Minutes earlier:
The echo of chants resonated through the ancient tunnels like a distant murmur. They were not human. They had no tongue or rhythm. These were voices without origin, charged with a power that made the blood vibrate. Kai, still weakened, covered his ears, but the voices slipped through his bones.
"Can you hear them?" Arisha asked, crouched beside him. The skin on her neck shimmered with a faint blue glow; the moon mark had spread across her collarbone like roots beneath the flesh.
Kai tried to sit up, but his body burned.
"I feel something calling me... from within," he murmured, touching his chest. The incomplete triskel was still there, alive like an ember beneath his skin. "Arisha, if I lose control..."
"You won't," she cut him off. "We're not the same anymore. The fire changed us, and if we're going to burn... let it be with everyone here, understood, Kai?" she snapped.
Grabbing Kai's claws and pressing them into her skin, he muttered:
"What are you doing?" He propped himself up with one arm to see through his blurred vision. "Arisha, don't."
A simple scratch was enough.
"With this, you'll stop talking nonsense and help me find Baco. That slave left me again... but I'll make him pay."
A drop of her blood fell onto Kai, and like an antidote, his internal bleeding stopped. His incomplete triskel glowed stronger, as if regenerating his body. A greenish aura surrounded him, and little by little, clarity returned to his eyes.
"Your eyes, Arisha… Nevri Blanco," he whispered.
They glowed with more passion than before. Even the aura around her was now bluish and fierce, almost beastlike.
"Get some rest. I'll be back, Kai."
She stood, leaving him propped against the wall.
In a darker corner of the tunnel, Lessa tried to contain her decay. Her leg had stopped responding. Her skin cracked like dry stone, and a black-veined circle had formed on her belly. She said nothing. She just opened her blood book, the same one she'd hidden since the orphanage, and flipped through it with trembling fingers.
"Mark of the Voice. Dead tongue. Legacy of the sealed ones."
The letters began to move. They screamed. Lessa clenched her teeth until she bled. It wasn't just poison coursing through her veins—it was a legacy. One she had been forbidden to mention... and now it was awakening.
Now:
On the surface, the fake celebrations over the supposed victory against Klaus were grotesque. Mikhael, still wearing a cracked mask, walked among nobles and commoners alike, parading as a savior. He showed no emotion, but inside, he savored every admiring look, every applause meant for someone else. Klaus was dust. And now, he was the voice.
A trembling messenger approached him.
"My lord… one of the survivors, young Balt, has awakened. He's speaking… about you right now to the interrogators."
Mikhael didn't answer immediately. He merely turned to the horizon, where the ruins of the Golden Tower still smoked.
"Then let them all speak. And let them do it with fear," he replied, not even glancing at the boy.
Elsewhere in the tunnel, Baco dropped to his knees. He had run without rest, following an illusory trail. But the hallway before him ended in a wall of bones. Skulls with ritual marks. Interwoven arms spiraling together. All of it hidden beneath the city, buried under centuries of denial.
"What… is this?" he whispered.
A voice replied.
"The beginning of the end."
Nevri emerged from the shadows, cloaked in a cold aura. He wasn't walking—he hovered just above the ground. His face was calm, but his eyes burned with blue fire. In his hand, he held an obsidian box sealed with blood.
"Do you want answers, son of ruin?" he asked Baco.
Baco didn't respond. His body was taut, like a beast ready to strike.
"Your body breaks because it's incomplete. It was sealed when you were born. To protect you… or to silence you."
The box in Nevri's hands opened on its own, revealing a small bone fragment, engraved with symbols identical to those on Kai's chest.
"This belongs to her," Nevri said. "Or to Lio."
Baco stepped back.
"Who are you?"
Nevri didn't answer right away. He touched the fragment, and an image burst into Baco's mind:
A figure with a purple cloak and white hair lay on the ground. From her womb, thick, black blood oozed, as if life itself was rotting from within.
She held a baby in her arms. She murmured words Baco couldn't understand… but his soul recognized.
"You are not a curse… you are the key to a new beginning," the voice whispered, while behind them, in an incubator, floated a dark-haired boy. "Let me free you—from the chains in your mind and your heart."
The vision warped. Baco felt cold metal beneath his back, the hum of machines, the metallic scent of blood mixed with formaldehyde.
A shadow leaned over him.
"How long until he awakens?" asked a familiar voice.
"That depends on her," answered another, deeper voice, as if dragged from the abyss.
Baco gasped and came to, sweating. The bone fragment still glowed in Nevri's hand.
Meanwhile, Arisha froze. Something had struck her—not physically, but in her consciousness. A voice. A sensation.
"Lessa," she whispered. "Kai… where the hell am I?"
She looked around, worried, at the clean and simple room.
"Is something wrong, miss?"
"Who?" Arisha asked.
The woman didn't reply. She turned toward the hallway from which voices echoed. There was no light—only a living, pulsating shadow. Arisha struck a locked door, whose handle burned like ice under her touch.
At that moment, from the highest balcony, Mikhael held the mask in his fingers and tossed it into the void.
"I don't need masks anymore. Only obedience."
Below, the crowd cheered.
But among them, a boy with white eyes opened his mouth… and a voice that was not human came forth.
"The seal… has been broken."
At that instant, all the triskeles, visible or not, burned in unison like bright lights in the sky, and a burst of white light shot from the earth to the heavens, turning the sky dark.
"So Baco figured out how to use his power," Mikhael muttered, giving the signal for the torches to be raised and the gates to be closed. "Let's see if you can come for Arisha after what I'll show you… damn slave."