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Keeper's Adide:
"When the gilded cage rots from within, the fracture becomes the hammer. Beware the power that answers contempt with decay, for the throne that fears the shattering may yet seek to wield the shards."
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil -----------‐--------------------‐
The null-lattice didn't shatter. It screamed – a psychic vibration resonating through the polished basalt beneath Hatim's suspended form, momentarily harmonizing with the deep thrum of the chamber's Akar veins before twisting into dissonance.
He hung, a hollow point in the council chamber's obsidian embrace. The Whispercloaks' binding was absolute erasure: no hum of Veins, no warmth from his Core, only the suffocating silence of negation. Yet, the chamber's opulence pressed in – a reliquary of power, and he was the desecrated artifact on display.
Deep within his ribs, the violet thread coiled. It had tasted the words resonating in this sanctum:
Valerius's venomous decree. Burn the root. Aethel's icy calculus.Optimal termination. Kander's ragged defiance.He is the seal!
The thread didn't whisper. It roared.
Hatim's body arched violently against the null-bonds. Not light erupted, but a shockwave of pure absence. Where it touched the obsidian lattice, the polished surface blistered, peeling back in layers like diseased skin, revealing raw, weeping stone beneath. Whispercloak glyphs – perfect geometries of negation – dissolved mid-air like sandcastles in acid tide, leaving only acrid motes of corrupted resonance. The null-field imploded with the soundless finality of a star collapsing.
He fell. Knees struck the resonant basalt. Where his palms slapped the floor, polished stone blackened, curling inwards like burning vellum, releasing the stench of ozone and scorched earth.
Akar Veins threading the walls convulsed. Their steady, golden pulse stuttered, thickened into sluggish, violet-streaked clots. The flawless crystal encasing them splintered. From the fractures seeped not steam, but a thick, dark ichor that dripped, sizzling, onto the floor, reeking of cloying honey and necrotic flesh.
Babs drawn to purity froze mid-whirl. One brushed a weeping vein. Its iridescent wings curled inward, desiccating instantly to grey gossamer. It fell, crumbling into dull ash. Others followed, a silent rain of extinguished sparks.
Valerius did not move his hands. His eyes snapped toward Hatim, burning with a sudden, crimson light. Akar surged from the veins in the walls to his will, flowing into the mental command. The sharp, violent angles of a Tharnel destruction-glyph manifesting in the air before him—a masterpiece of offensive power summoned by thought alone. It flared, hot enough to warp the air… then guttered, its perfect lines fraying at the edges, choking on the ambient decay. The crimson light around him died. His face, contorted in fury, froze into a mask of profound, disbelieving stasis. The flawless glyph dissolved into incoherent sparks before it could be unleashed.
Aethel's ever-shifting glyph-robes stilled, the shimmering silver symbols tarnishing instantly to the dull grey of dead slag. Her ice-chip eyes widened, not with fear, but with the chilling blankness of a grand equation encountering an impossible variable. Her fingers did not twitch; her mind raced, attempting and discarding a dozen layered Veshan containment protocols in a heartbeat. But each mental construct collapsed before it could fully form, its intricate logic devoured by the static of the unraveling world.
The Ironheart Envoy's grey-steel gauntlet slammed onto the obsidian table, not in rage, but reflexive bracing. A deep, resonant thrum vibrated from the steel – a potent Tharnel ward visualized and channeled defensively through her armor's conduits. It met the decay and died, the sound muffled as if swallowed by thick felt. She staggered half a step, her flint eyes wide with the shock of resonant silence where her power should have roared.
The Selvaris Representative's form seemed to blur for a nanosecond, a Sennari mobility-glyph half-formed in his mind and already acting on his body. But the glyph shattered in its infancy. He recoiled, a sharp hiss escaping clenched teeth, his reflexive speed nullified before it began.
Whispercloaks mirrored masks reflected the blighted veins, the falling babs, the nobles' frozen horror – grotesque distortions. One Cloak near the lattice jerked violently. Its glimmersteel robe rippled, then buckled like stressed metal. Its featureless mask splintered with a sharp crack, revealing swirling, chaotic darkness beneath. The air around it warped, humming with dissonant feedback – their flawless synchronicity fractured by conceptual dissonance.
Hatim gasped, lungs filling with air thick with scorched metal, cloying rot, and cold terror. The violet thread within him thrummed, a vibration of pure, icy contempt. Look at your perfect order now.
Valerius's mind, shattered by the failure of his art, defaulted to base instinct. His hand flew to the ceremonial dagger at his belt—the one object that required no thought, its Severance Glyph pre-etched into the metal. He didn't just lunge; he flowed, his body moving with the last echo of the Sennari speed that had already failed him. The dagger became a focused lance of purifying force aimed at the anomaly's core. The air crackled with his desperate intent.
Hatim didn't flinch. The violet thread twitched.
A jagged whip of void-energy, black and violet and utterly shapeless, snapped from Hatim's vicinity. It was not a glyph. It was unmaking. It met the purifying lance. The Akar-fire didn't extinguish; it curdled, turning viscous and black mid-strike. The dagger's sacred glyphs blistered and flaked away. The metal itself crumbled, disintegrating into a stream of fine, cold black sand that pattered onto Valerius's boots. Truth unmade.
Valerius stumbled back, staring at his empty hand, then the sand, revulsion twisting his features. "It… unmakes essence," he choked, the realization shattering his certainty in Akar's laws.
Aethel's voice cut the reeking air, sharp as shaved ice: "Whispercloaks. Contain. Protocol Zero." Existential threat. Purge the anomaly.
Six mirrored masks snapped towards Hatim. Palms swept down in terrifying unison. Glyphs unfolded – not summoned from their minds, but extracted from the resonant lattice of the sanctum itself, a last resort of pure, automated order. Lattices of pure negation, geometries of absolute silence, wove through the air with flawless, inhuman precision, converging on Hatim like a closing fist of the Crown's will.
They never touched him. The violet energy reached. Where the lattices met the decay-field, their perfect lines frayed, unraveling like rotten thread. The geometries distorted, collapsing inwards into incoherent shards of static light that winked out with feeble pops. The lead Whispercloak shuddered, its fractured mask revealing darkness churning violently. Its glimmersteel robe hissed, emitting corrupted sparks. Their truth met a deeper void.
Kander moved. Not with glyphs, but with the brutal, resonant efficiency of a Veinbreaker who knew the rhythm of chaos. He slammed his shoulder into the stunned Valerius, exploiting the lord's shattered focus, sending him crashing into the obsidian table. Kander pivoted, planting himself squarely before Hatim. Scarred hands came up, knuckles white, stance wide and low – a battered bulwark against the momentarily confused Whispercloaks. "Try," he rasped, the word a raw challenge in the unnatural quiet. Human defiance in the gilded cage.
The Whispercloaks paused. Mirrored masks tilted fractionally, recalculating. The lead Cloak's hand, half-raised for another glyph, hovered. The chamber's resonant hum, suppressed by decay and shock, struggled to reassert itself.
"Enough."
The word landed like a mountain settling. Heavy. Final. Implacable.
Torvin stood by the archway. The Royal Seal upon his chest – black iron encircling a burning ruby ember – thrummed. Not a sound, but a deep, seismic pressure that pressed against the violet energy radiating from Hatim. It didn't erase the decay; it contained it, defining a sphere of influence with the authority of the Ashen Throne itself. The violet thread recoiled sharply, vibrating with wary recognition against this ordered, sovereign pressure. The ambient decay ceased its outward creep. Control asserted.
The nobles froze. Valerius pushed himself up, face mottled, but silenced by the Seal's weight. The Whispercloaks stepped back as one fluid motion, masks reflecting Torvin's impassivity and the pulsing Seal. Its authority was an anchor in the chaos.
Aethel's voice was a razor drawn across glass: "This is catastrophic breach. The Unbinding responds to nothing but its own dissolution. The Ascended—"
"—sleep," Torvin cut in, his voice gravel under iron wheels. His gaze swept the weeping walls, the ashen babs, the nobles' paralyzed postures. "Scream for the headsman now, and you risk the avalanche." He paused, letting the reek of decay underscore his point. "The Throne commands control. Mastery. Not panic." He framed their paralysis as a failure of the very purity they enforced.
A younger lord lurched forward, insignia blazing. "The Ashen Throne—!"
"Let them convene," Torvin stated, a cold blade of a smile touching his lips. "Let them behold the consequence of startled incompetence within the sanctum." He turned their shock into a political weapon.
The silence thickened, charged with ambition and dread. The Whispercloaks stood like statues of glimmersteel, awaiting the Seal's command.
Torvin's gaze locked onto Kander. "Take him. Now."
Kander didn't hesitate. He hauled Hatim upright, his grip unyielding as basalt. Hatim swayed, vision blurring, the violet thread vibrating like a plucked wire against the Seal's containment.
One glance back burned the scene into him: Basalt walls weeping ichor onto polished floors.Nobles rigid, their finery tarnished by shock and decay. Whispercloaks standing unnaturally still, perfection fractured. Torvin, an island of cold authority amidst the ruin of the gilded cage, the Royal Seal pulsing like a captive dying star, holding back the tide he now commanded.
In the corridor's sudden gloom, cold stone met Hatim's back as he slumped. Kander braced him, breath harsh. "What... was that?" The words scraped out, laden with the weight of shattered certainties.
Hatim had no words. Only the phantom scream in his marrow, the nobles' frozen masks of disbelief amidst the chamber's corrupted splendor, and the icy certainty: the Crown's gaze had fixed upon the fracture.
From the shadowed archway, Torvin's voice followed, low and deliberate: "The Ashen Throne perceives the sundered threads."A pause, heavy as the Seal's thrum. "Now it weighs the hammer's edge."