Chapter 68: The Band depart to help
The gratitude in the pavilion curdled into something else entirely. It happened so fast.
Lord Tarius was still bowing, his wife weeping with relief, when Bruce’s head snapped toward Lady Lyra. His gaze, previously compassionate, hardened into something focused and cold. The swirling hazel stilled, the gold predominating like flecks of ore in a frozen stream.
“You brought a stowaway,” Bruce said, his voice low. It wasn’t a question.
Lady Lyra’s tears stopped. She blinked. “I… I don’t…”
Before she could finish the lie, Bruce moved. Not with godlike speed, but with a deliberate, terrifying finality. He crossed the space between them in two strides and his hand shot out, closing around her wrist. Not hard enough to break, but with an immovable pressure.
THE AIR CRACKLES WITH DISPLACED ENERGY AS BRUCE'S HAND TIGHTENS AROUND LADY LYRA'S WRIST, HIS SWIRLING HAZEL EYES BURNING INTO HERS.
A shimmer, like heat haze, rippled out from the point of contact. From within the folds of Lady Lyra’s somber, light-drinking gown, a tiny, intricate device of writhing black crystal dislodged itself. It hung in the air between them, pulsing with a sick, silent frequency.
“A reality anchor,” Mystique said, her voice flat. She didn’t move, but the temperature around them dropped sharply. “Keyed to a specific, invasive frequency. You weren’t just asking for help. You were trying to pin a door open. For what?”
Lord Tarius paled, his eyes wide with genuine shock. He looked at his wife as if seeing a stranger. “Lyra? What is this? You said it was a stabilizer… for the journey…”
“It is for the journey!” Lyra insisted, trying to pull her wrist from Bruce’s grip and failing utterly. Her sharp beauty twisted into desperation. “To ensure we could return home! The blight disrupts dimensional travel, we told you!”
“Bullshit,” Lena said, the word casual and cutting. She had her arms crossed, her weight shifted to one hip, a posture of pure, unimpressed skepticism. “A stabilizer doesn’t taste like that. That thing tastes like a drill bit. You were trying to bore a hole.”
Bruce’s eyes never left Lyra’s. He was reading her, not her mind, but the vibration of her soul, the history in her cells. “The blight isn’t just in your universe,” he said, the realization dawning in his tone. “You’re carrying it. You’re patient zero. And you weren’t trying to save your home. You were trying to spread it. A failsafe. If we said no, you’d infect this place on your way out, force our hand.”
A collective stillness settled over Bruce’s family. Not fear, but a cold, ready anger. Camille took a subtle step forward, her protective aura flaring faintly, a golden shimmer at her fingertips. Ketut’s foot touched the ground, and a deep, grounding hum resonated through the pavilion’s foundation.
NIAMH (FORMERLY ELARA SHE WILL NOW BE CALLED NIAMH) THE LORD AND LADY’S DAUGHTER IS COMPLETELY INFATUATED WITH BRUCE AND CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT SHE’S FEELING.
Niamh—the name her mother had whispered to her in the dark, the one her father’s politics had buried under ‘Elara’—stood frozen. The horror was back, but it had a new, sharper edge. It wasn’t just the horror of being offered as a trade. It was the horror of her mother’s deceit, of the vile, writhing thing now exposed in the air. And cutting through it all, a shocking, electric thread of awe for the man holding her mother accountable.
He wasn’t raging. He wasn’t posturing. He was just… certain. His grip was absolute, his gaze dissecting. He’d seen through the layers of tragedy and desperation to the rotten core in a heartbeat. And his refusal of her now felt even more profound. He hadn’t just rejected a bargaining chip; he’d rejected the entire corrupt premise of the offer. He saw her, Niamh, separate from the sickness of her parents’ actions.
She couldn’t breathe. She found herself staring at the line of his jaw, the shift of muscle in his forearm. The way his other wives had closed ranks around him, not in subservience, but in a unified front of formidable power. This was what real strength looked like. Not the hollow, fading authority of her father’s court, but this clean, terrifying clarity. A flush burned its way from her chest up her neck. She had to look away.
Bruce released Lyra’s wrist with a slight push that made her stumble back into her horrified husband. The black crystal device floated into Bruce’s palm. He closed his fist. There was no sound, no flash. When he opened his hand, a fine, inert grey dust sifted through his fingers and vanished before it hit the ground.
“The blight is a psychic parasite,” Bruce said, wiping his hand on his thigh. “A meme of despair. It doesn’t eat matter. It eats meaning. You can’t anchor it because it’s not physical. You’ve been trying to fight a ghost with a hammer.” He turned his attention to Lord Tarius, who looked utterly broken. “Your wife is infected. Deeply. It’s whispering to her, justifying anything. Even this.”
“Can you help her?” Tarius begged, his voice shattered.
Mystique stepped forward now. Her green eyes, flecked with gold and blue and violet, swept over Lyra. “I can quarantine the thought-form. Isolate it from her consciousness. But it’s woven in. Extracting it…” She looked at Bruce. “That’s a more delicate surgery. We need to go to the source. Find the original memory of despair that spawned it and rewrite it. Like with the scar.”
“Same job, different address,” Lena sighed, but she was already cracking her neck, a fighter shifting mental gears. “Okay. Intel says the blight’s psychic. So we’re not bringing the cosmic artillery. We’re bringing the therapists.” A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Anya, Freya. You’re on point. You’re our heart and our fire. You two can generate the strongest counter-memories.”
Anya’s violet eyes gleamed with focus. Freya nodded, her Mediterranean-sea eyes sharp. “Burn out the despair,” Freya said, her voice firm.
“Camille, Ketut, you’re our anchors and our foundation,” Bruce continued. “You hold the space, keep our connection to here solid. Mystique, you’re with me. You quarantine, I’ll extract. Lena, you’re the conduit. You link us all, keep the energy flowing.”
It was a plan, formed in seconds, a seamless integration of their strengths. They moved like a single organism.
AS BRUCE AND THE WIVES MAKE PLANS TO LEAVE TO HELP CHRONA ASKS DADDY CAN I COME WITH YOU?
The voice was small but clear, cutting through the tactical talk. Chrona, who had been watching quietly from beside a pillar, her eyes—so like her mother’s, but younger, softer—wide with concern, stepped forward.
Bruce stopped. All the godlike intensity melted from his frame. He knelt, bringing himself to her eye level. “This isn’t like the dryad’s forest, sweetheart. This is a sick place. It’s dangerous in a way that’s hard to explain.”
“I know,” Chrona said, her chin trembling only slightly. “But I can help. I can feel things. Like Mom can. I felt the icky thing in the lady’s dress before you did.” She glanced at Mystique, then back at Bruce, her expression fiercely earnest. “I want to learn. I can’t learn if I always stay here where it’s safe.”
BRUCE LOOKS AT MYSTIQUE AND SHE AT HIM TO MAKE THE DECISION TOGETHER.
Their eyes met over their daughter’s head. A whole conversation passed in the silence. The fear, raw and parental. The pride, equally sharp. The recognition that Chrona was not a normal child. She was a demigoddess of immense, latent potential, born of the two most powerful beings in existence. Sheltering her forever was an illusion, and a disservice.
Mystique’s multicolored gaze was the first to soften. She gave a barely perceptible nod.
Bruce looked back at Chrona. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “You stay between me and your mother. Exactly. You don’t reach for anything, you don’t touch anything without one of us. You’re an observer this time. Your job is to feel, and to tell us what you feel. That’s all. Can you do that?”
Chrona’s face lit up with a solemn, proud light. She nodded vigorously. “Yes, Daddy.”
“Okay,” Bruce said, standing up. He looked at Niamh, who was staring at the interaction with a kind of breathless wonder. “You too,” he said to her. “You’re coming. You’re the only one from your world who isn’t actively compromised. You might be our key to finding the source.”
Niamh could only nod, her throat tight.
Lord Tarius reached for his daughter, a final, helpless gesture. “Niamh…”
She looked at her father, then at her mother, who was now staring blankly, shivering as Mystique’s quarantine energy—a gentle, shimmering net of silver light—settled over her. “I have to,” Niamh whispered. “To make it right.”
Bruce turned toward the center of the pavilion. He raised a hand, and the air tore.
Not the gentle fold to the baths or the Infinity Pool. This was a violent, precise rip. The Void Threshold shimmered into being, a jagged iris of iridescent energy opening onto a howling, grey expanse. The whisper of forgotten things leaked through, cold and draining.
“Anchors ready,” Bruce said, his voice carrying over the drone. “Conduit, stand by. Let’s go fix a broken heart.”
He took Chrona’s small hand in his. Mystique took the other. As one, the family stepped forward into the bleached, silent scream of the Caelum universe, pulling Niamh and the quarantined Lady Lyra along in their wake.
The grey wasn't an absence of color. It was a phagocytosis of it. The air itself felt exhausted, leaching the vitality from their skin with a subtle, relentless pressure. Sound didn't echo here; it died, flattened into muffled tones. They stood on what might have been a street, the outlines of buildings visible as smudged suggestions, like a charcoal drawing left in the rain.
“Well,” Lena said, her voice oddly hollow in the thick atmosphere. “This is cheery.”
Chrona’s small hand tightened in Bruce’s. “It’s sad,” she whispered, her eyes already glistening. “Everything is so, so sad.”
Mystique’s quarantine field around Lyra pulsed a steady, defiant silver, a tiny hearth in a vast, cold nothing. Lyra herself stared ahead, blank-eyed, a tear tracing a clean path through the grey dust on her cheek. Niamh simply wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. The despair here was a physical weight, confirming every terrible thing.
“Anchors,” Bruce said, his voice cutting through the muffling effect. “Plant us.”
Camille and Ketut didn’t nod. They acted. Camille knelt, slamming a palm onto the grey, cobbled ground. A dome of warm, golden light erupted from her, a bubble pushing back the emotional miasma. Inside it, the air cleared, tasting of ozone and life. Ketut placed her hands on Camille’s shoulders, and viridian green roots of energy shot from the dome’s base, drilling deep into the planet’s heart, tethering them to something solid and real.
The relief was instant. Niamh gasped, drawing her first full breath since arriving. “You can… keep it out?”
“Temporarily,” Camille grunted, maintaining the shield. “It’s like holding up a dam. A really depressing dam.”
“Okay, therapists,” Bruce said, turning to Anya and Freya. “Find us a thread. Something we can pull on.”
Anya closed her striking violet eyes, extending her senses not out, but in, seeking the residual echoes of what this place had felt like before. Freya stood beside her, a hand on her shoulder, her own eyes shut. A soft, warm light began to emanate from them—not the blaze of a sun, but the steady, promising glow of dawn.
“There,” Anya breathed, pointing without opening her eyes. “Not far. A… a gathering place. There’s a faint imprint of community. Of music.”
They moved as a unit, the golden dome shifting with them. The grey buildings resolved slightly as they walked, revealing ornate, sweeping architecture now blurred and featureless. The square Anya led them to must have been beautiful once, centered on a dry, sculpted basin.
Now, it held people. Or the remnants of them. They sat on benches or stood listlessly, their forms washed of detail, their clothing shades of the same endless grey. They didn’t look up. A musician sat with a instrument in his lap, his fingers resting on silent strings.
“The meaning is gone,” Mystique observed, her multi-hued eyes analyzing the scene. “The music isn’t forgotten. The value of the music is. The connection it creates. It’s been stripped.”
Niamh let out a soft, wounded sound. She walked to the edge of their protective dome, staring at the listless musician. “That’s Maestro Orin,” she whispered. “He taught me my first scales. He used to laugh so loud it would echo for blocks.”
As she spoke, Freya acted. She focused on Niamh’s memory, on the clear, specific emotion in her voice. She cupped her hands and blew gently, as if scattering a dandelion’s head. A shower of tiny, glowing embers drifted from her palms, floating through Camille’s shield and into the square.
Where they landed, color sparked. A flicker of cobalt in a tunic. A flash of polished wood on the instrument. The Maestro’s finger twitched.
A single, pure, resonant note hung in the dead air.
It was like a lightning strike. Every listless figure in the square flinched, heads turning slowly toward the sound. There was no joy in their faces yet. Only a profound, bewildered recognition, the first ache of feeling returning to a frostbitten limb.
The note also acted as a beacon. The grey around them rippled.
From the blurred facades of the buildings, tendrils of concentrated apathy extruded. They weren’t physical, but they distorted the air, making the heart stutter and the mind want to simply… stop. They slithered toward the protective dome, toward the source of the painful, beautiful sound.
“Incoming,” Lena said, her voice tight. She raised her hands, and the air within the dome thickened, ready to deflect.
“No,” Bruce said, watching the tendrils. “Don’t fight their despair. Outshine it. Anya, feed Freya. Lena, amplify them. Chrona, tell me what you feel from those things.”
“They’re hungry,” Chrona said, pressing closer to his leg, but her voice was clear. “They’re empty and they want to be full but they don’t know how. They’re… lonely.”
Anya placed both hands on Freya’s back. Her power of creation flowed, a deep, supportive wellspring. Freya’s dawn-light intensified, burning brighter. Lena wove the air around that light, spinning it into a complex, haunting melody that carried the revived note, building it into a chord, then a phrase of song.
The song washed over the approaching tendrils. They recoiled, not in pain, but in confusion. The grey wavered. For a second, the beautiful, arched colonnade of the square snapped into sharp, vivid focus, adorned with flowering vines in impossible shades of cerise and amber.
In that moment of clarity, Niamh saw it. “There!” She pointed to the base of the dry fountain. “The fountain wasn’t for water. It was for wishes. People would toss in inscribed stones. My… my first stone is there. I was seven. I wished for my mother to smile like she used to.”
The memory, so specific and charged with a child’s hope, was a flare in the gloom. Bruce and Mystique moved as one.
He went for the source. She went for the symptom. Mystique’s hands flew up, and walls of shimmering force, woven with crackling electrical current and veined with glacial ice, erected themselves between the tendrils and their group, not attacking, but containing and cooling their advance.
Bruce knelt by the fountain, his hand hovering over the grey, dusty basin. He didn’t dig. He reached. Through layers of forgotten meaning, through the psychic sediment of despair, he sought the unique resonance of a child’s heartfelt wish.
His hand closed around something that wasn’t there. He pulled.
With a sound like a sigh, the grey at the fountain’s heart dissolved. A single, smooth river stone, inscribed with clumsy, hopeful runes, glowed with a soft, inner light. It was the only true color in the universe.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. The grey world screamed. Not a sound, but a pressure, a wave of pure negation that slammed into Camille’s shield. Cracks webbed across the golden dome.
“It’s anchored to her wish!” Bruce yelled over the psychic torrent. “The blight didn’t start here. It anchored itself here, to this memory, and rotted it out from the inside! Niamh!”
She was already stumbling forward, her eyes locked on the glowing stone—on the physical proof of a hope that had been twisted into a cancer. Her face was a mask of devastation. “My wish did this?”
“Your hope didn’t do this,” Bruce countered, his voice straining as he held the connection open. The negative pressure was immense. “Something else perverted it. Something that fears connection. You have to reclaim it. You have to wish it again, now.”
Trembling, she dropped to her knees beside him. She looked from the stone to the quarantined, blank face of her mother, to the listless, almost-remembering faces of her people. She closed her fingers around the cool, glowing rock.
She thought of the Maestro’s laugh. She thought of her father’s pride before the court faded. She thought of the man before her, who had refused to own her but now trusted her with this.
“I wish,” she said, her voice gaining strength, echoing strangely in the space between realities, “for us to remember how to feel. All of it. Even the hurts. Because the hurts mean we lived.”
She placed the stone back into the basin.
The glow erupted. It wasn’t a gentle light. It was a concussion of meaning, a shockwave of restored context that blasted outwards from the fountain in a ring of furious color and sound. It smashed into Mystique’s containment walls, shattering them, and then hit the tendrils of despair.
They didn’t retreat. They transformed. The grey, slithering forms crystallized in the air, becoming intricate, frozen sculptures of sorrow and joy intertwined, then dissolved into a fine, benign mist.
The wave hit the people. Maestro Orin jerked, drew a ragged breath, and his fingers flew across his instrument’s strings, producing a wild, discordant, and achingly alive cascade of notes. All around the square, people were clutching their chests, weeping, laughing, shouting in confusion and awakening.
The blight was not gone. The wave was just a pebble in a pond. But the pattern was clear now. The infection had a core.
Bruce stood, pulling Niamh up with him. Her eyes were wide, streaming tears, but she was radiant, clutching the now-dull wish stone. In the square, her mother, Lyra, slumped within Mystique’s quarantine net, but her eyes were no longer blank. They were filled with a horrified, dawning awareness of what she had almost done.
“You found the wound,” Bruce said to Niamh. His swirling hazel eyes held hers, and in them she saw no blame, only a grim respect. “Now we know where to cut. The heart of this isn’t in a city square.”
He looked past the awakening chaos, to the distant, blurred outlines of a towering, palatial structure on the hill. The epicenter of the psychic decay was there, where hope would have been most concentrated, and thus, most vulnerable to betrayal.
“It’s in the palace,” Niamh whispered, following his gaze. Dread and determination settled in her gut. “My father’s throne room.”
“Then let’s go pay a visit to the king,” Lena said, cracking her knuckles. The melody around her fingers shifted, turning from a song of remembrance to a low, determined rhythm of advance.