Chapter 501: Void

A working so old it had been struck from imperial memory, not because it failed… but because it worked too well.

The air did not freeze.

It went dead.

Sound dulled first. The distant collapse of the palace faded, as if the corridor had been wrapped in thick velvet. Even Bianca’s own breath felt swallowed.

Eris lifted her hand to summon fire.

Nothing answered.

No flame. No spark. Not even heat.

What should have burned simply… vanished.

Eris took a step backward, and for the first time, her expression sharpened, not with anger, but calculation. The power inside her surged, pressing against her ribs, her veins, her spine.

It had nowhere to go.

Her fire was not being smothered.

It was being denied.

“Oh,” Eris murmured, quiet with something dangerously close to interest. “So that’s what you became.”

Bianca laughed, thin and wild. “Trapped,” she hissed. “All that fire—and nowhere to let it breathe.”

She didn’t give Eris time to adapt.

The moment the dead space held, Bianca moved, hurling the jagged shards she had concealed, each one driven by desperation and the last of her strength.

The first shard caught Eris across the shoulder. The second sliced her cheek.

For the first time since the trial began, Eris felt the sharp, stinging reality of physical pain.

She stumbled back, her hand going to her face, her fingers coming away red. The heat inside her was building to a dangerous, internal pressure, but the world outside her was a dead, silent vacuum.

Bianca laughed, a high, broken sound that echoed in the velvet stillness. “How does it feel, Eris? To be human again? To be weak?”

She raised her hands for the killing blow, dozens of obsidian shards hovering in the air like a cloud of black glass.

“Die,” Bianca whispered.

Eris remained standing, though she was a map of jagged, crimson lines. Shards of obsidian were buried in the meat of her arms and the slope of her chest, yet she didn’t fall.

When Bianca, fueled by a manic, shrieking confidence, aimed a cluster of black glass directly for Eris’s stomach, the air seemed to thicken into a physical wall.

The shards didn’t shatter; they simply stopped, suspended in a dead pocket of space inches from Eris’s skin.

Both women froze. Bianca’s eyes darted between the hovering shards and Eris’s face, her confusion turning into a frantic, ugly twitch.

She assumed she had simply missed her mark, that the void she that surrounded them had distorted her depth perception.

She unleashed another volley, her hands blurring as she threw everything she had at Eris’s midsection.

Again, the shards hung in the air, held by an invisible, crushing force.

Eris understood. She glanced at the suspended glass, then at Bianca, and her mind sharpened like steel.

Bianca hadn’t merely chilled the air. She had carved a pocket of stillness so absolute that fire itself seemed to forget it belonged.

Pyronox screamed in her marrow, coiling through her veins, desperate to escape but it found no path.

Her flames flickered in her mind, and died before they could ignite. Her power pressed against her, trapped, restrained by something heavier than fire itself.

She was a furnace sealed inside a lead vault. If she tried to blast her way out with raw power, she would cook her own organs.

The heat would backflow, destabilizing the bond with the dragon and tearing her apart from the inside out.

She changed her strategy. She stopped trying to burn.

Most fire mages projected outward, throwing their flames into the world. Eris did not.

She drew her fire inward, gathering it deep inside her, letting it coil in her chest like a living, writhing thing. It burned, it throbbed, it begged to be free but she did not release it.

The cold could not touch her. It could not snuff her fire. She let it pulse and grow, and when she moved, the air itself shuddered.

A tremor ran through the corridor, not from frost or ice, but from the weight of a dragon claiming her ground.

Bianca felt it.

The space itself bent to the will of the fire that refused to burn, that refused to yield.

The void didn’t melt. It shattered.

The air itself seemed to crack like glass under structural overload, the sudden resonance of Eris’s power tearing through Bianca’s focus.

The velvet silence of the corridor was replaced by a thunderous, ear-splitting boom that sent the ice shards flying in every direction.

Eris took a step forward. The void was gone. The air carried her heat once more, and it was glorious.

“You’ve had your turn,” Eris said. She was ten feet away now, her silhouette framed by the flickering, reborn shadows.

She looked at Bianca, not as a rival, but as a predator looks at a wounded mouse. “Now. It’s mine.”

The power began to build, visible now in the way the air shimmered and danced around Eris’s hands.

But she didn’t reach for a fire blast. She didn’t want a quick death for the woman who had threatened Rael. She wanted something that would last.

She reached out with her mind, targeting the water within Bianca’s own body.

The human form was a vessel of liquids, blood, bile, moisture.

Eris began to raise the temperature, not in the air, but inside Bianca’s veins.

It was a careful application of heat. Slow. Steady. Agonizing.

Bianca felt the warmth first, a strange, internal flush that she didn’t understand.

She thought for a second that her own magic was recovering, but then the warmth became heat. It was wrong. It was coming from the inside.

“What—what are you—” Bianca gasped, her hand flying to her chest. Her eyes went wide with a sudden, sharp realization of her own mortality.

The heat spiked. Bianca’s blood began to warm toward the boiling point. It was the sensation of being cooked from within, a slow, methodical destruction of tissue and nerve.

Bianca let out a sound that wasn’t a scream—it was a wet, choked gurgle of pure, unadulterated agony.

She fell to her knees, her fingers clawing at the stone floor as her heart began to race in a frantic, losing battle.

The air in her lungs felt like steam. Her organs were being seared, her very essence being scalded by the woman she had dared to call weak.

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