To break the cycle.
The words remained in the air like a philosophical challenge made manifest, their weight pressing against the contained reality of the private room.
Achilles looked up at the ceiling.
The surface above showed not plaster or metal but a view into the void between stars, where light itself seemed uncertain about whether to exist.
He was quiet for a long moment, his purple-gold eyes reflecting depths that had nothing to do with their physical properties.
When he finally spoke, his voice carried the quality of someone reaching back through time to grasp a memory that had shaped everything that came after.
"When I was young," he began, the words emerging with deliberate pace, "growing up in a little Colony called Neon, before I knew anything about lineages or cosmic inheritance or the weight that blood can carry…there was a bully."
