The silent, deafening roar of the cosmic fire swallowed everything. Consciousness didn't fade; it was extinguished. The annihilating light wasn't just brightness; it was the absence of thought, sensation, self. Kuro and Shiro ceased to exist as separate entities, consumed by the raw, white gold fury they had unleashed, bound by blood, scar, and desperate will. They were motes in a stellar furnace, dissolving.
Time became meaningless. There was only the Void, punctuated by fragmented, dislocated sensations bleeding through the absolute dark:
Cold: Not the chill of the observatory, nor the damp of the undercrofts. This was the deep cold of interstellar space leeching into marrow. It permeated the rough fabric they were wrapped in, pressed against skin like frozen lead. It was the cold of a tomb sealed within a glacier's heart.Motion: A sickening, rhythmic swaying. Not the gait of men carrying burdens, but the glide of something unnatural, smooth, silent, yet conveying immense weight. The faint scrape of runners on ice, the groan of stressed metal under extreme cold. They were being transported, but not by horse or cart. Something colder.Sound: Muffled, distorted voices. Harsh commands barked in guttural tones Vorlag's, thick with pain and fury, answered by toneless, mechanical acknowledgements that resonated with chilling familiarity Blackcloaks, but... colder. The constant, unnerving hiss crackle of spreading frost. And beneath it all, a low, subsonic hum that vibrated teeth and bone, the signature of powerful, frozen engines.Smell: Overpowering the lingering ozone and blood was the scent of pure, sterile ice, the absence of life, vast and ancient. Underlying it, the faint, metallic tang of advanced machinery running at cryogenic temperatures. And their own blood, dried stiff and cold on their clasped hands, a coppery ghost beneath the frost.Touch: Hard, unyielding surfaces beneath and around them. The constriction of tight bindings, not rope, but something metallic and bitterly cold that bit into wrists and ankles, suppressing any residual thaumic flicker. The crushing pressure of Kuro's hand still locked in a death grip around Shiro's, fused not just by frozen blood, but by the unnatural cold of their bindings. Agony pulsed from their slashed palms, a deep, frozen throb where the Polaris scars had been reopened.
They weren't awake. They were cargo. Precious, dangerous cargo being delivered through the frozen heart of Astralon towards its darkest core.
Consciousness returned to Shiro like shards of broken glass forced back into a shattered mirror. Each piece scraped, sharp and disconnected, against the inside of his skull. Awareness seeped in slowly, painfully, dominated by sensation:
Cold: Deeper than the transport. A marrow freezing presence that was the bedrock beneath him. It leached through the smooth, dark stone pressing against his cheek, a cold so profound it felt like the planet's dead heart beating directly against his skin. It radiated from the air, thick and still, heavy with the promise of eternal frost.Sound: A ragged, wet rhythm beside him. Kuro's breathing. Each inhalation was a visible struggle, a gasp against an unseen weight, each exhalation a plume of vapour that crystallised instantly in the still air, falling like minuscule, mocking diamonds onto the stone. A low groan escaped the prince, thick with pain that resonated in Shiro's own bruised ribs.Smell: Blood. Coppery, vital, but chillingly intimate. Not just blood spilled, but blood mingled. The metallic tang filled his nostrils, mixed with the ozone reek of expended, chaotic power, and the underlying, ancient scent of deep ice, sterile, vast, and utterly devoid of life. He felt its sticky warmth, now cooling rapidly towards freezing, where Kuro's hand was still locked in a death grip around his own, fused by frozen gore and the biting cold of their manacles.Sight: Shiro pried his eyes open. The light was dim, indirect, filtered through immense walls of glacial blue ice that soared upwards into shadowed vaults far overhead. They lay sprawled on a dais of smooth, obsidian like stone at the centre of a cavernous space. It wasn't a natural cave; it felt like a cathedral carved by glaciers. The walls were sheer, polished by eons of slow moving ice to a mirror finish. Etched deep and precise into the ice itself, countless eight pointed stars, Nyxara's sigil, pulsed with a faint, internal sapphire light. The reflections shifted on the icy surfaces, making the entire chamber feel like the frozen, beating heart of some slumbering cosmic entity. Ryo's hidden sanctum.
Shiro tried to move. Agony, white hot and immediate, lanced up his right arm from his palm. His star scar wasn't just throbbing; it was a nexus of frozen fire. He looked down. The skin around the scar was a mottled horror of purple black frostbite, the intricate star pattern webbed with jagged lines of dead, white flesh radiating outwards like cracks in ancient porcelain. It felt brittle, as if the slightest pressure would shatter his hand entirely. And Kuro's hand… Kuro's hand was still clamped onto his, knuckles white with the force of it even in unconsciousness. Between their locked palms, where their blood had mingled and spilled during the desperate pact, a single, dark rivulet had frozen solid. It wasn't just frozen blood; it looked like a vein of pure obsidian, a physical chain forged in desperation and cosmic fire, binding them together.
"Still breathing, slum rat?" Kuro's voice was a ruin, a dry rasp that scraped the air like stone on stone. His eyes were slits of pain, his face pale as the frost creeping up the stone dais towards them. A trail of dried blood crusted his lips and chin, stark against his pallor.
Shiro spat. The saliva was pink tinged, landing on the stone with a tiny, frozen tink. "Unfortunately," he grated, his own throat raw as if scoured by the supernova's afterburn. Every muscle screamed in protest. "Your brilliant fucking plan… nearly atomised us." He tried to flex the fingers of his bound hand. Needles of agony shot through the frostbitten scar, making him gasp. "Feels like it did anyway."
Kuro managed a weak, pained smirk that didn't reach his haunted eyes. "Worked, didn't it? Vorlag's probably still picking pieces of his dignity out of the rafters." He tried to lift his head, groaning as the movement pulled at unseen injuries. "Where… in the frozen hells…?"
CRUNCHHHH.
The sound wasn't loud, but it echoed with chilling, absolute finality in the vast, silent chamber. A boot, forged from obsidian steel, polished to a mirror sharpness that reflected the pulsing sigils on the walls in distorted, menacing shapes, pressed down firmly, deliberately, onto Kuro's throat.
Kuro choked, his eyes bulging wide, the weak smirk vanishing into a grimace of pure suffocation. His free hand flew up, scrabbling weakly, uselessly, at the armoured foot. His legs kicked in a spasm of panic against the cold stone.
Akuma loomed above them. He hadn't entered; he had coalesced from the very shadows between the glowing eight pointed stars, void swirling around him like a sentient cloak. It writhed in slow, serpentine coils, whispering secrets only the absolute cold could understand. His obsidian armour was pristine, untouched by the cataclysm they'd unleashed, drinking the chamber's blue light and giving nothing back. His face remained shadowed deep within his helmet's cowl, invisible save for his eyes. His star pupils glowed with a cold, predatory luminescence, fixed not on their faces, but on their clasped, blood frozen hands. The dark obsidian rivulet binding them seemed to hold his entire, chilling attention.
"The twin stars," Akuma murmured. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried in the frozen silence with the resonance of a glacier calving. It was ground glass over ice, devoid of warmth, devoid of anything recognisably human. "How... unexpectedly poetic. A suicide pact etched in gore and starlight." He applied infinitesimal, cruel pressure with his boot. Kuro gagged, a desperate, wet sound escaping his constricted throat, his struggles weakening. "Pathetic."
Behind Akuma, the air shimmered, not with heat, but with an even deeper cold. Mist, thick and white as burial shrouds, parted like a stage curtain. Priest Gin emerged from its depths, his skeletal frame seeming even more insubstantial, almost spectral against the glacial blue light. Cradled in his arms, like a blasphemous, frozen offering, was the crow. It was perfectly preserved, every feather rigid, coated in a thin, crystalline rime. Its eyes were shattered, reduced to empty sockets filled with glittering, colourless ice dust. Gin's long, bony fingers stroked the frozen feathers with a disturbing, almost tender reverence. His own star shaped pendant pulsed erratically, casting sickly green highlights on his hollow cheeks.
"The frost remembers," Gin whispered. His voice had changed. It echoed with unnatural harmonics, layers of sound that didn't belong to a single throat: the sighing of polar winds across infinite wastes, the groan of continent sized ice sheets shifting, the distant, soul chilling cry of something ancient and ravenous. It resonated in Shiro's bones, colder than Akuma's boot on Kuro's throat. "It remembers the warmth stolen; the light extinguished. It remembers the shape of defiance..." His finger traced the crow's shattered eye socket, the ice dust sparkling. "...and grinds it to dust." He lifted his gaze from the dead bird. It settled on Shiro, then Kuro, gasping under Akuma's boot, and finally back to Shiro. The hunger in those eyes wasn't physical; it was the hunger of the void for light, of entropy for order. It was profoundly, cosmically cold.
Akuma finally shifted his gaze from their frozen hands to their faces. His star pupils narrowed, drinking in Kuro's suffocating panic, Shiro's impotent rage, their utter helplessness. A sound escaped him, not a laugh, but a low exhalation that crystallised instantly into tiny, sharp needles of ice that pattered onto Kuro's chest like morbid confetti.
"Welcome," Akuma intoned, the mocking lilt in his voice as sharp as his armour's edges. He leaned down slightly, the void cloak swirling closer, its whispering coils brushing Shiro's frozen cheek with a touch like liquid nitrogen. "Welcome, you guttering sparks, to the place where your borrowed fire dies." He straightened, his boot still pinning Kuro. "His Majesty anticipated your little... flare. Ordered you retrieved before you burned yourselves out." He paused, letting the horror sink in, Ryo had expected this, perhaps even counted on it. "Seems even dying embers can be useful kindling."
Akuma's star pupil eyes locked onto Kuro's ribs, visible through his torn tunic where he'd crashed against the star table. "But kindling must be prepared." His voice dropped to a chilling monotone.
With terrifying speed, faster than a striking viper, Akuma moved. Not his booted foot, but his right hand, encased in the razor edged obsidian gauntlet. It wasn't a punch; it was a piston driven hammer blow delivered with contemptuous precision.
It struck Kuro just below the sternum, on the left side.
The sound was horrific. Not a dull thud, but a wet, visceral CRUNCHHH SNAP that echoed obscenely in the Sactum. Like a bundle of dry twigs stomped under a boot, amplified a hundredfold, mingled with the sickening tear of cartilage and the muffled pop of internal structures giving way.
Kuro's body arched off the stone dais, a silent scream stretching his mouth impossibly wide, eyes bulging with an agony beyond sound. The air exploded from his lungs in a single, choked, bloody spray that misted the frozen air before falling as crimson ice crystals. His grip on Shiro's hand convulsed, bone crushingly tight for a split second, then went terrifyingly limp. His body slammed back down, twitching violently, his breath reduced to shallow, wet, bubbling gasps. Each tiny inhalation caused a visible, sickening ripple in the ruined left side of his chest, a depression where solid bone should be, surrounded by rapidly purpling, swelling flesh.
Akuma watched dispassionately as Kuro writhed, his boot still resting lightly, possessively, on the prince's throat. "A reminder," he stated, the ground glass voice devoid of inflection. "Of consequence. Of insignificance." He turned his star pupil gaze to Shiro, who was frozen in horror, staring at Kuro's shattered chest, the wet, ragged sounds of his breathing filling the chamber. "Just wait," Akuma murmured, the promise dripping with glacial malice, "for what His Majesty has planned for you both. This is but a prelude."
He gestured curtly with his bloodless hand. "Bind them. Separate the hands. Carefully." Blackcloaks materialized from the mist shrouded edges of the chamber, their movements silent, their armour reflecting the pulsing sigils. "Use the temple manacles. The King desires them presented intact. Especially that." He nodded at the frozen rivulet of their mingled blood binding their scars. "The palace awaits its new... ornaments."
These manacles weren't just cold; they were sentient agony. Forged from black ice threaded with anti thaumic runes that glowed a sullen crimson, they clamped onto their wrists and ankles with the finality of tomb seals. The metal bit, leaching warmth, suppressing the faintest flicker of the Polaris scars, turning the frozen fire within into a deep, penetrating ache that radiated up their arms and legs. Worse was the separation. Two Blackcloaks, faces impassive masks beneath their helms, used specialized, frost coated pry bars to lever apart Kuro and Shiro's frozen, blood bonded hands. The obsidian rivulet of their mingled blood cracked with a sound like shattering glass. Shiro felt a physical tearing, not just of frozen gore, but of something deeper, a connection violently sundered. Kuro screamed, a raw, animal sound ripped from his ruined chest, cut short by a wet, bubbling gasp as the movement jarred his shattered ribs.
They were hauled upright. Kuro sagged between two Blackcloaks, his legs useless, his head lolling. Each shallow, wet breath hitched with agony, blood frothing faintly on his lips. Shiro, standing but swaying, met Gin's gaze. The priest cradled the frozen crow like a relic, his star pendant pulsing erratically. That cosmic hunger was still there, but now overlaid with a chilling satisfaction. "The chain is broken," Gin whispered, his multi voiced tone slithering over the ice. "But the pattern remains. Frost preserves... for the shaping."
Akuma watched, a statue of obsidian menace. He gave a curt nod. "Move."
The journey from the Sanctum was a descent into deeper layers of frozen hell. They were dragged, half carried, half dragged, through corridors hewn from living ice. The walls here weren't just etched with the Royal Sigil; they were composed of countless frozen faces, expressions locked in silent agony, ecstasy, or vacant oblivion, their features blurred by time and frost but undeniably human. The air grew colder still, thick with the sterile scent of absolute zero and the faint, cloying sweetness of decay preserved indefinitely. Distant, rhythmic thumps vibrated through the ice underfoot, like the slow, ponderous heartbeat of the frozen titan they were within. Ryo's pulse.
They emerged onto a vast, open platform carved from the glacier's flank. An obsidian transport sled awaited, sleek and predatory, its surface drinking the weak, reflected light from the ice canyon below. Frost swirled aggressively around its runners. They were shoved inside a cramped, unlit compartment. The door sealed with a hiss of freezing steam, plunging them into absolute darkness and cold. The sled glided forward with unnatural silence, accelerating rapidly. Through small, thick portholes of ice reinforced glass, Shiro caught nightmarish glimpses of Astralon far below. The city wasn't just frost rimed; it was being consumed. Thick veins of luminous blue ice pulsed through the streets, climbing spires, encasing buildings mid collapse. Tendrils of sentient frost snaked across rooftops like searching fingers. Distant screams, thin and hopeless, echoed up from the frozen abyss, swallowed by the wind. Nyxara wasn't just coming; she was here.
Time stretched and compressed in the suffocating dark. Kuro drifted in and out of consciousness, each ragged breath a wet rattle that filled the compartment. Shiro huddled against the biting cold of the wall, the ice locks burning his skin, the image of Kuro's shattered chest replaying behind his eyelids. Akuma's words echoed: "Just wait for what His Majesty has planned." The fear wasn't just of pain; it was the fear of being used, of their power, their very blood, becoming part of Ryo's monstrous design.
The sled stopped. The door hissed open. Blinding, frigid light assaulted them, not sunlight, but the cold, actinic glare reflecting off mountains of polished obsidian and ice. They were hauled out onto a causeway of black basalt, wider than a city boulevard, stretching towards a monolith that dwarfed comprehension. The Royal Palace.
It wasn't a building; it was a tectonic plate forced upright and carved into impossible, jagged spires. Its surfaces weren't smooth; they were facets of pure obsidian and glacial blue ice fused together, catching the bruised twilight in a kaleidoscope of distorted reflections. Frost didn't cling to it; it pulsed from within, forming intricate, shifting patterns that crawled across its surface, the royal sigil endlessly repeating, consuming, reforming. The air vibrated with palpable power, thick with the scent of ozone, old blood, and the crushing, sterile cold of the void. It felt less like a seat of power and more like the exposed nucleus of a dying star frozen mid collapse.
Massive doors, easily a hundred feet tall, barred the entrance. Carved into the obsidian were scenes of celestial conquest, stars being quenched, constellations bound in chains of ice, figures kneeling before a faceless King. But the carvings were obscured, overgrown by thick, pulsating veins of the same luminous blue ice that crawled through the city below. The ice seemed alive, digesting the stone. Before these doors stood ranks of Blackcloaks, not in their usual patrol gear, but in heavier, rune etched plate armour that glowed with the same sullen crimson as the manacles. Their faces were invisible behind full helms shaped like snarling, frozen demons. They stood utterly silent, still as the statues they resembled.
Akuma stepped forward, frost swirling around him like an honour guard. Gin followed, still cradling his frozen crow. The Blackcloaks dragging Kuro and Shiro halted at the base of the causeway leading directly to the titanic doors. The silence was absolute, oppressive, heavier than the mountain above Nyxara's cathedral. Only Kuro's wet, laboured breathing and the faint hiss crackle of Akuma's void cloak broke it.
Akuma didn't speak. He raised one gauntleted hand towards the doors.
Slowly, with a sound that resonated deep in the bones, the groan of continents shifting, the scrape of glaciers grinding bedrock to powder, the massive doors began to open. Not swinging inwards, but receding, sliding apart into the mountain of fused ice and stone. Darkness yawned beyond. Not empty darkness, but a darkness that seethed. A darkness colder than the space between stars, thick with unseen movement and the promise of absolute, annihilating regard. From within, a wave of frigid air rolled out, carrying with it a scent that stopped Shiro's heart: ozone, yes, and old blood, but also the unique, cloying metallic tang of Ryota's discarded Polaris insignia mixed with the sterile decay of Kaya's tomb effigy. And beneath it all, faint but unmistakable, the scent of the Butcher King himself, cold iron, stale sweat, and the acrid tang of unravelling sanity.
Akuma turned. His star pupil eyes fixed on Shiro, then on the barely conscious Kuro. The message was clear. This is it.
The Blackcloaks shoved them forward onto the causeway, towards the yawning maw of darkness. Kuro stumbled, crying out as the movement tore at his broken ribs, only held upright by the brutal grip of his guards. Shiro walked, legs trembling, ice locks burning, the frozen stump of the blood chain on his wrist a constant, throbbing reminder of their sundered pact and the power it had unleashed. The darkness within the doorway seemed to deepen, to focus on them as they approached. The seething intensified. Shiro felt it, a gaze, vast and terrible, pinning him like an insect. Not Akuma's predatory stare, not Gin's cosmic hunger, not even Nyxara's chilling presence. This was older, fouler, poisoned by millennia of absolute power and burgeoning madness. The gaze of the butcher king. The gaze of King Ryo Oji.
They crossed the threshold.
The darkness wasn't empty. It pressed in, thick and suffocating, colder than the void outside. The only light came from behind them, the cold glare of the causeway shrinking rapidly as the immense doors began their ponderous, grinding closure. It illuminated the first few yards: a floor of seamless, polished obsidian that reflected their distorted, terrified forms, stretching ahead into absolute black. And flanking this path, barely visible in the dying light, were shapes. Hulking, indistinct forms encased in ice so thick and ancient it was black. Frozen warriors? Trapped titans? The remnants of Ryo's past enemies? Impossible to tell. They radiated despair and a crushing sense of age.
Shiro's blood ran colder than the frostbite in his scar. King Ryo. This wasn't just Gin's fanaticism or Akuma's casual brutality. This was the Crown's direct, calculated will. Their capture, their suffering, was the culmination of the hunt, orchestrated by the king himself. The palace. The heart of the monster. The end of the path, paved not just with ice, but with Ryo's venomous, meticulous cruelty. They hadn't just failed; they'd been herded, broken, and delivered straight into the maw of the beast whose shadow they'd dared to defy. The light hadn't ended; it was being methodically, excruciatingly, extinguished.