The air was a thick, gritty soup of dust and spent magic, clinging to the back of Veridia's throat. Each ragged breath tasted of ozone, pulverized stone, and the coppery tang of Orcish victory. Around her, the throne room was a testament to brutal conquest. Warlord Grummash Bonebreaker, his massive form silhouetted against the shattered remnants of a stained-glass window, threw his head back. A guttural, triumphant roar ripped from his lungs, a sound of pure, uncomplicated power that vibrated through the floor. His Orcs, a sea of scarred flesh and jagged iron, echoed the cry, their combined voices shaking the last shards of glass from their frames in a final, percussive tinkle.
Veridia ignored them. Their primitive celebration was the background noise to her ascension. Her entire world had narrowed to the single point of light at the heart of the ruin. There, on a dais of fractured marble, pulsed the Pardon. It was a living crystal, radiating a soft, steady warmth that promised an end to the long, cold misery of her exile.
Victory. It was absolute, undeniable, and it tasted like ash in her mouth.
Her gaze drifted to the pathetic heap of filth and despair that was her sister. Seraphine knelt in the debris, a broken doll of torn silk and matted hair. The witty, cruel host was gone, replaced by a shuddering, vanquished thing. The sight should have been exquisite, the perfect, final course in a banquet of revenge. Veridia had imagined this moment a thousand times—the taste of Seraphine's tears, the sound of her begging for a mercy she would never grant.
But the triumph was a hollow echo in the sudden, unnerving silence of her own soul. The gnawing hunger, the desperate, leaking emptiness of the Curse, was gone. Stilled. A lifetime of screaming noise had been replaced by a profound and disorienting peace. Who was she without the hunger that had defined her every waking moment? Without the all-consuming need that had been her whip, her motivation, her entire purpose?
She looked at Seraphine, and for the first time, felt not a searing hatred, but a distant, dismissive contempt. The game was over. Her sister was no longer a rival, no longer a tormentor. She was just… a loose end. A piece of trash to be left behind in the rubble of a show that had been cancelled.
A slow, condescending smile touched Veridia's lips. She turned her back on her sister, the ultimate, final dismissal. She was done with this pathetic mortal realm, done with this humiliating performance. She walked toward the dais, each step a deliberate act of coronation. The Orcs' roars faded into a distant hum. All that mattered was the warm, golden light of her freedom.
As Veridia's fingers brushed against the smooth, warm surface of the Pardon crystal, a laugh echoed from behind her.
It was not the practiced, honeyed sound of the Host. This was something else. A broken, splintering thing, a shard of sound scraped from the bottom of a soul that had nothing left to lose but its own sanity. It was the laugh of the genuinely unhinged, high and sharp and full of glass.
Veridia spun around. Seraphine was on her feet, her posture no longer that of a victim, but of a zealot at the moment of martyrdom. Her face was a mask of triumphant despair, her eyes burning with a light that was all madness and spite. In her hand, she held not a weapon, but a jagged shard of solidified shadow, carved with writhing runes that pulsed with a malevolent red light, seeming to drink the warmth from the air. The Soul-Tether. Forbidden. Irrevocable.
"You think you've won?" Seraphine's voice was a venomous hiss, raw and ragged with hate. "You think you get to walk away? I am not a season you can cancel, sister."
Veridia's blood went cold. This was not the impotent fury of the vanquished. This was a new and terrifying script, one she had never anticipated.
"If I cannot have the fame," Seraphine snarled, her knuckles white around the obsidian shard, "I will have *you*. Forever."
Veridia lunged, a wordless cry of denial ripping from her throat. Across the room, Grummash bellowed in confusion, his hand going to his axe, his warrior's mind sensing the shift in power but utterly failing to comprehend the nature of the foul magic unfolding. He was a creature of steel and bone, unprepared for a war fought with pure, distilled spite.
But Seraphine was faster. Her movements were fueled by an entire exile's worth of jealousy and rage. She slammed her palm onto the shard, unleashing its forbidden power an instant before Veridia's hand closed on the golden glow of the Pardon.
The world exploded in a silent, overwhelming wave of crimson light.
A chain of raw, red energy erupted from the shard in Seraphine's hand. It was not metal, but a living manifestation of a binding curse, a thing of pure, possessive magic with thorns made of shadow. It shot across the chamber and struck Veridia in the chest. The impact was a searing, violating brand on her very soul. She felt the faint, silvery thread of the old life-link curse—the one that had tied their mortal forms together—incinerate in an instant, consumed by this new, ravenous power.
Veridia screamed as the chain of red light, having anchored itself deep within her, arced back through the air. It pierced Seraphine, who threw her head back and shrieked in a terrifying chorus of agony and ecstasy. At the same moment, the Pardon crystal flared to life in Veridia's hand, its warm, golden light a pathetic, useless glimmer against the overwhelming, malevolent red that painted the entire chamber in the color of blood.
The light faded, leaving behind an echoing silence broken only by ragged gasps.
An ornate scroll of shimmering parchment materialized in Veridia's hand—the official Pardon of House Vex, its promise of freedom now a cruel, cosmic joke.
Hanging in the air between her and her sister was a permanent, unbreakable chain of glowing crimson energy. It pulsed with a slow, steady beat, a physical and spiritual shackle binding them soul to soul, visible to all.
Seraphine looked up from her knees, her face pale and sweat-slicked, but her smile was one of absolute, horrifying victory.
"Now," she whispered, her voice a triumphant, parasitic rattle that echoed not in the chamber, but directly inside Veridia's own mind. "Now we're co-stars for life."