Chapter 42: The Forgotten Promise

Zoria wasn’t finished, though. He made a point of adding that his offer would benefit Lucian far more than it benefited him.

All he wanted, he claimed, was a temporary vessel, something to carry him while he searched for a better body out in the real world, one more suited to him. Lucian’s body, he said, simply wasn’t the right fit.

Lucian’s eyes narrowed. "What, you’re saying I’m too weak for you?"

Something in the Omen’s borrowed expression shifted, close to amusement, close to disagreement. Zoria insisted that wasn’t it at all. If anything, he found Lucian’s body genuinely remarkable.

But.

The Omen’s massive hand lifted, one finger aimed squarely at Lucian’s eyes, and Zoria’s voice dropped, cold and matter-of-fact.

"You’re cursed. Badly. Strong enough that even I don’t actually want to touch what’s inside you. But it looks like this is the only way out of here for me."

Lucian scratched at his ear, more baffled than offended by the accusation.

Yeah, maybe he’s got a point there. Lately it’s been nothing but bad news stacked on top of worse news.

He couldn’t exactly argue the claim, either, not with everything that had piled up on him these past months. His own body ran weaker than any of his siblings’, a truth that had never needed proving.

It was the same truth that had made his own family look down on him for years, blind, broken, cursed, depending on who was doing the talking. If his family already saw him that way, there wasn’t much room left to deny it now.

And yet something about hearing it from Zoria’s mouth lit something hot and furious in his chest anyway.

"Don’t you want to become something stronger than you are right now?"

"Don’t you want to pay back everyone who ever looked down on you?"

"Don’t you want people to finally see you for what you really are?"

Zoria’s words came slow, deliberate, each one aimed like a hook meant to sink deep and pull.

"Accept my power, and I’ll cure that curse of yours myself. No one will ever get to belittle you again."

Something in Lucian did want to lean into it, if only for a heartbeat.

But every memory of anyone tied to the Crimson clan came stitched together with disaster, every single time. And Zoria, infamous even by Lumina’s own account for his cunning, wasn’t someone Lucian had any intention of trusting with anything, least of all his own body.

"If you were the first person from the Crimson clan I’d ever run into, maybe those pretty words would’ve actually gotten to me. But I’ve already seen what happened in that memory. You’re not half as strong as you’re pretending to be right now, not when you’ve spent this whole time hiding from her."

Something in Lucian’s memory of the fight had made that much clear: bodies claimed too deeply by Crimson blood broke down, deteriorated past any point of return.

Whatever Zoria carried now, hiding out here rather than facing Lumina directly, only confirmed how badly he’d already been outmatched.

"Hmm. So you’ve been talking to that red-haired woman, then. Her presence alone still unnerves me, I won’t pretend otherwise. But don’t mistake that for fear. I only avoided her earlier because I assumed she was the one meant to be guarding this place, so I didn’t see the point in wasting effort on her."

Zoria had apparently mistaken Lumina for the domain’s actual guardian, the Lady Ghost herself. From the sound of it, whoever the Lady Ghost really was, she and Zoria already knew each other, and not on friendly terms.

Whichever of them Lucian was actually dealing with, both of them, it seemed, were entities trapped somewhere inside this domain, tangled up in a rivalry that predated him entirely.

But that raised a new question. Why had the Lady Ghost gone quiet, when she’d been talking to him constantly until now? He didn’t have time to chase the thought further, though, not with the woman still hanging above him, still waiting to be freed.

While he turned it over, a wet, sliding sound rose behind him.

SPLASH!

A thick spray of crimson fluid lashed out from directly behind him, aimed straight for his back.

What is this?

He barely twisted clear in time, though some of it caught the edge of his blade regardless, clinging there.

This is the same fluid from the chain.

His attention snapped forward, dread already sinking in. He hoped, quietly, that this wasn’t what it looked like.

THUD!!

Light flared from his sword and the Kirana crystal again, catching the follow-up strike aimed dead at him.

"ZORIAAAA!"

His suspicion had been right all along.

Zoria’s actual body, or whatever passed for it now, had never been housed inside the Omen at all. The proof of it was right there, that same crimson fluid nearly tearing into his back had come from the chain itself, from the black stone, meaning Zoria’s soul, his true self, had fused directly into the chain binding this place together.

It explained everything. Why he’d nearly fallen the moment he’d gotten close to the woman above. Why the Omen had recoiled in pain the instant his blade had grazed the chain by accident.

Now he was boxed in from both directions, the chain lashing at him from behind, the Omen still blocking the path ahead. Running deeper into the fog wouldn’t help either, he’d only end up surrounded from every side at once.

His hand started trembling, not from fear, but from something else entirely, the sword itself seemed to be pulling at him, urging him to drive it down into the ground beneath his feet.

He gave in, letting his arm follow wherever the blade wanted to go.

He drove Sonata down, deep into the stone floor.

Faint green light bled out from the blade first, followed by blue, then yellow, and finally a blaze of red, each color surging brighter than the last until the whole sword lit up at once.

Something unfamiliar surged up through Lucian’s arm, a strength he’d never felt before.

Zoria’s eyes narrowed at the sight of it, threads of light in every color spiraling out around Lucian’s body. Whatever those threads meant, Zoria clearly didn’t want him finishing whatever he was doing with them, and he lunged, the chain’s crimson fluid surging forward to stop it.

The Kirana crystal blocked it again, flaring bright enough to hold the strike at bay.

In the middle of all of it, something in Lucian’s expression settled, calm bleeding into focus, as though he were simply following some instinct that had always been there, waiting for him to notice it.

I can feel these threads again, without even touching them.

The threads answered to him without resistance, bending to whatever he willed, though the red one burned brighter than all the others combined, dominant over every other color entwined with it.

Without meaning to, that red thread began weaving itself into the shape of a door.

"You little pest. So the key to this entire domain was with you this whole time."

Zoria’s voice cracked with fury from somewhere beside him. Lucian barely registered the accusation at all, too caught up in the door now forming in front of him, no idea yet that Sonata itself was the very key that had let Zoria slip into this place to begin with.

The door hadn’t finished forming before the sound of a handle turning reached both of them, clear and deliberate.

Someone was already waiting on the other side.

The door swung open completely.

A gust of wind hit Lucian square in the face, muffling his hearing for a moment, but even through it, he caught the unmistakable edge of recognition in Zoria’s voice.

"Shit. How the hell are you here."

♪ INNERTIA: LIGHT! ♪

A spear of light tore past Lucian’s side, the war cry behind it carrying a technique aimed straight at Zoria.

The sensation radiating off that spear felt nothing like anything Lucian had encountered in this place before, pure Sacred Mana, dense and unmistakable, saturating every inch of it.

The hem of a white dress brushed against Lucian’s skin as the woman wielding it stepped past him, brown hair trailing behind her, emerging fully from the red door.

♪ Nearly twenty years I’ve spent hunting you down, hiding here this whole time, Zoria! It’s finally time I settled this. ♪

Something in her voice, the cadence of how she spoke, matched exactly what Lucian had already come to recognize as the Lady Ghost’s own. But underneath that eerie register sat something more familiar still, a voice he’d never heard directly, and yet somehow already knew.

"Alayna..you still alive?"

Confusion crashed over him as the pieces clicked together. The Lady Ghost he’d been talking to this entire time really was Alayna, though nothing about her now matched the version he’d seen in Miyu’s memory.

Older. Sharper. Every trace of the young woman from that fragment of the past had matured into something entirely different.

There was one thing missing, though, the thing Lucian relied on more than anything else to register another person as real: a heartbeat.

He listened for it and found nothing. In its place, only the roar of mana coursing through her, far too fast, far too dense for any human body to sustain without breaking apart under the strain.

What happened to her? Lucian wondered, unable to shake the wrongness of it.

♪ Why are you just standing there staring? Cut that chain, now. ♪

♪ I’ll deal with this bastard, you go and— ♪

Alayna’s words cut off mid-sentence, her gaze snagging on something past Lucian’s shoulder, on the black stone rising above them, on the white-haired woman still chained there.

Her eyes shook the instant recognition hit.

Sacred Mana surged out from her body in a violent wave, fury radiating off her at the sight of someone she clearly knew, bound and helpless at the top of that stone.

♪ Zoria, you absolute bastard! ♪

♪ How did you get your hands on Miyu’s body? ♪

She didn’t wait for an answer. She drove straight at Zoria with everything she had, and Zoria, still wearing the Omen like a second skin, met her head-on, blow for blow.

Nothing about this fight resembled the one Lucian had watched unfold in the memory before. It was rawer now, more brutal, and Alayna clearly held the advantage in raw power this time.

Something had changed her, somewhere between that memory and now, something Lucian still didn’t understand.

"Tragic, isn’t it, Alayna. Haha. Your dear friend gave up her own life to save you, and this entire time, you never even knew what happened to her. Isn’t that just poetic? I wonder how disappointed she must be, watching all this from wherever she ended up. Haha!"

Something in Zoria’s words hinted at whatever had actually happened to Miyu in the act of saving Alayna, something Alayna herself seemed to know nothing about at all.

Lucian didn’t wait to hear more. He broke into a run, driving straight for the top of the stone, cutting through the crimson fluid still lashing out from the chain with every stride.

Threads of light, every color woven together, suddenly shaped themselves into a hand a few steps ahead of him, reaching upward toward the peak of the black stone.

A staircase built entirely of light climbed into being in front of him, guiding him upward, carrying him toward Miyu.

Regret settled into him with every step he climbed.

He should have known from the start that the Miyu he’d met wasn’t some illusion, nothing so simple as that.

And he’d already made a promise, to her aunt and uncle, back through that green door, that he’d protect her.

Every swing of his blade carried more force than the last, driven by that promise, closing the last stretch of distance toward the peak of the stone, toward Miyu.