Chapter 46: Memory Of Chaos

Every voice in the domain rose at once, screaming for him to stop.

Lucian refused.

Something in his chest insisted there was someone waiting for him on the other side of that barrier. Someone who’d already been waiting a long, long time.

He drew one last breath, deep and steady, raised the blade high, and brought it down across the glass with everything he had.

CRACK!

The sound of the fracture tore through the entire domain, violent enough to shake the ground and sky alike.

Lucian didn’t flinch.

He struck again, and the glass gave way entirely under the second blow.

Sonata blazed with light, and a violent gust of wind tore free from the widening crack, tearing at his clothes and hair with brutal force.

He pushed forward anyway, driving himself into the fracture itself, every step forward costing him more than the last, the pressure bearing down harder with every inch he gained.

The Omen and Alayna both screamed for him to stop.

His body passed fully through the shattered glass regardless, swallowed by whatever waited on the other side.

The black blindfold he’d worn for as long as he could remember finally came undone.

The muscles behind his eyes shuddered violently, and his eyelids flew open wide, wider than they’d ever opened before.

For the first time, his eyes were truly open. His pupils burned bright with color, shaped like a star fused with a sun, blazing blue and yellow in equal, brilliant measure.

Both eyes blazed with light, fixed straight ahead.

"I can see."

He looked down at his own hands first, then across the rest of his body, the sensation of sight itself feeling utterly foreign, nothing like the borrowed perception his skill had once granted him. This felt native. Like something he’d been born with, finally waking up after a lifetime asleep.

Then he looked elsewhere.

What greeted him wasn’t beauty. It was the head of a Titan, immense beyond comprehension, filling his entire field of vision. Its eyes had been closed at first, until the instant Lucian’s gaze landed on it, and then they opened too, meeting his stare directly.

The Titan turned fully toward him, its expression carrying something close to fury.

Not aimed at Lucian, though. Its massive hand moved, hauling its own colossal frame upright, rising to its full, staggering height.

And through the gap the Titan’s movement opened, Lucian caught sight of what lay beyond it.

A war unfolded there, vast beyond anything he could have imagined.

Meteors rained down from a fractured sky.

Lightning tore the earth apart with every strike.

Massive spheres of raw magic collided in open air, detonating with force enough to shake the heavens themselves.

The combatants locked in that war carried wings, white and gold, their forms barely recognizable as human at all. Beside them, another army fought, horned figures wreathed in dark mana, standing shoulder to shoulder with the winged host against whatever they faced.

Even seeing all of it laid bare in front of him, Lucian couldn’t make out the leaders on either side, both sides throwing off so much light and darkness that their forms blurred past recognition entirely.

Except for one.

A single figure stood between both warring factions, his face indistinct, but his shape unmistakably human, standing his ground alone against both armies at once.

He held a crystal in one hand.

Both sides were converging on him, throwing everything they had against a single man, and the Titans Lucian had seen only moments earlier were fighting at his side, holding the line, absorbing blow after blow meant to reach him.

The scale of it was staggering.

Every strike that man landed seemed capable of leveling a mountain with nothing but the flat of his palm, and still neither army gave ground, the winged host raining down blade after blade of pure light without pause, the horned legion tearing into every Titan still standing between them and their target.

In the end, the Titans fell, one after another, driven back into the earth beneath the weight of the assault.

The man who’d stood so tall only moments before staggered now, grievously wounded, cut down by the combined force of both factions’ leaders at once.

He didn’t stop there, though. He looked down at the crystal still gripped in his hand and crushed it, pouring an almost incomprehensible surge of mana into the act, shattering it into several separate pieces.

One of those fragments fell, tumbling down through the chaos, landing directly at Lucian’s feet.

Lucian looked closer. The fragment glowed red.

He glanced down at the yellow Kirana crystal fused to his own sword. The shape of it matched the piece in front of him almost exactly, except this red fragment sat whole, undamaged, complete in a way his own crystal never had been.

He knelt down slowly and reached out, fingers extending toward the red crystal resting on the ground before him.

The instant his hand closed around the red crystal, the ground beneath his feet shifted entirely.

The dark sky, the battlefield, all of it vanished in a single breath.

What remained around him now was a grand hall, cast entirely in silver, dominated by seven raised seats arranged like thrones fit for kings.

Behind each one stood a masked figure, their faces sealed so completely that even their eyes seemed hidden from view. Their hair, though, was unmistakable: silver, every last one of them.

Lucian recognized the moment instantly, and understood exactly where he now stood.

Every figure in that hall wore the same robe, marked with the same crest, a lighthouse crowned by a burning star, the sigil of House Lysandra.

Each of the seven seated figures held something in their hands. Only one object stood out clearly among them: a crystal, deep red, gripped by one of the seven.

And among them, someone Lucian had already seen once before.

The same man who’d fought with such devastating power in the memory before this one sat among the seven now, though he looked weaker here, none of the towering strength that had defined him moments ago.

This time, Lucian could actually make out his face, though only his eyes stood out clearly against the rest of it.

Lucian didn’t register, not yet, how closely the shape and color of those eyes matched his own.

The man moved among the seven, presenting each of them with an heirloom of their own. What caught Lucian’s attention most was a white sword, handed to one of the seven in particular, a blade nearly identical to the one Lucian carried now.

Despite the clear authority radiating off all seven seated figures, every one of them bowed their heads toward the man, deference written into the gesture. He seemed to be leaving them with some final instruction, urging them to guard whatever he’d just entrusted to their care.

The moment he finished speaking, his body began to dissolve, fine particles of light bleeding from his fingertips first, spreading outward until they consumed the whole of him.

The seven seated figures dropped instantly to their knees, and everyone else present in that hall followed suit, heads bowed low in a final gesture of reverence.

It felt, unmistakably, like the last moments of someone’s life.

The light scattered across the entire hall as his body faded, drifting particles washing over everything, including Lucian himself.

He watched them swirl past, and the instant his focus settled on them, the whole room shifted around him entirely.

What replaced it looked nothing like the hall before.

Lucian tilted his face upward, taking in the new scene.

Rain fell across his face, cold and startlingly real, soaking through his hair and clothes as though the storm around him were genuinely happening.

He tried to move his feet and found them slow, dragging against thick mud underfoot. Around him stretched a forest drenched in rain, and ahead, rising through the downpour, stood a black castle.

As he pushed toward it, the sound of frantic footsteps closed in from beside him.

That mask. Isn’t that one of the seven from the throne room?

Sure enough, it was one of the same masked figures he’d seen seated moments before, the one who’d been holding the red crystal.

The masked figure sprinted past him, clearly running for his life, driving hard toward the castle ahead.

Then a black fracture tore open in the air above him, and the pressure radiating from it stopped the masked man cold in his tracks.

He didn’t reach for any Grimoire. Instead, he drew on the red crystal itself, threads of crimson light weaving out from it, forming something like a shield around him.

A moment later, something emerged from that fracture: a figure with four black wings, horned, unmistakably inhuman.

It tore into the masked man with brutal, unrestrained violence, and the gap in their strength showed instantly. The man never stood a chance.

He went down hard, his body torn open in several places, and still he refused to let go of the crystal, clutching it with everything he had left.

Blood poured from his wounds, pooling into the mud beneath him.

The winged creature gathered a mass of black dark mana in its palm, aiming it squarely at him.

"No matter how long it takes, our bloodline will reclaim this crystal!!"

The masked man’s voice cracked out with what strength remained in him, right before his body finally gave out completely.

Blood kept spilling from him, soaking deeper into the earth.

The winged creature pressed forward anyway, reaching for the red crystal still locked in the dying man’s grip.

What it never noticed was that it wasn’t the only living thing standing in that clearing. From where Lucian stood, another figure had already appeared behind it.

A woman, her hair a deep, dark red, long and flowing, walked toward them, her face hidden beneath a black hood.

Something about her presence carried a weight far more unsettling than the winged creature’s own, enough that the creature turned instinctively to look behind itself.

It never got the chance to see what was coming.

Its body was already being torn apart, run through by streams of the masked man’s own blood, weaponized and turned back against it.

That blood, it became clear, answered to the woman’s will alone.

She stepped past the creature’s ruined body without a glance, her eyes locked entirely on the red crystal still clutched in the dead man’s hand.

She drew on the blood pooled around them, using it to draw the crystal toward herself, until it settled into her open palm on its own.

The instant her fingers closed around it, the crystal flared bright, and dark mana surged in from every direction, gathering around her.

She drew it all in, absorbing it whole, the crystal itself seeming to answer her will without resistance, bending entirely to her control.

That command over blood. Isn’t that exactly what someone from the Crimson clan can do?

The thought had barely formed in Lucian’s mind before he realized, too late, that he’d lifted his head.

The woman was already standing directly in front of him.

She was looking straight at him.

Genuinely looking at him, her head tilting slightly to one side as she studied his face.

Then she smiled.

Lucian’s entire body locked in place under that gaze, unable to move an inch.

"You can see me?"

A sudden blaze of light tore out from Sonata, swallowing the entire scene whole, cutting off whatever came next.

The light carried him away, pulling him toward somewhere else entirely.