Chapter 58
The air vibrates with an eerie hum as Aks’tof snaps his fingers. A sharp, crystalline sound—like glass fracturing—shatters the silence. The world fractures with it, splintering into a thousand shards of darkness, each piece slipping away like ink dissolving in water. For a heartbeat, I am weightless. The ground beneath me ceases to exist, and I drift in the void, untethered.
Then, reality exhales. It rushes back in, folding around me with a slow pulse—familiar, yet not. Not as I remember it.
I stand at the threshold of a long corridor, shadowed within the crumbling bones of an ancient stronghold. The air is thick with the scent of damp stone and burning wood, the lingering bite of autumn threading through the ruined hall. A shiver runs through me. I know this place. Too well.
The Beast Lord’s Castle.
The throne room.
Where everything began.
Or perhaps—where everything ended.
Through the skeletal remains of broken pillars and fractured walls, a figure kneels before the throne, fingers ghosting across its timeworn surface as though tracing the echoes of history itself. Selene. My sister. Her orange hair pools around her, catching the pale glow of dying embers suspended in the air—remnants of a magic that binds this moment in time. But the light is wrong. Fragile. Flickering. A breath away from vanishing.
The Gnarly Roses and the Relic Hunters gather around her, their voices low, hushed as if afraid to disturb the silence that clings to these stones.
A phantom pain tightens in my chest. The past presses in, insistent, merciless. I see him. The man’s body—still, lifeless. My hand, trembling, brushing against his face, feeling the cold weight of finality. I close my eyes, but the memory does not yield. It cuts through me, sharp as ever.
Aks’tof’s voice coils around me, smooth and detached. “You’ve pushed that one away, haven’t you, Elara?”
My throat tightens. I force the words past it. “What is this?”
“This, my dear granddaughter, is where the threads of fate twisted. Where things began to unravel.”
The truth settles over me, heavy and inescapable. This grief—it was never just for him. It was for something else, something deeper than love or loss.
Aks’tof’s voice is soft, knowing. “You know what he is.”
A slow breath. A whispered exhale.
“Yes,” I say. “He… like me… was gifted.”
The void presses in, dense and suffocating, as though the air itself conspires to drown me in silence. Aks’tof lounges upon a jagged shard of stone, his posture at ease, but his eyes—cold, glittering—watch me with quiet amusement. A twisted smile ghosts across his lips, the shape of it sharp, knowing.
he echoes, his voice rasping like steel dragged across stone. He is enjoying this. Enjoying .
I steel myself, spine rigid, fists clenching at my sides. "Yes. As in—no longer," I snap, my voice a blade, honed sharp enough to cut. But there, just beneath the surface, is the flicker of unease. I can hear it, even if I refuse to acknowledge it.
Aks’tof’s smile widens, his teeth glinting like a predator’s in the dark. He lifts a hand, lazily twirling a finger through the air. A gesture. A command.
"Look."
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The word is soft, almost gentle. It is anything but.
I hesitate, but my body betrays me, my gaze drawn to the illusion he has spun from memory and shadow.
The Beast Lord’s Castle rises before me. Again. I know this place too well. The throne room is caught in a moment outside of time, its silence heavy with something raw and unfinished. The air is thick with the scent of cold stone and embered ruin. And at the heart of it—
A man.
He lies there, but not for long. His form is already fading, unraveling thread by thread. His body is dissolving, pulled apart by unseen forces, vanishing like ash carried on the wind. The last of him drifts away, lost to nothing. The finality of it strikes like a blow, as inevitable as the weight of a closing door.
The ground shudders beneath my feet. Ice spreads in my veins.
Aks’tof’s voice slithers through the air. “He is gifted, yes. But he is not like you.” A pause, drawn out like a blade before the plunge. “He is like Or rather… than me.”
Something shifts inside me. A slow, twisting dread.
I turn to him, my breath uneven. “Like you?” The words barely escape, a whisper of disbelief. “Wait… ?”
Aks’tof’s grin stretches wider, the sharpness of it something feral, something ancient. “You are and ” he murmurs, the weight of his words pressing against me, sinking deep. “I am
and ” A beat. A breath. “But child… ”
The air thickens, closing in around me.
The words hang between us, heavy and unyielding, sinking into the marrow of my bones. The term carries the weight of something vast, something I do not yet understand but already know to fear.
And suddenly, everything—the Consortium’s reach, the actions of the Gnarly Roses, the rising threat unraveling at the edges of the world—leads back to this. To
To a moment I can never take back.
The scream shatters the silence—Selene’s cry, raw and jagged, a sound that cuts through the air like a blade. It is agony made manifest. Her hand clutches the throne, fingers white-knuckled, as something dark and hungry slithers up her arm. It moves like fire, devouring, claiming.
I cannot move.
My chest tightens, breath trapped somewhere between disbelief and horror. The scene unfolds before me, too familiar, too real, a nightmare draped in memory’s shroud. But the past should not breathe, should not shift beneath my gaze like a living thing.
Then, movement—quick, desperate. A figure rushes past me.
Me.
I blink, the weight of impossibility crashing over me in waves. That cannot be me. And yet… it is. I watch as my past self surges forward, reaching for Selene. But something is wrong—Selene, Garik, Tibbins… They should not be here. Not in this moment. Not in this place.
"This is taboo," I whisper, the words tasting of old knowledge, of truths buried beneath the weight of what should never be.
A chuckle—low, smooth, like honey laced with poison.
"Only if you pry…" Aks’stof’s voice coils around me, sinking into my skin.
Understanding slams into me. This is not just memory. This is something deeper, something forbidden clawing its way free from the veil of time.
I watch as my past self hesitates, her hand hovering over Selene’s shoulder—so close, yet held back by something unseen. And then, I feel it. The moment where everything fractures.
Power surges between us—between Selene and me. It does not spark. It does not flicker. It erupts, wild and unbound, as if the very fabric of the world cannot contain what has been set in motion. The air quakes. The space between seconds stretches.
Then, chaos.
The vision shudders, distorts—past and future folding in upon themselves.
Traps. Riddles. Puzzles. Sacrifices. The ancient tomb. The undead. The automatons. The Lich.
Moments blur, overlapping like echoes in a vast, empty hall. A reality unraveled, twisted upon itself in an endless loop. But the truth settles into my bones, cold and undeniable.
None of it happened.
And yet… it will.
The vision collapses. Darkness rushes in. I gasp, yanked back into the void’s cold embrace. Arms steady me—Aks’stof’s. Holding me back from the precipice, from the madness that lingers in the wake of unraveling time.
I tremble, the weight of revelation pressing upon me, too heavy to bear, too impossible to deny. I lift my gaze to the man I have spent my life longing to understand.
My voice is barely more than breath. “It was you… You are trapped within the throne?”
The words tremble. And for the first time, so does he.