The Obsidian Throne Room didn't merely absorb light; it consumed hope. Stepping into its suffocating embrace felt like drowning in tar. Obsidian walls, polished to a depthless, liquid black, devoured the guttering torch flames whole. The sconces holding them weren't metal; they were tarnished silver shaped like skeletal hands, fingers eternally frozen mid claw, straining towards a ceiling lost in shadow. Only when your eyes adjusted to the perpetual twilight did the horror above reveal itself: the vaulted expanse wasn't stone, but black ice, thick and ancient, etched with mutilated constellations. Cassiopeia's throne lay shattered, her spine snapped clean through. Polaris, the Unmoving Star, was depicted chained directly to the silhouette of the obsidian throne below, its celestial light depicted as pale rivulets being siphoned downwards, feeding directly into the jagged points of the King's iron crown. The air itself was a physical assault, thick with the reek of burnt stardust (like ozone and charred sugar), the cloying sweetness of decaying lilies, and the metallic tang of old blood. It coated the tongue, gritty and cold, tasting of tombs and extinguished dreams.
Shiro hit the black marble floor hard, driven to his knees by a gauntleted blow between his shoulder blades. The impact jarred his teeth, sending fresh waves of agony radiating from his frostbitten, star scarred palm. His wrists were bound behind him not with rope, but with Temple forged manacles. The metal was unnaturally cold, leaching heat, and the inner surfaces weren't smooth. They were lined with microscopic, needle sharp thorns crafted from frozen star iron. Every twitch, every involuntary spasm of pain, drove the icy barbs deeper into his flesh. Blood, dark and sluggish in the frigid air, welled around the cuffs, dripping onto the polished floor with soft, rhythmic plinks. Yet, clutched desperately in his bound, bleeding hands was Aki's locket, a small, tarnished silver starflower. Its edges bit into his frostbitten skin, but it also burned, radiating a low, insistent heat against the pervasive chill. It was a relic of the sister who'd raised him, who'd taught him the names of the stars Aki hadn't seen in years, who was right now dying alone in the freezing slum shack, her breath a wet, ragged rattle Shiro could almost hear over the pounding of his own heart. The locket wasn't just metal; it was a lodestone of guilt, love, and desperate, failing hope.
Beside him, Kuro was a ruin sculpted in defiance. He hadn't been forced down; he'd collapsed, his legs refusing to hold him after Akuma's 'escort' through the frozen palace tunnels. His silver streak was matted with dried blood, his own and others plastered against his temple. One eye was swollen shut, the other a furious, blazing slit of supernova fury in a face masked by crimson filth and fresh bruises blooming purple black across his jaw. He'd taken blows meant to break him, meant to make him beg. He hadn't uttered a sound. His breaths came in shallow, pained rasps, Akuma had enjoyed breaking a few ribs, but his posture, even crumpled, screamed contempt. His own Temple manacles bit into his wrists, the thorned ice undoubtedly savaging the star scar Gin found so fascinating. He spat a gobbet of blood onto the obsidian floor near Ryo's boot. It steamed faintly before freezing solid, a tiny, defiant ruby.
King Ryo Oji rose from the Obsidian Throne. The movement was unnervingly smooth, like oil flowing. His heavy velvet robes, the colour of clotted blood, whispered against the dais. In his hand was not a sceptre of gold, but a length of petrified star wood, blackened and twisted, capped with a jagged shard of meteorite. He slammed its base against the dais. The sound wasn't loud; it was a crack that resonated in the bones, a sonic shard tearing through the suffocating silence, echoing the shattered constellations above.
"You spit on your blood, gutter rat," Ryo hissed, his voice a venomous rasp that carried unnaturally well in the dead air. His gaze, cold as the void between stars, fixed solely on Shiro. "Yuki Aratani's bastard get. Did you truly believe time, or your sister's pathetic lies, could erase her stench from your veins?"
Yuki Aratani.
The name detonated in Shiro's mind like a frozen grenade. Not a clear memory, but sensory shrapnel: the phantom scent of parchment and crushed juniper berries, the blurred warmth of laughter echoing down a corridor lost to time, the fleeting impression of ink stained fingers tracing shapes on his toddler's palm, stars, maybe? A lullaby hummed in a soft, melodic voice he could almost grasp, like smoke, before it vanished. Aki had always spoken of Yuki with a quiet sadness. "She was brilliant, Shiro. Like starlight given form. But the sickness… it took her too fast. When you were three." A lie. A fucking foundation of his life built on quicksand. The Scar burned as if reacting to the kings words, like a brand of truth.
"Liar!" Shiro snarled, the word ripping from his raw throat. He tried to surge forward, to lunge at the shadow on the dais, but the thorned manacles tore deeper, sending fresh jolts of icy agony up his arms. The locket's heat intensified, a counterpoint to the pain, a silent scream confirming the king's words.
Ryo descended the dais steps slowly, deliberately. His shadow seemed to elongate, swallowing the already feeble light, a living darkness spreading across the floor towards the kneeling prisoners. The reek preceding him intensified, rot, deep and organic, mingled with the cloying decay of lilies and something else… like stardust left to fester in a sealed tomb.
"Your sister stole you," Ryo murmured, stopping mere feet away, his voice dropping to a terrifying intimacy. He looked down at Shiro, not with anger, but with the cold curiosity of a vivisectionist. "Snatched you from the pyre the Temple had prepared for Yuki's… contamination. Aki, that star drunk fool clutching her herbs and her useless hope, thought she could hide Yuki's defect. Hide you." A thin, cruel smile touched his lips. "I let her try. Let her scurry back to her slum hovel with her stolen burden. Let her play mother to a poisoned seed." He leaned closer. His breath washed over Shiro, thick with the stench of grave soil and spoiled wine. "It amused me. Watching hope curdle into desperation. Watching her break, year by year, under the weight of her lie." His gaze flickered towards Kuro for a nanosecond, dismissive, before returning to Shiro with predatory focus. "And now? Now Aki rots in that same hovel. Alone. Choking on the blood filling her lungs, not from my blade, but from the frost your little rebellion called down upon her. Does she still sing you those lullabies, gutter rat? While she drowns in her own fucking fluids?"
The words were scalpels, flaying Shiro open. The image slammed into him with physical force: Aki, frail and gasping in the freezing dark, the prismatic frost creeping up her arms, her voice a wet rattle trying to form a familiar melody. His fault. His mother's fault? Ryo had orchestrated it all. A lifetime of suffering as entertainment. A low moan escaped Shiro, part agony, part soul deep rage. He felt the locket's heat sear his palm, a desperate plea from the past.
"You rotting pathetic bastard!" Kuro's voice shattered the tension, raw and ragged, spraying blood flecked spittle. He'd levered himself up onto one elbow, his good eye blazing with pure, incandescent hatred. "You talk of poisoned seeds? You're the fucking blight! My mother saw it! They carved stars while you carved throats!" He tried to surge forward, a wounded animal spitting defiance, but Akuma's shadow detached from the wall behind the throne.
The High Inquisitor moved silently, a wraith in obsidian plate. He didn't strike Kuro; he simply placed a booted foot on the prince's broken ribs and pressed down, slowly, deliberately. Kuro's defiance choked into a strangled gasp, his face contorting, all breath driven from him. Akuma's star pupiled gaze remained fixed on Ryo, awaiting command. Frost swirled lazily around his armoured form.
Ryo didn't even glance at his son's agony. His attention remained locked on Shiro, drinking in the devastation his words had wrought. He raised a hand, not towards Kuro, but towards the towering obsidian wall. A section shimmered, not melting, but becoming unnaturally clear, like black ice thinning.
An image formed.
Not a scrying pool, but a window carved through space by frost.
It showed Aki's shack. Not from outside, but inside. The perspective was low, looking up. Aki lay on the pallet. Her skin was the terrible translucent grey, spiderwebbed with those pulsing, prismatic veins of frozen light. Her chest hitched violently, each breath a wet, bubbling struggle. Frost encrusted her lips and eyelashes. Her eyes were open, unfocused, staring at the ceiling where the star carved plank hung, Cassiopeia's throne, tilted west. Her lips moved, soundless in the vision, but Shiro knew. He knew the shape of that lullaby. The one Yuki might have sung. The one Aki had sung, a thousand times, in the warm dark.
"Little star, don't fade away…"
The vision sharpened. Standing beside the pallet, coalescing from the freezing shadows near the door, was a figure. Not human. Gaunt, indistinct, formed from swirling black snow and the absolute cold of the void between stars. Its eyes were prismatic voids, mirroring Mira's, mirroring the Algol demon's. It leaned over Aki, its formless head tilting as if listening to her dying breaths. Nyxara's presence. Or a fragment of it. Drawn by the fading ember of Aki's life. Drawn by the lingering resonance of the stars she'd carved, the hope she'd nurtured. Drawn, ultimately, by him.
"The frost remembers, gutter rat," Ryo whispered, his voice slithering into Shiro's ear like frozen oil. He gestured at the vision. "It remembers Yuki's defiance. It remembers Aki's stolen ember. And now… it remembers you. Your little supernova in the canals? A beacon. You didn't just bleed stars. You rang the fucking dinner bell."
He straightened, turning his back on the horrific vision, on Shiro's shattered expression, on Kuro's strangled gasps beneath Akuma's boot. He ascended the dais, his blood coloured robes flowing like a wound.
The obsidian throne room didn't just absorb sound; it suffocated it. The wet, rattling ghost of Aki's dying breaths, conjured by Ryo's frost window, hung in the air like a physical shroud, thick with the cloying stench of burnt stardust, decaying lilies, and the metallic tang of fresh blood dripping from Shiro's thorned manacles. The image of Nyxara's fragment leaning over Aki, a swirling vortex of absolute cold and hungry void eyes, was seared onto Shiro's retinas, superimposed over the mutilated constellations above. Dinner bell. Ryo's words echoed, a frozen dagger twisting in his gut. He'd brought the frost to Aki's door. Just as Ryo had orchestrated.
But beneath the immediate, crushing guilt over Aki, a deeper earthquake was tearing through Shiro's foundations. Yuki Aratani. Not dead from sickness. Burned. Burned on a Temple pyre for her 'contamination'. Aki had stolen him from the flames. His entire life, the bedrock of his identity, the slum rat, Aki's burden, the defiant star carver, was built on a pyre of lies and ash. Fragmented memories detonated like shrapnel: Ink stained fingers tracing constellations on his tiny palm, the scent of parchment and crushed juniper sharper now, a fleeting warmth, a melody hummed – "Little star, don't fade away..." Yuki's voice? Or Aki's imitation? The locket in his bound, bleeding hands burned like a coal, the starflower engraving branding his frostbitten skin. Why? The question wasn't just for Ryo, but for Aki, for the ghost of the mother he couldn't remember. Why lie? What defect? What was I? His vision swam, the obsidian walls seeming to ripple and bleed darkness. He felt untethered, adrift in a void of betrayal and unanswered fire.
Kuro, however, was a supernova contained by chains and agony. Akuma's boot still pressed on his broken ribs, a constant, grinding reminder of his helplessness. Ryo's dismissal, turning his back, ascending the dais as if his son were less than the frozen blood spittle on the floor, was the final spark. The vision of Aki dying, the casual cruelty about Shiro's mother, the fucking smugness radiating from the obsidian throne… it ignited the volatile core of Kuro's being.
"YOU ROTTING, MAGGOT INFESTED FUCK!" Kuro's roar tore from his ravaged throat, spraying flecks of crimson across the polished obsidian floor. It wasn't just loud; it was a physical force, a wave of pure, incandescent hatred that momentarily silenced the oppressive weight of the room. He surged against his chains with a violence that shocked even Akuma, muscles bunching, tendons standing out like cables on his neck. The thorned manacles tore deeper into his wrists, fresh blood welling black in the guttering torchlight, mingling with the filth on his face. His one good eye, a slit of white hot supernova fury in the mask of blood and bruises, locked onto Ryo's back. "YOU FUCKER! YOU TOOK EVERYTHING! EVERY FUCKING THING FROM ME!"
The King paused, halfway to his throne. He didn't turn quickly. He turned with the slow, deliberate menace of a glacier calving. His expression wasn't anger; it was cold, analytical contempt, like a scientist observing a particularly volatile specimen. The petrified star wood sceptre, tipped with its jagged meteorite shard, swung almost lazily.
THWACK CRUNCH.
The sound wasn't the crack of the dais. It was wetter, more visceral. The sceptre connected with the side of Kuro's already swollen jaw. The impact wasn't just bone cracking; it was the sickening sound of fractured cartilage, of flesh splitting under brutal force. Kuro's head snapped sideways, a spray of blood and saliva arcing through the air, painting a grotesque Rorschach blot on the dark floor. He sagged heavily against Akuma's boot, a guttural groan escaping him, but his eye, even through the fresh wave of agony, still burned with undimmed hatred.
"Pathetic," Ryo hissed, his voice a venomous rasp that cut through Kuro's pained gasps. He leaned down slightly, peering at his son's broken face. "Just like your traitorous whore of a mother. Weak. Sentimental. Blind to true power." He straightened, his shadow engulfing Kuro. "She actually begged, you know. On her knees in the throne room, right where you're bleeding now. Not for her own life. Oh no." Ryo's lips curled into a cruel parody of a smile. "She begged for yours. 'Spare Kuro,' she wept, her starry fucking eyes wide with tears. 'He's just a child. He didn't know.' Pathetic."
Kuro tried to spit, but it came out a bloody bubble. "Liar," he choked, the word thick with blood and defiance, but a tremor ran through him. A flicker, deep beneath the rage, the terrified six year old boy who'd hidden under his bed for weeks after his mother vanished, who'd been told she'd 'gone to the stars', who'd secretly believed it was his fault for some unknown transgression.
Ryo saw it. Of course he saw it. His smile widened, becoming a rictus of pure malice. "Liar? You were six. Spoiled. Arrogant. Like a mewling kitten playing with things beyond its comprehension." He took a slow step closer, his polished boot coming to rest inches from Kuro's bloodied face. "You stole my crown. Thought it a shiny toy. Clomped around the solar wearing it, giggling." Ryo's voice dripped with mockery. "When my guards dragged you in here, crown clutched in your grubby little fist, your precious mother Kaya intervened. Threw herself between you and my justice. Screamed about innocence." Ryo's eyes, cold voids, held Kuro's. "So I showed her the price of defiance. I showed her the price of your arrogance."
He paused, letting the memory coil like frost in the air. "I called the hounds. Not Temple beasts. My hounds. Bred in the deepest frost, starved for three days. She fought. Oh, how she fought. For you. Her screams…" Ryo closed his eyes for a second, a shiver of perverse pleasure running through him. "...they weren't brief. They echoed in these halls for hours. A symphony of failure. All because her precious, thieving brat wanted to play king then for the cherry on top I carved her eyes what a sight to behold it was seeing the light extinguished from her eyes literally." He drove his boot, not into Kuro's stomach this time, but hard into his already broken ribs.
CRUNCH.
Kuro doubled over with a strangled, animalistic cry, retching blood onto the king's boot. Agony, white hot and blinding, ripped through him. The chains bit viciously as his body convulsed. The terrified six year old surged forward, drowning in guilt, his fault, his fault, his fault she screamed, his fault she died.
But then, rising through the pain, the guilt, the suffocating memory of imagined childhood blame, came the rage. It wasn't just hot; it was glacial, pure, and infinitely destructive. It was the fury of a lifetime of manipulation, of cruelty disguised as discipline, of a mother's love weaponized against her son. It crystallized the pain, forged it into something sharp and lethal.
Kuro's body stopped convulsing. He went terrifyingly still. Slowly, agonizingly, he raised his head. Blood streamed freely from his shattered jaw, dripped from his nose, matted his obsidian hair. His one good eye was no longer just furious; it was demonic. A fissure of pure, incandescent hatred burning in a ruined face. He locked eyes with his father. His voice, when it came, was a guttural rasp, bubbling with blood, yet carrying a terrifying, absolute clarity. Each word was a shard of ice, a vow carved in bone deep loathing.
"You…" Hack. Spit blood. "...fucking…" A wet, ragged breath. "...EYE LESS…" He strained against the chains, muscles screaming, veins standing out like black cords on his neck. "...DERRANGED… CUNT!"
The profanity wasn't just insult; it was a weapon hurled with all the force of his shattered being. The air crackled. Even Akuma's implacable presence seemed to tighten, the frost swirling faster around his armour. The torches guttered violently, as if Kuro's rage was sucking the oxygen from the room.
Shiro, jolted from his dissociative spiral by Kuro's raw, elemental fury, felt a surge of horrified empathy. His mother… fed to hounds… because he stole a crown… The sheer, gratuitous cruelty of it dwarfed even Yuki's burning. He saw the flicker of the broken child in Kuro's eyes before it was consumed by the supernova of hate. It mirrored his own shattered foundation. Both our mothers… destroyed by him. Yuki burned for her stars. Kuro's mother torn apart for protecting her child. Ryo carved her eyes. He destroyed what saw the truth. He extinguished their light.
Ryo, however, merely looked bored. He flicked a speck of Kuro's blood from his boot with a disdainful gesture. "Eloquent as ever, boy. Proof the gutter breeds true, even in gilded cages." He turned fully towards the throne. "Akuma. Silence the mongrel. Permanently, if necessary. We have the main attraction to prepare." His gaze, laden with cruel anticipation, slid back to Shiro. "The Sovereign hungers for starlight. Especially… tainted starlight what a load of bullshit who actually believes this shit."
Shiro flinched. Tainted. Yuki's defect. Him. The locket seared his palm, a brand of unknown legacy. His mind reeled, pyres, hounds, carved eyes. The mothers. The cost. His amber eyes, usually sharp with defiance, were wide, fractured. But deep within the shock and terror, something else sparked. Not the comet flare Ryo might expect, but a cold, hard ember of understanding. Ryo didn't just kill; he erased. He extinguished light. Yuki's fire. Kaya's vision. Aki's hope. He was the void given form.
Akuma shifted his boot, preparing to deliver a silencing blow to Kuro's head. Frost crackled around his gauntleted fist. Kuro, bloodied but unbowed, stared up at his tormentor with that single, burning eye of pure, unadulterated hate, a silent promise of murder etched in every line of his broken face.