Bloodline Interrogation

Seraphina drifted in and out of consciousness, her body suspended in a haze of dull, throbbing pain. Cold metal restrained her wrists, her fingers slick with sweat and dried blood. The room was shrouded in flickering shadows, the dim glow of ember-forged torches casting jagged silhouettes across the cracked stone walls. A faint scent of scorched metal and damp earth clung to the air—a scent of old torture, of past confessions carved into flesh.

Theodric stood before her, his figure a stark monolith against the wavering light. His gaze was unreadable, but his grip on the molten iron relic in his hands was steady, deliberate. The twisted remains of a family crest—melted, reshaped, and now wielded as an instrument of pain.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked, his voice a low murmur, almost gentle. Deceptive.

Seraphina forced a smirk through cracked lips, despite the throbbing pain. "A relic of a bloodline that means nothing to me."

Theodric tilted his head, his mechanical fingers flexing. "Strange, then, how it always finds its way back to you."

With slow precision, he pressed the searing metal against the inside of her forearm. White-hot agony surged through her veins. She refused to scream, but beneath her skin, something stirred.

The pain did not fade—it transformed. Cold tendrils unfurled from the burn, winding across her flesh like frost creeping over glass. Ice crystallized along the edges of the wound, forming the delicate, impossible shape of a rose. A mirror of the one she had seen before. The one in the beginning.

Theodric inhaled sharply, withdrawing his hand as if burned. His gaze flickered, a crack in his resolve. He knew what this meant.

"Your mother," he said slowly, his voice heavy with calculation. "She knew about this mark, didn't she? She knew what it meant, what it could do."

Seraphina swallowed the coppery tang of blood, refusing to let him see her fear. "If you want to talk about my mother, at least untie me. I doubt she'd appreciate you using family heirlooms as torture devices."

A dry chuckle escaped his lips. Theodric crouched, leveling his gaze with hers, his mechanical fingers twitching as if they were itching to touch her. "You think this is torture? No, Seraphina. This is discovery."

He reached for her wrist again, but this time, as his fingers brushed against the frost-laced scar, something pulsed. The ice spread—not just across her skin, but along his artificial limb, sinking into the delicate mechanisms, embedding itself in the synthetic nerves.

Theodric jerked back, but it was too late. The ice seeped into him, latching onto something deeper, something buried beneath layers of metal and old memories.

His breath hitched. His pupils dilated, then constricted. And for a brief, fragile moment, his expression was not one of a captor, but of a man trapped in the ruins of his own mind.

A whisper, barely audible, escaped his lips. "Lyria?"

Seraphina's pulse pounded in her ears, her voice a fragile thread of hope. "What did you just say?"

Theodric's jaw tightened. He pushed away from her, pacing, his mechanical fingers twitching, flexing. His breath came shallow and uneven, as if the ice had unlocked something—a forgotten fragment lodged in his circuitry.

Seraphina latched onto the shift. "You know her, don't you? Not just as a name. You remember her."

His silence was answer enough.

Lyria's death had been buried beneath centuries of erasure, her rebellion reduced to whispers and warnings. But Theodric had been there. He had seen more than he was meant to. Perhaps he had even been part of it.

"Tell me," she pressed, her voice sharper now, fueled by the hunger for answers. "What did she do to you?"

Theodric's grip tightened into a fist, his knuckles whitening beneath the strain. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, laced with something dangerously close to regret. "She planted something in me." He exhaled sharply, as if tasting bile. "Loyalty. To a cause I should not have been loyal to."

Seraphina stared at him, her mind racing. Lyria had done something to him—perhaps not entirely of his own will. And now, despite his position, despite the chains that bound him to his masters, he was still susceptible to whatever ghost she had left behind.

A weapon. A weakness.

She leaned forward, her restraints digging into her flesh. "Then the question is," she whispered, her voice a silk thread woven with venom, "how much of you still belongs to her?"

Theodric hesitated. And in that hesitation, Seraphina saw it: doubt. A crack in the foundation of his certainty. A fracture she could widen.

This was no longer just an interrogation.

It was a war of wills.

And she was not the one losing.