The headache was a persistent throb behind his left eye, a souvenir from Gorn's furnace-heart grief. Aris masshed his temple, the memory of sanctified steel and dying fur a faint echo now, integrated but not forgotten. Trauma absorption. A psychic tax for his "gift." He wondered, grimly, if there was a deductible.
He'd just finished scrawling his session notes—Gorn, Lord of Wrath. Core trauma: Betrayal/Loss (Karroq). Treatment plan: Mindfulness-based containment exercises.—when the atmosphere in the room changed.
The heat and violence bled away, replaced by a damp, creeping chill. It wasn't a temperature drop; it was a feeling. The sensation of being meticulously compared, found wanting, and yet still… coveted. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
She didn't break the door. She was just… inside.
One moment the space before his shattered doorway was empty. The next, she stood there, as if she'd always been part of the shadows. Lady Sylene, the Whisper of Envy. She was tall, willowy, clad in robes of shifting emerald and silver that seemed to drink the light. Her hair was the color of tarnished moonlight, falling in a perfect cascade. Her face was a masterpiece of delicate, ethereal beauty, but her eyes… Her eyes were a verdant, luminous green that held no warmth, only a bottomless, calculating hunger.
"Fifty-seven minutes," she said. Her voice was a silk ribbon drawn over a razor's edge, soft and lethally sharp. "You gave the smoldering brute fifty-seven minutes of your… attention."
Aris slowly closed his notepad. "Session length is flexible, Lady Sylene. It depends on the client's needs."
"Needs." She glided into the room, her feet making no sound. Her gaze swept over his desk, his chair, his cheap plastic pen, lingering on each as if assessing their value, their worthiness. "His need is to break things. A simple, ugly need. Mine are… more complex. Yet I receive a standardized slot. Is that fair, Doctor?"
He gestured to the reinforced couch. "Please. Let's discuss what fairness means to you."
She didn't sit. She drifted to his bookshelf, a slender finger tracing the spine of a translated demonic history text. "You look tired. The Wrath Lord's chaos must be so… draining. So vulgar." She glanced at him, her head tilted. "My energy is quieter. More refined. Would you not find a session with me… more restorative?"
The subtext was a labyrinth. She wasn't just complaining about time. She was envious of the attention he gave Gorn. Envious of the energy Gorn expended, even if it was destructive. She wanted to be the sole focus, the preferred patient, the most important.
"Therapy isn't about my restoration, Lady Sylene," he said, keeping his tone neutral. "It's about yours. My notes indicate your 'leakage' manifests as 'reality erosion in localized zones of perceived inadequacy.' Can you explain that in your own words?"
She finally turned from the bookshelf, a pout on her perfect lips. It looked practiced. "Such cold, clinical language. It erases the poetry of it." She sighed, a sound like wind through dead leaves. "Where I walk, if I see a thing of beauty I cannot possess… it sometimes simply ceases to be. A rival's flawless painting becomes a blurred smear. A garden more vibrant than mine withers overnight. A song purer than any I could sing… falls silent." Her luminous eyes fixed on him. "It is not malice. It is… a correction. The world aligning to the truth of my lack."
Aris felt a new kind of chill. This wasn't explosive rage; it was a psychic rot, a passive-aggressive annihilation of anything that made her feel less-than. "And how does that make you feel? When you 'correct' the world?"
"Empty," she whispered, and for a flicker, the mask slipped. He saw not a powerful demon lord, but a hollow girl in an endless hall of mirrors, each reflection a mockery. "Because the beauty is gone, but my want remains. It is a hunger that consumes what it feeds on, leaving only ash on my tongue."
Bingo. The core wound. Chronic, insatiable inadequacy. Identity defined by external comparison. Coping mechanism: Destruction of the comparator.
"This hunger," Aris pressed gently. "Where do you think it began? Can you remember a time before it?"
Her expression shut down, smooth and porcelain once more. "Before? There is no 'before.' I am Envy. It is my essence."
"You are also Sylene. A person. Before the title, before the Sin… who were you?"
Silence stretched. The damp chill deepened. Frost began to spider-web delicately across the surface of his teacup.
"I was… a piece of a whole," she said, her voice distant. "One of a thousand echoes in the Choir of Reflection. We sang the glory of the Celestial Citadel. Our voices, our forms, were meant to be identical. A perfect, harmonious unity."
Aris nodded slowly. A celestial chorus. A forced collectivism where individuality was a flaw.
"But one of us… her voice had a unique resonance. A slight, silver vibrato. The audiences loved it. The Maestro praised it." Sylene's hands, perfectly still until now, clenched at her sides. "I practiced until my throat bled, trying to mimic that imperfection. I could not. So I prayed. I prayed to the Gods of Harmony that her voice would find its true, pure, uniform tone."
"And what happened?"
"The next dawn, her voice was gone. Not hoarse. Gone. As if it had never existed. The Maestro said it was a tragic flaw corrected by divine will." She looked at her hands. "And I felt… nothing. No satisfaction. Only the sudden, glaring silence where her unique sound had been. And the realization that now, there was nothing to compare myself to but the perfect, silent void. I was cast out not long after. The flaw of 'wanting' had rooted in me too deeply."
The story hung in the air. A god, not a hero, had been the original trauma. A divine system that valued perfect harmony over individual spark, and had used her own envious prayer as a channel for its cruel "correction." She had internalized the violence of the system. She had become it.
"They made you believe your uniqueness was a sin," Aris said. "And then they made you the sin itself."
For the first time, her eyes focused on him with something other than hungry calculation. It was a flash of raw, startled recognition. No one had ever framed it that way. She was always the monster, the flaw. Never the victim of a larger, colder cruelty.
She floated to the couch and sat, her posture rigid. "What does it matter? The hunger remains. I see your calm, Doctor. Your… centeredness. It is a beauty I have never possessed. Part of me wants to understand it. A larger part wants to see if it can crack."
The threat was clear, but so was the plea. Fix this rot inside me before I destroy what I admire in you.
"We can work on that hunger," Aris said, picking up his pen. "Not to erase it—our feelings are valid—but to change its diet. To turn the energy you use to erase others, inward, to build something for Sylene. To find what is uniquely yours, not in comparison to anyone else."
"Build something… for me?" The concept was as alien to her as "personhood" had been to Gorn.
"Yes. It will be difficult. It will require you to tolerate the existence of beautiful things without possessing or destroying them. To feel the envy, but not let it dictate your actions."
"And if I fail?" she asked, her green eyes gleaming.
"Then we'll try again next session." He offered a small, tired smile. "My attention is not a prize to be won, Lady Sylene. It's a tool to be shared. You will get your fifty-seven minutes. And more, if you need it."
She studied him, the envy still there, but momentarily overshadowed by a deep, curious fascination. The therapist was not just a healer. He was a new kind of mirror, one that reflected back not her flaws, but her potential shape.
As the session ended and she vanished as silently as she came, Aris felt the new cost. Not a searing memory, but a hollow, sucking sensation in his gut. The ghost of her endless hunger. The ache of the silent choir.
He lit a cigarette, the smoke battling the lingering chill. Two lords down. Five to go. Each trauma more intricate than the last. Each session leaving a piece of their broken world inside his own mind.
The speaking tube crackled. "Master Healer! A… a situation! Lord Gorn attempted the breathing exercise you suggested. There was a minor… explosion in the east wing barracks. No fatalities! But he is demanding to see you for a 'follow-up.'"
Aris closed his eyes. Progress was messy. He thought of Sylene's frost on his cup, Gorn's shattered door. He thought of the "Hero Party" out there somewhere, the smiling ones.
The real apocalypse wasn't a battle. It was a cascade of untreated trauma. And he was the lone, chain-smoking dam trying to hold it all back.
One session at a time.