Corvis Vritra
The walk to the lab felt like traversing a familiar, recurring nightmare. Corridors of cold, dark stone, lit by pulsating mana-lights embedded in the ceiling, stretched before me like decayed fangs.
My feet knew the path, carrying me with an unsettling autonomy towards one of the hundred labs of Taegrin Caelum.
The specific location triggered an unpleasant chord. Strangely, it wasn't the lab where Dad experimented on reincarnation—the place humming with the chilling resonance of displaced souls, the air thick with the blasphemous tang of violated Fate.
No. This was different. The lab near the cell of Dawn Asclepius...
Dawn Asclepius. The name slammed into my consciousness, stopping me dead in the echoing corridor. A jolt of pure, unadulterated urgency surged through me, followed instantly by a crushing wave of frustration.
Why did that name strike so much inside me? It resonated with profound importance, a keystone to… something vital.
A promise? A duty? A failure? I felt like I had something important to do with Dawn Asclepius—a desperate, clawing need to act, to reach, to save—yet I couldn't remember it.
The knowledge was a ghost, flitting just beyond the grasp of my frantic thoughts, leaving only the hollow ache of its absence and a chilling certainty: this omission was dangerous.
Dad wouldn't have brought me here by accident.
Pushing down the disquiet, I entered. The air was frigid, sterile, smelling of preservative chemicals, and something deeper, older—the faint, metallic scent of immense, ancient power long extinguished.
Dad was wearing a white lab coat, pristine against the grey of his skin, a stark contrast to the grim spectacle dominating the vast chamber.
Hr was fidgeting with the huge and intimidating black serpentine body in the centre of the room. It hung suspended by thick chains of solidified mana, coils as thick as ancient tree trunks, scales like obsidian shards catching the harsh laboratory lights.
It was the true form of a basilisk asura. Immense. Majestic even in death. A relic of a power I instinctively knew was my heritage, yet felt utterly alien and even more intimidating.
In my mind flashed projects on how to craft an asuran body starting from the corpse of a dead Asura. Schematics unfolded with crystalline clarity: mana conduits grafted onto decaying neural pathways, matrices woven into necrotic flesh, the blasphemous reanimation of god-flesh.
Accompanying these images, sharp and sardonic, came the commentaries of a male voice which sounded awfully familiar that addressed specifically me. A voice laced with dry wit, ancient weariness, and a protective ferocity.
"Tacky, even for my beloved Dad. Using a Kothan carcass? The scales are practically weeping residual indignation."
The phantom commentary vanished as quickly as it came, leaving a profound, echoing loneliness in its wake. Who was that? Why did the thought of reanimating this corpse feel like a personal insult get made with all the good intentions of this world?
"Corvis, my boy." Dad's voice took me out of my thoughts. Warm. Paternal. Utterly incongruous with the chamber of cold death. He turned, his red eyes fixing on me, the predatory gleam momentarily softened into something resembling concern.
"I am happy to see you are doing better." He approached, his movements smooth, powerful, radiating an aura that made the massive basilisk corpse seem like mere set dressing.
I stood there too afraid of speaking up. The fear was pressing down on my chest, constricting my throat. The fact that I failed a mission for Alacrya was still there, a nebulous, guilt-inducing shadow, and Dad hated failures more than anything.
His displeasure wasn't just anger; it was the withdrawal of that terrifying, life-sustaining approval, the cold scrutiny that could dismantle your very sense of self. The sterile air suddenly felt suffocating.
"What's with that face, my boy?" Dad asked, his voice dropping to a low, almost tender rumble. Moving away from his experiment, he closed the distance, towering over me. Then, unexpectedly, he bent, bringing his face level with mine.
The sheer power contained in that lithe frame before me, was dizzying. Putting his hand on my shoulder. The cool, smooth weight was instantly familiar, instantly reassuring.
His thumb rubbed a small circle through the fabric of my shirt. A gesture of comfort? Or a subtle anchoring point for deeper probing? The duality was maddening.
"I am afraid you are mad at me." I replied, the words scraping out, raw and honest in their terror. It was true. The fear of his disappointment was a primal thing, deeper than reason.
When I said that Dad let out a laugh. Rich, booming, echoing off the cold stone and the silent basilisk scales. It sounded genuine, warm.
Why was he always putting his hand on my shoulder? I... I don't like being touched. No! Corvis he is Dad, not a stranger.
The physical connection was deeply reassuring amidst the oddity, a tether in the confusion… but... was he using his magic to plunder my thoughts? To understand if I was telling him the truth? The suspicion was a viper, coiling cold in my gut. The subtle pressure against my mental barriers felt… invasive. Probing.
No! Bad Corvis! The internal reprimand was swift, vicious. Dad would never... he respects you, I told myself, forcing the treacherous doubt down, smothering it with the conditioned belief in his paternal love. Disloyalty felt like a sin.
"I am not mad at you, Corvis!" He said, the laughter subsiding into a warm smile. But his smile turned for a bit... predatory. A subtle shift in the angle of his lips, a hardening in the depths of those red eyes. The warmth felt suddenly calculated.
"But if you want so much to be forgiven for something you didn't even do," he continued, his voice a velvet purr, "what about helping your Dad with something?"
Helping Dad? A surge of pure, uncomplicated warmth momentarily eclipsed the fear and confusion. I loved helping Dad in his researches... The intricate puzzles of mana, the manipulation of fundamental forces, the dance on the edge of the forbidden—it was exhilarating.
My purpose.
Even if they were mostly about reincarnation and Fate. A slight chill touched that warmth. The Legacy Project. Tessia. The name surfaced unbidden, accompanied by a pang of inexplicable sorrow and dread.
"Is it about the Legacy?" I asked, my voice carefully neutral, but a flicker of that dread must have shown, my mood a bit dampened by it. Dad's reaction was swift. But Dad laughed it off. A dismissive wave of his hand.
"No, dear boy. The Legacy can wait until you will feel better." He stood, his hand leaving my shoulder only to ruffle my hair. The gesture was shockingly affectionate, intimate. I loved when he did it. A childlike spark of pure joy ignited, momentarily banishing the shadows.
"I want you to help me with my researches on decay." He gestured grandly towards the suspended basilisk corpse.
"Decay mana?" I echoed, the term instantly triggering a cascade of theoretical knowledge: entropy given form, the corrosive dissolution of structure, the antithesis of life and creation.
"Indeed." Dad's voice took on the lecturing tone I knew so well, the tone of the brilliant scientist sharing his vision. He walked towards the colossal form, looking up at its immense, lifeless head. He stood up and gestured to the body of the basilisk hanging above us.
It loomed, a monument to extinct power. It was deeply intimidating, radiating a residual aura of ancient malice and immense, decayed potential. The scales held a distinct more purplish tone.
He seemed more a Kothan... The classification surfaced easily. A rival clan now ruling in the Vritra's place in Epheotus. Why use this corpse?
"As you know in Alacrya I have developed more the decay mana arts." Dad began, pacing slowly before the suspended serpent. "Originally all of us Basilisk simply infused decay with our normal elemental arts, but that was both weaker than the elemental spells of other Asuran races and the pure mana of the dragons."
He spoke of ancient weakness, a vulnerability that resonated with a buried sense of ancestral shame. "But us Vritra have always had our intellect to aid where our power was lacking." Pride laced his words. "Basilisks were, in fact, the weakest Asuran race when speaking of potential alone." The admission was stark, almost brutal.
"With the decay mana arts I resolved it." Triumph. Absolute conviction. He had turned weakness into terrifying strength.
He stopped pacing and turned back to me, crouching in front of me again. His red eyes burned with an intensity that was almost feverish.
"Your Meta-awareness, dear boy, perfectly suits you." His hand came up, not to my shoulder this time, but to gently tap my temple.
"It perfectly suits my son." He said, full of pride. The warmth of that pride was intoxicating, a drug I desperately craved. He saw me. Valued my unique gift. His son.
However, something felt wrong. A discordant note beneath the symphony of paternal approval and scientific fascination. I didn't know what, how or why, but this all felt like sweet lies. Too perfect. Too tailored.
The pride, the affection, the shared intellectual passion—it was a feast laid before a starving man, yet the taste was subtly off, laced with an undetectable poison. But it was too sweet, intoxicating even. I wanted to believe it. Needed to believe it.
The alternative—that this love was conditional, that this pride was manipulation—was a chasm too terrifying to peer into.
"But I wasn't meaning Decay mana." Dad said, his smile shifting, becoming… cunning. Avuncular, yet razor-edged. Before I could process the shift, he took my arm. His grip was firm, unyielding. He took up my sleeve, pushing the fabric roughly past my elbow, showing me the tattoos covering my entire body.
Intricate, swirling patterns almost invisible, pulsing faintly with mana coming from my core. Against the Tragedy. My masterpiece. My shield against the world's cruellest blows. The masterpiece I made taking Realmheart as a base.
What did Dad mea—wait. A connection sparked. Dragons were able to feel aether not only because of Realmheart, but also because of their ability to purify mana to such extent it was superior to all other kinds of pure mana. The purest conduit.
Theoretically if a quadra-elemental lesser mage had something similar to Realmheart or Realmheart itself they could be able to see aether just like dragons. The logic unfolded with Meta-awareness clarity.
Arthur… Grey… Grey, Grey… The names slammed into my mind like shrapnel. Why did it sound so familiar? Accompanied by a visceral jolt—a memory fragment? A flash of silver eyes, cold determination, shared pain? It vanished, leaving only a throbbing ache behind my eyes and a profound sense of loss.
"You were talking about Realmheart, right?" I asked, the deduction slipping out, driven by the sudden cascade of thought. I saw surprise in Dad's eyes. Real surprise. A genuine flicker, quickly masked. He chuckled, a low, appreciative sound.
"You are very smart, Corvis." Dad said. The praise warmed me, momentarily eclipsing the confusion of the names. "Yes, I was exactly talking about Realmheart. The Indrath Clan stole the knowledge about spellforms from the Djinn and they created Realmheart from it."
"You want to make Realmheart, but for Basilisks." I declared, the conclusion inescapable. A decay-based equivalent. Not purification, but controlled, weaponized entropy as a lens for aether. Dad nodded, a slow, satisfied incline of his head. The serpent acknowledging the mouse's cleverness.
"Yes, it's something I have been thinking about for many centuries," he admitted, standing again, his gaze drifting back to the Kothan corpse. "But I always lacked the way to recreate the needed spellforms."
Why did this conversation seem to have happened before in another life? In the life of... someone named Romulos. The name resonated with the phantom commentator's voice. The certainty was profound.
The way it ended...
Dad couldn't recreate Realmheart because of two things: inability to refine such decayed mana, even basilisks had limits and completely decayed mana was impossible to make—in theory—and because of the original Realmheart created by the Djinn being unattainable. The knowledge wasn't just theoretical; it felt like lived experience, a shared failure.
"You want me to work on a way to do it?" I asked Dad, a flicker of genuine intellectual challenge sparking despite the fear. Solving the unsolvable. Proving my worth.
"No, that would be a waste of time." The dismissal was casual, brutal. Dad said it with a sly smile. The smile of a predator who'd gotten exactly what he wanted without expending the promised reward.
"I only wanted to ponder your reasoning." The admission was a cold knife.
I only noticed it now, a delayed, horrifying realization dawning. The comforting hand on the shoulder, the affectionate hair ruffle, the crouching proximity—through all this conversation Dad was using magic to plunder my thoughts and mind. Not just surface emotions, but deep cognitive processes.
The flow of deduction, the spark of memory, the phantom names, the buried grief—he'd been sifting through it all. He was... violating my deepest privacy with the casual intimacy of a parent checking a child's temperature. Yet something was preventing him from reaching further down—a core of resistance, a shielded vault where the phantom voices and the girl with teal eyes resided.
Fortunately.
My Dad was a monster. The thought crystallized, cold and hard, cutting through the fog of affection and fear. A monster I loved fiercely. The contradiction was a wound tearing me apart. The love was real, conditioned, desperate. The monstrous violation was equally real.
"Now go back to your room." His voice was abruptly devoid of its earlier warmth. Dismissive. The experiment concluded. "Tomorrow we will start working on the Legacy."
I immediately obeyed, the ingrained obedience overriding the storm of questions, the outrage, the terror. Even though I had so many questions to ask him. Why the Kothan corpse? What was Dawn Asclepius? Why probe my thoughts about Realmheart only to dismiss it? Who was Romulos? Arthur? Grey?
However, a part of me was telling me to keep quiet about it. A deep, instinctual warning, cold and clear. A part that I couldn't control like it was buried deep within my soul somewhere I nor Dad with his magic could reach.
A hidden bunker protecting the last embers of Corvis Eralith.
As I reached the massive, reinforced door, Dad's voice stopped me, casual, almost offhand. "And if you wonder where the Scythes are, I sent them all to Dicathen."
Ice flooded my veins. I froze, my hand hovering over the door mechanism. Dad said, a hint of amusement colouring his tone. Amusement? At what? What?
"All of them?" The question was out before I could stop it, my voice betraying me, cracking with a fear that felt… personal. Profound. "W-why?"
"Because they harmed my precious son, of course!" Dad said sardonically, the false paternal outrage dripping with cynical mockery. Then, the tone shifted, becoming smooth, reassuring poison. He added. "You don't have to worry about that, Corvis."
"Yes, Dad." I said, forcing my voice into a semblance of submissive calm, maintaining a fearful tone he would expect. But inside of me I had something like a storm raging. A maelstrom of hundred of emotions: fear for the green lands and ancient trees, anger at the betrayal of any semblance of a deal, worry for…
Tess? Virion? Sylvie? Names and faces flashed, indistinct but charged with desperate significance, despair at the overwhelming power unleashed, and betrayal. Profound, soul-crushing betrayal. He'd promised. He'd promised my surrender would spare them.
What was I saying? The conditioned response surged, smothering the rebellion. Of course Agrona wouldn't respect the deal he made when I gave myself in. The realization was a crushing weight. Seris still spoke to Grey about an attac—I stopped my mind.
Whose thoughts were this? Grey? Who was Grey? The connection shattered, leaving only the devastating certainty: the deal was ash.
I returned to my room, the walk a blur of cold stone and colder despair. The opulent space felt like a prison cell. I needed to ponder about all this mess going on in my head. The conflicting identities, the violated thoughts, the phantom memories, the crushing betrayal, the impending genocide.
Dad must have done something to me after I was defeated, the conclusion was inescapable. There were no other explanations. He hadn't just captured me; he'd begun the process of unmaking me, brick by psychic brick, replacing him with the obedient son, the useful tool, Corvis Vritra.
And the terrifying part? Part of me was letting him. Part of me craved his approval even as the other part screamed in silent, buried agony.
I sat down and took some parchment that the servant assigned to me left before. I started to write.