Viola’s breath caught. “Lucius…”

Lucius didn’t look at her first.

He looked at Ludger.

“How?” he demanded, voice rough. “How did you find me?”

Ludger didn’t move.

“You erased your mana signature,” he said evenly. “And you were walking around almost without touching the ground. Clever.”

Lucius’ eyes narrowed.

“But,” Ludger continued, “you got angry like an amateur.”

His gaze sharpened, almost cold.

“You can hide your mana,” Ludger said. “You can float. You can even suppress your presence.”

He took one step forward.

“But if you throw emotion at me that loudly, you might as well shout your location.”

Lucius stared at him, jaw tight.

For the first time, he looked less like someone in control…

…and more like someone who’d been caught right before the end of whatever plan he’d convinced himself was necessary.

Ludger walked toward the earth cocoon with slow, deliberate steps.

He didn’t rush. Didn’t posture. He just stopped close enough that Lucius couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there, and close enough that Lucius could see his eyes clearly.

“We’re doing this peacefully,” Ludger said, voice calm, “or I start breaking bones. Choose.”

Lucius’ mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace.

“As long as the bones aren’t mine,” he said hoarsely, “you can break as many as you want.”

Viola stiffened at the tone. Luna’s gaze sharpened. Ludger didn’t react outwardly. He simply held Lucius’ stare… And what he saw there wasn’t arrogance. It was exhaustion.

Not physical, not really, Lucius was still standing, still coherent, still holding himself together. The exhaustion was behind the eyes. The kind that came from being alone with grief long enough that it stopped being grief and became a lens through which everything else was judged.

Lucius had been alone with his thoughts after losing someone. Too long. That was the problem.

When someone like Lucius isolated, there were no interruptions. No reality checks. No normal conversations that forced him to speak out loud and hear how his own reasoning sounded. His thoughts would have looped. Tightened. Reinforced themselves like a rune circuit fed by its own output.

Grief did that.

It took one question, why did this happen? and turned it into an obsession.

And obsession didn’t need good evidence. It only needed a direction.

A person alone with grief starts bargaining with the world. Making silent deals. “If I can just learn enough.” “If I can just reach far enough.” “If I can just fix one thing, everything else will be bearable.”

But the longer they stay alone, the more the mind starts treating those bargains as logic rather than desperation.

They stop asking, Is this sane?

They start asking, What’s the fastest route? What’s the cost? Who gets in my way?

And once that shift happens, people become obstacles instead of friends. Allies become liabilities. The closest person, Rathen, in Lucius’ case, becomes someone to hide things from, because being questioned would slow the plan down.

That kind of solitude doesn’t create clarity. It creates certainty. False certainty, built on unchallenged fear. Ludger let that settle for a heartbeat, then spoke again, voice unchanged.

“You’ve been alone too long,” he said.

Lucius’ eyes flickered, just slightly.

Not guilt. Not agreement. Just the smallest sign that the words had struck something true.

Viola and Luna moved closer, stepping out from the cover of broken walls and vine-choked stone. The moment Lucius saw them, his posture shifted subtly, like his mind recalculated which words were safe to say now that there were witnesses.

His eyes went to Ludger again.

“So,” Lucius said, voice rough, “you brought a lot of people to look for me.”

Ludger didn’t blink. “Viola did.”

Lucius’ gaze slide to Viola.

For a moment, the hard edge in his expression faltered. He took her in, mud on her boots, tension in her shoulders, the way she held herself like she’d been running on stubborn willpower for days.

And then he saw her eyes. Worry, raw and unpolished. Not political worry. Not noble optics. Real worry.

Lucius’ jaw tightened. He looked away as if meeting that expression directly was more uncomfortable than being pinned inside an earth cocoon.

Luna watched the exchange carefully.

She expected Ludger to defuse it with a dry comment, a blunt joke, something to cut the tension and keep emotions from spilling into the wrong places. He didn’t.

Ludger just stood there, steady and silent, eyes fixed on Lucius with a patience that felt more dangerous than anger.

The atmosphere didn’t lighten. It sharpened. Because whatever came next wasn’t going to be smoothed over with humor. It was going to be decided. Ludger didn’t circle around the subject. He just said it.

“The dead can’t be brought back to life.”

Lucius’ eyes widened as if Ludger had slapped him.

For a heartbeat, he looked genuinely stunned, like he’d expected resistance, yes, but not dismissal. Not something so final stated so casually.

Then the shock hardened into glare.

His jaw clenched. His gaze sharpened. Anger flared, raw and immediate.

It changed nothing.

Ludger’s expression didn’t move.

Lucius leaned forward inside the earth cocoon as much as he could. “If someone killed your family,” he demanded, “would you do nothing?”

Ludger answered without hesitation.

“I wouldn’t try to bring them back,” he said.

Lucius’ lips parted, ready to spit something bitter. Ludger continued, voice steady.

“I’d kill whoever killed them,” he said. “And if the world tried to stop me, I’d destroy half of it.”

The words landed heavy. Not as a threat. As a simple statement of intent.

“But I wouldn’t try to bring them back,” Ludger finished. “Because that isn’t how it works.”

Lucius stared at him for a moment longer, then gave a short, broken laugh. He shook his head, a sound halfway between disbelief and exhaustion.

“So which one of us is the most moral?” he asked, voice edged with something ugly. “The one who refuses to accept death… or the one who’s willing to burn the world down?”

Ludger surprised Luna then. He laughed too. Not warmly. Not kindly. But honestly, because the question was absurd in the way only grief made things absurd.

“It’s not a matter of morality,” Ludger said, the amusement fading into calm. “It’s a matter of reality.”

He took one step closer to the earth cocoon.

“You’re trying to rewrite the rules because you hate what they did to you,” Ludger said. “I get that.”

His gaze stayed locked on Lucius.

“But hating a rule doesn’t make you strong enough to break it.”

Ludger exhaled slowly, as if letting the last edge of tension bleed out before it turned into something messier.

“We could sit here and have a philosophical talk about life and death,” he said. “But it would be a waste of time.”

Lucius’ eyes narrowed.

“Our opinions are biased,” Ludger continued, voice calm. “Built from what we’ve lived through. From what we’ve lost. From what we can’t accept.”

He paused, then added, quietly, almost reluctantly. “That said… death isn’t truly permanent.”

Viola’s head tilted slightly. Luna’s gaze flicked to him, surprised.

Ludger didn’t look away from Lucius.

“I know that,” he said. “Because a piece of those who pass away stays with the ones who remain.”

The words weren’t poetic. They were practical. As if he were stating another rule of the world.

“Habits you learned from them. Values you inherited. Mistakes you promised not to repeat. The way you react under pressure. The things you build because they would’ve wanted you to.” Ludger’s voice stayed level. “That’s real. That’s what persists.”

For a moment, the air felt still. Then Lucius’ expression didn’t soften. It didn’t waver. His eyes stayed hard, jaw tight, as if Ludger’s words had simply bounced off a wall built from grief and obsession.

And that, more than anything, told Ludger the truth. Lucius wasn’t searching for meaning. He was searching for reversal.

And no sentence, no matter how honest, was going to pull him away from that path by itself.

Lucius snapped. The calm veneer tore away like wet paper.

“How can you say that?” he shouted, voice cracking through the ruins. “You don’t understand me! You’ve never lost anyone, so you don’t have the right to say any of it!”

Viola flinched. Luna’s posture tightened. Ludger didn’t react.

He just stared at Lucius, eyes steady, face unreadable, letting the anger burn itself out instead of meeting it with his own. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.

“I’ve been preparing since the moment I became aware that danger exists,” Ludger said. “Since I understood that my family could be targeted one day.”

He tapped his forearm guard lightly, as if the metal itself was part of that preparation.

“I’ve been doing what I can to avoid that,” he continued. “Building walls. Building routes. Building people. Building plans.”

His gaze didn’t leave Lucius.

“And even that might not be enough.”

The words were flat, but there was weight under them.

Ludger exhaled once.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what you felt. Or what you’re feeling.”

He paused, then added, “But Viola does.”

Lucius’ glare faltered for half a beat as his eyes flicked toward her.

Ludger turned his head slightly in Viola’s direction, not looking at her fully, but acknowledging her presence with intent.

“She lost her mother when she was five,” Ludger said. “She still has her grandfather, yes. But she grew up with that hole in her life the same way you’re carrying yours now.”

He looked back at Lucius.

“So tell me,” Ludger said, voice still calm. “Are you going to stand there and claim she doesn’t understand you either?”

Silence hit hard. Viola’s jaw tightened, and her hands curled slightly around her sword’s grip. Lucius’ eyes flickered again, this time not with anger, but with something else. Something closer to being cornered by a truth he didn’t want to face.

Ludger let the silence sit for a few seconds longer, then shrugged as if the argument had never mattered in the first place.

“Anyway,” he said, voice flat, “I found you. Like Viola asked me to.”

He took a small step back and flicked his fingers.

The earth cocoon loosened.

Stone crumbled away in controlled chunks, falling to the ground without collapsing onto Lucius. The pressure vanished, and Lucius staggered half a step as the restraint released, free again.

Ludger didn’t move to threaten him. He didn’t raise a weapon. He just watched, making it clear that freedom wasn’t permission.

“You probably want to talk with him,” Ludger said to Viola, nodding slightly in her direction. “So do it.”

Then he turned his attention back to Lucius, eyes narrowing.

“But before that,” Ludger continued, “you’re going to tell me who gave you the information.”

Lucius’ jaw tightened.

“Who told you there was knowledge on this side of the labyrinth,” Ludger clarified. “Who pointed you here?”

Lucius went quiet. Not thoughtful, quiet. Defensive quiet.

The kind that came when a person realized the question wasn’t optional, and that answering it would reveal something they’d been trying very hard not to name out loud.

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