The orb shrank to the size of a plum, boiling purple-black against the gilded vault, radiating a heat that smelled of scorched marrow. Tullio choked against her shoulder, his pale fingers knotting into the wool of her riding jacket.
"Ovidia," he wheezed, black fluid speckling his chin. "The floor... it's dissolving."
Across the barrier, Cosima stood behind the glass-fronted reliquaries, her holy veil pinned crookedly to her blond braids. A tiny, cruel curve touched her lip. "It will dissolve down through four stories of Bastione's bedrock. When they dig through the slag, they will find only heretic residue. Goodbye, Lady Vencenza. You were an amusing nuisance, but his Grace requires a purer vessel."
She turned to leave. The wards hummed higher, a pitch that made Ovidia's molars ache.
[EMERGENCY OVERRIDE: Sentient ward detected! Hostility matrix: 100%.]
[Prompting Player Choice to Disarm Dynamic Encounter! Select proper affection response:]
[A: 'Even in darkness, my devotion is an unquenchable flame!']
[B: 'Take my flesh, but spare the vow we whispered under the arbor!']
[C: 'I surrender my sovereignty to your possessive grasp, my prince!']
Ovidia stared at the hovering pink cursive. The floating script bobbed cheerfully, its glossy pastel sheen masking a doomsday countdown. Sentient? A ward crafted from parasitic cores retained raw hunger, not logic. It was an arcane automaton tuned to agony.
If it wanted purple prose to validate its artificial ego, she would feed it until it choked.
"Option A! Option C! Both!" she shouted toward the plaster overhead. She threw her arms wide, shielding Tullio while projecting her voice with the brassy volume of an opera director. "Hear me, prison of cruel longing! Even in darkness, my devotion is an unquenchable flame! Take my sovereignty, take my vow under the arbor! Let your grasp swallow me whole, my jealous star!"
Tullio stared up at her, utterly horrified. "Sister? Have you lost your mind?"
The dark bead stopped shrinking. It shuddered. The sigils carved across the parquet floor began to flicker erratically, the arcane logic stalling as it tried to compute whether it was an execution protocol or a courtship trial.
[ERROR: Syntax overload. Target displays extreme submissive affection! Recalibrating punitive output...]
"Keep recalibrating, you idiot contraption," Ovidia muttered. She lunged forward. Right at the ward's anchoring locus, perched atop an iron plinth inside the boundary, lay the obsidian core Cosima had left behind. It was wet with oily residue, pulsing like a harvested lung. If she severed its link, the cage would collapse before the black condensation finished deciding its romantic orientation.
She grabbed the jagged stone with her bare right hand.
Heat failed to singe her skin; memories struck instead.
A sickening rush dragged her consciousness downward, plunging into an ocean of cold tar.
She wasn't in Cosima's study anymore. She was ten years in the past, crouched in a damp, salt-crusted cellar beneath the southern docks. The scent of lye and human waste was suffocating.
A boy sat huddled in the corner, chained to an iron ring bolt. He was nine years old, skin so translucent his blue veins showed like cracked glaze. Cosima’s voice echoed from the shadows above, sweet and detached: *"Cut the tendon again. See if the black marrow regenerates faster under terror."*
Then the cellar door swung open.
Past-Ovidia stepped inside, holding a cracked porcelain bowl of cheap turnip porridge. Her younger self looked terribly tired, wearing an apron stained with soot, counting copper coins under her breath.
*"There you are, you skinny stray,"* the younger Ovidia grumbled in the memory, crouching beside the terrified, bleeding child. She offered no holy prayers. She shoved the spoon into his mouth with brisk efficiency. *"Eat it while it's hot. If you starve, who’s going to join the Border Guard and send me twenty silvers a month? Come on, chew. Good boy."*
She had reached out, casually brushing the matted hair from his forehead, scratching behind his ear the way one might comfort a barn cat before returning to farm chores.
To Ovidia, it had been basic human decency mixed with blatant retirement planning.
To the boy, it was cataclysmic.
Through the core's resonance, she felt Nereo's mind shatter and reforge around that single touch. The abyssal parasite had not consumed him; it had twined around the memory of her greasy turnip soup, mistaking her pragmatic transaction for absolute, divine love. *She touched my head. She owns my blood. If she leaves, the universe has no light. If she looks elsewhere, kill the elsewhere.*
*Merciful heavens,* Ovidia realized, the thought crashing over her with horrific clarity. *I didn't rescue a knight. I cultivated a god-killing monster by being cheap with soup.*
The vision snapped.
She tumbled backward onto the wooden floor of the study, gasping for air. Her fingers were blistered black from holding the core, which now lay cracked in half beside her knees. Above her, the containment core had gone haywire, spitting erratic violet arcs that set the velvet drapes blazing.
Cosima paused at the threshold, her expression twisting into furious disbelief. "How are you still breathing?"
"Because your security wards have terrible taste in romantic literature!" Ovidia rasped, pulling Tullio behind her as the masonry groaned.
The bomb was destabilizing. Without the core to anchor its polarity, the energy was about to expand outward, leveling the entire east wing of Bastione.
Then the sound came.
It wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of reality tearing open like wet canvas.
The air behind Cosima split down the middle. A rift of pure, void-colored ink ripped through the solid stone wall, ignoring wards, ignoring structural physics, ignoring every law of matter. Two gloved hands reached out from the void, seized the edges of space itself, and tore the aperture wide.
Nereo stepped through.
His uniform was drenched in gore from the lower courtyards. His irises had lost their usual slate tint; they burned with an absolute, bottomless crimson, pupils thinned to predatory slits. Black tendrils whipped around his coat, hissing against the air, their very presence dissolving the limestone pillars into fine gray dust.
[CORRUPTION METER: 98%]
[CRITICAL THRESHOLD REACHED: REALITY INTEGRITY FAILING.]
He gave no look to Cosima, nor to the scorched hangings or the sagging rafters. His gaze locked onto Ovidia's blistered, soot-streaked hand.
"Ovidia," Nereo said softly. The tone was gentle, polite, and completely insane. "You are bruised."
The temperature in the room plummeted until their breath plumed in thick frost.
"Nereo, wait—it’s just a scratch from the ward!" Ovidia scrambled to her feet, desperate to keep the meter from ticking to that final, apocalyptic hundred. "Don't do anything rash! We can resolve this through official university disciplinary channels!"
Cosima shrieked, raising her holy staff to cast an expulsion rite. "Abomination! Return to the pit!"
Nereo vanished from the doorway.
A dry crack echoed through the chamber.
Before Cosima could finish her incantation, Nereo materialized in front of her. His left hand wrapped around her throat, lifting her clear off the floor until her embroidered slippers kicked helplessly in empty air. Her holy staff shattered into splinters beneath his boots.
The stone floor under Nereo’s feet buckled, spiderwebs of black frost racing outward across the Collegium's foundations. The sky visible through the blown-out windows turned the color of dried blood, clouds peeling back to reveal a weeping void.
"You touched her sanctuary," Nereo whispered, tilting his head with an expression of sweet, inquisitive cruelty. His claws lengthened, digging into the soft flesh of the saintess's neck, blood welling in sluggish, dark beads over his knuckles. "Shall I pull your spine out through your mouth, or would you prefer I feed your limbs to the dogs while you watch?"
Cosima choked, her face turning mottled blue, eyes rolling upward in pure terror.
Ovidia took a frantic step forward, her breath catching behind her ribs. "Nereo, stop! If you kill her, my pension inquiry will be cancelled!"
Nereo’s crimson eyes cut toward Ovidia, his smile widening into a terrifying, possessive crescent as his grip tightened, ready to tear Cosima’s head clean off her shoulders.