Dawn in the cursed Falus Forest bore no resemblance to any dawn that broke over quiet cities. The light did not steal in with softness and romance to wake the creatures of the world. It stormed through the thick, toxic fog wreathing the trees like cold silver blades. Threads of grey light wrestled with the darkness, exposing the shadows of twisted trees that appeared as tormented souls frozen mid-scream. The morning air carried a bone-biting cold and the smell of damp earth mixed with old blood and rotting vegetation.
On the bank of the lake they had emerged from in the night, Dex sat on a large jutting rock, his feet planted firmly on the rough ground. Despite the biting cold of the air, his bare chest still pulsed with a faint, steady warmth. A pale blue aura threaded with golden filaments surrounded his skin like the remnant of a burning dream that refused to fade, granting him automatic protection against the forest's frost.
His back was straight and his gaze focused entirely on something he held between his hands. It was a heavy golden pendant, ancient in appearance and exquisitely crafted. This was the official emblem and absolute seal of the House of Williams. The raised engraving depicted a roaring golden lion standing proud upon two crossed swords, encircled by a halo of flames carved with such skill they appeared to move.
Dex looked at the crest with a bitter disdain, a sardonic smile forming at the corner of his mouth. The house that was supposed to be a symbol of absolute power, of rigid justice, and of fires that burned the Empire's enemies, stood now in reality at the edge of a deep abyss: broken from within and cast aside by a sordid conspiracy that no lion's sword had been able to turn.
Beside him, at a short distance, Lumia sat crouching atop a slightly higher rock, her arms wrapped around her knees. She appeared as a sculpture carved from pure silver marble, utterly still save for her quiet breathing. The rough black cloak wrapped around her and the hood concealing half her face and hair made her exposed skin appear more pallid and flawless, lending her aura a doubled mystique.
Her eyes, mirror-silver the night before, had been altered in a strange magical way by the morning. They now reflected the faint crimson of the dawn and the fire-aura radiating from Dex's body, making them appear as two smouldering embers glowing softly. Those red eyes tracked every movement of his hand, every blink of his eyelid, every breath that left his chest with meticulous precision. She did not fully understand the value of the golden pendant or its symbolic meaning-she did not know what nobles or houses were-but through her Celestial sensitivity to energy, she could read with perfect clarity the immense emotional weight and the aching vibrations emanating from Dex's soul.
"Lumia... look at me," Dex broke the heavy silence at last, in a quiet voice loaded with the bitterness of the long years in the prison and the fury of betrayal.
Lumia tilted her head slightly and looked directly into his eyes, waiting.
"This pendant in my hand is not a piece of gold jewellery worn for decoration or hollow pride," Dex began to speak, as though emptying his burden before the one person in this world who would not judge him. "It is a commitment engraved in blood. I am not here in this cursed forest, and I did not survive that cavern, in search of treasure or to acquire raw power for power's sake. I am in a mortal race against death itself. And this time the adversary is not a Rank B demon I can burn with Phoenix fire. This time the adversary cannot be touched or killed. The adversary is time."
He passed his thumb over the roaring lion's engraving and continued, his eyes dissolving into his memories.
"My father-Lord Marcus Williams. At the height of his power, he was not merely a man. He was a legend that walked on two legs. A sorcerer and warrior of Rank SS, one of the pillars that held the Empire's sky in place."
Dex's fingers stopped their movement, and his tone shifted from pride mixed with nostalgia to a pure, undiluted black hatred.
"But even walls of steel fall when struck from the inside. My father was poisoned. And it was no ordinary poison that any healer could treat. They administered to him Beelzebub's Tear."
Lumia's eyes widened slightly at the terrifying tone with which he spoke the poison's name, though she did not know its meaning.
"It is not merely a lethal poison, Lumia," Dex continued, his voice trembling with the force of suppressed rage. "It is a liquid curse-a forbidden chemistry drawn from the deepest levels of hell. This poison does not kill its victim quickly. It seeps into the sorcerer's own Mana channels and uses the sorcerer's own energy as fuel for his destruction. My father is imprisoned now inside his own formidable body. His mind is entirely awake, and he can feel every particle of this poison as it dissolves his organs, his muscles, his insides-slowly and without mercy. He burns from within, in a suffering that surpasses description, without even the luxury of screaming, because the poison has paralysed his entire motor nervous system. Imagine, Lumia... imagine being one of the most powerful men on the entire continent-a terror that made armies tremble-and yet finding yourself bedridden, unable even to expel a single drop of that vile liquid from your own veins."
Dex closed his hand around the pendant with a violent force that nearly crushed the solid gold. With that emotional surge, the Phoenix Core responded to his anger. Mana erupted from the pores of his body like a miniature volcano, wrapping his arm and hand in blazing gold and blue flames that melted the frost in a circle of several metres around them.
"I have lived in dark cells," Dex whispered through clenched teeth, fire dancing in his eyes. "Prisonment behind steel bars is hard, and physical torture is painful. But to know-to feel at every passing second-that your father is dissolving alive, and to understand that you now possess the power and the means to save him, and yet be separated from him by miles of forest, thousands of beasts, and days of travel... that is the true prison. That is the helplessness that burns my soul."
Lumia's silver eyes trembled. She had not understood every word in the lexical sense, but the vibrations of his deep grief and the force of the anguish in his voice had pierced her Celestial defences and the emptiness that filled her mind. She descended from her rock with an effortless lightness and drew close to him.
She extended her white hand-cold as a glacier a thousand years old-and placed it with exquisite gentleness on his bare chest, undeterred by the powerful heat aura. She positioned her palm precisely over the point where the Phoenix Core pulsed-directly over his heart.
She was not merely touching his physical body. She was touching his spiritual turbulence. The contrast between the blazing fire in his chest seeking an outlet to destroy his enemies, and the calming cold of her hand drawing off the excess of his rage, embodied their existential condition in a perfect symbolic way: a fire burning for urgent rescue and vengeance, and an ice attempting to understand, to learn, and to absorb the pain.
As her hand rested on his chest, the furious beating of his blazing heart calmed somewhat. Dex looked into her red-glowing eyes and understood that the journey to save his father would not be undertaken alone any longer.