Chapter 35 – Learning Experience

Chapter 35 – Learning Experience

 

Serivhal immersed himself in memories.

These memories were not his own. They were alien things, far removed from the life he had led.

Vile. Disgusting. Full of mortal weaknesses.

Profane.

And yet they refused to leave. So he would confront them head-on.

Serivhal did not wall them off or dull their edges. He seized them, dragged them into focus, and forced himself to endure.

Again. And again. And again.

Each repetition was deliberate. Each confrontation a test of dominance. He would break them as he had broken everything else that had dared oppose him. He would bend them, strip them of their power, and make them submit.

He was Serivhal, Lord of Ashen Eternity.

He would not be cowed by the recollections of a witless mortal brat, even if that brat had once been him, twisted by an altered past.

And so, once again. He met Her. For the first time ever. His Light. His Goddess. His Big Sis.

She stood before him, crowned in radiance, and the ruined dead land he had come to know so intimately receded before her light. Flowers bloomed. Dead leaves unfurled. And color returned to his ashen world.

The Goddess reached out for him with her hand. Without fear, without revulsion, without judgement. Her expression was infinitely gentle.

Relief surged through him, so profound it bordered on pain.

He took her hand. Warmth flooded into him.

She drew him into an embrace. Her arms wrapped around him with quiet certainty, as if there had never been any doubt that he would be accepted. As if there had never been anything in him worth rejecting.

It had been years since he had known human contact.

The memory did not allow him to distance himself. It forced him to feel it fully.

Serivhal drowned in it.

His body leaned into hers without resistance. His breath slowed. His thoughts unraveled. For a fleeting, unbearable moment, he wanted nothing more than for it to continue.

To remain here.

To never let go.

He tore himself from the memory as if burned.

The warmth vanished, leaving behind a cold that bit deeper than anything he had known before.

“Disgusting,” he hissed.

His fingers curled against the armrest of his Divine Throne, the ancient bone creaking faintly under the pressure.

He gathered himself.

Again.

Serivhal, Lord of Ashen Eternity, refused to lose to a mere memory.

A faint pulse brushed against the edges of his consciousness.

It was subtle at first, a distant disturbance that barely registered against the vastness of his awareness. He might have ignored it entirely, had it not persisted.

His attention shifted.

He traced the sensation to its source, following the thread through layers of wards and bindings until he reached the alarm system he had grafted onto Elysium’s undercity network.

He paused, weighing the interruption.

For a moment, he considered acting. Then he dismissed it.

“Camilla will handle it,” he murmured.

Most likely, it was nothing more than some idle festival-goer, emboldened by drink and curiosity, probing where they should not with crude divination.

Not worth his time.

He turned back to the memories. He would master them. He would master himself.

The second alarm struck like a hammer. The sensation was sharp, urgent, far too close on the heels of the first.

Serivhal stilled. “That was too fast,” he said quietly.

His mind moved through possibilities with ruthless efficiency. Only one person he knew of could do this.

“Liria Yggdris…” he muttered. But she should not be anywhere near Elysium.

Unless—

A vision flashed through his mind. A laughing face. Bright. Carefree. Wrong.

That giggling abomination.

His teeth ground together with a harsh scrape. “It has to be you,” he said, voice low with contained fury. “You would dare…”

The conclusion settled into place with cold certainty.

He reached outward, seeking the firmest, most stable connection he still possessed to the world beyond his sanctuary.

It was still there.

Of course it was.

No matter how much he despised it, no matter how much he rejected its existence, that warped and twisted thing remained bound to him.

His corrupted other half.

The connection pulsed faintly, a constant reminder of a flaw he could not excise.

“This will end,” he whispered. “Soon.”

He reached through it.

What greeted him was alien and wrong.

His fragment of the dead god’s essence was gone. Once, it had been as familiar to Serivhal as his own bones. After three centuries of assimilation and conquest, he had grown beyond it. But the loss still hurt.

In its place—

Light. Blinding, all-consuming light.

It surged against him the moment contact was made, searing, invasive. It pressed into him with relentless force, unraveling the edges of his being.

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Memories surged with it, unwanted and unwelcome. They forced their way into his mind, crowding out his thoughts, pressing against his will.

Ever since that accursed Oath, this happened every time.

Serivhal’s lip curled. “I am the original,” he snarled. “Why am I the one being corrected?”

The world did not answer. It never did.

He held the connection just long enough. Just enough to see.

For a fraction of a second, he looked through those eyes. He saw Elysium’s undercity. Saw movement. Saw her.

Then he tore himself away.

The light vanished. The pressure snapped back, leaving him intact but seething. A scream tore from his throat, raw and furious.

“As expected,” he growled. That thing had led Liria Yggdris here.

Rage burned bright and clean, but beneath it, something colder stirred.

Unease.

He had looked through its eyes. What if it could do the same? What if, one day, it learned to reach back?

His fingers tightened against the throne. “That cannot be allowed.”

The conclusion was immediate. It must die. As soon as possible.

But first—

“Isolde,” he said. For an instant, his voice almost softened.

Almost.

His mortal past held little of value. Most of it was beneath him, unworthy of consideration.

But there was one exception.

The Vampire Queen.

She had been Seris’s only ally. The only one who had stood beside him without hesitation. The only one who had accepted him.

The one he had failed.

“She should have been great,” he murmured. Her power had been immense. Her fragment of the dead god second only to his own.

And yet she had wasted it. Trapped in contradiction. Torn between what she was and what she had been taught to be.

In the end, she had chosen death. His jaw tightened.

“That will not happen again.”

He reached for Camilla. The connection formed instantly, and he descended upon her awareness with precise control.

The spell he wove was intricate, delicate, and entirely his own.