The transition was not a gentle fade or a shimmer of displaced air. It was a violent, sensory slam. One moment, the sterile, absolute silence of Justicar Morian's obsidian court; the next, the crunch of damp, dead leaves under her boots and the smell of wet earth and decay filling her nostrils. The air in the Tithelands was a familiar poison—thick, grey, and heavy with the promise of a rain that would never quite fall.
Veridia stood tall, a reflexive act of defiance against the bleak familiarity of Aethelgard. In her hand, she clutched the ethereal parchment of her Pardon. It was weightless, yet it possessed a substance her boons never had. Its golden light was a cold, mocking glow against the overcast sky, but the warmth it radiated into her palm was undeniably real. This was it. The prize. The culmination of every humiliation, every forced submission, every calculated spectacle.
She had won.
A few feet away, Seraphine stood as a living monument to that victory. She was no longer an intangible illusion of light and wit. She was shockingly, pathetically solid, her designer court-leathers torn and smudged with soot from her brutish, failed assault on the trial chamber. She was silent. Her face, once a perfect canvas for smug superiority, was a mask of cold, tight fury. She refused to look at Veridia, staring instead at the miserable line of skeletal trees on the horizon, her posture screaming a humiliation too profound for words.
Veridia took a deep, cleansing breath, trying to savor the moment. The gnawing ache of the Curse of the Sieve, the constant metaphysical leak that had defined her existence, was gone. In its place was a quiet fullness, a reservoir of power that was entirely her own. She had beaten them all. Malakor, Zael, the Patrons, and finally, her own sister. She had played their disgusting game and won the ultimate prize. Freedom.
Yet, there was no ecstatic roar from the Patrons. No surge in her E-Rating. The silence was absolute, unnerving. The absence of the broadcast, of the constant, judgmental gaze of the Network, felt like a phantom limb, an itch in her soul she couldn't scratch. She was an actress standing on an empty stage after the audience had gone home.
With a final, dismissive glance at her sister's rigid back, Veridia turned to leave. Her old life waited. Power waited.
"Well, this has been dreadful," she said, her voice dripping with the sweet, condescending finality she had longed to use. "Do try not to get eaten before sunset. The ratings for that sort of thing are terribly pedestrian."
She took a confident step, her boots sinking into the soft earth. Then another. On the third, at a distance of precisely ten feet from her sister, an invisible force brought her to a halt so abrupt and violent it was as if she had walked into a wall of solid stone. The impact rattled her teeth and drove a grunt of pained surprise from her lips as she was thrown back a step.
Her ingrained arrogance warred with raw confusion. A root? A trick of the miserable terrain? She scowled, a princess annoyed by the mud, and tried again, pushing forward with deliberate, focused force. The resistance was immense. It was not a solid wall, but a living, elastic tether, a metaphysical chain that hummed with a malevolent energy, yielding an inch before snapping her back with bruising finality. The air between her and Seraphine shimmered for a split second, and in that flash, Veridia saw it—a shimmering, sickly green cord of energy that connected them, emanating not from their bodies, but from the very core of their souls.
The Pardon was for her exile. Not the curse.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced the warm glow of her victory. She wasn't free. She lunged against the bond, a frantic, desperate push against the unyielding force. It was like throwing herself against a mountain. She was chained. Permanently, intimately chained to her most hated enemy.
Seraphine had not moved. She simply turned her head, her expression no longer furious, but filled with a cold, detached curiosity. She watched Veridia struggle, watched her throw herself against the invisible chain like a trapped animal. She watched as the full, soul-crushing weight of their shared damnation finally settled upon her sister's shoulders, extinguishing the last embers of her triumph.
The full weight of the situation crushed Veridia. The Pardon in her hand felt like a sheet of ice. The victory in her heart felt like a mouthful of ash. She sank to her knees in the damp leaves, the fight draining out of her.
Her entire life had been a game of power, and she had just played the final, masterful hand. She had endured the humiliation. She had orchestrated the spectacle. She had navigated the treacherous politics of the Patrons and the Court. It had all led to this.
"I won," she whispered, the words cracking, her voice a raw, broken thing. "I beat them all. And this is my prize?" She looked from her own chest to her sister's, at the ten feet of cursed space that now defined her world. "An eternal cage for two?"
Seraphine remained silent, her expression unreadable in the grey light. For a long, still moment, it seemed she shared in the despair, a fellow prisoner in a new, more intimate hell. The world was quiet, the air heavy.
Then, a sound broke the stillness.
It started as a small, choked noise from Seraphine's throat. A giggle. It was a broken, ugly sound that shook her shoulders. It grew, bubbling up from the depths of her ruin, no longer a giggle but a full, unhinged laugh. It wasn't a sound of mirth or even mockery. It was the chilling, frantic laughter of someone who had lost everything—her fame, her power, her future—and had just realized the sheer, cosmic absurdity of it all. It was the sound of a prisoner discovering the key to their cell also locked the guard inside with them.
She lifted her head to look at Veridia, tears of manic laughter streaming down her filthy cheeks, her eyes wild and terrifyingly alive. The witty host was gone. The political player was gone. The game they had been playing was over.
A new, far more dangerous one had just begun.