The revelation wasn't a memory. It was a fault line.
It shattered the smooth, cold ice of my being. It didn't flood back as a narrative. It erupted in jagged, sensory shards that tore through the void's numbness like glass.
The taste of cheap noodles, the only warm meal of the week.
The sound of his sister's laugh, a tiny, bright bell in a dark room.
The smell of stale beer and sweat as a heavy body loomed over me in the dark.
The wet, hot slickness on my hands. Not blood. Something worse. The feeling of a kitchen knife grating on bone, over and over and over.
Liam Volkov. That wasn't my name. That was a mask I'd built in my last moments of sanity, a persona of control and logic to armor a shattered soul. My name… my name was…
It didn't matter. The person who bore it was dead, erased as thoroughly as Corvin. What remained was this patchwork creature: the hollow shell of Kieran, filled with the screaming ghost of a boy who killed to protect, and the cosmic silence of the Star-Eater.
The ghost had a sister. Her name was Maya. She had eyes that crinkled when she smiled, even when she was hungry. She would hum songs from cartoons they'd watched together before everything broke. She was sick. Dying. And I had left her alone.
The void in my chest didn't just hum. It recoiled.
For the first time, the Star-Eater's presence felt… contaminated. Not by the ghost's emotions, but by its sheer, desperate humanity. The all-consuming hunger met a grief so vast it was its own kind of event horizon. They warred inside me—the need to annihilate and the need to preserve.
I collapsed to the floor of my chamber, the cold stone doing nothing to numb the psychic storm. I didn't weep. The void had stolen my tears. I dry-heaved, clutching my head as the two realities—the strategist, the prince, the killer, the brother—smashed against each other.
I had wondered what was left to build. Lyra's warning echoed.
Now I knew.
Maya.
Somewhere, in a world of concrete and fluorescent lights and broken systems, my sister was dying. And I was here, in a world of magic and monsters, learning to unmake reality.
The cold purpose that settled over me was different. It wasn't the void's sterile calculation. It was the white-hot, frozen fury of the ghost. It had a target now. Not a throne. Not revenge on faceless patrons.
A way home.
Or a way to bring her here. Or a way to send her a cure. Something.
The Star-Eater's power wasn't for survival or politics. It was a tool. The ultimate lockpick. And I was going to use it to pick the lock between worlds.
This changed everything.
Blind Master Orin, Victus, Valerius, the 'V & Flame'—they were insects buzzing around a statue. My war was not with them. My war was with the fabric of existence itself.
But to wage that war, I needed to be stronger than I had ever imagined. I needed to master the void not as a scalpel, but as a can opener for the cosmos. And to do that, I needed to be free of the insects.
Orin first.
He was a threat because he could sense the void. He was a warden. He would try to excise me. I could not run. I could not hide forever. I had to deal with him.
But not with negation. With corruption.
Lyra's lessons took on a brutal new focus. I stopped asking about theory. I demanded application. "How do I make a stillness hungry?" I asked her the next night, my voice stripped of all pretense, the ghost's desperation bleeding through the prince's flat tone.
She studied me, her sharp eyes missing nothing. "Something has changed in you."
"I remembered why I fight," I said. It was the truth.
She nodded slowly. "To make a passive stillness hungry… you would need to introduce a catalyst of want into a system designed to want nothing. A paradox. It would require a sympathetic link to something he already desires to be rid of."
"The void," I said.
"Precisely. But you cannot give him the void itself. You must give him the fear of the void. Amplify it. Make the silence he guards so profound it begins to whisper his name." She rummaged through her shelves, pulling out a vial of faintly shimmering, grey liquid. "This is Echo-Sap. Drawn from trees that grow over mass graves. It doesn't hold memory. It holds… absence. The echo of what's missing. Ingested, it causes profound melancholia, a longing for things lost."
I took the vial. "And if it's introduced into a being who is already a vessel for stillness?"
Lyra's smile was grim. "Then the stillness becomes a tomb, and the tomb becomes lonely. Loneliness is a kind of hunger. It might… unbalance his perfect perception. Make him seek the source of the echo to fill the silence he feels. Make him active. And active things make mistakes."
It was a plan of sublime, psychological cruelty. I would poison the warden with homesickness for the abyss.
Executing it required the pinnacle of the Seven Principles. I used Concealed Action to mask my work as a routine cleaning of the archives' air-filtering crystals. I used Catalytic Agents (Gimmerblight residue) to subtly weaken the minor ward on Orin's personal water carafe—not to break it, but to make it permeable to non-magical substances. I used Sympathetic Resonance to tune the Echo-Sap's frequency to the specific "sound" of Orin's personal stillness, making it irresistibly attractive to his nature.
I sacrificed a small, silver locket I'd found in Kieran's mother's forgotten trinket box, feeling a pang of guilt for the long-dead woman as its potential turned to cold, dead metal in my hand. The power fueled the intricate working.
Two days later, Blind Master Orin took a drink from his carafe.
Nothing happened immediately. He did not convulse or cry.
But the next night, when I cautiously extended my senses towards the scriptorium, the perfect stillness was… itched. There was a faint, resonant want in the silence now. A barely perceptible tremor, like a plucked string in an empty hall.
He began to leave his post. Not to patrol, but to wander. His slow, sure steps took him to places of old magic, of sealed doors, of cold spots in the palace. He was searching. Not with a warden's purpose, but with a ghost's confusion. He was feeling the void's absence in the world, and it was making his own void ache.
He was becoming my problem, but he was also becoming predictable.
I watched him from the shadows as he stood for an hour before the sealed door to the ice cellar, his blind face tilted upwards. He didn't try to enter. He just… listened to the silence behind it.
He was close. Too close.
The time for subtlety was ending. The ghost inside me, the one with Maya's face etched behind its eyes, screamed for progress. For power. For a way to tear a hole in the sky and look through it.
I needed a greater source of power. The bead was a focus, a tiny aperture. The door in the cellar was a seal. Behind it was the sphere, the concept of consumption.
What lay beyond that?
I didn't know. But the ghost was done waiting. The void was done being patient.
The next time Blind Master Orin wandered the halls, drawn by the new hunger in his silence, I would not be hiding in the shadows.
I would be waiting at the door.
And I would be opening it all the way.
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