Chapter 70: Voices

The woman beside her noticed her sudden stillness, and her brow furrowed in concern. “Lady Anastasia?” She called. “Are you… alright?”

Lucrezia snapped her head to the side faster than she intended. The sudden movement made the woman recoil on instinct, drawing her face back as if bracing for impact. Lucrezia’s eyes flared wide, her breath hitching as her pulse thundered in her ears, loud enough to drown out everything else.

When the question finally settled, she opened her mouth to speak. Was she alright? Her throat went dry, barely containing the answer to her thought, and she nodded faintly, barely imperceptible, unable to answer.

Suddenly, her voice became lost under the barricade of something unknown, and she looked away before the woman could notice how flushed she was.

The voices didn’t pause and continued, weaving questions, judgments, and statements directly into her skull.

“…undeniably mistaken. I don’t believe his survival depends entirely on this trial,” Another came in, followed by a sharp sound that made her teeth clench, and her eardrums burn painfully.

It was too much… It was becoming too much to handle that her vision swam. The arena noise returned all at once, crashing over her like a wave, but the voice lingered beneath it.

Lucrezia wavered on the edge of disbelief, trapped between convincing herself it was nothing more than a fevered trick of her imagination and the terrifying possibility that the voices were real.

Each word pressed against her thoughts, and with every syllable, the line between what she knew and what she feared blurred further.

Was she hearing voices? She questioned the absurdity. O-Oh Gods…

Her pulse hammered in her ears, while the crushing weight of different voices obscured her sanity. Her fingers trembled against the railing, trying to focus on the arena.

“He’s a Sin. Creatures unworthy of the trial are proven mortal-descendants,” A masculine voice intercepted this time around and her fingers curled into the railing as she fought the rising panic.

The voices did not overlap the world around her, but moved through it, weaving beneath the noise and threading themselves into her thoughts. She couldn’t tell how the voices spoke without their owner in sight, only that they did, and it frightened her more than anything.

However, the cold certainty that no one else could hear them terrified her the most.

“Mortality has shaped his mind,” Someone added in reference to the latter. “His thoughts, his choices, and ways of thinking. Surely that should be the sign we’re looking for,”

Lucrezia drew in a sharp breath to control herself from the weight of the words and voices inside her head, but the more she attempted to, the worse it became.

“He is a threat to the balance,”

“An abomination,” The curse was sharp and cruel, and a strained gasp escaped her lips. “If his mind is proven to be initiated by mortality in the past years, he’s dangerous to our world,”

“The only way to correct it is to eliminate him,”

More and more voices overlapped, one after another, until they blurred into a single, crushing roar. Lucrezia now drove her nails into her palms, biting down hard as if the pain might anchor and drag her back from the abyss of her own mind and into something solid… something real.

Cold clammy sweat broke across her skin, trickling down her spine despite the bitter, unforgiving air. The wind gnawed at her, but it was her corset that stole her breath most cruelly.

Each inhale came shallow and fractured, the breaths pressing in as though they meant to crush her ribs altogether. She tried to breathe through it, to count the seconds between breaths, but panic surged faster than any reason.

How could she reason when the cyclone inside her mind was a world that threatened to destroy her? The world she knew tilted, and sounds grew distant, then unbearably close again in a too-loud-too-near manner.

Her vision swam, edges darkening as she staggered, and her fingers grasped for anything that might steady her. But what could steady the chaos inside her?

Her fabric burned against her skin as her heart hammered wildly, and still the voices would not stop. Lucrezia squeezed her eyes shut, willing the noise to fade, clinging to the fragile hope that if she could just endure a moment longer, the storm inside her would finally break.

“Lady Anastasia?”

Lucrezia didn’t try to look, believing the voice was another from that of her mind. Gods, she didn’t know what to believe. Her fear and panic had taken over her rationality, and the corset crushed her ribs physically.

Breathe, Lucrezia. A deep breath, she told herself, but another voice mingled inside her mind before she realized it.

“I can feel something,”

This one was familiar, carrying the weight of something that made her still. There was judgment in it, and something far worse; certainty.

Lucrezia pressed her hands to her ears as if that might help, as if she could shut it out the way one might block the wind. Stop, she told herself, as though it might help her situation. Enough. Her breath hitched, and for a moment the voices blurred again, fading into a dull rush.

“Like a presence,” The voice continued once more, closer now, and almost thoughtful, settling heavy in her chest.

No, no, no…

She felt a movement somewhere nearby, and eyes shifted slowly, searching the entire amphitheater. Lucrezia could not see them, yet her skin prickled all the same, a crawling awareness tracing along her arms and down her spine.

“Lady Anasta…”

Lucrezia swayed, the edges of the world softening before she could stop it.

Her vision blurred, colors bleeding into one another and she blinked, once, then again, but it made no difference.

N-Not here… she tried to anchor herself. Not now… P-Please, not now… and clenched her hands at her sides, fighting to stay upright, fighting to hold onto that name.

Her knees threatened to buckle as the edges of the world dissolved completely, leaving her suspended between panic and the unknown. And then, silence followed right after, but the certainty of something watching pressed against her chest, until darkness grasped her as well.

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