The desert had been endless.
Not in the way mortal eyes understood "endless"—no, this was infinity reimagined by cruel hands. Sand stretched forever in every direction. The horizon shimmered, always just beyond reach. The sun bled its heat downward without movement, as if stuck at the very peak of its arc, glaring like the eye of a wrathful god.
Elior had walked with Seo-jin across that desert until he'd stopped counting his steps. Until thirst burned away the numbers. Until even prayer itself dried in his throat.
Now, they were free of it.
Or so the Overseers claimed.
Elior sat slumped against the cold wall of their next prison—a cell without windows, without doors. Simply chains and stone. He could feel the memory of the desert still blistering under his skin, as though his flesh remembered heat even in this stale coolness.
Seo-jin lay on the floor nearby, sprawled out as though he had been born careless. Arms loose, legs crooked, expression faintly amused even in exhaustion.
Elior hated that expression.
No one should look amused when the world sought to break them.
And yet—Seo-jin did.
Always.
For a time, the silence of the cell pressed against Elior's ears. No footsteps of guards. No whisper of Overseers. Only his own ragged breathing and the soft scrape of chain against stone when Seo-jin shifted.
Then he heard it.
A sound.
At first he thought it was his own imagination, one of the cruel aftereffects of the desert trial. His ears had invented voices before, when the hunger was too sharp, when his mind reeled in circles.
But this…
Seo-jin's lips were moving.
Elior froze.
The necromancer wasn't speaking aloud—he had no voice still, his throat shredded from the Trial of Silence. But his mouth shaped words silently, lips curving around syllables that Elior couldn't hear.
His expression changed as he mouthed them.
Not his usual mask of mockery. Not that blade-edged smirk.
But something gentler.
Softer.
As though someone else existed in this room, unseen, and Seo-jin spoke only to her.
Elior's chest tightened.
He hated himself for it, but he felt something close to envy.
When the chains tugged and the air shifted—the Overseers signaling that another trial was yet to come—Seo-jin stirred. He caught Elior watching him. For a heartbeat, their gazes held.
Seo-jin's grin bloomed, sly and crooked. He lifted a hand, drawing a crude shape with his fingertip on the stone floor. A circle with two dots and a line. A face.
A smiley.
Elior frowned. "…Why?"
Seo-jin only tapped the doodle, then tapped Elior's boot, then leaned back with a silent laugh.
The Saint's jaw tightened. He refused to respond further.
But when he looked away, his heart clenched with unease.
Seo-jin should not have looked so content while alone in a room of stone. Unless, of course… he had not been alone.
He tried to pray.
It was habit. Whenever his mind grew restless, whenever shadows thickened too much, his lips formed old hymns like a man might hum to himself to keep despair away.
But no light came.
His god had been silent since the chains first bound him here.
The silence stretched so long Elior had almost begun to wonder if his faith had been cut away along with his freedom.
And in that void, Seo-jin's strange behavior gnawed louder.
The Saint turned over fragments in his mind.
He had seen the necromancer smile at shadows.
Seen him tilt his head as though listening to whispers no other could hear.
Seen him mouth words like prayers—yet not to the gods Elior knew.
The Overseers were cruel, yes. They loved illusions, tricks, tortures spun from lies. But this… this did not feel like an Overseer's performance.
It felt intimate.
Private.
As though Seo-jin carried a secret companion chained only to his soul.
Elior should have confronted him.
Every teaching from the temple urged it. Strange voices in the silence were omens. They heralded demons. They were the touch of corruption, the first step toward madness.
And yet—he stayed silent.
Because he feared the answer.
If he asked Seo-jin who he whispered to, and Seo-jin told him the truth… what then?
What if it was a demon?
What if the necromancer's bond to death had attracted some restless spirit?
Elior's stomach knotted.
Because even if it was true—even if Seo-jin was being haunted—he could not leave him.
He needed him.
That truth was more bitter than the desert's thirst.
A memory came unbidden.
The temple courtyard, sun streaming down golden. He had been a boy then, no more than thirteen. His teacher's voice had rung out, steady and calm: "A Saint must guard not only his own soul, but the souls of those beside him. Where corruption whispers, the Saint must silence it."
How easy it had seemed, back then.
How clean.
How impossible now.
He looked at Seo-jin sprawled across the stone floor, hair a mess, chains clinking softly whenever he twitched in half-dream.
Corruption whispered to him—Elior was certain of it.
And yet Elior did not silence it.
He only watched.
The trial that followed was meant to break them with tedium.
Hours—or days, Elior could not tell—passed with no task, no torment, only silence. No hunger. No pain. Just the void of endless waiting.
It should have been simple.
But Elior soon realized it was worse.
Pain was something one could fight. Silence only left the mind to devour itself.
Seo-jin, of course, found ways to mock it. He scratched doodles onto the floor. He balanced chains on his fingertip like a child playing. He gestured rude symbols at the walls, daring the Overseers to react.
And sometimes, when he thought Elior wasn't looking, he smiled at nothing again.
A soft smile.
Almost tender.
It was that which unsettled Elior most.
Because it was the one expression he had never seen on Seo-jin's face before.
Late, when even the silence grew thick, Elior pretended to rest. His eyes were half-closed.
He watched.
Seo-jin stirred.
He tilted his head, as though listening.
His lips moved.
One word, shaped carefully. Elior could not hear it. Could not guess it. But the look on Seo-jin's face told him it mattered.
Gentleness. Warmth.
Things Elior had not thought this necromancer capable of.
Seo-jin smiled faintly, then lay back down, as though soothed by the phantom presence.
Elior's hand curled tight against his chest.
For the first time since his chains had bound him, he felt fear not of the Overseers—but of the man chained at his side.
When the Overseers finally stirred the air and declared: "Next Paradox: The Trial of Masks," Elior barely heard them.
He was still watching Seo-jin.
Still replaying that moment over and over, burned into his thoughts.
The necromancer had someone else.
Someone unseen.
Someone who could make him smile that way.
And Elior hated it.
Feared it.
Envied it.
Because he was no longer certain whether Seo-jin was his ally, his doom, or something far worse.
"My partner is haunted," Elior thought grimly, chains biting into his wrists. "And the chains are no longer our only prison."