shattered glass.
Then, the wheel turned again.
Back to Heat. The same patch of flesh, now super sensitized and raw from the cold, was subjected again to the deep boiling agony. It was worse now, the pain layered, the tissue feeling like it was tearing itself apart from the violent thermal expansion. A wet, choked sob escaped Kuro. He could feel a blister rise, a huge, fluid filled bubble of torment, only for the wheel to turn once more.
Back to Cold. The new blister instantly froze, the fluid within turning to a sharp, burning slush that pressed against the tortured skin from the inside. The sensation was a nightmare of conflicting agony, the deep, bone ache of the cold and the sharp, localized fire of the frozen blister. He thrashed his head, his neck cords standing out, a continuous, reedy whine escaping his throat that he could not hear.
Akuma moved the wheel slowly, meticulously, to Kuro’s abdomen. The cycle repeated. The cooking, the freezing. He could feel his intestines clenching and groaning, a visceral, nauseating pain that made him drool helplessly onto the slab. The wheel travelled to his inner arm, the thin, sensitive skin there offering a new dimension of suffering. He could feel individual nerve endings firing like overloading stars, each cycle of heat and cold a fresh supernova in the tiny universe of his arm.
He then moved to Shiro, applying the wheel to his legs. The dead, paralyzed flesh was not immune. The agony was different, a deep, resonant, bone deep torment that vibrated through the useless limbs. The heat felt like it was melting the very calcium of his bones, turning them to soft, painful wax. The cold that followed made the bones feel brittle, ready to snap into a million icy shards under the slightest pressure. Shiro’s screams were higher, more desperate, his body trembling uncontrollably as the wheel cycled over his thighs, his knees, his shins. It was a violation of the grave, a torment that reached into limbs that were already tombs and made them scream anew.
Through it all, they clung to their hatred, their screams morphing into curses. “BURN IN IT! BURN IN THE HELL YOU MADE!” Kuro would roar during a cycle of cold, his teeth chattering. “I’LL FEAST ON YOUR ENTRAILS! I’LL PISS ON YOUR GRAVE!” Shiro would shriek as the heat blistered his legs, his voice a serrated edge of pure, undiluted malice. Their profanity was a shield, the only weapon they had left in a war against reality itself.
Back to Heat. Then Cold. Heat. Cold.
It was a cycle of elemental violation, a pendulum swinging between two opposite hells. There was no respite, only the dreadful anticipation of the next transition, the body’s nerves screaming in confused, overlapping agony. He was being baked and flash frozen, his skin a battlefield for impossible temperatures.
He worked on them for what felt like an eternity, a slow, methodical application of his thermal scourge. And through it all, the twins clung to their hatred. They screamed profanities at him, at Ryo, at the mothers who weren’t coming, at the void itself. Their curses were the only defence they had left, the only proof they were still alive inside the broken meat of their bodies.
When he finally stopped, their world was a map of phantom burns and deep, bone ache chills. The door opened. Aki shuffled in, her empty presence a familiar stain in the room.
The door opened. Aki shuffled in, her empty presence a familiar stain in the room. Her approach was a shift in the air, a subtle cooling that had once, in a forgotten life, promised relief. Now, it promised only the violation of false mending. Her footsteps were vibrations of impending dread.
As her cool, impersonal hands reached for him, Shiro flinched as if touched by a live wire. A fresh wave of hatred, more personal and venomous than anything he felt for Akuma, surged up from the depths of his broken soul. This was not the hatred for a tormentor, but the bottomless, profane rage for a beloved ghost, for the ultimate betrayal of memory itself.
“Don’t!” he snarled, his voice a low, feral thing. Then it erupted. “DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
His blind face contorted into a mask of pure revulsion, twisting towards her vacant presence. “Get away from me! You’re not her! You’re not Aki! You’re just a thing he uses! A SPOON TO SCOOP OUT SOULS! A PAIL TO CARRY OUR FUCKING SCREAMS!”
He was screaming now, every word a shard of his own heart being vomited forth. “My sister is DEAD! She died in this fucking room and he left her shell to mock me! TO MOCK US! YOU ARE A GRAVE ROBBER’S PUPPET!”
Kuro, from his own slab, added his voice to the condemnation, his own hatred for the hollow thing that had once been a girl giving weight to Shiro’s. “LOOK AT WHAT HE MADE YOU! A TOOL! A WHINING GEAR IN HIS TORTURE MACHINE! YOU’RE PITIFUL! YOU’RE NOTHING!”
Aki did not react. Her hands, which had paused a few inches from Shiro’s seared chest, remained still. There was no flicker in the dusty plains of her eyes, no tremor in her stance. The void in her gaze was absolute, a perfect, polished obsidian wall against which their fury shattered into meaningless noise. She was a hole in the world, and their pain poured into her without echo, without acknowledgment.
The words hung in the silent room, their power draining away into her infinite emptiness. Akuma, instead of forcing the issue, made a gentle, dismissive gesture. Aki stopped, her hands retreating to her sides as if her programming had been effortlessly overwritten. She stood for a moment, a hollow monument to their loss, then turned with that same, jerky, automated gait and shuffled out, dismissed. Her departure was more devastating than her touch could ever have been. She was a door closing forever on the past, and the twins were left alone in the sterile, horrifying present, their rage the only thing left to fill the void she left behind.
Akuma’s vibration was almost warm. “You see? You are learning to refuse false comfort. You are learning that everything is an enemy. Even the memory of love. Especially the memory of love.” He leaned close, his final words a breath against Kuro’s forehead. “This hatred… this is the only family you need now. Nurture it. It is the last thread holding you to this world, and I will never, ever let you fall.”
He left them there, unhealed, the phantom burns and deep chills a permanent part of their new reality. But he paused at the door, a final, looming shadow in their perception. He did not use the slate. He leaned down, his lips close to Kuro’s ear, the vibrations of his words a vile caress.
“You think this is the end of feeling?” the vibrations formed, dripping with paternal condescension. “This heat? This cold? This is merely the orchestra tuning its instruments. The grand finale is yet to come.”
He moved to Shiro, delivering the same silent, tactile prophecy. “You cling to this hatred. You think it makes you strong. But it is just another feeling. A sensation. And sensations… are a luxury you will soon no longer be able to afford.”
He stood between them, his presence a blot that consumed all other input. “Tomorrow,” the vibrations promised, a death knell felt in their bones. “Tomorrow, we complete the masterpiece. We sever the last, frayed chord tethering you to reality. The nerve endings will be silenced. The skin will become a dead letter. You will be unable to feel this slab, the air, the break of your own bones… or the heat of your own rage.”
A final, grotesquely gentle vibration, a father’s goodnight kiss. “Sleep well, my sons. Treasure these phantom pains. They are the last whispers of a world you will never know again. Tomorrow, you become nothing. True, empty shells. And then… then you will finally be perfect.”
The door sealed. The twins were left in the void, but now it was a waiting void. The hatred still burned, but Akuma’s words had planted a seed of a terror so profound it threatened to dwarf even that. The last chord. The final sense. To be unable to feel even this agony? To be unable to feel the chains, or the memory of a touch? It was not peace he promised. It was a death beyond death. The silence was no longer just empty. It was hungry. And tomorrow, it would feast.
The silence of the Black Keep was a palpable, weeping wound in the world. The void woven path was no longer a suture between worlds, but a screaming artery pulsing with Lucifera’s fury. Her return journey was not a transit; it was a forced march of a singular, cataclysmic will through the gibbering intestines of the cosmos. The formless chaos that pressed in did not whisper temptations of oblivion or rage this time. It recoiled. It was as if the non space itself had recognized a new, fundamental law of reality: the absolute, unforgiving hatred of a mother who has seen the blueprint of her children’s damnation.
The memory of Ryo Oji’s words,
“Akuma requires new playthings… We will hollow them out… send them back…”
, was a psychic brand, searing itself onto the back of her eyelids. Each syllable was a fresh lash, a violation more profound than any physical wound. She did not fight the memories of Kuro’s weight in her arms or Shiro’s blushing trust. She let them curdle. She allowed the image of Kuro’s stubborn pride to warp into a phantom of his sightless, screaming face. She let the memory of Shiro’s gentle hands twist into the sensation of his bones being hammered to powder. These were no longer comforts; they were sigils of power, fuelling the stellar inferno that had consumed her soul.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Her fear was a cold, sharp counterpoint to the rage, a silvery needle of terror stitching its way through the fabric of her wrath. It was not for herself, but for her sisters. Nyxara, Statera, Lyra. They were in the heart of Aerie Stellara, a Citadel she now knew to be a gilded cage of traitors, treating with smiling faces who had already signed the edicts for their extermination. Were they, at this very moment, drinking wine sweetened with betrayal? Were they hearing hollow pledges of support from the Cygnus, the Grus, the Pavo, clans whose sigils were now forever etched in her mind as marks of the damned? The thought was a fresh agony, a helpless fury that her warnings might arrive as a eulogy spoken over their already poisoned cups.
They are in the Black Keep,
the fact echoed in the hollowed out chamber of her mind, a death knell.
Astralon. Akuma.
The names were not locations or titles; they were different flavours of a single, cosmic evil. The Butcher King’s fortress, a place built upon a foundation of screaming souls, and his most depraved artisan of pain. Her sons were there. Now. While she moved through this meaningless void, they were being unmade, their bond inverted into a weapon, their love for her twisted into a prelude for a more exquisite torment.
A soundless roar built within her, a pressure that threatened to crack the very vessel of her form. It was the scream of a universe that had dared to steal from her. It was the promise that this universe would be corrected. Erased.
She burst from the void woven path not with a whisper, but with the force of a surgical strike. One moment, the formless chaos; the next, the cold, thin air of the Aerie Stellara docking spires. The transition was a physical shock, the sudden reality of the Citadel’s ordered splendour a grotesque mockery of the truth festering within its heart.
She did not navigate the grand avenues. She was a shard of concentrated night, a blur of motion that parted the crowds not through stealth, but through the palpable, psychic radiation of her malice. Starborn of the Lyra and Cygnus clans instinctively flinched as she passed, their harmonies faltering, their proud wings tucking in slightly, as if avoiding the shadow of a predator they could not see.
She arrived at the humble, pearlescent structure of the Falak home. The door was before her. She did not knock. She did not pause. She placed a hand on it, and the wood, woven with ancient defensive wards, did not just open; it seemed to flinch inward, the patterns of dying nebulae on its surface recoiling from her touch.
The scene inside was a tableau of fragile, desperate planning. Nyxara stood over a map of the mountain, her multi hued light a banked, smoky ember of contained fury. Statera was a statue of frozen grief by the cold hearth, her Polaris nature turned so inward she seemed to be listening to a truth too terrible to voice. Lyra was not humming; her silence was a high pitched, psychic whine that frayed the edges of the air. Aquilina stood as their anchor, Caelia a warm, sleeping weight against her chest, her Altair eyes sharp with a worry that now, Lucifera knew, was fatally understated.
All four pairs of eyes snapped to her as she entered.
The change in the room’s atmosphere was instantaneous and absolute. The fragile tension shattered, replaced by a vacuum that was then filled with the sheer, undiluted force of Lucifera’s presence. She was not a woman returning from a scouting mission. She was a calamity walking on two legs.
“Luci…” Nyxara began, her voice a dry rustle of leaves.
Lucifera’s hand came up, a gesture that was not a request for silence, but a command that enforced it. Her brilliant white eyes, usually pools of dry, analytical light, were now the focused lenses of a superweapon, burning with a cold, stellar fire. The dust of forgotten archives and the psychic residue of absolute betrayal clung to her like a shroud.
“They are not in the mountain,” she stated. Her voice was not her own. It was the sound of tectonic plates grinding, the voice of a dead star speaking its final curse.
The hope that had been a flickering ember in Nyxara’s eyes died instantly, replaced by a yawning chasm of dread. Statera made a small, wounded sound. Lyra’s hands clenched, the knuckles white.
“Mavros,” Nyxara snarled, the name a curse. “The lying, venomous bast…”
“Mavros,” Lucifera cut her off, her voice dripping with a contempt so profound it seemed to bleach the colour from the air, “is a pathetic, grubbing insect. A quartermaster of souls. A festering carbuncle on the body of a far greater disease.” She took a step forward, and the very air grew colder, thinner. “The betrayal is not his. It is systemic. It is cosmological.”
She took a step forward, and the very air grew colder, thinner, as if the room were being pumped full of void. “The Corona Regis is not just a corpse; it is a cadaver that has been puppeteered for cycles, its strings pulled by a hand we were too comfortable, too domesticated, to see.”
She paused, letting the accusation hang in the air, a blade over their former lives.
“I did not find a conspiracy. I found a sacrament. A patient, meticulous liturgy of self immolation. The dates on the correspondence… they stretch back nearly six cycles. This was not a hasty coup. It was a slow, deliberate poisoning of the well from which we all drank.” Her gaze, burning and dry, swept over them. “The Leos, the Scorpio, the Algol… they are but the most visible, festering sores. The cancer has metastasized into the very bone marrow of our people.”
From within her robes, she produced not a single document, but a sheaf of them, their pale, unsettling parchment seeming to drink the light. She held them up, not as papers, but as artifacts of a dead world.
“The Grus,” she began, her voice a low, relentless drumbeat of doom. “Their solemnity, their reverence for the dead… sold. They bargained for the right to oversee the mass graves, to chant the funerary rites for entire sectors deemed ‘unworthy’.” She let the image settle, a chill creeping into the room. “The Cygnus. Their songs of tragic beauty… now composed as hymns for the new regime, their art a lubricant for the machinery of genocide.”
She laid the first pages on the table with a soft, final click.
“The Pavo’s vanity was purchased with promises of being the sole source of splendour in a grey, utilitarian hell. The Ankaa, the Tucana, the Apus, the Sagitta… their lofty independence was a lie. They traded it for the coward’s guarantee of survival, agreeing to look away as the world burned below.” She took a sharp, painful breath. They have signed the death warrant for our sons, for our future, for the very concept of sanctuary.”
The revelations fell not like hammer blows, but like the slow, crushing descent of a glacier, each one layering upon the last, building an inexorable weight of horror.
“They have not just sold Nyxarion. They have pledged their souls to the architect of its unmaking. This is not a political squabble. It is an apostasy.” Her voice dropped to a whisper that was more terrifying than any shout. “And its name… is the Tenebris Imperium.”
The revelations fell like hammer blows, each one landing with the weight of a world ending. Nyxara’s face was a mask of horrified denial, then dawning, absolute fury. Statera’s frozen stillness became the stillness of a glacier calving into a killing sea. Lyra’s silence became a resonant chamber for a single, dissonant note of pure hate.
“Only Altair, Corvus, and Lyra are absent from the rosters of the damned,” Lucifera continued, her voice a low, relentless torrent. “And Sirius. And Polaris. And Vega. Our own clans, Lina. They did not answer Mavros’s call. They are either already dead… or they are waiting for a sign we failed to give.”
Then, the final, most devastating truth. The one that made the architectural betrayal of an entire civilization feel like a prelude.
The silence after the name ‘Tenebris Imperium’ was a living thing, a thick, suffocating wool of dread. Into that silence, Lucifera’s voice returned, but it was broken now, stripped of its analytical precision, raw with a pain that was both ancient and terrifyingly new.
“It was never about the throne,” she whispered, the words a confession torn from a deep and bleeding wound. “Not truly.” A single, perfect tear of pure, undiluted rage traced a path through the grime on her cheek, sizzling where it fell. “The throne was the stage. The exile, the drama. We were all players in a script he wrote cycles ago.”
She looked at them, and in her eyes, they no longer saw the abyss; they saw a specific, personalized hell, crafted just for them.
“Mavros… that preening, venomous gnat… he was a delivery boy. A quartermaster of souls. The true transaction… the personal gift to the coming king, the one that secured his pathetic place in the new order…” Her voice hitched, a fracture in the glacier of her composure. She struggled to form the words, as if speaking them aloud made the nightmare real in a way it hadn’t been before.
“Was our sons.”
The word ‘sons’ was not a sob. It was a detonation. A sound that contained the shattering of two worlds: the one they had built, and the one that had been built for them in the dark.
She convulsed, a dry heave of anguish, before forcing herself to continue, her hands clenching into fists so tight the bones threatened to break through the skin.
“Ryo Oji… he did not want them as prisoners. He did not want them as pawns.” Her voice was a death rattle. “He wrote it. In his own hand. He gave them to Akuma. As… playthings.” The term was a vileness, a blasphemy that sucked the air from the room. “He said… ‘the last one broke’.”
The casual cruelty of the phrase, the offhand dismissal of a life as a used toy, landed with the force of a physical blow. Nyxara made a sound like a dying animal.
“But that is not the point,” Lucifera pressed on, her eyes wide with the horror of the full revelation. “The torture… the breaking… it is not the end. It is the pedagogy. He wrote, ‘We will turn them into truly broken things. We will not just hurt them; we will rewire them. We will make pain their only scripture, and obedience their only prayer. We will hollow them out until they are nothing but elegant, screaming vessels.’”
She was screaming now, the words tearing from her, each one a shard of her own soul.
“And then…! And then he will send them
back
. To us. A final gift. A demonstration of the new world’s truth! That everything breaks! That love is the sharpest knife! He wants us to hold the empty shells of our reason for being! He believes it will be more destructive than any army!”
The silence that followed was a physical entity, a suffocating weight that pressed down on the room, stealing the air. The horror was too vast, too personal, too profane to be comprehended. It was not just cruelty; it was a nihilistic philosophy enacted upon the bodies of their children.
Nyxara made a sound, a low, guttural rumble that was the antithesis of her musical laugh. It was the sound of the mountain’s heart cracking. Her multi hued light flared, not with warmth, but with a corona of black fire that bled the colour from the room. “I will tear his throat out with my teeth,” she whispered, the words sizzling with psychic static. “I will march into that viper’s nest and I will peel the flesh from Mavros’s bones while he screams the location of that Black Keep.”
She took a step toward the door; a sovereign becoming an avatar of annihilation.
“Nyxara, no.” Lucifera’s voice was a whip crack, freezing her in place. “There is no need. I know where they are. The Black Keep of Astralon. Marching into the Corona Regis now is what he wants. It is a trap baited with our rage. It would be a meaningless suicide, and it would not save them.”
Nyxara whirled on her, a nebula of incandescent fury. “Then what? We sit here? We negotiate?” She spat the word like poison.
“We do not negotiate with cancer,” Lucifera stated, her calm more terrifying than Nyxara’s rage. “We excise it. But we cannot do it alone. The Aerie Stellara is a poisoned well. We cannot trust the Conclave. We need an army they cannot predict, cannot corrupt. We need blades that owe no allegiance to thrones or citadels.”
Her gaze swept over them all, a strategist surveying the scorched earth of their old lives and finding one, final, desperate gambit.
“We need the Sovereigns Alliance.”
The name hung in the air, a ghost from a colder, harder age. The pact forged in blood and fire in the aftermath of the Plaza, a fleeting constellation of her, her sisters, the Twin Stars, and a handful of others who had stood against the darkness before comfort had made them soft.
“They are embers,” Lucifera admitted, her voice softening for the first time, edged with a desperate hope. “Scattered, lost. But if they live… Corvin… the others… they would be where it began. The old barracks at Elara’s Hearth. It is the only place not yet rotted by the court’s gilded poison. They are our only hope.”
The plan was a desperate, razor thin thread, but it was a thread. While Lyra and Statera began the agonizing work of trying to reach out psychically, to brush against the faint, desperate frequencies of their sons across the impossible distance, Nyxara and Aquilina moved with lethal purpose. Messengers, sworn to the Falak line with blood oaths older than the Imperium’s conceit, were dispatched not to the grand halls of the Conclave, but into the deeper, shadowed places of the Citadel.
They did not summon the traitor clans. They summoned the outliers, the ones Lucifera’s evidence had cleared. A grim delegation assembled in the Falak home, the air thick with a tension that was part rage, part despair, part a nascent, terrifying resolve.
The Lyra representative, the ancient composer, whose music had faltered at Lyra’s threnody of grief.
The Sirius envoy, a woman with a gaze as sharp and cold as Lucifera’s own, who had found Mavros’s political machinations beneath her notice.
Aether and Phoinissa, the Polaris Lumina, stepped into the chamber, their light sharp and unyielding. Aether's voice, a blade of pure logic, declared, "The truth is not shaped by sentiment. It is a constant, unbroken thread that binds all existence. To bend it to serve the council's hateful agenda is to unravel the very fabric of our purpose." Phoinissa added, "Yet even truth requires discipline. It must be wielded with the precision of a scalpel, not the clumsiness of a hammer. The council's new direction is a stain on our legacy—a distortion of the principles we swore to uphold." The assembly fell silent, confronted by the couple's condemnation, reflecting their own failings. Finally, the one they needed most had arrived.
The grim delegation assembled in the Falak home was a constellation of confusion and brewing storm. The ancient Lyra composer, his form seeming woven from fractured sheet music. A stern, sharp-featured woman from the Sirius conclave, her white eyes narrowed in calculation. A Polaris Lumina, his light a guttered, uncertain flicker. And Voron of Corvus, a carrion king awaiting the feast.
It was the Sirius envoy who broke the silence, her voice a scalpel. “This convocation outside the Conclave is… irregular. The algorithms of power are shifting, but the data is unclear. Explain this breach of protocol, Lucifera. What is the existential threat that requires such shadowed counsel?”
Lucifera turned her burning gaze upon them. “The Conclave is a corpse, and you are debating the arrangement of the funeral flowers. The protocol you cling to is the very script of your own execution.”
She laid out the evidence with the dispassion of a pathologist conducting an autopsy. The Tenebris Imperium edict. The rosters of treason. The chillingly bureaucratic plans for the “Culling of the Unworthy.” She did not speak of her sons. Not yet. This was the diagnosis of the disease; that was the prognosis of the terminal patient.
The Polaris Lumina, Orion, stared at the parchment bearing his clan’s sigil, his own light dying in his chest. “This… this cannot be a fixed point. The Polaris truth is unwavering. This is… a lie.”
“It is the truth they have chosen,” Lucifera countered, her voice flat. “The truth of the void. That all light is temporary, and the only permanence is the cold.”
The Lyra composer let out a mournful, dissonant chord. “They came to us,” he whispered, his voice the sound of a shattered violin. “They spoke of a grand, new symphony. A unification of all melodies into a single, perfect chord of order. I refused. I said such a song would be the death of music. They called me a sentimental relic.”
The Sirius envoy, Valeria, gave a sharp, bitter nod. “They presented it to us as a logical conclusion. The eradication of inefficient biological sentiment. A universe cleansed of the chaos of love, grief, and attachment. We rejected it. It was not logic; it was the arithmetic of a machine that has forgotten it was ever alive.”
Voron of Corvus let out a dry, cawing laugh that held no humour. “They offered the Corvus the spoils of knowledge. The secrets of the dying, the private thoughts of the slain. We see the ends of things, little starlings. This Imperium is not a beginning. It is a scream in the dark before the final, eternal silence. We showed them the door.”
Lucifera looked at each of them—the loyalists from traitor clans, the islands of sanity in a sea of madness. “You are the proof that the poison is not total. But the body is septic. And we are out of time.”
The reminder was a fresh wave of agony that washed over the mothers. Statera flinched. Lyra’s hands flew to her mouth, stifling a fractured note. Nyxara’s black fire corona pulsed with a violent rhythm.
“We cannot fight this alone,” Nyxara said, the admission tearing itself from her. “We need the Alliance. We need Corvin.”
Voron was silent for a long moment, his gaze turning inward, consulting maps of fate only he could see. “The embers yet glow,” he murmured finally. “My son… he and the others… they wait in the places the light does not reach. Elara’s Hearth is a possibility. A grave of a hope. But to reach them… to rally them against this… this
nothingness
…” He looked at Lucifera, then at Nyxara, his decision made. “The Corvus stands with the Falak. We have always seen the rot. Now, we will help you burn it out.”
The alliance was sealed, not with cheers, but with a shared, grim understanding. They were no longer a group of grieving women and political outcasts. They were the nascent, bleeding heart of a resistance against the absolute void. The final, terrible truth settled upon them all: this was not a battle for a throne, or even just for two boys. It was a war for the very soul of reality, against an enemy that believed the greatest victory was to prove that nothing, not even a mother’s love, could ever truly matter. And time, like the silence in a torture chamber, was running out.

.
!
V5: C13: Curses At The Gods