Death

Nemeor savored every moment, motionless like a statue of ice carved from darkness. His hand, raised with perverse elegance, held Jonas suspended in an invisible yet implacable vise. The air grew thin around them, heavy with palpable tension. Behind that smooth, emotionless mask, Arthur could sense a smile, not from what he saw, but from that malevolent aura radiating from the entire being. Shadows danced on the rocky walls to the sinister rhythm of dying torches, casting distorted silhouettes that seemed to writhe with pleasure at the macabre spectacle.

The Abjured observed Arthur with almost paternal attention, his voice caressing the air like poisoned velvet:

- "You must understand one essential thing, young awakened one..."

He slightly loosened his grip. The hoarse, desperate sound that escaped from Jonas's throat echoed against the cold walls of the underground gallery. A brief gulp of air, a spasm of life in lungs starved of oxygen. His feet weakly kicked at empty air, like the broken wings of a dying bird.

- "The Impulse is not a simple force, a banal energy, a toy to be manipulated for vulgar power games..." Nemeor continued.

His voice, sharp as a blade of black crystal, seemed to resonate not only in the air but directly in Arthur's mind. Each syllable infiltrated his thoughts like a slow, methodical poison.

- "The true Impulse, that which surpasses the limits of body and mind, that which disrupts the balance of all things... manifests only through deep and intense suffering."

The echo of these words seemed to linger in the air, as if suspended in time. An icy shiver ran down Arthur's spine, a primitive, animal intuition that something irreversible was about to happen.

Nemeor approached Jonas with deliberate slowness, each of his steps echoing in the oppressive silence. He tilted his head slightly, studying his prey with the morbid curiosity of an entomologist contemplating a rare specimen he was about to pin.

- "And you, young awakened one, have never truly suffered yet."

The mask pivoted toward Arthur with unbearable slowness. Arthur felt his invisible gaze pierce through him, searching his soul, laying bare every weakness, every fear.

- "It is time for that to change."

The blade then sprang forth, like a crimson tongue of fire torn from the bowels of hell. It seemed to absorb the surrounding light rather than reflect it, creating around it a halo of pulsing darkness. The incandescent veins running through the dark metal cast dancing shadows on the walls, like eager spectators of the drama about to unfold.

With a calculated gesture, imbued with perverse solemnity, Nemeor drew his blade backward. The movement was slow, almost ceremonial, like the inexorable pendulum of a clock marking the final moments of a life.

Time slowed.

The entire world seemed to freeze, suspended in the amber of a moment that Arthur's memory would forever engrave in his very flesh. The air became thick, viscous, as if each molecule refused to witness the imminent horror.

Arthur's eyes widened with primitive terror. His heart, in his chest, seemed to stop beating for an eternity, before resuming in deafening thunder that filled his ears. A sensation of intense, almost supernatural cold invaded his limbs. His body, driven by an instinct older than reason, tried to rise. His hands reached toward his father in a derisory and desperate gesture.

His voice tore through the silence like a sharp blade splitting a silk veil:

- "NOOOOO!"

The cry echoed against the stone walls, amplified, multiplied, becoming a chorus of despair that seemed to come from all directions at once.

Jonas, suspended and drained of strength, managed to turn his head slightly. Through the misty veil of asphyxiation, his eyes found those of his son.

A look.

In that look, the entire universe seemed to condense. A silent dialogue, more eloquent than all words ever spoken. A lifetime of shared memories, exchanged laughter, disputes resolved, tacit but unshakeable love.

A moment suspended outside of time.

The wing beat of a butterfly of eternity, fragile yet more enduring than mountains.

A silent farewell.

A mute promise, to continue living, fighting, honoring what had been and would be no more.

An infinite love expressed in one final visual contact.

An invisible but tangible transmission, as if Jonas's very essence sought to imprint itself on his son's soul, to bequeath him not only a genetic but spiritual heritage.

Then Nemeor's blade sliced through space in a thin but perceptible whistle, like the murmur of a reaper too long starved. It crossed the air, cutting reality itself, with terrifying, perfect, inhuman precision. The saber met flesh without apparent effort, as if Jonas's body offered itself to it, resigned to its fate.

An atrocious sound wet, organic, unspeakably real accompanied the separation of head and body. A scarlet spray burst into the air, suspended for a moment like a macabre constellation, before falling back in a warm, viscous rain.

Jonas's head fell slowly, spinning almost imperceptibly in its fall. The drops of blood accompanied it in its descent, like ruby tears weeping for the life that was escaping.

Arthur saw everything. Every detail imprinted itself on his retina with supernatural clarity, as if engraved with red-hot iron. The exact angle of the decapitation. The last contraction of his father's facial muscles. The last flutter of his eyelids. The last movement of his lips, perhaps forming a word that Arthur would never be able to hear.

The head struck the rocky ground with a dull, wet sound that resonated in Arthur's entrails like a death knell. It rolled slightly, describing a macabre arc, before coming to rest facing him, as if to give him one last look.

Jonas's eyes, still open, still bright with a life that refused to be completely extinguished, seemed to fix on a point beyond Arthur, beyond the cavern, beyond known reality.

The silence that followed was deafening. A silence so dense, so thick that it seemed to have its own substance, palpable. A silence that crept into the lungs, that suffocated more surely than any invisible hand.

Arthur rushed to the ground, his legs giving way beneath him like branches too long bent by the storm. His mind was a devastated battlefield where coherent thoughts had been massacred, leaving only scattered and dissonant fragments. He extended trembling hands toward his father's head, his fingers hesitating a fraction of a second before touching what had been, just moments earlier, the being he loved most in the world.

- "No... no... no..."

His voice was nothing more than a broken whisper, barely audible, like the last breath of a dying man. His fingers brushed the still-warm cheeks, that warmth already evaporating, taking with it the last traces of life.

His tears, freed from an emotional dam pulverized by horror, flowed without restraint. They fell on Jonas's face, mixing with the blood that was beginning to coagulate, creating pinkish rivers that serpentined on the increasingly pale skin.

Arthur stared at his father's lifeless eyes, wide open and frozen in an expression that was neither of fear nor pain, but of strange serenity, as if he had glimpsed, in his final moments, something beyond the veil of reality.

He trembled violently, shaken by spasms that seemed to come from the very depths of his being. Horror and despair crashed over him like a black tide, soiling every corner of his soul, gradually obscuring his vision with a veil of tears and rage.

His heart, in his chest, no longer beat normally. It vibrated, contracted, writhed like a wounded animal desperately seeking to escape unbearable pain. Each pulsation sent through his veins not blood anymore, but liquid, burning pain, which inexorably transformed into incandescent anger.

His vision, first blurred by tears, began to change subtly. A reddish tint gradually invaded his field of perception, as if his eyes were bleeding internally.

Red like his father's blood staining his hands, warm and viscous.

Red like the ignoble blade that had cut the thread of a life, a blade that still seemed to gleam with an unhealthy glow in the murderer's hands.

Red like the anger boiling within him, rising from the depths of his being like lava from a long-dormant volcano.

Something, in the deepest part of his being, awakened. Not with the gentleness of a revelation, but with the violence of a wild beast torn from its sleep. An ancient, primal presence that had always been there, lurking in the shadow of his consciousness.

The Impulse.

This mysterious force his father had spoken of, which he had barely touched during brief exercises, suddenly manifested in all its raw power. Like a volcano erupting after centuries of sleep, his power, still crude, inexperienced, began to rumble in response to the emotional storm raging within him.

Arthur felt this force rise, amplify, like a titanic wave nourished by his rage, his sadness, by the brutal trauma that had just torn the very fabric of his existence. It was no longer a simple power to master, it was an extension of his pain, a physical manifestation of his lacerated soul.

He no longer controlled anything. The Impulse controlled everything.

- "AAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!!!"