#cerin
Cerin Holt's joints ached like rusted hinges.
He hadn't eaten in a day, hadn't slept in three. The body could be ignored. It was the chains that did real damage they were made from dragon's breath.
The first time he had seen it being made was at the College of Sovereigns during the first uprising. They had used it to bind awakened children to slabs of obsidian then they were marked with smoking metal.
He tried to shake away the children's scream.
Back then, he had thought it was punishment for monsters.
Those chains he had thought were for monsters were now coiled around his wrists.
No book or scroll would have explained the pain an awakened feels when they are cut of from the wildworld
He limped forward, boots dragging across velvet he could not feel. The guard yanked the chain and made his knees buckle so much so that he could feel the blood welling up in his tounge.
He coughed once, then chuckled dryly.
"Do you bind all your scholars in chains?" Cerin rasped. "Or just the ones who built your floating country?"
There was no reply. Just a slow tug that arched his spine like a bow.
"Ah. The silent treatment. My favorite form of censorship."
They reached the massive golden door in moments but Cerin's eyes had never left the spear of the man by his side. It was a weird choice for a weapon: blackwood shaft and a curved edge that was soaked in bloodwine.
"Why the weapon?" Cerin asked. "Afraid I'll sneeze a fireball through my beard?"
The guard smirked. Smoke curled from the spear's tip.
" Feel free to talk as you please, dead men don't have that liberty. But you know I thought you would be different seeing how the Dominion reveres you as a God. "
He lowered the spear until it hovered near Cerin's eye
Cerin studied the man's face. No cruelty. Just recognition. The kind born from textbooks and war briefings.
"I'm glad I'll be remembered," Cerin muttered.
The golden doors creaked open like groaning gods. Slabs thick as walls. And beyond them the ten were seated waiting.
The room stretched like a graveyard for kings and you could barely make out the figure inside with all the mist inside. The ceiling vanished into a mist that never cleared. The floor was polished black stone, etched with two koi—one white, one black—forever circling.
One had a crack through its eye with a smear of dried blood curved along the mosaic's tail, half-scrubbed, like someone had tried to clean it... then stopped caring.
As soon as the wift found it way to cerin's nose he was on the floor; trembling.
Don't scream. Don't crawl. Don't let them smell fear.
He gathered his words then spoke. "I want to live."
A laugh, thin and shaped like a knife, broke the silence.
Lord Daryon. Sword on his hip. Smile like perfume rotting on spoiled fruit.
"Three months in isolation and the heretic finds religion," Daryon said. "Enlightening."
A second voice. Crisp. Female. Flint.
Lady Afolake.
"I don't want you dead, Cerin. You act like we're asking for the balls of a dragon," she snapped. "Just tell us how to intercept the spelltech you built. That's it."
Cerin rose to one knee then the other not minding the blood dripping from his trembling knees.
"You've starved me. Tortured me. As if my will is so weak as to give an Igonrant council a weapon your inflated egos won't allow you to hold in silence!
Afolake tilted her head.
"Seriously Cerin. Drop this facade you are putting it on," she moves her hands as if trying to grab his soul. You're at death's door. The Dominion won't remember your sacrifice—they'll rewrite it. Temidayo is a throne-warmer with a crown. And you're a footnote waiting to be misquoted."
He glanced left. A young clerk—barely a teenager—stood trembling.
Ink stains. Paper cuts. Eyes wide.
One of mine?
"If our children don't survive this system," Cerin growled, "what exactly are you building?"
Then a third voice—slow, old, heavy—cut through.
High Magister Rulen, eldest of the Ten, skin like old parchment, stroked his beard as he spoke.
"An Aurellian, building weapons for the Dominion. Where does your loyalty lie, exactly, young one?"
The chains his wrist were getting hotter as the old mans ever so often cresendoded.
But it couldn't sway him.
Anaye—thirteen, burning alive after a failed test. Her scream. Her eyes. Her ash.
"My loyalty lies where truth lives. I regret not going to the Dominion sooner. And might I remind you that Aurellia floats because of me! This country is my sweat. My blood!"
He stood straighter, voice breaking open.
"You say it like a cold war isn't brewing in the coner. To turn more children into orphans. I won't be part of that."
Cerin was still speaking when the air split.
His words hung mid-breath.
One heartbeat.
Then a blur.
A figure stepped — no, flashed — through space, collapsing the distance between them like it was never there.
The strike came sideways — not a slap, not quite a blow — just a sharp, surgical chop to the side of Cerin's neck.
Sound vanished.
Cerin staggered back, eyes wide, voice gone. The strength in his limbs fled all at once, like someone had pulled the thread holding him upright. His knees dipped, breath rasped.
The attacker stood close enough for Cerin to see the faint distortion around their outline — heat, or power, or something stranger.
"Enough talk," they said, voice flat, almost bored.
"You will speak of the Ten with only respect."
He looked at the red ribbon on your gavel then turned, locking eyes with Afolake.
" let's not pretend this is justice."
"You never planned to let me leave."
"I will die before I give it to you."
Rulen nodded.
"Then you'll be executed. Publicly. Tomorrow."
Cerin smiled—bloody, cracked.
He let the chains drag him from the chamber like a man already halfway gone.
The prison floor welcomed him like stone always does.
No softness. No grace. Just impact and iron.
The chains yanked him down. Arms bowed. Back bent. Like a statue broken mid-prayer.
His blood was everywhere. Thick. Smelling of salt and fire.
Then—a voice.
"You shouldn't make them wait."
A boy stood just outside the bars. Sixteen, maybe. Shoes too clean.
Cerin looked up. The boy flinched.
"They told me to check your vitals. I—I'm just…"
"An intern?" Cerin croaked. "Did they run out of executioners?"
"No, sir. I—I study systems theory.I really a fan of papers on mana. I have study everyone the Dominion has released I was–"
"What's your name?"
"Ebuka."
"Don't remember it."
He coughed blood into his sleeve. Watched it soak.
"Sir… you could tell them. Just say it. They'll stop."
Cerin stared at him. Not with cruelty. Not with warmth.
"I had a student that looked just like you. He was a brillant mind and much like me skipped some ethics. He gave rebels a tool I made that melted half a city grid."
Ebuka froze.
"He's dead now. I buried him."
The boy stepped back. then ran and only then did she appear. The shadow. The candle. The ghost in clean boots.
"Why don't you want to save your life," came the voice.
He didn't flinch.
She stepped forward. Blonde. Pale. Helmet off. Her favorite disguise.
"You don't me to tell you how quickly geniuses die in the Dominion," she said. "
"They are geniuses like me," Cerin rasped. "What do you think the Dominion will do when they hear that the youngest of the ten countries killed one of the brightest minds the new world has ever seen."
"The Dominion?" Afolake laughed will they find out should be the world you have spoke"
She just enough into the candle light enough for anyone with a good sight to see it folding.
"You didn't create the eleven mana sides," she said. "You merely found them. Stop thinking yourself a God."
Cerin smiled " Well I am"
She leaned in.
"When I find your family... I'll make sure they remember what you gave your life for."
Her face dissolved into light—and vanished.
The rain had stopped an hour ago, but no start had shone yet even the scaffold was still wet.
He hadn't seen sunlight since he was brought to the box, It was the most secure place in Aureilla for a reason even time moved different inside it but if he had to guess: April 3rd, 2083.
The crowd below stood silent. No chants. No cries. Just waiting some sure of the person their country was about to kill.
---
He climbed slowly, led by guards who said nothing. Their silver armor gleamed. No one wanted blood on the Dominion's finest.
That job belonged to the masked man beside the block. Terion.
Cerin's chains clinked—soft, metallic, thin as breath.
At the top, he looked out.
He hadn't meant to. But he saw her.
Rinya.
Blue shawl. Edges soaked. Arms wrapped around herself like a cage. They had talked about this so many times in letters so he wasn't as worried about her as much as his boy that he hadn't seen in years
Aiden.
Sixteen. Face red. Hands clenched.
He tried to memorize the boy—the slope of his shoulders, the careless way he hummed to himself. His hair, dark and heavy, already fell into his eyes no matter how often his mother trimmed it, a silken curtain that seemed to grow just to defy the sun. He tried to store it all somewhere beyond the reach of death.
Cerin's breath hitched. For a moment, the crowd blurred, and he saw them at the breakfast table—Aiden asking about combustion runes, Rinya pretending not to worry about the revolution three cities over. Ordinary. Fragile. Lost.
Now they looked like survivors. And he felt like a ghost.
Don't look too long.
He glanced away.
Above them, the Council watched from their balcony of glass and gold.
This news wouldn't reach the imperial seat for years. Aurellia sealed every truth in it's country and so much more for when he was being killed in it capital.
Maybe ten years and the world would know.
Maybe never.
He looked once more.
Aiden's mouth opened. A sound formed—but Rinya covered it with her hand.
She didn't block his eyes.
She let him look.
Let him learn.
The priest stepped forward. Pale. Thin. Holding a red-bound book—the Lex Sancta Tei, older than any throne. Its edges were blackened from years of smoke, blood, and lies passed off as liturgy. Across his robe shimmered the image of Tharoz, one of the supreme deities that ruled over emotions —wings curled in gold thread, eyes burning like molten glass.
Not the religion of Temidayo. Not the crown. This man answered to an older origin.
"Do you seek absolution before the sword finds you?"
Cerin turned just enough for the priest to hear.
"I've made peace. With the gods. With the dead. Not with you."
The priest hesitated, glanced at the koi cracked beneath the scaffold. It hadn't been cleaned either. Nothing was ever really cleaned in Aurellia—only covered in law, and perfume, and fog.
Good.
The man in the max moved forward. The were two people with mask on the platform but to the far end. He looked at the girl with elf made sure of something then his eyes was back to the man .
At his sides two swords, one silver, one dull iron—but he didn't reach for them.
Instead, he drew the third from across his back. It hummed as it cleared its sheath—blue, pulsing.
He counted trying to feel how much his mana has grown. Then he forced his head up even as blood entered his eye and make him squiint.
So they sent you to kill me, Musashi.
He smiled.
The man's hand paused. "Any last words?"
Cerin didn't look at the Council.
Didn't look at Aiden.
Didn't blink.
"It'll make him the strongest."
Not for the crowd.
Not for the Ten.
For the boy in the shadow of a blue shawl.
The sword fell.
The silence shattered.
No gasp.
No cry.
Just a hiss—like water dropped on flame—
Then a soft, final thud.
Aiden didn't cry.
Rinya held Aiden . He wasn't crying, just trembling in place.
She never covered his eyes.
He would remember even if he didn't yet understand.
Far above, the youngest scribe of the Ten recorded the death without comment.
Cerin Holt – Architect of the World.
The Council had long dispersed. The corpse was gone.
But the ink on the record still bled when the scribe lifted his pen from the parchment.
He glanced toward the wall. She had let her presence be known.
A woman stood in the shadows. Cloaked. Unmoving. Her eyes calm as still water. She hadn't spoken a word, but he knew she had been watching him for some time.
"If I may speak, my lady…" the scribe said, though the air did not demand a reply. "I understand summoning an Imperial Hero to kill him. I understand wanting a clean end."
He set the pen down beside the ledger.
"But now that he's dead… how does the Council intend to clean their hands? Aurellia is the only province among the Nine that's been sanctioned fifteen times in six months."
He hesitated.
"Can an Imperial Hero… be killed?"
A sound from deeper in the shadows. Footsteps—measured. Intentional. Not hers.
The scribe flinched.
The man who emerged did not.
Tall, draped in a black coat. No weapons. No crest. But dangerous in the way silence can be.
His voice, when it came, was silk drawn across a blade.
"To Lady Afolake," he said, finishing the scribe's question. "Can an Imperial Hero be killed?"
He smiled—without warmth.
"Of course. By another one."
His eyes never touched the scribe. Only the woman.
"And I know the right one, my lady. That is… if you'd be so kind as to send me out."
A long pause.
Then finally, her voice—cool, even.
"You know that's out of the question," she said. "`If you go I know on my father skull that I will need to put my mind to things that I have not considered in years.."
Ajo-Ka bowed his head once.
Lady Afolake turned slightly. Just enough to be seen. "That student that you trained send her"
Ajo- Ka didn't speak but stepped forward then inclined his head again.
One gloved hand rested lightly on an object at his waist.
"As you wish."