Corvus stood motionless, the violet light of the ritual casting long, dancing shadows that made him look like a ghost caught between worlds. He stared at Lucian for a long, agonizing moment, and for the first time in all their bloody encounters, the mask finally cracked.
The manic, theatrical villain vanished. The calculated architect of ruin dissolved.
In the hollow of his eyes, Lucian saw something far more terrifying than madness: he saw the wreckage of a man. He saw the shape of a human being that had been hollowed out by a grief so profound and so jagged that it had acted like an acid, dissolving everything that made him whole.
It was the look of someone who had tried to survive a storm by becoming the storm itself.
"I'm too far gone," Corvus said.
His voice wasn't a boast or a dramatic declaration; it was flat, hollow, and terrifyingly calm the way a man might read a terminal diagnosis of his own soul. "The Calamity isn't just a force anymore."
"It's... it's in me."
