Chapter 65: Severance of Will II

There was nothing distinct in the silence that felt wrong. It was that feeling she had when she was kidnapped, and at her arrival here at Blackvale. It all seemed to correspond to the inaptness, in an odd manner.

Lucrezia tried to affront the sensation, focusing on the arena where the creature remained. That sensation she’d always felt for him seemed to cease to exist, leaving her free from the torture of her mind.

The sound came first from below like a low vibration that crawled up the bones rather than through the air. The obsidian floor answered it in kind when the symbols along the perimeter brightened until they cast long, warped shadows across the blood-slick stone where Vaeron stood at the center of it all.

He had forced himself upright, though the effort showed in the tight line of his jaw and the slight tremor in his arms. Blood still clung to him along his ribs, and was tacky at his fingers, staining the hem of his tunic. He looked less like a god now than a man who had refused to fall simply because the ground had not yet claimed him. Or so she thought, and Lucrezia’s hands clenched together in her lap.

This felt wrong in a way the first phase had not. That had been brutal, yes, but comprehensible. It was a duel where she watched bodies fail, flesh tear, pain accumulate, and even death appear as a distant, unwelcome possibility. As a… mortal, she thought, the word sounding strange in her mind, Lucrezia understood those things. She couldn’t exactly place words into what she felt, but this felt… thinner, as if something essential perhaps, had been drawn too close to the surface.

The symbols flared brighter and Vaeron inhaled sharply. His posture shifted only slightly, but enough that she noticed the way his shoulders squared then slackened again, swaying before he caught himself, and her breath hitched in response.

The air changed into something that wasn’t air anymore. Lucrezia could not explain it better than that. She could only hope that whatever phase this was wasn’t as bad as the last one. Or worse even.

The arena felt suddenly hollow, when sound dulled further, so that she didn’t need to be told it was part of the process of Severance. However, Lucrezia wondered what exactly was severed of him this time.

Below, Vaeron lowered his gaze to his hands. He flexed his fingers once, then again, slower the second time. She watched his brow furrow in something closer to absence, that little action a sign that whatever was in his possession was already stripped off.

The ground trembled at once causing the obsidian floor to lose its sheen. The blood darkened until it looked old, absorbed rather than fresh. The symbols along the perimeter dimmed also, their sharp geometry blurring like ink left too long in water.

That same air that was all… wrong… no longer vibrated. It settled, heavy and close, pressing against Lucrezia’s skin until she found herself breathing shallowly.

She was right about one thing. This phase wouldn’t be any easier.

Vaeron remained kneeling at the center, his head bowed, shoulders rising and falling in slow, uneven breaths. Blood continued to drip from him, but the arena no longer responded to it. And for the first time since the Severance began, the space seemed… indifferent.

Lucrezia did not trust that. Neither, she suspected, did Vaeron.

A low sound emerged; although not from below, not from above, but from everywhere at once. It wasn’t quite a voice; like a sound of something being acknowledged.

The woman beside Lucrezia straightened. “You aren’t wrong to react this way. Most first-timers react far worse than you do,” She said, grabbing her attention away from the arena that seemed to make her paler as seconds passed.

“First-timers?” Lucrezia questioned back. “Mortals are allowed here? To witness the trial?”

“Not mortals in general,” She corrected. “Punishments,”

Lucrezia’s stomach sank.

To think—no, to believe—that beings like her truly existed; Punishments wrought of flesh were something Lucrezia could scarcely comprehend. The notion alone unsettled her. She wondered how long it would be before her small deception, her fragile impersonation, was exposed—before Blackvale swallowed her whole.

Her gaze flickered to the dais, where the Nameless King still lounged upon his throne. His expression was unreadable, yet it sent a cold shiver crawling down her spine.

He knows… That thought terrified her more than any consequences that might follow. She wrenched her eyes away, forcing herself to breathe.

Lucrezia had been raised on the doctrine that the Sins were superiors—wiser, sharper, and above all, divine instruments of the gods’ will. To be bound to one in marriage was to be bound to judgment itself, and if that were true, then surely he—her husband—must know of Veximoor’s clever little deceit.

Her heart thundered in her chest at the manner in which her introspection had changed course.

The creature despised werewolf kind with the same fervor she despised and feared her father. If the truth had reached him, why hadn’t he stopped the wedding? Why allow such a blasphemy to proceed?

The answer was no. She didn’t think so. There was no world in which he would accept someone unchosen, someone unworthy of the title of Punishment. It wasn’t a blessing but a curse but certainly not someone like her. A… cursed breed with a cursed fate. A living proof of a lineage her father had meticulously erased from history, convincing the world that such tainted blood had long since vanished.

And yet, here she stood, unmasked only by her own terror, waiting for the moment it would no longer be enough to hide. And Lucrezia hoped that by then, she would have achieved her mission a long time ago.

Below, Vaeron lifted his head, and her focus shifted back to him. His eyes were no longer empty, nor were they whole when she stared. There was focus there now, but it wavered, looking around with the same motive he had when faced with his opponents.

Lucrezia couldn’t help but wonder if there would be another opponent for this phase.

As if in response to her thought, the arena opened conceptually. The space around him folded inward, compressing until distance lost meaning, and the walls of the arena became irrelevant, present yet unreachable. Sound receded further still, until Lucrezia could hear nothing but her own breathing and the faint, unsteady cadence of her husband’s.

Then the first figure appeared, standing several paces from Vaeron, facing him, looking uninjured and… whole.

What she meant by whole, was that his body looked real, unlike his whose essence was stripped out. Clad in armor unmarred by battle, posture upright and composed, his expression was calm, unreadable, and his eyes cold with certainty.

Power radiated from him in the same manner as Vaeron’s when he was still… him. The quiet authority of something that had never been questioned, and never will.

Vaeron stared at him until he took off the helmet shielding his face, and Lucrezia felt the recognition before she understood it.

“That’s-” She whispered, her voice trembling from disbelief and shock. Isn’t that him?

“Yes,” The woman beside her said what she couldn’t finish. “What he was. What was made of him and was designed by him,” She said, her voice coming clearly through the sudden stillness in the amphitheater. “Each one of them is his truth, and in each, one must be chosen. The wrong one? The arena would recoil. It will turn hostile, and the accusation will be proven in spectacle and blood. The right one?” She let out a humorless laugh that terrified Lucrezia more than she imagined the truth should be. “Then the arena will accept it. It will bind us to that truth, carve it into memory and law, and make us complicit in what he became. We will surely survive the choice, but we will carry it, and the arena will never let us forget that we chose it willingly.”

Which was what made it dangerous, Lucrezia thought. Which was what made the gods defer from mortality. While mortals hold trials, the one guilty or innocent endures the weight of the wrong or right and the magistrates are spared. But here, the gods are also affected.

It should’ve made her feel the justice it bore, but the tradition itself wasn’t. She couldn’t imagine something being a trial and an entertainment at the same time. Publicly disparaged, given a choice to choose who would win or not, and allowed the freedom of witnessing.

She felt sick.

“If you cannot bear the sight and require a moment, you can retire,” Lucrezia heard her say and she forced herself to breathe.

She’d not realized how pale she was until air rushed back into her lungs, adding color to her face. Yes, she thought. She so badly wanted to, but that decision shattered when she heard a familiar voice and her back stiffened.

“Unable to handle the scene, Lady Anastasia?” Vaeloria called with a tone close to mockery, and Lucrezia clenched and unclenched her fist, taking a deep breaths to control herself.

The rest of the others attention shifted from the arena to her, and Lucrezia felt several gazes pierce through her thick cloak, leaving a scar on her skin.

Ensuring she was half-perfectly fine, Lucrezia’s eyes met hers in a practised civility. “I’m perfectly fine, Lady Vaeloria. You worry for nothing,”

It seemed the woman was about to respond, when a sound distracted her, dragging her attention towards the arena.

Lucrezia released a deep sigh. That was close, she thought, and looked at the woman beside her. “I can manage, thank you,”

The woman didn’t look convinced but nodded nonetheless.

Her voice cracked from the tremor writhing inside her when she spoke again, “Does the… trial happen annually?” Lucrezia remembered she mentioned first-timers which are others like her, and she wondered if they witnessed the same thing occasionally. Or was it part of the tradition that a Punishment must witness a trial?

The woman’s eyes never wavered, especially when she shook her head and answered, “No,” She said, and that caught her off guard. No? “Depending on how severe the charges are, the trial is built as a judgment ground, especially when it’s beyond us,”

Something beyond the gods? Lucrezia might’ve laughed out at the thought if there was even a trace of humour left in her.

“It has only happened once. Now being the second time,” She said, looking at her. “Your husband is not merely a nuisance. He is a precedent,”

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