Chapter 10: The Price of Knowledge

The echo of flesh against stone rang through the crimson chamber, dull and wet, over and over again.

Each strike reverberated like a mournful bell tolling for the dead.

Kairos' fists slammed into the cold temple floor, again and again, with a fury that bordered on madness. The marble was long since shattered, reduced to jagged dust and smeared blood. His hands—if they could still be called that—were raw slabs of shredded flesh. Bones jutted out like white thorns, glistening with every drop of blood that flowed, slow and syrupy, from the torn remains of skin.

And yet, he didn't stop.

Couldn't.

Not while the memory was still fresh.

Not while the grief still lived.

He bit down on his lower lip so hard it split, and thick blood rolled down his chin. A line of red traced the curve of his jaw before breaking into droplets that spattered onto the ground. Each droplet vanished into the fractured lines of the temple floor—lines that seemed to drink the blood eagerly, as though the stone remembered the sacrifices it had already consumed.

"Damn it..." Kairos hissed, voice hoarse, no louder than a breath. "Why did it have to end like this?"

His words dissolved into the silence.

There was no reply.

Only the deep, suffocating quiet of a place that had not known laughter in centuries. A place built for mourning. A place that devoured hope.

The silence wasn't just empty—it was watching.

A little while back...

The temple hadn't always pulsed like a dying heart.

When they first stepped inside, it had appeared… familiar. A warped reflection of the palace they had grown up in, the palace. The same grand arches. The same towering columns. But here, everything was bathed in bloodlight—an arterial glow that seemed to ooze from the very stone. It shimmered behind the veins etched deep into the walls, like some grotesque circulatory system.

It was beautiful.

And wrong.

The air was heavy with old death. Like breathing in the last scream of a thousand ghosts.

"It looks like home," Illumi had murmured. "But it feels like something's wearing our home like a mask."

They moved with caution, footsteps muffled against the soft layer of ash carpeting the floor. Symbols spiraled across the marble—curving runes in no language they had ever studied. Some moved subtly when you weren't looking, like the whisper of a serpent's tongue against your skin.

"It's an altar," Lysander had said, frowning. "Or… a grave."

"No," Kairos had replied, stepping forward, drawn by some invisible tether. "It's both i guess? I don't know but It's where truth was buried. I can feel it. Why else will father forbid anyone from ever crossing it?"

"Your obsession will kill us," she snapped, but there was no real heat in her words. Only fear. She tightened her grip on her saber, the red tattoos across her forearms dimming, as though the runes themselves were suffocating.

"I had to come," Kairos whispered. "I had to know. I'm not going to lose to him, or the throne."

A voice had answered.

> "The weight of knowledge is often heavy," it said. "And knowledge itself… just as heavy."

They spun around.

Weapons drawn, ready to strike at any moment. Backs to each other.

But there was no one there.

Only shadows that shifted too slowly.

"Show yourself!" Zephyrus barked. Runes trying surge to life along his arms, flaring with silver heat.

> "I am not a self to be shown," the voice responded. "I am the Veil. I am what remains—the cluster of consumed souls, broken and offered."

The chamber darkened.

The walls breathed.

And from the center of the room, a red fog began to gather—slow, deliberate, patient. It formed into faces. Familiar, contorted, sobbing in silence. They drifted in and out of the mist like drowning memories.

> "The king," the Veil hissed, "sacrificed thousands to reach beyond truth. To tear through the Veil. This temple is the graveyard of his ambition."

"No," Lysander breathed. "No, he wouldn't—"

> "You've always known," the Veil said.

And they had, in a way.

Deep down, where childhood memories went to rot. They had always felt the emptiness in their father's gaze. The chill of something inhuman behind his every decree.

Kairos stepped forward, voice quiet.

"I sought truth… and I found it beneath corpses."

> "Yes," the Veil whispered, "but truth is never alone."

Kairos didn't understand what was happening, he had so many questions to ask but before he could.

The floor split open.

Runes flared like lightning across the room, and in an instant, the temple was gone.

Elsewhere...

They stood in a vast, infinite void.

A realm without sky or ground—only endless shadows stitched together by screams. Above them, stars flickered in and out like dying embers. Beneath their feet, a platform of silver light materialized, shaped from fractured soul-glass.

> "This is the Trial," the Veil spoke. "The cost of knowing."

Figures emerged from the darkness.

Not beats. Not monsters.

People. They were people.

Twisted, broken, but still bearing echoes of the lives they once lived. A knight in cracked armor, a child holding a burnt doll, a one-eyed priestess. Even the old palace librarian, face sunken and screaming without sound.

> "Only one soul may leave,one of you or one of the dead" the Veil declared. " Just one."

"No," Kairos murmured. "Not like this. We have to win."

"We knew the risks," Illumi said, calmly, quietly.

Zephyrus rolled his neck, flexed his fists. "Then we make them regret ever dying. This would be a walk in the park."

" We'll fight," Lysander said. "But not each other. Well first defeat the souls then figure a way out"

They stood together—siblings born of anomaly, raised in shadows, now warriors bound by blood and doom.

And then—

The swarm came.

The battle was carnage wrapped in light and screams. Every slash of Lysander's blade was poetry laced in blood. Zephyrus shattered attackers with his fists, each strike sending shockwaves through the void. Illumi moved like a phantom, directing them, seeing openings before they appeared.

Kairos… lost himself.

His body moved with instinct, but his mind was elsewhere—remembering smiles, echoes of laughter, chasing fragments of his siblings in the faces of the damned.

But the tide never stopped.

One by one, they fell.

Illumi, vanishing into the fog, her eyes never leaving Kairos.

Zephyrus, roaring as he held the line, until he was dragged down beneath a sea of clawed hands.

Lysander, her blood staining Kairos' arms as she collapsed.

> "Keep going," she whispered. "Don't… let this… be for nothing."

Then nothing. Not even the broken souls.

Only Kairos.

Alone.

Kneeling. Screaming. Fists pounding into the soulglass floor until it bled with him.

The was deep oppressive silence.

The battlefield crumbled, fading into ash and echo. It disappeared just as quickly as it came.

Kairos stood alone in the void. His body broken. His spirit in tatters.

Before him, a chasm yawned—black and bottomless.

Across it: a distant shore. Faint lights shimmered. A new world… or maybe the last lie. Their father had always said there was nothing beyond their continent.

" Was it all a lie?"

A pedestal rose before him, ancient and waiting.

> "To cross, a bridge must be formed," the Veil said. "But no soul walks freely. You must give… and bind."

Kairos stepped forward.

Hands trembling. Face hollow. Heart thunderously silent.

He placed his hand upon the stone.

> "What do you give?"

He did not hesitate.

"My memory," he said. "Of them."

Kairos could have sworn he felt the veil smile. A sinister vexing smile.

The pain was unimaginable.

Not the burning of the body, but the tearing of the memories. He felt it all—Lysander's laughter, Zephyrus' pride, Illumi's quiet wisdom—being ripped from him like threads from his heart.

Their names faded from his tongue.

Their voices faded from his mind. Slow but steadily.

Gone.

> "What oath do you bind?" the Veil asked.

Kairos whispered—low, furious, eternal:

"I will destroy the Veil, my father and and saved them all. No matter the cost."

From the mists, a bridge began to form—woven of silver memory and threads of blood.

Kairos staggered forward.

One step. Then another.

Every movement was agony. Every breath, a price.

But he walked.

He walked across the chasm of what he had lost.

He walked, not as a prince.

Not even as a brother.

But as the last echo of vengeance.

Toward truth.

Toward ruin.

Toward destiny.