He tries to speak. His jaw will not move.
He tries to open his eyes. The lids remain sealed, heavy as stone.
Panic flares, bright and sharp, but his heart beats slowly. Too slowly. As if something chemical dampens even his fear.
The last memory surfaces through the fog: Janus across from him in the dining hall. Those gray-violet eyes, empty and distant. The words he spoke, flat and terrible.
"I ate them."
Then Janus lunging at him. The sudden impact, his forehead cracking against Lias's nose. Blood, hot and copper-bright. Pain exploding across his face, his vision going white.
The eunuchs pulling them apart. Forcing tea into trembling hands.
The tea.
The realization cuts through the fog with sudden clarity. The eunuchs forced tea into everyone's hands after the attack.
Lias drank his.
I was drugged.
The knowledge settles cold and certain. Whatever was in that tea has locked his body away from him, turned him into a passenger in his own flesh.
The swaying continues. Footsteps echo around him, not his own. Multiple sets, moving in synchronized silence.
He tries again to open his eyes. Nothing. The paralysis holds absolute.
But he can hear.
Fabric rustling. The whisper of robes against stone. Breathing, steady and measured. The soft pad of feet on polished floors.
And voices.
Lias's awareness sharpens. The eunuchs are speaking. The sounds drift around him, wet and guttural, like water gurgling through broken pipes. Consonants without shape. Vowels stretched into meaningless groans.
His mind rejects the noise. It sounds wrong. Damaged. As if tongues are required to form proper speech and these speakers have none.
But beneath the mangled sounds, something else emerges.
Words, forming in his mind with perfect clarity.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Heavier than he looks.
Lias freezes. That thought was not his own. The phrasing is wrong, the concern alien.
Careful with the head. The blow split skin.
Another voice. Different tone. Though tone is the wrong word because the actual sounds remain the same wet garble.
Yet Lias understands.
The hands gripping his legs shift slightly. One palm presses against his calf, warm through the fabric of his robes.
The clarity sharpens. The garbled sounds resolve into meaning, perfect and precise.
The Dularch's orders grow darker each day.
This batch will not survive. Most of them. Too young, untrained.
The old ways, he calls it. But the old ways never sent children to die blind.
The thoughts flow around him, between the eunuchs carrying his paralyzed body. Lias focuses on them, drawn to their clarity despite the drug-fog clouding everything else.
Do you remember when the trials were survivable?
I remember them being allowed to train first.
Now they are thrown into the depths like meat to wolves.
Lias's mind races. They are discussing the trials. The real trials that come after the First Baptism, the tests that separate Initiates from Novices.
How many will return from this year's descent?
Half, if we are fortunate.
A quarter, more likely. They know nothing.
The carrying-rhythm shifts. They are climbing stairs now, his body tilting backward as they ascend.
The Dularch says it will strengthen them.
The Dularch is mad with grief.
A pause. Heavy with meaning.
Careful. Such thoughts are dangerous.
We have no tongues to betray us.
We have minds. And there are those who can read them.
Fear spikes through the stream of understanding, sharp and sudden. Lias feels it echo in his own chest, his drugged heart picking up speed.
But the voices continue, quieter now, more careful.
The boy we carry. Did you see what broke his nose?
The hands gripping Lias tighten slightly. He feels himself shifted, adjusted. They have reached a landing.
More dangerous words.
The Exarchs watch him closely now.
We all do. And what we see frightens us.
A door opens. The temperature drops. Lias feels cool air wash over his exposed skin.
The infirmary. Lay him in the third alcove.
They move again. Shorter steps now, navigating a smaller space. Lias's body tilts, then settles onto something soft. A bed, he realizes. Or a cot.
His nose will heal. Bone-knitters will see to that.
If he lives to reach them.
If any of them liv—
Pain.
White-hot and searing, splitting Lias's skull from crown to jaw. He tries to scream, but his paralyzed throat produces no sound.
The thread he pulled snaps back like a released bowstring. The eunuchs' voices vanish, replaced by a roaring emptiness that threatens to swallow him whole.
Too much. The realization comes through waves of agony. I reached too far.
His consciousness fractures. Fragments scatter like broken glass.
A Semblance.
The thought surfaces, clear and terrible in its implications.
I have a Semblance.
He should not. The First Baptism was days ago. His torq is still new, barely bonded to his flesh. Semblances manifest later, years later, after training and meditation and careful cultivation.
But here it is. Raw and uncontrolled, tearing through his mind like lightning through a storm.
I could understand them.
Not through their garbled speech. Through something deeper.
Their thoughts. Their knowledge. It becomes mine when we touch.
The pain intensifies. His drugged body cannot move, cannot express the agony tearing through his skull. He is trapped, locked inside flesh that will not respond while his mind burns itself out.
I have a Semblance. The thought comes with strange calm.
Then nothing.
True unconsciousness takes him, and Lias falls into depths where even understanding cannot follow.
Shattered Empire is 20 chapters ahead on Patreon, and that’s only the beginning.
-
Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
-
Ablations (ongoing)
Patreon.com/cw/u792045