Chapter 2478: Deeper

Sylas continued watching Cassarae through the connection to Earth while another challenge formed around him. Her sword moved against Tomoe’s, her Will carrying a freedom he had never felt from her before, yet his thoughts had gone too far inward for even the battle to hold them for long.

He had spent the last several minutes questioning how well he knew his wife, then his father and grandfather, and eventually himself. Once he started looking, memories he had spent years accepting without examination began returning with different meanings.

Cassarae was seventeen the first time he became afraid of himself around her. She had told him she had a surprise, and Sylas had expected some stupid prank right until she stepped out of her bedroom flushed from head to toe, nervous in a way he almost never saw from her.

He still remembered the sheen of sweat along her collarbone and the way her heartbeat showed beneath it. What he remembered most clearly was the thought that entered his mind before he had time to dress it up as anything more civilized, had time to hide it beneath the veneer of fakeness he was used to facing the world with.

She was his.

The feeling had been violent in its simplicity. He wanted to take her, keep her, mark something into their relationship that would make the question of who she belonged with irrelevant forever, and the ease with which those thoughts came had frightened him more than anything Cassarae could have done.

He had pushed her onto the bed before his own mind caught up with him. Cassarae’s eyes had held shock and a little fear, but there had been anticipation there too, and somehow seeing that she wasn’t entirely repulsed had only made Sylas more uncertain of himself.

Her excitement faded while he sat trapped inside his own head. She touched him, worried that she had done something wrong, and Sylas had been too busy wondering who the hell he was to give her an answer.

Years later, he had finally understood part of what happened. His desires had collided with what Cassarae might want, and for perhaps the first time in his young life, another person’s desires mattered enough to make his own feel dangerous. But maybe more importantly than that, it had forced him to face just how little he showed the world of his true self.

He had broken up with her soon afterward.

At the time, Sylas could have given himself several explanations for the decision. Looking back now, stripped of all the language he had once used to make sense of it, one remained more convincing than the others.

He had been scared.

Another crimson fracture spread beneath Sylas’ cheek while Rheos spoke somewhere across the challenge space. Nosphaleen shifted closer when she noticed it, though she remained silent this time and allowed Sylas to continue staring at something neither she nor Rheos could see.

There had been other warnings.

Sylas remembered the child with bloody hands.

The image had first come to him under the influence of Greed, so he had always found it easy enough to file away as another expression of a Madness Seed. A small boy sat over something dead or dying and opened it with his bare hands, carefully pulling apart flesh and exposing whatever lay beneath with none of the revulsion a child should have felt.

The boy wanted to know how everything worked. Which pieces were necessary, what could be removed without ending life immediately, how long the body would continue functioning after each part disappeared. The blood on his hands had meant less to him than the unanswered questions inside the corpse.

Then the child had looked up.

Sylas had seen his own face.

He had known the memory wasn’t real. His recollection stretched back farther than most people’s, and there was no missing childhood afternoon where four- or five-year-old Sylas had carved apart a living creature to satisfy his curiosity.

Yet the image had returned in different forms ever since. He had thought of it while dissecting enemies, while studying creatures that should have terrified him, and in those moments when the desire to understand something became strong enough that the method of reaching the answer stopped carrying much weight.

Maybe Greed hadn’t created that child. Maybe it had simply found something inside Sylas that already understood him.

And then Sylas recalled. Recalled how many times he had wanted to do exactly that as a child, and yet had been clever and intelligent enough to understand just how the outside world would perceive it.

So he had buried those desires instead of acting upon them, starting to face the world with that familiar face of fakeness from the very start. No... maybe there were moments even before then when he had started. Just how long had he been burying his true self away?

His mind drifted deeper, toward another memory that had never received a satisfying explanation. There had been a moment when Sylas looked into himself and found a pair of eyes staring back from somewhere so far beneath his conscious mind that they felt less like a thought and more like another person waiting behind a locked door.

He had never truly opened it.

For all his talk of understanding everything, Sylas had accepted the existence of an entire portion of himself without studying it. Some of that came from the suspicion that whatever waited there would make the rest of the world even duller once it awakened, stripping away the few remaining things capable of holding his attention.

That explanation had suited him, but it was also incomplete.

Sylas remembered his mother’s face the day he nearly killed a boy in high school. Isolde rarely looked at him that way, and the fact he could still remember the severity in her expression after everything he had experienced since spoke to how deeply it had lodged itself into him.

His parents had spent his childhood teaching him restraint without ever calling it that. Family dinners, routines, expectations, ordinary rules about how people treated one another. Cedric and Isolde had built a life where Sylas could be sharp without being cruel, competitive without needing to dominate everything around him.

They had seen pieces of him long before Sylas possessed the words to describe them.

Maybe they hadn’t understood exactly what they were steering him away from. But they also didn’t need to.

Sylas finally admitted what sat beneath all of it. He was afraid of becoming that man.

He had always framed fear as something distant from himself, an emotion useful for identifying danger but rarely powerful enough to decide his actions. Yet he had abandoned Cassarae at seventeen, buried the possessiveness he saw in himself, accepted the locked portion of his mind, and spent years polishing the version of Sylas that his parents had taught him how to live with.

Perhaps the cage had never been imposed on him. Perhaps Sylas had helped build it from the very start.

The realization didn’t make him want to tear away everything Cedric and Isolde had taught him. His parents had given him something valuable, enough humanity and control to reach this point without becoming the sort of creature that dissected the world simply to see what screamed first.

But control required understanding and avoidance wasn’t control.

Sylas looked inward again, farther than he usually allowed himself to go, and felt something begin to rise in answer. Bloodthirst came first, followed by a hunger to win that carried none of his usual interest in fairness, consequence, or whether there would be anything left standing once he reached the top.

He had built his Classes around the Sylas he understood. Selfwrought Emperor, Void Sovereign, Willborne Crown. Each one had been another method of digging out the potential of the person he already knew himself to be.

He would change that.

His future Classes would reach deeper.

Sylas would not leave some unknown part of himself buried simply because he feared what it might want. He would uncover it, understand it, shape it, and if there was something inside him that would burn the entire world for victory, then even that would answer to him.

The presence within him rose higher, and for the first time Sylas didn’t push it back. He looked into those depths, found the eyes waiting there, and stared directly back.

Across his body, the crimson fractures began to accelerate.