Caera Vritra
I was thrown, spat, hurled back into reality...
It was impossible to describe what resurrecting felt like, only that I knew with absolute certainty that I had just died—again.
I coughed and trembled against the cold stone floor, but my body... my body was completely unharmed, for Vritra's sake!
Through the Grim Mist pooling on the floor, I saw two dark boots. I raised my gaze, and Agrona Vritra's blood-red eyes were locked on me, his horned head tilted in half amusement, half interest.
"H-High Sovereign, n-no! Please!" I begged, eliciting a rare physical reaction from the Lord of the Vritra Clan: his eyebrows raised in mild surprise.
"It works," Agrona mused, a cruel smirk curling his lips. "What should I stop doing, Caera? I have done nothing... yet."
Done nothing?! He has been murdering me for hours!
"H—"
My voice was abruptly cut short as I felt dozens of jagged spikes of Blood Iron erupt from the floor, piercing my body and drowning out my pathetic screams.
I felt something torrential and vast—like the deepest ocean in the wildest storm—whisper my name, and I was swallowed by the abyss of death for the... I lost count how many times the High Sovereign had been torturing me like this.
The return to reality was instantaneous, but far from painless. Just as it had happened dozens of times before, after Agrona Vritra slaughtered me, I snapped back to the exact moment prior, begging for my life and pleading for him to stop this madness.
A violent urge to vomit seized me, and I heaved, throwing up the acidic contents of my stomach onto the shadowed floor. The High Sovereign merely observed me as I knelt, crouched in agony at his boots.
"Interesting," Agrona muttered, his scarlet eyes gleaming in the gloom. "What happened, Caera? Tell me. What exactly happens after you die?"
"I don't know... it just repeats itself," I gasped out, my throat burning.
I was used to being beaten to a pulp during the brutal training Scythe Seris had put me through to forge me into the perfect, ideal image of a Retainer.
But my harsh, compassionless mentor had never actually killed me!
"Time travel!" Agrona mused aloud, spreading his arms in dark amusement as his form drifted through the Grim Mist. "How unfortunate that your version of this power is still so unripe. How does it work? What is the mechanism? How can Fate still exert so much influence over Asuraloka that, despite the Aether Realm's existence, it can still dictate the flow of the river of time? What are its limitations? What specific kind of death triggers the reversal? Is it even a reversal?"
My head throbbed violently, overflowing with the visceral, overlapping memories of my own demise. I had no idea what the High Sovereign was talking about. I just wanted this nightmare to be over.
Steel your mind, Caera. Don't let desperation win, I told myself. They were empty, vague words, but they were still an anchor.
The Lord of the Vritra Clan stepped forward, now fully visible through the swirling mist, a wicked, analytical smile on his lips.
"I am pleased, Caera," the High Sovereign purred, his very presence a mockery of life itself. "Too much experimentation of this kind will make your mind shatter entirely, and that is not what we want. Not yet, at least."
I didn't answer; I just silently, desperately accepted that this nightmare was over for the time being. With a casual click of the Basilisk's fingers, the heavy gates sealing the chamber groaned open, the Grim Mist immediately siphoning out into the dark, echoing corridors of Taegrin Caelum's dungeons.
"Lavinia, love," the High Sovereign called out, keeping his back turned to the open entrance and his daughter. "Lead the Legacy back to her quarters, please."
"As you wish, Father," Sovereign Lavinia replied.
The beautiful Vritra bowed slightly at his command. She shot me a sharp, unreadable glance, and I knew better than to disobey. I scrambled to my feet and followed the Sovereign of the Central Dominion, my head bowed low and my heart pounding against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Get away from here, just get away from here, I repeated rhythmically in my mind, my only desire being to put as much distance between myself and that torture chamber as physically possible.
Without daring to meet Lavinia's eyes, I followed her through the labyrinthine bowels of Taegrin Caelum, leaving the Basilisk who had murdered me over and over again to his twisted machinations.
—
I had dared to hope the agony would somehow lessen after the... I didn't even want to think about how many times I had already died. But no. The High Sovereign would never allow me to grow complacent with my own demise.
He wanted to keep me desperate. He wanted to keep me terrified.
And so, every single time I perished within that sealed chamber, amidst the freezing Grim Mist that bit through my flesh straight down to the marrow, I died in sheer, unadulterated agony.
Now, I trembled beneath the High Sovereign's towering figure. The Lord of the Vritra Clan gently placed his heavy boot atop my head, resting it there as he spoke.
"How can Fate possibly know when you die whilst completely isolated behind an Ayin Gate?" the High Sovereign mused aloud. "Is the Legacy acting as some sort of beacon? Or are you just particularly... special, Caera?"
The High Sovereign laughed softly at his own dark amusement as he spoke those final words. Then, his foot came down with shattering force.
And life abruptly left me, swallowed once again as that powerful, roaring torrent I had come to know so well flooded the world, washing the pain away into nothingness.
—
"Tell me, Caera," Agrona Vritra spoke. His figure was entirely invisible through the Grim Mist save for his red eyes—two dots of hellfire suspended within a fog that devoured all light. "What is the name of this ability?"
Name? Why would the High Sovereign want to know the name of this curse that keeps me from dying? That keeps me trapped—no, don't give in to the panic, Caera. Cecilia begged you not to.
Cecilia had suffered through something like this in her past life, she had told me. Being used... being... experimented on. Cecilia would hate seeing me succumb to this madness.
"I—I don't know!" I cried out, my voice trembling in the freezing damp.
"How can I trigger the Legacy into revealing more about this ability..." the High Sovereign mused aloud.
The Grim Mist abruptly parted around me, revealing the statuesque form of Agrona Vritra. His obsidian horns were somehow even more light-consuming than the suffocating mist itself.
The strange, malachite-horned frog I had seen the very first time the High Sovereign brought me into this sealed chamber of death was constrained within his pale hand. The plump, amphibious creature squirmed desperately, trying to free itself from his iron grip.
The High Sovereign brought a hand to his chin in thought. A grim crown of aetheric black iron, jagged and uneven like the teeth of a ravenous beast, manifested in the air above his head, cementing his terrifying authority.
A cruel smirk crept onto Agrona's lips. He took the blue frog's extremities with both hands and, without a shred of hesitation, tore the creature apart alive, bisecting it in a gruesome, wet tear of flesh.
Something akin to blood dripped from the unrecognisable carcass of the amphibian. It was a crystalline liquid of a beautiful, radiant teal, resembling a liquefied mixture of both the creature's skin and its malachite horns.
The sight should not have disturbed me. To acquaint me with the realities of death, Scythe Seris had forced me to witness countless atrocities inflicted upon uncountable mana beasts.
But the sheer casualness and the genuine delight with which Agrona Vritra had just slaughtered the helpless creature sent violent chills down my spine.
"Drink the blood, Caera," the High Sovereign ordered.
I had no choice but to comply. It was that very same authority—the dark, Vritra Blood that flowed within my own veins—that compelled my body to obey the terrifying whims of the High Sovereign.
I crawled forward, shaking uncontrollably, to do as he commanded.
I have to run, I promised myself, the taste of teal blood, so, so wrong, burning my throat. I have to run away from this hell.
—
The next time I died, I did not immediately snap back to the cold stone at the feet of the High Sovereign.
I was not instantly returned to reality, ready to be slaughtered over and over again—treated like nothing more than a mindless Wogart, processed day and night by the butchers of Aedelgard to feed their Highblood masters.
My body felt impossibly heavy, submerged in a thick, oily substance. I kept my eyes clamped shut, dreading the sound of the High Sovereign's voice, fully expecting that no time had passed for him despite my death.
But instead, there was only a profound, suffocating silence.
I didn't feel the biting cold of the Grim Mist. In its place there was a cloying, oppressive warmth that clung to my skin, smelling faintly of iron and rot. It felt like a fever dream, but I was undeniably awake—of that I was certain.
No nightmare could ever eclipse the visceral reality of Agrona Vritra's torture.
I opened my eyes, and the sheer, incomprehensible vastness of the unintelligible stared back at me.
So high above that it made my mind ache just to look at it, a vault of infinite, glowing golden threads twisted and untwisted.
They were too numerous to count, weaving and unweaving with a maddening, impossible rhythm that was simultaneously too fast and too slow for a mortal mind to process.
"W-what..." I murmured. My heart sank, but... I didn't actually feel it beat against my ribs.
I scrambled to my feet, slipping slightly in the pond of viscous, coagulating blood pooling around my calves. I looked down, and the body I saw was utterly unfamiliar.
I touched my own arms and face. The flesh was mine, yet I didn't feel like myself. Not my current age, at least. I looked years older: firmer, talle and undeniably stronger.
I refused to give in to panic. By Vritra's horns, I was feeling everything but panic right now; anything was better than returning to that suffering. If I was merely hallucinating my own afterlife, I would gladly drown in it for as long as I needed to.
Tearing my gaze away from my older, unreal body, I finally took in the hellish, otherworldly scenery stretching out before me.
Everywhere around me, endlessly, lay a churning expanse of blood. It was a torrential ocean of deep, rotting reds, bruised violets, and pitch blacks. The oily fluid seemed to be boiling, driven by a violent, turbulent undercurrent.
Every few seconds, pressurised jets of this vicious (and viscous) liquid erupted from the surface, geysering high into the air and raining thick, warm clots back down upon the surface.
All of this raged beneath the swirling, golden storm of threads in the "sky." Was this the river of time the High Sovereign had been raving about?
But what made this already eerie realm truly horrifying was the source of the torrential flood. The ocean of gore was bleeding directly from a colossal carcass that dominated the entire horizon.
Like grotesque, roaring waterfalls (bloodfalls?), thick sheets of blood spilled violently from the giant corpse, which was just as incomprehensible in scale as the vaulted storm of gold above it.
I didn't know what kind of beast it was, only that it was unfathomably ancient and entirely inhuman.
It was a mountainous, insectoid monstrosity, partially obscured by a hazy veil of atomised blood that hung heavily in the non-air. Its massive chitinous plates were cracked and weeping, its membranous wings long since withered into rotting, skeletal shreds.
It possessed multiple, jagged legs that pierced the sky like the obsidian spires of Taegrin Caelum—legs so impossibly large I was profoundly grateful my mortal eyes couldn't perceive their entirety.
"Bloodlet Bourne..." I found myself whispering, staring blankly at the bleeding god-corpse.
I shook my head, forcefully turning my back on that colossal, bleeding monstrosity. Whatever this realm was, I knew with a chilling certainty that I wouldn't be here for long. I could feel the invisible tether already pulling at my soul.
I crossed my arms tightly beneath my chest, genuinely startled by the unfamiliar weight and curves of my own older form, but now was hardly the time to gawk at my own flesh.
"This is the river of time," I realised, my mind revising the detached comments of the High Sovereign as he killed me. "Which means..."
"...I need to find this Arbiter," I murmured under my breath, the sound instantly swallowed by the rushing deluge of blood.
The Arbiter was clearly the key to Agrona's current obsession. They were a threat: an enemy the Lord of the Vritra Clan continuously muttered about in relation to Fate.
Not once during my endless loops of torture had I heard Agrona speak of his supposed greatest archenemies: the Indrath Clan. The Dragons of Epheotus, who, according to the Vritraism ingrained into every Alacryan from birth, plotted the death of Almighty Vritra's mortal self and banished the High Sovereign from the gods' continent.
He hadn't spared a single breath for Kezess Indrath. But the Arbiter? That was a distinctly different story.
I needed to make contact with whoever—or whatever—this Arbiter was. I possessed the Legacy of Insight; cold pragmatism urged me to use it as a bargaining chip.
If the Arbiter helped me, Agrona would lose the very tool he was using to decipher their temporal authorities.
And I would finally be free of Taegrin Caelum. Cecilia would be free, too.
But that same pragmatism violently reminded me that I couldn't rely on blind hope. What if this Arbiter was exactly like Agrona Vritra? What if they were simply another ruthless Basilisk or Dragon or whatever other Asuras existed?
Before I could even think about reaching out, I had to find a way to sever the absolute control Agrona held over my own body. If the High Sovereign could simply twist me into an obedient puppet with a snap of his fingers, any plan I forged would be utterly futile.
I had to commit the ultimate blasphemy in the eyes of Alacrya: I had to actively reject my Vritra bloodline. I had to purge the divine, sovereign ichor that millions of my people would gladly butcher each other to possess.
I bit my lip hard, tasting familiar iron as I frantically tried to formulate a solution to either of my impossible problems. My time in this intermediate realm was rapidly running out.
Very soon, I would be violently yanked back to that sealed chamber, to the freezing Grim Mist, and to the crushing, oppressive gaze of Agrona's wanton cruelty.
I steeled my mind and grasped at the only bright side I had left: I finally had a starting point to work with; I was standing in a literal river of time, nourished by the bleeding carcass of a dead god. I just had to figure out how to use it.
—
When my consciousness slammed back into my physical body, I fully expected to be returned to the exact moment before Agrona Vritra killed me.
Instead, reality violently proved me wrong.
A massive spike of Blood Iron was already protruding from my chest. I felt the agonizing burn of decay magic searing through my sternum: the sheer, terrifying sensation of a foreign, hostile force actively shredding my ribcage and skewering the most vital of organs—my heart.
I gasped in sheer panic, vomiting a thick geyser of blood. My brain immediately began to short-circuit as my ruptured heart failed to pump blood through my rapidly collapsing veins.
"H-High Sovereign!" I begged blindly.
All the quiet defiance I had managed to build within the Bloodlet Bourne evaporated instantly, erased like mortal lifeforce under Soulfire.
"Huh. Still alive, Caera?" the High Sovereign mused, utterly unfazed by my form writhing like an impaled worm on his Blood Iron spike. "What an unexpected turn of events. Tell me, how many times did you die before something like this happened?"
"I—I don't know," I wheezed, spitting another mouthful of blood onto his dark boots.
What is happening?! What is happening?! I screamed in the confines of my dying mind.
The Blood Iron spike abruptly vanished from my chest, the High Sovereign casually dispelling the physical manifestation of his magic with a mere thought.
Then, he washed me in his Soulfire; not the corrosive black flames designed to erase life, but the twisted, restorative version that exclusively nourished those with Vritra Blood coursing through their veins.
I felt profoundly disgusted with myself for how much my body revelled in it. The sensation of Agrona Vritra's Soulfire was indescribable. My corrupted blood fiercely rejoiced, and the gaping, fatal wound in my chest rapidly knitted itself back together in a matter of seconds.
I crumpled onto the cold stone floor of the sealed chamber, violently coughing up the residual blood pooling in my throat. Trembling, I raised my eyes to look at Agrona through the thinning Grim Mist.
"Temporary immortality," the High Sovereign concluded clinically, his red eyes narrowing in fascination. "As always, the Arbiter's authorities are frighteningly powerful."
Hearing the word "frightening" fall from the lips of a divine being like the High Sovereign made my freshly healed blood congeal into ice. What kind of war had I been dragged into?
"You gave me a wealth of material to work with today, Caera, dear," the High Sovereign cooed in that honeyed, paternal voice that desperately made you want to believe he was an ally.
Like the Devil, Cecilia had warned me. It was a flawless mask hiding the absolute, malevolent intent that formed the core of Agrona Vritra's being.
"We are done for today," he said.
The massive doors sealing the chamber ground open with a thunderous din. The Grim Mist trapped inside immediately escaped into the underground corridors of Taegrin Caelum, creeping outward like a hundred hungry fingers of fog.
"Cadell," the High Sovereign commanded, speaking into the darkened hallway. "Take the Legacy away."