Chapter 52: _ What Your Soul Desires

"She’s systematic," he whispered.

His eyes widened as the grand theory took shape in his head. "It’s an organized, calculated campaign."

Maeve blinked. "...What is?"

"She isn’t just a lowborn," he began to pace again. "No lowborn would ever dare behave like that. Any normal commoner knows that approaching and accusing a royal prince without permission carries a public execution sentence. But Elira? She walks into the academy, ignores every law of society, and deliberately targets the most powerful men in the Five Factions!"

"She’s a gold-digger?" Cedric offered, floating down to sit cross-legged on the edge of his bed. "In my day, we simply called them ambitiously scandalous."

"No!" he shouted, slapping his forehead. "She’s a Borrowed! Don’t you see it?! They hell agents aren’t just stealing the lives of random people. They are infiltrating the highest tiers of power in Last Bastion! She’s attempting to seduce-trap every prince in the academy! She tried to compromise Ajax, she tried to provoke Remus, she framed Ivar, and when she realized I was the only one who could see through her disguise... she deployed her ultimate weapon!"

Maeve stared at him for three long seconds. "...Her ultimate weapon being... letting you touch her underwear?"

"SHE BEWITCHED ME!" he yelled, his voice hitting an embarrassingly high pitch. "She used a localized succubus charm! She knew I was wounded! She knew the rot-sap had weakened my magic, so she positioned herself in that corridor, acted disoriented, and waited for me to make physical contact so she could lock a dark hell compulsion onto my soul!"

Cedric let out a long, theatrical sigh and covered his face with his ghostly hands. "Gods above, the denial is breathtaking. It’s like watching a man drown in three inches of water while screaming that the ocean is attacking him."

"It’s not denial!" he snarled, pointing an accusatory finger at Cedric. "It’s a logical analysis! She is a Borrowed asset sent to neutralize me! But she failed! Because instead of falling into her trap, I broke the spell and escaped!"

"You fled," Maeve corrected helpfully, raising her tiny finger. "You ran away screaming, master. You literally yelled ’Fuck that bloody venom!’ and sprinted into the dark like a startled rabbit."

He turned back to the room, his mind racing. "It doesn’t matter. Now I know her strategy. I know what she is. She thinks she can use me as a pawn in her little invasion scheme? She thinks she can seduce the son of the High-Rector? I will show her what happens to creatures that try to play games with me! I will track her every move. I will pretend to fall for her charms, extract the identities of every other Borrowed agent hiding in the five academies, and then I will personally carve her core out of her chest!"

"Oh, lovely," Maeve clapped, her eyes lighting up. "A classic ’I’m going to fake-romance my enemy to ruin her’ plot! Those always go smoothly and never end with anyone weeping in the rain!"

"I am NOT romancing her!" he screamed, grabbing a heavy silver candlestick and slamming it onto the table. "I am hunting her! I am going to destroy her!"

"Clearly," Maeve smirked, floating upside down right in front of his face. "Though I have to say, if she’s trying to ruin reputations, she’s doing a fantastic job. I mean, Prince Ivar only gave her a forehead kiss and she tried to frame him for assault. You, on the other hand? You had your hand beneath her dress, your mouth on her throat, and you were groaning like a–"

"MAEVE!" he roared, his face flushed bright red. "Why don’t you write a four-volume historical treatise on it if you’re so utterly fascinated?!"

"I might! The Mad Prince and the Markless Leech: A Tale of Strategic Grope-fare! It’s going to be a best-seller in the lower districts!" she squealed, doing a victory loop through the ceiling.

"Ignore her, Raice," Cedric said, floating closer with a surprisingly gentle expression on his face. "Listen to me. I have watched mortal men for three centuries. I know the work of fate when I see it. In all the years I have been bound to your tortured soul, no girl has ever succeeded in getting your attention. If they get close, you threaten them, you ignore them, or you plan and execute their execution. But this Elira? She made you lose control. For five minutes, you weren’t a brooding, paranoid necromancer. You were alive. You were intimate with a woman."

"It was the VENOM!" he yelled, his chest heaving, his fist clenching so hard his knuckles turned white. "It was not fate! It was not romance! It was a biological, dark-magic malfunction! I want to KILL her, Cedric! I want to tear her to pieces!"

"Yes, yes," Cedric patted his shoulder uselessly, his hand passing through his skin with a cold breeze. "You want to ’kill’ her. That’s why your heart is beating at two hundred beats per minute right now."

"I am going to exorcise both of you! I swear to the First Courts, I will bind you both to a sewer rat in the lower quadrants!" he threatened, looking around for a binding ritual chalk.

"FOUND IT!"

Wight’s booming rasp suddenly broke the chaotic noise in the room.

He whipped around. Wight was standing upright, his skeletal gray arm pointing directly at a line of ancient text on the yellowed page of the tome.

"You found the venom description?" he asked, a surge of overwhelming, glorious relief flooding his chest. He rushed over to the iron stand, his heart leaping with joy. "Tell me! Tell me it causes acute neurological compulsion! Tell me it forces the host to perform erratic, uncontrollable physical acts against their will!"

"Not... exactly," Wight rasped, leaning his horned skull closer to the book.

His relief instantly withered. "What do you mean, ’not exactly’?"

"Apparently, one of those beasts you fought in the perimeter was a Vespera-Boar," Wight explained, his icy white eye-sockets glowing brightly as he read the translation. "The beast itself is believed to be extinct and its tusks are coated in a rare psychic toxin known as Veil-Siphon. It does not generate artificial desires from nothing."

A sinking sensation formed in the pit of his stomach. "...It doesn’t?"

"No," Wight continued calmly. "The text states that the Veil-Siphon venom acts as an absolute amplifier of the host’s deeply buried, subconscious cravings. When the host is brought into physical proximity with that which their subconscious mind desires above all else... the venom shatters their cognitive inhibitions. It forces the host to hallucinate and act on their deepest, most desperate internal need until it is satisfied."

Silence fell over the room.

Dead silence.

Maeve stopped floating. Cedric slowly dropped his hands. Even the candles on his desk seemed to dim as the words hung in the air.

He stood frozen beside the iron stand, staring at the gray entity with a wide gaze.

"...What?"

"The venom amplifies what you already want," Wight clarified helpfully, gesturing toward the text. "It does not create new thoughts. It simply strips away your self-control and forces you to take what your soul is secretly starving for."

His brain completely stalled out.

What my subconscious mind desires above all else...What my soul is secretly starving for...

His mind traitorously flashed back to the hallway. To the soft, damp heat beneath her dress. To the taste of her lips. To the way the agonizing, screaming noise in his head had completely vanished the very second his skin touched hers.

"No," he stammered, stepping backward away from the book, shaking his head furiously. "No. No, no, no. That’s... that’s impossible. That’s wrong. The book is wrong! Wight, your translation is outdated!"

"The text is from the First Era, Raice. It has never been incorrect."

"IT IS INCORRECT TODAY!" he shrieked, his voice echoing off the stone walls as panic seized his soul. "I don’t desire her! My subconscious doesn’t want her! She is a markless, arrogant, dragonless, mark-stealing, suspicious little parasite!"

"Who happens to be your subconscious heart’s desire!" Maeve squealed, bursting into hysterical, echoing laughter as she tumbled through the air. "OH, MY GODS! The Mad Prince is in love with the Dragonless girl! The dark, broody monster wants the commoner!"

"I DO NOT WANT HER!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, grabbing his hair with both hands as his whole world crumbled into utter, embarrassing chaos. "I WANT TO PURGE THE BORROWED! I WANT TO SAVE THE REALM!"

"You want her lips, boss!" Maeve sang, floating in circles around his head like a lunatic fairy. "You want her touch! Your soul is starving for the little leech!"

"CEDRIC, HELP ME!" he pleaded, turning desperately toward the older ghost.

Cedric looked at him, shook his head with pity, and adjusted his lace ruff. "I cannot help you, my boy. You are a victim of your own repressed hormones. May the gods have mercy on your pathetic, hypocritical soul."

"I AM NOT HYPOCRITICAL! I AM A WARRIOR!"

He dropped to his knees in the middle of his quarters, burying his face in his hands as the horrific, embarrassing truth beat against his skull like a war drum.

He was the son of High-Rector Maddox. He was the feared Mad Prince of the Fae Court.

And his subconscious mind had apparently decided that its ultimate, most desperate desire in the entire universe... was an angry lowborn girl who had just tried to frame a Wolf Prince.