Each step Mathias took up the stairs was a heavy, deliberate strike, a metronome counting down to an inevitable end. He didn't rush. He didn't need to. When he reached the door, he nudged it open with a slow, agonizing crawl of wood against frame that felt like a blade sliding into skin.
The air inside was thick with the stagnant stench of a life coming undone. Elvira wasn't on the bed. She was a heap of rags and bruised skin on the floor, looking less like a woman and more like something broken and discarded. For decades, she had pulled the strings of the empire, but here, in the wreckage of her own bedroom, she finally tasted a humiliation that no amount of pride could swallow.
Mathias didn't just enter the room; he occupied it. His obsidian mana flooded the space, a suffocating, lightless pressure that snuffed out her own power like a boot crushing a dying ember. She couldn't even manage a twitch.
A single tear cut a clean path through the filth on her face.
