THE UNMASKING

Cassian's manicured fingers dug into "Dain's" face.

"Strange," he murmured, "I don't remember you having... scars."

The skin-mask sizzled at his touch.

Draven didn't breathe.

Across the banquet hall, Lady Taria smiled with too many teeth.

Cassian pulled.

The mask tore free with the sound of ripping parchment—revealing not Draven's true face, but a writhing mass of black veins and molten silver eyes.

The nobles screamed.

Draven's jaw split open vertically.

His scream wasn't human—it was the sound of a thousand crows drowning in blood.

Cassian staggered back, his perfect composure cracking.

"Impossible. You were supposed to die! The ritual—"

Draven's spine erupted from his back in a whip of bone and tendon, skewering a fleeing lord through the chest.

"You don't remember my last words, brother?"

The spine retracted, dragging the twitching corpse closer.

"'Rot in hell.'"

Draven bit the dead lord's face off.

Lady Taria shrieked—a sound like breaking glass.

Her skin sloughed off, revealing something beneath:

Six arms ending in bone scalpels

A mouth where her navel should be, chanting in a dead language

Violet fire bleeding from empty eye sockets

The banquet hall twisted. Walls breathed. The chandelier melted into screaming faces.

Draven's ribcage split open, revealing a second set of teeth.

"Finally," he gurgled, "a real fight."

They collided in a storm of:

Bone blades vs. whip-spine

Violet fire vs. black bile

Two monsters pretending they'd ever been human

Draven bit through three of Taria's arms.

She stabbed a bone scalpel through his lung—

—only for him to laugh as the wound sprouted teeth and bit the scalpel in half.

Cassian watched from behind an overturned table, his perfect hair finally mussed, his hands shaking.

"Stop her," he begged Draven. "She was supposed to bring my son back, not—"

Draven ripped Taria's remaining arms off.

"You don't get to beg."

Draven's maw unhinged.

Taria's head disappeared between his three rows of teeth.

Her body kept fighting.

He swallowed.

Silence.

Then—

A baby's cry from inside Draven's chest.

Cassian wept.

Draven coughed up a tiny, perfect hand.

It crumpled to ash.

"I loved you once."

The words crawled into Draven's skull like maggots.

Cassian knelt amidst the ruin of his banquet hall, his perfect face smeared with other men's blood. His fingers trembled around a shattered wine goblet—the same one he'd toasted Draven's execution with twenty years ago.

Draven's spine-whip lashed, carving a canyon through the marble between them.

"You loved my title," he hissed, his voice splintering into a chorus of vengeful dead. "My lands. My magic. Never me."

Cassian smiled—a cracked, broken thing.

"Then why," he whispered, "did I save your heart?"

The palace dungeons smelled of old pain.

Cassian led him past rusted chains and child-sized cages to a black altar. At its center pulsed a crystal jar—

—inside, a human heart, perfectly preserved.

*Draven's_heart._

"Every night for twenty years," Cassian murmured, "I fed it drops of my blood. To keep you anchored to this world."

Draven staggered. His monstrous flesh convulsed, black veins writhing toward the jar like roots to water.

The voice inside him screamed.

"LIES!"

Cassian pressed a dagger into Draven's clawed hand.

"Kill me now," he breathed, "and your heart dies with me. The blood magic breaks." His eyes glowed faint gold—the same hue as Sylas's crow. "Or take it back... and remember who you were."

Draven roared, his jaw splitting into a maw of thorns—

—and slammed the dagger into the jar.

Crystal shattered.

Blood erupted.

The dungeon screamed.

Memories flooded in:

Cassian, eight years old, sharing stolen sweets behind the stables.

Cassian weeping as their father whipped Draven's back raw for some forgotten slight.

Cassian the night before the execution, mouthing three words through the prison bars:

"Trust the axe."

Draven vomited black blood and shards of bone.

His body was unraveling.

Lady Sylas stepped from the shadows, her crow laughing.

"Oh, Draven," she sighed. "You really didn't know?"

She kicked Cassian's twitching body.

"He sold you to me. To us. The Phoenix Cult needed a vessel, and your dear brother volunteered you." Her smile widened. "The execution? The rebirth? All part of the ritual."

Cassian coughed blood.

"I... tried... to stop them..."

Sylas crushed his skull beneath her heel.

"Now," she purred, "let's finish your ascension."

The dungeon collapsed around Draven, but the falling stones melted before they struck him—molten droplets freezing mid-air as time itself stuttered.

Sylas's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere:

"You were never meant for revenge, Draven. You were meant for ascension."

His body was coming apart.

Fingers splintering into feathers of shadow

Ribs cracking open like a cage for something older

Voice becoming something that could not be spoken

The heart in his chest—both his and not his—beat once.

The world held its breath.

Visions ripped through him:

A circle of masked figures chanting as the axe hesitated above his past self's neck.

Cassian weeping as he lit the ritual brazier—not in joy, but in grief.

Sylas plucking his still-beating heart from his corpse with golden tongs.

"A Phoenix does not rise from death," whispered the cult's master, their face a void. "It rises from betrayal."

Draven screamed—but the sound unmade the dungeon walls instead.

Sylas reached into his chest.

"Give in," she urged, her hand wrapped around his dying heart. "Become the God of Scorched Vengeance we made you to be."

Draven remembered:

The first time Cassian took a beating for him.

The last time Cassian smiled before the axe fell—not in triumph, but in sorrow.

His blackened veins pulsed.

"No."

He bit off Sylas's hand.

The Phoenix flame erupted—but not as the cult intended.

It burned in reverse.

Ash reforged into flesh

Hate unraveling into something older

Time itself screeching as Draven rewrote the ritual

Sylas shrieked as her crow exploded into golden dust.

"You can't! The ritual demands—"

Draven laughed, and the sound resurrected dead stone.

"I am the ritual now."

Cassian's corpse twitched.

Draven crawled to him, his monstrous form shedding like a snakeskin.

One human hand remained.

He pressed it to his brother's chest.

"You don't get to die a martyr."

The last flame surged—

—and Cassian Veyne gasped awake, his eyes burning black.