Prince Victus's visit was a seismic shift. My world was no longer the four walls of my room and the silent war against poison. It was now a chessboard, and I had been acknowledged as a piece—a strange, unpredictable pawn. The calculation in his grey eyes had been clearer than any threat: You are interesting. Do not become inconvenient.
His passive protection was a cage of gilded wire. It meant the clumsy attempts on my life would likely cease. Valerius's faction, or whoever used the 'V & Flame' as a false flag, would now risk exposing their move against Victus's new "interest." But it also meant I was under sharper scrutiny. My survival was no longer just my own secret; it was a variable in Victus's equations.
This changed everything.
My nightly purges of the poison took on a new urgency. The void's cold erosion of my self was a price I had to pay for clarity, for the strength to be more than a piece to be moved. Night after night, I paid it. The last vestiges of the toxin were like deep-rooted weeds, clinging to the marrow of my bones. Removing them was exquisite agony, each Void Pin feeling like it drew out a fragment of my soul along with the venom.
The morning after I finally, truly, eradicated the last trace, I awoke different.
The constant, low-grade pain was gone. The weakness in my limbs had receded, replaced by a lean, wiry strength. I could take a full breath without a hitch in my lungs. I was healed.
But I was also hollow.
Liam's memories felt like a book I had read long ago, the emotions faded to sketches. Kieran's childhood terror was a distant rumor. When I looked at my hands, they were tools, not parts of me. The bead against my chest was the most real thing, a cold black sun whose gravity held my remnants together.
I was not a person. I was a will, encased in flesh, orbiting a void.
It was time to stop being a patient and start being a power.
My education began in earnest. I devoured the stolen primer, moving beyond basics. I studied the palace map until I could walk its corridors blindfolded in my mind. I listened to the gossip Elara now freely brought, her debt a forgotten ghost and her loyalty cemented by shared bloodshed. She was my eyes and ears, reporting on Victus's movements, Valerius's public bluster, the minor dramas of the court.
I learned that Victus was the "Spider Prince." He controlled the College of Assessors, the empire's bureaucracy. His power was not in flaming fists, but in tax ledgers, supply lines, and the quiet approval or denial of permits. He built webs, not bonfires.
Valerius, the "Flame Prince," was the opposite. Commander of the Ignis Guard, hero of the border skirmishes, all roaring charisma and public displays of fire magic. He was the favourite, the obvious heir.
And I was the void between them.
My first active move as a free agent was not against a person, but against a system. I needed a source of information Victus's spiders wouldn't touch, and Valerius's brutes wouldn't understand.
The palace's main mana-lamp array.
The great crystals that illuminated the halls and courtyards were fed by a central mana-conduit that ran like a glowing artery beneath the foundation. The primer mentioned that fluctuations in this conduit could cause "sensory echoes"—brief, distorted reflections of strong emotional or magical events nearby, captured in the crystal lattice.
It was a security flaw no one cared about, because reading those echoes required a rare and useless affinity for Crystal or pure Mind magic.
But I didn't need to read the echoes. I just needed to access them.
In the deepest hour of the night, I found the maintenance access for the conduit—a small, rusted grate in a forgotten sub-cellar. Using my lockpicks and a surge of void-chilled strength, I pried it open. The pulse of raw, unfiltered mana from within was a physical pressure, a blinding cacophony of light and sensation to my void-attuned senses. It was repulsive, like standing in a screaming gale.
I focused on the bead. I didn't try to fray or delete the mana. Instead, I envisioned a Void Lens. A filter. I poured my will into shaping it, a disk of absolute stillness in the raging flow.
The effort was monumental. My vision greyed at the edges. The cold inside me bit deeper, freezing the breath in my throat. But I held it.
I pushed the conceptual Lens into the conduit's stream.
The effect was instantaneous. Where the Lens intersected the flow, the chaotic mana-light didn't vanish. It was calmed. Still. For that thin slice, the conduit became a silent, dark mirror.
And in that mirror, reflections began to flash.
Not images. Impressions. They slammed into my perception like falling stones:
The heat of rage in a council chamber. A gilded hand slamming on a map. (Valerius).
A cold satisfaction in a shadowed office, the scent of sealing wax and cheap wine. (Victus).
The sharp, metallic fear of a messenger bringing bad news to the Spider Prince's web.
A flicker of green, unfamiliar mana—sickly and invasive—in the eastern herb garden, late at night.
The last one caught my attention. It was wrong. Not Fire, not Earth, not any of the standard affinities. It was foreign. Heretical, even.
I held the Lens for only thirty seconds before the strain threatened to shatter my mind. I released it, staggering back from the conduit, my nose bleeding a thin, icy trickle. The information was fragmentary, chaotic. But it was real. Unfiltered by spies or agendas.
I had tapped the palace's nervous system.
Over the next week, I returned. Each session was shorter, more targeted. I learned to angle my Void Lens, to sift for specific "frequencies" of emotion or magic. I couldn't spy on conversations, but I could detect lies in a council chamber (flashes of anxious, spiking mana), or secret meetings (clusters of subdued, focused energy in odd locations).
I built a map not of stone, but of intent.
I learned that Valerius's fury was often a performance, his mana flaring brightly but without the core-deep heat of true rage. Victus's calm was absolute, his mana a still, deep pool with vicious currents hidden beneath.
And I tracked the sickly green mana. It appeared irregularly, always at night, near the eastern wall. The royal herb garden was there, but also the abandoned Temple of the Verdant Mother, a minor deity whose worship had faded.
My curiosity was a cold, clinical thing. This green mana was an anomaly. An unknown variable. I needed to understand it.
On a moonless night, I went to see for myself.
The herb garden was walled, fragrant with night-blooming jasmine and rosemary. The green mana signature was faint tonight, a fading smear near the old temple's sealed door. The temple itself was small, made of weathered limestone, overgrown with ivy.
As I approached, the bead at my chest gave a sudden, sharp tug. Not the gentle pull of the cellar door. This was a jerk, a warning.
The temple door was not simply sealed. It was warded.
A complex, vicious lattice of Earth and Life mana was woven into the wood and stone, designed to trigger thorns, entangling roots, and a silencing fog on any unauthorized entry. It was not palace work. It was older, wilder, and deeply defensive.
But to my void-sight, it was also… deliciously structured. A puzzle.
I raised a hand, not to touch, but to trace the patterns in the air. The green mana I'd sensed was inside. This ward was keeping something in. Or keeping everyone else out.
The void in me hummed, not with hunger, but with a profound, intellectual appreciation. Here was a system. A beautiful, intricate system to be understood.
And then, to be taken apart.
I smiled for the first time in weeks. It felt strange on my face.
I had a new project.
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