There was one final, excruciating detail: one small crack in the flawless porcelain of Rex's new world. The tears streaming down Lily's and Diana's faces were not illusions.
They were not conjured by magic. They were real.
Their hands trembled against Leonidas's arms, their knuckles white with the effort of holding on.
Their mouths remained curved in those terrifying, serene smiles, chanting his name with ecstatic fervor, but behind those smiles, buried under a spiritual weight they could never hope to lift, lay something else.
Deep beneath the violet euphoria, in the microscopic fissures of their consciousness, something was screaming. It was the raw, primal shriek of their true selves, their actual desires, and their actual fears being crushed into submission.
The [Idolatry Dominion] was not a perfect erasure; it was a violation.
It lay over them like a suffocating shroud, forcing them to perform devotion while their souls wept in the dark.
