Chapter 56: Darkness 2

Chapter 56: Chapter 56: Darkness 2

Liora sat on the edge of her bed, looking at the console, her expression softening, then toward the door.

Whenever he was in the room, the darkness inside her pulled back.

Yesterday had been especially good. He wasn’t great at the game: average, maybe slightly above, but he listened. Move left, he moved left. Dodge, he dodged. Boss incoming, he actually reacted instead of freezing up.

She liked that, most of her life had been spent listening to others. Having someone actually listen to her felt strange, and good.

"Today," she said to herself, smiling, already having picked the game, "we’ll play this."

The door clicked, and she perked up instantly, eyes brightening.

"Felix—" She turned toward it and froze.

Something was off. He came in without the usual smile, expression serious, focus sharp, a faint edge in his voice.

"Good morning, Liora."

Her smile slipped. "Good morning." Her eyes went to his hands. No console. Her brow furrowed. "What happened? Where’s your console?"

He closed the door behind him instead of answering, and her nerves spiked.

"Liora." She looked at him. "We need to talk."

Her heart skipped. "About what?"

He sat. She stayed standing, fingers twisting into the hem of her shirt. "What happened?"

"I found out about your affinity."

Dead silence. She didn’t breathe for a second. "My... affinity?"

"Yes."

She looked away. "They said I don’t have one."

"They were wrong."

Her fingers trembled. "Wrong?"

"There was a reason nobody could identify it." He held her gaze. "It’s Darkness."

The word seemed to hang in the air between them.

"Darkness?" She laughed, thin and nervous.

"No. That’s not, they tested me. Many times. They said there was no elemental signature at all."

"There wasn’t one they could detect. That’s different."

"Then how do *you* know?"

He took a slow breath, and his mind went back to the northern forest: the dark elf, the crimson eyes, the black mana that disrupted every spell it touched, the way it had bent lesser monsters to its will without a word.

Then the moment his own healing mana had brushed against that same corrupted trace, still lingering inside the mind healer who’d tried to reach Liora’s thoughts.

"I’ve seen this affinity before," he said. "Inside a monster."

Her face twisted in confusion. "A monster?"

"A dark elf. An S-rank boss."

Something in her chest went cold, and she lowered her head slowly.

"So I have the same power as that thing," she said, voice already starting to shake.

"No—"

"*It’s a monster’s power, Felix.*" Her voice cracked as it rose, and her hands came up in front of her, staring at them like she could see straight through skin to whatever was underneath.

Her breath went ragged. "That’s... that’s what I did. That’s exactly what happened that night."

Felix went still, watching the color drain out of her face.

"I killed them with *this*," she said, barely above a whisper. "My team. My friends. I killed *Elise* with this, she protected me my entire life and I—" Her voice broke apart entirely.

"I used this thing on her. On all of them. And it’s not even, it’s not even a *human* power. It belongs to whatever tore my parents apart in that house. It belongs to things like *that dark elf.*"

She pressed both hands over her face like she could physically stop herself from looking at them. "I’m not just someone who lost control. I’m carrying the same thing that killed my parents. The same thing I used to kill everyone who ever loved me." Her shoulders shook. "I don’t want this. I don’t want *any* of this inside me."

Felix let her get all of it out before he spoke, keeping his voice low and steady. "Liora. Look at me."

She didn’t, not at first, but eventually her hands came down enough for her eyes to find his.

"An affinity isn’t a verdict," he said. "It doesn’t decide who you are before you’ve had a chance to. The dark elf used Darkness because that’s what it is: a monster, built around killing. You’re not that. You’re a person who awakened with something nobody had ever seen before, with zero guidance, zero training, and it broke loose one time under conditions that would have broken almost anyone." He held her gaze.

"That’s not the same thing as being the thing that hurt you."

"How would you even know that," she said, thin and raw.

"Because you’re the only human being on record who’s ever had this affinity." He let that sit a second. "Not one of many. The only one. Which means there’s no rulebook anywhere that says what a human carrying Darkness is supposed to become. Nobody’s written that story yet." His voice softened further.

"You get to be the one who writes it."

Liora stared at him, breathing unsteady, saying nothing for a long moment.

"It’s been part of you your whole life," he went on, gentler now. "Long before that night. It didn’t turn you into a killer, it responded to something that would have broken anyone, with no training and no warning, and it broke wrong. That’s a tragedy. It’s not a verdict on what you are."

"I don’t know how to believe that," she whispered.

"You don’t have to believe it today." He kept his voice even. "I’m not asking you to feel fine about this in the next five minutes. I’m asking you to let me help you understand it, so it stops being a black box you’re scared of every second you’re alone in this cell."

She looked down.

"I don’t want to hurt anyone again," she said.

"Then we make sure you don’t. That starts with understanding what you actually are instead of guessing at the worst version of it." He paused. "I’m not leaving you alone with this."

For a long moment she just sat with that, some of the tension bleeding slowly out of her shoulders without fully disappearing. "Is it dangerous?" she finally asked.

"Potentially. So is every affinity with real power behind it. What matters is control, not the label on it."

"Can... you help me get that?"

"That’s why I’m here."

She nodded slowly, not steady yet, but no longer shaking either. Felix stood.

"We’re not doing anything with it today," he said.

"Today was just so you’d hear it from me instead of finding out some other way. We’ll go slow. No pressure, no timeline."

"Okay," she said, quiet.

He walked to the door, then stopped with his hand on it and looked back.

"Liora." She lifted her eyes to him. "This doesn’t change what I think of you. Not even a little."

She didn’t answer that, but something in her face loosened slightly at the words.

The door closed behind him, and she sat there a long while without moving. Eventually she looked down at her own hands and tried, almost without meaning to, to feel for it, whatever it was, still living somewhere inside her.

The jammers locked around her wrists gave back nothing at all, no flicker, no response, the suppression as absolute as it always was.

She stared at her own empty palms for a long time anyway.

"So that’s you," she said, very quietly, to something she couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, but she didn’t flinch away from the thought either, and for the moment, that was as far as she could go.