The low timber of Olekshar’s greeting dragged across the damp clearing. He stayed motionless upon his gnarled throne, yet the stagnant air thickened with frost, pinching Veleshka’s lungs. The guide, still caked in marsh mud, dropped flat beside her with a muffled gasp. Olekshar’s gaze lingered on Veleshka’s face, tracing the grime and dried blood with an almost clinical precision. Then, slowly, with a deliberate grace that belied the brutality she’d witnessed, he rose. His movements were fluid, like ink spilled into water, and the obsidian blade at his side seemed to hum with a faint, malevolent energy as he passed it. He stopped before her, a head taller, radiating an unnatural cold that curled the broad leaves of the cleansing bulb. His hand, impossibly pale and long-fingered, reached out. Veleshka flinched, but he merely brushed a thumb across her cheekbone, wiping away a smear of black mud. The touch was feather-light, yet it felt like a brand. “My Anya,” he murmured, his voice softening into a heartbreaking tenderness. “Look at you, my brave flower. So much hardship for a fleeting freedom.” Anya. The tragic maiden from the pages of 'Crown of Miasma', dead before the rot could be halted. Spoken with hollow reverence, the name hung between them like an open wound. He did not see Veleshka; he saw a phantom. The scout made a choked sound in the weeds, shifting between Veleshka and the towering sovereign. Olekshar spared him no glance; the guide might as well have been a clump of peat. Veleshka forced a wobbly smile, a practiced mask of wide-eyed innocence she’d honed since childhood. “Olekshar,” she breathed, leaning into his touch with a calculated tremor. “I… I was so scared. I thought I’d lost you.” The lie tasted like ash, but his expression melted, a flicker of genuine relief softening the hard lines of his face. His thumb stroked her cheek again, almost possessively. “Never, my love. Never again. I swore I’d find you, no matter how far you tried to stray.” “I only wanted to find an end to the rot,” Veleshka whispered, tilting her chin in practiced meekness while tracing the luminous core behind him. “This place smelled of quiet.” She gently took his hand, intertwining her fingers with his cold ones. The act was a desperate gamble, a risky step closer to the very source of her potential freedom. But he permitted it, his grip tightening around hers, a possessive warmth radiating from his palm despite the chill of his skin. “It is important, my Anya,” he agreed, his eyes dark pools reflecting only her face. “This is where our story began, and where it shall finally be mended.” He turned slightly, drawing her with him, until she stood directly before the cleansing bulb, pale luminescence skimming her linen sleeves. “This place holds promise, does it not? A sanctuary for us, away from the world’s cruelties.” The guide crept along the clearing's fringe on belly and elbows, dragging a rusted trowel toward the thickest spur of the taproot. Veleshka kept her gaze locked on Olekshar, offering him a look of profound, unwavering adoration. “It’s beautiful, Olekshar. So… vibrant. Like a new beginning.” She let her free hand drift towards the root’s main stalk, as if mesmerized. “The cellular integrity is quite remarkable, considering the surrounding blight.” The words slipped out, a relic of her past, a detached scientific observation. The moment they left her lips, the tender expression on Olekshar’s face vanished. The warmth in his grip turned to ice. His eyes, fixed on hers, began to deepen, swirling into an inky blackness that consumed the faint traces of white. The air around them crackled with an unseen energy. The glow of the Purifying Root flickered, dimming as if suffocated. Olekshar's lips drew thin, his bloodied smile straightening into an edge of cold obsidian. “Cellular integrity?” he repeated, his voice no longer a silken caress, but a rasping growl. The hallucination shattered, leaving behind a stark, terrifying clarity. “Anya would never say such a thing. Anya loved pretty words, flowery sentiments. Anya was a simple, innocent thing.” Iron fingers snapped shut around Veleshka’s wrist. He drove her backward into the ridged trunk of a willow, knocking the air from her ribs. In the brush, the guide went entirely still, trowel hovering inches above the peat. Olekshar leaned in close, his face inches from hers, his breath cold against her skin. The scent of ozone and something ancient, something that had never seen sunlight, filled her nostrils. His eyes were wholly black now, devoid of any discernible pupil or iris, reflecting her pale, calculating face in their polished glass. “But you, Veleshka,” he snarled, the name a venomous hiss. “You are not Anya. You are sharp, calculating. You are a viper in a garden of false innocence. You scheme. You fight. You run. And I prefer you this way. Ruthless. Alive.” His grip on her wrist tightened further, threatening to shatter bone. She could feel the faint thrum of the Abyssal Rot connecting them, now a violent tremor, echoing the fury in his gaze. His other hand, the one that had been resting under his chin, moved with blinding speed. It reached out, not for her, but for the pale, luminescent column of the sacred root. His fingers locked around its stem, the fibrous husk groaning under the strain as black miasma seeped from his skin, devouring the green light. With a sharp crack of wet fiber, Olekshar clenched his fist. The bulb burst inward, its luminescent sap hissing into black ash, pitching the willow grove into sudden, suffocating darkness. “There is no cure, Veleshka,” he whispered, his voice a chilling promise, his black eyes burning into hers. “We die together, or we live forever in the dark.”

The King's Hallucination