Chapter 47: The Last Lysandra

Light flared rapidly from the Kirana crystal fused to Lucian’s sword, flashing bright enough to force his eyes shut, cutting off every last trace of sight and sensation around him.

Then sand struck his cheek, carried on wind.

His hand rose to touch the spot, registering the grit of it against his skin.

When his eyes opened again, his gaze dropped instantly to a sweep of sand stretching endlessly around him.

The sensation felt identical to the first time he’d stepped through that yellow door.

Heat pressed down on him immediately, brutal enough that sweat had already broken across his skin within moments.

He scanned the horizon in every direction and found nothing but open desert, vast and empty.

Except, looking closer, a line of footprints cut through the sand ahead of him, someone’s trail, leading forward.

Curiosity pulled him toward it before he’d fully decided to move. He followed the tracks, his feet sinking with every step, refusing to let the effort slow him down.

Eventually he crested a dune, breathing hard, the trail of footprints still visible ahead of him.

When he lifted his gaze, a tower came into view, built in that same distinctive figure-eight shape.

This is the other side of Loupulan’s entrance.

Ahead of him spread the same city he’d already walked through once with Lumina, except this version of Loupulan looked nothing like the ruin he remembered.

It looked alive, thriving, crowded with people moving through its streets, no trace anywhere of the slum he’d once seen tucked against its walls.

Following the footprints further, they led him directly toward the city gate.

Beneath that gate stood a woman, silver-haired, and in her arms she held a small girl, white hair, young.

The woman seemed to be straightening the child’s clothes, brushing gently at her face, before pressing something into her hands: a yellow crystal.

The girl bowed her head as she accepted it.

The woman turned then, walking off to the side, away from both the girl and from Lucian.

The crystal she’d just handed over looked nearly identical to the one fused into Lucian’s own sword, except this one sat whole, unbroken, none of the damage his own carried.

Nothing about the silver-haired woman’s clothing marked her as part of House Lysandra, a plain, worn robe in faded cream, nothing close to noble dress.

But the color of her hair, the shape of her face, matched Lucian’s own closely enough that it stopped him cold.

He moved toward her without thinking, desperate to see her face clearly.

His own carelessness betrayed him. He slipped on the shifting dune and went down hard, sand filling his mouth.

He forced himself back up anyway, hands digging into the ground for leverage, pushing himself upright to chase after her.

Every muscle in his arms and legs strained as he ran, and he shouted for her to stop.

But this was only a memory.

She couldn’t hear him. Nothing he said would ever reach her.

He knew that. He kept calling out anyway.

Something reflexive tore loose from somewhere deep inside his chest, a word he hadn’t meant to say, the one word that felt like it belonged to whoever he’d been searching for his entire life.

"Wait, Mo—"

He never finished it. Something in him hesitated at the last syllable.

But.

The woman stopped walking.

As though she’d somehow heard exactly what he’d started to say.

Lucian’s whole body went rigid, his eyes locked on her back as she stood there, motionless.

He surged forward, desperate to close the last of the distance between them.

CRACK!

A fracture split open again, and the light pulsing from the Kirana crystal in his hand began to dim.

Panic tore through him. He was so close, close enough to finally see her face, and now his own body had begun dissolving into the fracture itself.

He fought against the pull with everything he had, sprinting toward her even as the ground beneath him gave way.

But the fractures kept spreading, wider, faster, swallowing more of the space around him with each passing second.

"No."

The crack behind him tore open completely, and it dragged the whole of him backward into it.

"Wait!!"

His body was already being pulled under, but through the haze of it, he caught one last, fading glimpse: the woman, turning slightly to look back at him.

Her lips moved, shaping words meant only for him.

’Believe in what lives inside you.’

The words struck something deep in him, settling in like they’d always belonged there.

He fought the pull with everything he had left, but it was already too late, his body fully swallowed, nothing left in front of him but light.

White light poured into him.

It burned. His eyes screamed with it, and he slammed his eyelids shut on instinct, trying to block it out entirely.

He cried out, the pain of it feeling exactly like fire.

A hand seized the front of his shirt and hauled him hard.

His body tore free of the fracture, thrown clear, landing across a stretch of wildflowers at the edge of a blue lake.

Water sprayed across his face.

♪ Are you okay? ♪

Alayna’s voice reached him from somewhere close by.

His eyes wouldn’t open, though. Something had sealed them shut entirely.

He strained against it, fighting to force them open, but they held firm, locked.

’You’d be better off not forcing your eyes open right now. You’re not inside a hollow space at the moment. Force it open here the curse will slowly consume your body and shorten your lifespan, and your curse will only spread faster once you’re back out in the real world.’

The Omen had brought up his curse again, speaking of it like it genuinely understood what was happening to him.

"Do you know something about me and my family?"

Lucian pushed himself upright, forcing his way through the fog still clouding his thoughts, sitting up against the covered ground beneath him.

The Omen couldn’t answer him fully, though. It shook its head instead, something like genuine puzzlement crossing its expression as it studied him.

’Not everything. I only know a little about the curse running through you, because it looks nearly identical to Miyu’s own, and hers traces back to House Faeren.’

Miyu comes from House Faeren?

"Wait. You mean the House Faeren from here on the continent of Arta? The family that was wiped out in the war against the Crimson clan?"

The Omen nodded, confirming Lucian’s guess.

According to what it explained next, House Faeren hadn’t actually been wiped out entirely, a handful of survivors had made it through.

But the ones who lived were marked by the Nightkeeper himself, cursed with a strange, terrible power in the process.

The Nightkeeper showed no mercy to anyone who’d stood against him. Every bloodline that had opposed him and lost was cursed to bear children carrying dark mana from birth, on and on, generation after generation.

House Faeren had turned to the Order of Lumielle first, begging for protection. The Order refused them outright, and worse, joined the hunt against them, branding them demon-blooded and declaring their extermination a righteous cause.

Left with nothing, they’d fled across the sea to the continent of Eosia, settling in the Red Lands. Eventually, only one survivor remained: Miyu, found wandering alone in the desert as an infant, taken in by two Cardinals of Selena.

Years later, as a teenager, Miyu had wandered too far while playing and gotten lost in that same desert. There, she’d found a woman with silver hair.

That woman hadn’t just saved her. She’d given Miyu the Kirana crystal itself, telling her it would let her live something close to a normal life, safe from the people who’d otherwise hunt her down, as long as she kept the crystal with her always.

But the silver-haired woman had made her promise something in return: to guard that crystal until a descendant of House Lysandra finally succeeded in reuniting every fragment of the Genesis crystal, the only thing capable of lifting House Lysandra’s curse for good.

"I still don’t understand what this curse actually is, the one running through me and my family."

Piecing it together, Lucian finally understood why he’d seen that strange black light during his own Awakening. He’d been cursed from the start.

But something, some higher power, had clearly been shielding him from anyone realizing what he actually was. If word ever got out, there was nothing stopping his fate from mirroring Miyu’s exactly, hunted by everyone, hunted by the Order of Lumielle itself.

Who had been protecting him, though? Was it the strange text he’d seen since his Awakening? Or had some goddess of Lumielle simply taken pity on him?

Underneath all of it sat the more basic question gnawing at him.

"Do you know why my family was cursed in the first place? What kind of curse is this, exactly?"

The Omen’s hand rose, gesturing toward the white sword still gripped in Lucian’s fist.

’The answer is simple: you can use Sonata at all. No one can wield that blade except its rightful owner, and members of House Lysandra. You should already know who that owner really is, the same man even the gods and the demonic gods themselves have been hunting.’

Lucian turned the chain of events over in his mind. It made sense now, that man never would have handed down so much of his own legacy to House Lysandra if none of them could have actually used any of it.

But it clearly went deeper than just the Genesis crystal fragments. This sword he carried held history running far beneath the surface of anything he’d understood until now.

It made perfect sense that his family had been dragged into this, marked as cursed by gods and demons alike, purely for being capable of wielding it at all.

’As for the curse itself, you should already have your answer. Have you ever met another descendant of House Lysandra besides yourself, Lucian? Because you’re the last one left in your entire bloodline.’

Lucian searched his memory and came up empty. He’d never known any other Lysandra, any other family beyond House Sarnel, the only one he’d ever called his own.

Even his memories of his own mother felt like they were slipping away from him the longer he tried to hold onto them.

’But she told me once. The curse on House Lysandra was actually meant to protect them. Without it, House Lysandra would have grown far beyond any limit that should exist.’

Beyond any limit, just because we could use something no one else could? What history does my family actually carry? Is that why I was born blind, why my Mana Core has always struggled to grow, like something’s been deliberately holding my own strength in check this whole time?

Even with the Omen confirming he was cursed, something, some goddess, still seemed to be standing on his side, on his family’s side, if what he’d glimpsed in that strange text during his Awakening, that fragment of conversation between gods, meant anything at all.

"But who is he, really? That man the gods and demon gods were hunting?"