Chapter 88: Not a Blessing

The light broke over them like a sun dropped into the middle of the hall, close enough to touch, close enough that clothing and skin alone weren’t nearly enough to stand against it. Some of the nobles threw their own mana up like a shield, anything to blunt what was pouring down on them.

Cries rose from every direction, people unable to hold out against it any longer, collapsing where they stood one after another until the floor was littered with the fallen.

The light itself felt wrong in a way none of them could name. It carried none of the softness anyone recognized from an ordinary Light element, nothing gentle about it at all.

And yet it wasn’t truly hurting anyone.

It was hiding something. Something that was never meant to be seen by most of the people in that room.

Because only one figure stood through all of it, upright, unbent, facing the glowing Grimoire without flinching.

It wasn’t only the Grimoire casting that light.

Behind the black cloth still bound over his eyes, a yellow glow had begun bleeding through, tracing strange, deliberate patterns across the dark, reaching out toward the Grimoire as though something on both ends recognized the other.

The book’s pages tore open on their own, one after another, faster than any hand could have turned them, as though it meant to lay its entire contents bare for Lucian alone.

Each page that flipped sent a violent gust tearing through the hall, hard enough to feel like a disaster unfolding in real time. Tables toppled. Chairs skidded across the marble. Carpets rippled and tore loose from the floor.

Whoever in that room still had the strength to stay conscious fought to hold their ground against the light and the wind both, wondering, in whatever corner of their mind they had left for wondering, exactly what Rhaiven had just handed to a disowned, half-blind boy.

In the middle of that chaos, Lucian strained to see clearly into whatever the Grimoire was showing him.

Unlike everyone else around him, neither the light nor the wind touched him at all. If anything, the wind seemed to be doing the opposite, pulling him closer, step by step, toward the book hanging in the air before him.

Then, all at once, the pages stopped turning, settling open on a single page inked entirely in gold.

"This isn’t a Grimoire."

He felt nothing flow into him, no surge of mana, none of the familiar current that should have answered a true Grimoire’s touch.

What he was looking at, the thing every soul in this hall believed was a Grimoire, was something else entirely.

A Codex.

A record, written by someone’s own hand, filling page after page of brown parchment bound inside a borrowed shell.

Confusion settled over his face. He had never seen anything like it, a private record hidden inside the body of a Grimoire, and not just any Grimoire, but one everyone believed to be a true Light Grimoire.

A deep, uneasy suspicion took root in him, buried somewhere beneath a light no one else in this hall could even see.

"This is a Codex, by the structure of it. But whose? Why is it in Rhaiven’s hands? And why did its seal open in mine?"

The light had never been illumination at all. It had been a seal. And Lucian, as the one who’d broken it, was the only person in that hall left untouched by its effects, the only one who could see the Codex for what it truly was.

Driven by something he couldn’t quite name, he reached out and touched the writing itself, each letter rendered in ink that shimmered faintly gold, woven through with mana.

What he found there stole the breath from his chest, and he couldn’t look away from it, not for a single second.

The words stretched on, far longer than he expected, meant for his eyes alone.

{This isn’t a Grimoire that can give you a blessing. I’m sorry, if that’s what you were hoping to find here.

I don’t have anything precious like that left in me to give anyone.

I was never gifted the way most people are. I carry a White Awakening, and where I come from, that isn’t an honor. It’s a mark of shame, a stolen inheritance from a god that no one asked me to bear. There was hardly anyone who could teach me how to use it.

But I once heard that on another continent, people born with a White Awakening are treasured. They say there’s even a whole order built around them, because they’re believed to be a blessing chosen directly by a god.

Hearing that made me so happy I could have cried.

That place sounded like a dream I wasn’t allowed to have.

I wanted to go there more than I have ever wanted anything.

But it was too far.

Far beyond anything these small feet of mine could ever carry me.

All I could do, in the end, was discover that Sacred Mana made building a Relic simple in a way nothing else ever had.

Every element has its own current, its own shape, and getting them to join together inside a single Relic is normally the hardest part of the whole craft. Sacred Mana runs through all of them without resistance.

It doesn’t fight the other currents, it threads between them, binding what should never connect on its own into a single, working whole. Once I understood that, building anything at all felt almost effortless.

I learned how from a woman with silver hair. She taught me how to craft, and how to use Sacred Mana properly, something she clearly understood better than anyone I’d ever met.

She was kind to me, even though we’d only just met. She taught me more than anyone ever had.

And then, one day, I never saw her again.

My brother was the only one who ever stayed close to me, back when everyone else kept their distance, afraid of what I might do with Sacred Mana running through my hands.

Then one day, a man in a green cloak came looking for someone in our settlement, convinced whoever he wanted was hiding among us.

He searched every corner of our home and found nothing. That alone was enough to send him into a fury, and he called every one of us traitors, every single person in our tribe.

Our chief knew exactly who that man was looking for. It was the same woman I’d met before. But he swore he’d never say her name, and told the green-cloaked man, to his face, that he was the true traitor to humanity instead.

The man’s rage broke loose after that. He tore our whole tribe apart. Even our strongest warriors couldn’t stand against him. He could open a hole clean through a person with nothing more than a single finger, and not one of them could land so much as a single blow on him in return.

Until there was no one left but us.

In that last moment, he looked at the two of us, my brother and me.

At me, specifically. My brother threw himself in front of me anyway, and the force of being struck aside for it nearly killed him.

We thought that was the end. We were ready for it to be the end.

Instead, the man offered us something. He realized we were brother and sister, and he said he saw something worth keeping in my brother.

If we helped him, he said, we wouldn’t just be spared. We’d be given the chance to become something stronger than we’d ever been.

My brother said yes before he understood what that promise would actually cost either of us.

He took us to a place somewhere in the region of Greenland.

There was a village there, and it looked prosperous, almost peaceful, the day we arrived.

At first, the green-cloaked man treated us well enough. Nothing strange ever happened to me there. My brother, though, grew busier and busier with every week we stayed, until I barely saw him at all.

Then, one day, my body simply stopped working the way it should. I grew weak, and it never passed.

The man came to see me himself and told me I was suffering from Sacred Mana left uncontrolled too long.

My brother, terrified for me, begged him for any way to cure it. The man said there were two ways. I never learned what either of them actually were. They spoke of it only in private, always where I couldn’t hear.

Months passed, and the village that had once looked so prosperous began to empty out, as far as I could tell through my window.

I grew suspicious. Ever since that quiet settled over the place, I’d started hearing strange sounds, coming from somewhere beneath our own home.

One day I found a door I’d never noticed before, rotted through at the hinges, and when I looked past it, I saw bodies. So many of them, already gone blue. I couldn’t hold back the sound that tore out of me.

The man was behind me before I’d even finished making it, dragging me into another room, reaching into my body with his own power, trying to bend it to his will.

He never realized the Sacred Mana already living inside me was holding my own mind together against him.

But he was still far too strong for me to fight. He didn’t want me dead. He wanted me as leverage, something to hold over my brother.

He left half my body paralyzed, and stole my voice entirely. My sight went dark soon after. All I had left was my hearing, and only barely, because I’d poured every drop of Sacred Mana I had left into keeping that one sense alive.

He believed every part of me had gone silent. He never knew I could still hear every word spoken near me.

My brother, seeing what had become of me, agreed to anything that man asked after that. He did terrible things, things I still can’t fully write down, as though his own memory of who he used to be had been carved out and replaced with someone else’s. All to find something that might save me.

Whatever good was left in him, I watched it change into something else entirely.

Then, once, we were moved to a city, somewhere I never learned the name of. My brother brought me into a room where the green-cloaked man sat speaking with someone else, discussing a yellow crystal, and a silver-haired woman last seen somewhere in the Redland region.

My brother was sent there once, to search for her. He came back having found nothing of her at all, only a book they believed to be a Light Grimoire, which they handed to me afterward, since they judged it worthless.

I shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all by then, my sight had already been taken from me.

But somehow, without my eyes, I saw it clearly anyway, something buried inside its pages that could only be a map, marking out certain places, as plainly as if I’d traced it with my own fingers

Days later, I overheard them again. The green-cloaked man said they should have found a map during that search and hadn’t, and had come away instead with nothing but the scars of a brutal attack.

That was when I understood. The map they were looking for had already been found. It was here, inside this very Codex, all along.

Since then, I’ve kept the light element inside this Codex suppressed, folding its seal back into something ordinary, so that only someone truly meant to find it, someone who isn’t like the people who hold it now, would ever be able to open it.

I hope whoever is reading this is that person.

I can’t write much more. I think my time may run out before my hand can move again. But if you’re reading this, please, find a way to tell my brother that this letter was written in my last hours.

I hope, more than anything, that my brother Rhaiven can finally let himself believe he doesn’t have to carry this weight for me anymore.

He’s free now. He doesn’t have to remember any of it, if he doesn’t want to.}

The writing ended there, with no way to know what had truly become of the woman who’d written it. But one thing was certain beyond any doubt.

Every piece of that life, every scrap of what she’d lived through, would matter to Lucian now.

And the map hidden inside it had already become something more. Without Lucian even realizing it, it had slipped free of the Codex entirely and settled into Sonata itself, as though the blade had simply claimed it as its own.

The light vanished all at once.

The Codex closed in his hands, its cover no longer white, but a plain, worn brown.

Lucian caught it against his chest, careful, still only half believing what he’d just read. Around him, most of the hall lay collapsed across the floor, save for a handful of the strongest, those who’d managed to stay upright through all of it.

Rhaiven was one of them, and his eyes had locked onto Lucian with a terrible, focused intensity the instant he saw the Codex answer to him.

His hand shot forward, closing hard around Lucian’s throat.