The antechamber was a perfect, silent sphere of polished obsidian, so cold it seemed to leech the warmth from the air itself. It reflected not just Veridia's image, but a thousand fractured possibilities of her—a princess in royal silks sneering at a wretch in chains, a conqueror in flawless armor ignoring a beggar bleeding in the dirt. The quiet was a physical weight, a pressure against the eardrums that promised to crush any sound before it was born. In the center of the void, floating with impossible grace, was the Scepter of Pardon, trapped within a cage woven from pure, shimmering light.
Glowing runes pulsed on the walls, their light a sickly, judgmental green in the oppressive dark. They were not instructions. They were accusations. They were the price.
*A trap for the soul.*
The rules of this final, intimate game had been brutally simple. To claim the prize, she had to dismantle the cage. And to dismantle the cage, she had to confess her failures, aloud, for the Patrons and the entire Network to witness. She had to touch each rune and vomit up the truth of her own humiliation.
Veridia's hand trembled as she approached the first symbol, its lines forming a fanged serpent with glittering jade eyes. The memory of Lord Malakor's prized pet, of her own breathtakingly arrogant miscalculation, coiled like a cold snake in her gut. She pressed her fingers to the stone. It felt like ice.
"I was a fool," she forced the words out, her voice a raw rasp that the silence seemed to fight. "I mistook a political slight for a declaration of war. My pride… my pride cost me everything."
The cage of light flickered violently, its structure groaning with a low, harmonic chime before stabilizing. A wave of profound nausea washed over her as the memory was ripped from her, no longer a private shame but a public admission. It was like vomiting up a piece of her soul for their consumption.
She stumbled to the next rune, a crude depiction of a goblin's leering face. Grolnok. The memory was not a clean image but a sensory assault—the stench of filth and unwashed bodies, the feeling of dozens of greasy hands, the sound of their crude laughter.
"I submitted," she choked out, the words tasting of bile and old shame. "To a creature of filth and greed. I performed… I performed for my survival."
Again, the cage shuddered, its light dimming perceptibly. The Audience Approval rating in her mind's eye spiked, a flash of validation that felt like acid. Matron Vesperia was surely savoring the tragic poetry of this confession. Lord Kasian was no doubt thrilled by this ultimate gamble of self-destruction. Their approval was a disgusting, necessary fuel, burning away her dignity but leaving a core of cold resolve.
Veridia faced the final rune: a stylized image of a four-armed Orc, an axe in each hand. Matriarch Kherzog. This was the hardest confession. This was not a miscalculation or a degradation. This was a defeat in battle, a loss she had almost framed as honorable in her own mind. To admit the truth of it was to admit she had been out-thought, out-fought, and utterly broken.
"I was weak," Veridia whispered, the confession a final, shuddering surrender that tore from the deepest part of her. "She was stronger. She was smarter. She defeated me."
The cage of light did not flicker. With a sound like shattering glass, it dissolved into a million motes of fading dust. Silence returned, deeper and more absolute than before. The pressure was gone. Veridia lunged forward, her fingers closing around the cool, ornate metal of the Scepter of Pardon. She had won.
Just as the first true smile in an age touched her lips, the entire chamber shook with the force of a colossal impact.
A section of the obsidian wall didn't just crack; it exploded inward. A storm of razor-sharp stone shrapnel and choking dust filled the chamber. Through the ragged breach, silhouetted against the fires of the war-torn city, stood Seraphine. Her face was a mask of incandescent fury, her designer battle-leathers torn and scorched. Flanking her were two hulking Slag Orcs, their axes dripping with the blood of the city's defenders.
Seraphine had ignored the puzzles, the trials, the entire point of the challenge. She had used Grummash's warriors as a living battering ram, smashing her way directly to the heart of the prize with brute, artless force.
Her eyes, wide and disbelieving, locked onto the scepter in Veridia's hand. The realization hit her like a physical blow. While she had taken the brutish path, Veridia had taken the *correct* one. She had lost.
Veridia lifted the scepter, its polished surface reflecting Seraphine's own enraged face back at her. "Subtlety was never your strong suit, dear sister."
Seraphine's perfectly composed features twisted, her mask of the witty, untouchable host shattering into a thousand pieces. Her voice was a low, trembling thing, stripped of all its honeyed poison. "Give. It. To me."
Veridia just smiled.
A sound tore from Seraphine's throat. It was not a cry of frustration or a shout of anger. It was a raw, animalistic scream of pure, absolute rage. It was the sound of a star collapsing, of a carefully constructed reality being ripped apart. It was the broadcast of her own, ultimate, public humiliation, and it echoed through the ruined chamber with the force of a final, damning verdict. The Orcs behind her shifted uncomfortably, their brutish minds unable to process this display of utter, powerless defeat from their supposed commander.
Veridia basked in the sound. It was the sweetest music she had ever heard, a symphony of her sister's ruin. But then, the screaming stopped.
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the rage. Seraphine's heaving breaths subsided, and the trembling in her hands ceased. Her head came up slowly, and a chilling, serene smile spread across her lips. Her rage had not vanished; it had cooled, condensed into something as hard and sharp as a diamond.
"What is that pathetic trinket?" Veridia asked, a flicker of unease spoiling her triumph as Seraphine reached into a hidden pouch at her belt. "Another one of your cheap props?"
Seraphine's smile widened. "This?" she said, her voice unnervingly calm. She pulled her hand free, revealing a small, pulsating object. It looked like a calcified heart, no bigger than a fist, wrapped in chains of black, soul-forged iron. It throbbed with a sickly, nauseating purple light that seemed to drink the very air around it.
"This is a Soul-Chain," Seraphine purred, her eyes glittering with a madness Veridia had never seen before. "A forbidden little souvenir from the black markets of Dis. The Patrons promised you a Pardon. Freedom." She savored the word, then let it drop like a stone. "But if I can't be free…"
With a sharp, cracking sound, Seraphine crushed the artifact in her fist.
The calcified heart shattered. The black iron chains dissolved into tendrils of violet smoke that shot across the chamber with impossible speed. They struck both sisters in the chest at the same instant.
A searing, unimaginable pain erupted in Veridia's soul, a cold fire that felt like her very spiritual DNA was being violently rewritten. She screamed, stumbling back, clutching at her chest as if she could tear the agony out. On the pale skin above her heart, a glowing purple rune burned itself into existence, its lines intricate and cruel. She looked up in horror to see an identical mark blazing on Seraphine's chest, a perfect, spiteful mirror.
Seraphine finished her sentence, her voice a triumphant snarl that echoed with the finality of a slammed coffin lid.
"…then neither can you."