The season turned without ceremony.
The storms that roamed Khthonia's horizon receded to dull embers, leaving the manor washed in a sterile light.
Iblis had come to regard the passing of time as mere maintenance of pattern; years arranged themselves into identical corridors.
He was sixteen when his father brought her—
a Nonci girl with wrists too thin for the cuffs that held them, her eyes pale from hunger and light.
No one told him her name.
He would later record it himself: Subject N.
Kaelith's tone was clipped.
"She will attend to your studies. Treat her as an instrument."
Then he left, the door closing with the precision of ritual.
Iblis regarded the girl for a moment, calculating the distance between curiosity and contamination.
Her presence would disturb the experiment—Lyria's conditioning required a closed system.
And yet, disruption had its uses.
"Stand there," he said.
She obeyed.
He noted the tremor in her breath, the faint dissonance of fear.
A new stimulus, then. Something unquantified.
---
Lyria
From the first moment, Lyria disliked the girl.
Not for cruelty, but for displacement.
Her brother's attention had always belonged to her, his gaze the axis of her small, ordered world.
Now, a stranger occupied its center.
The Nonci girl's silence unsettled her: she never cried, never spoke unless instructed, as though she lived in permanent apology.
One afternoon, Lyria found her scrubbing the marble floor outside the library.
Blood rimmed the girl's knuckles.
When Lyria knelt to help, the girl flinched as if struck.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to stain it."
Her voice was hoarse, like something unused for years.
Lyria stared at her, bewildered, no one in the manor apologized.
Later, when she told Iblis, he only said, "Guilt is a primitive stabilizer. Observe it, but don't engage."
He didn't notice how softly she replied, "Yes, brother."
---
Iblis
The disturbance deepened.
He observed Subject N at work: her obedience lacked calculation. It was not submission born of fear but of absence, a hollow compliance, as though she had forgotten the concept of self.
He tested it.
Minor provocations, controlled deprivation, verbal command.
Each yielded the same response: compliance without question.
When he asked her what she wanted, she seemed confused by the word.
"To serve," she said.
He almost smiled.
In his notes:
- Perfect baseline subject. Minimal volatility.
Potential vector for testing emotional transference on Subject L.
So began the next iteration.
---
Lyria's Unease
Lyria's days filled with invisible noise.
The girl's presence stretched across every silence, a thread pulling taut between curiosity and jealousy.
She watched Iblis address the Nonci girl with an attention she recognized too well—the same stillness he used when he studied her.
But there was something different now, a kind of hesitation before speech, as though he were trying to locate a word buried beneath the rational.
Once, she entered the study unannounced and found the girl asleep by the window, Iblis watching her.
He did not move.
The expression on his face frightened Lyria, not because it was cruel, but because it was empty.
That night she dreamed of glass breaking in endless corridors.
---
The Nonci Girl
Her world had always been labor and silence.
She remembered a field once—ashen, full of light.
Then fire, chains, a name shouted and lost.
In House Veyrahl, she learned the geometry of service: each task a fraction of absolution.
The young master's gaze was unbearable, not for its severity but for its indifference.
He saw through her like clear water.
Yet, he spoke gently at times.
He asked questions—impossible questions.
"What do you think of sorrow?"
She had answered, "It's a habit."
He had written something down afterward.
For days she wondered if that made her real.
---
Some days later.
It began with an accident.
Lyria fell ill, a fever that turned her pale and listless.
The manor physicians whispered of Aether imbalance, the side effect of her proximity to her brother's aura.
Iblis ordered the Nonci girl to attend her.
For three nights, the girl stayed at Lyria's bedside, bathing her forehead, whispering songs in a forgotten tongue.
Lyria's fever broke.
When Iblis entered the room, he saw them together:
Lyria asleep, her head in the girl's lap; the Nonci girl looking at him not with fear but quiet defiance.
A soft, living warmth he could neither quantify nor extinguish.
Something shifted, an error in the experiment.
That night, he dreamed for the first time since infancy:
a corridor of mirrors, all reflecting faces that were his.
In every one, he was smiling.
---
Kaelith noticed the change immediately.
"Attachment?" he asked, one brow lifting.
Iblis said nothing.
His father's eyes narrowed. "Then you've failed to learn."
And with that, the experiment was taken from him.
He returned home the next evening to silence and the faint scent of blood.
The girl lay in the courtyard, her body small against the marble, eyes open to the sky.
Kaelith stood above her, hands unstained.
"She was a variable," he said. "You remove variables."
Lyria screamed.
Iblis did not.
He only watched, the reflection of her body imprinting itself like a star collapsing inward.
---
Later, alone, Iblis opened his notebook.
Every page was covered in meticulous handwriting, diagrams of response, equations of affection.
He turned to the final entry and wrote:
- Termination of Subject N: external interference.
Emotional residue: persistent.
Correction required.
He sat for a long time, pen motionless.
When he rose, something inside had already cooled past the point of thawing.
The notion of care, of error, of connection, was reduced to an abstraction, a term to be dissected.
From then on, even his silence changed texture.
It was no longer absence; it was erasure.
---
Lyria
She stopped calling his name after that night.
She still followed him, but the air between them had turned thin, brittle.
He looked at her as though she were a memory misplaced in the wrong experiment.
---
X. Cosmic Interlude
A god stirred and smiled, a creation perfected.
Thus the vessel learned the paradox of power:
To feel is to fracture.
To purge is to ascend.