Catherine's world hadn't just tilted; it was as if it had evaporated.
She remained frozen, Thorne's report in one hand, the file on the Fire in the other.
Her mind, that cold, analytical machine, was spinning its wheels, refusing to process the information.
It was a lie.
A coincidence.
The rambling of a senile old man and the note of an incompetent archivist.
Her father was dead. It was the foundation of her life, the cornerstone of her misery, and more recently, the sacred fuel for her vengeance. A man could not be both the martyr and the monster.
Alastair. Her father's name. The butcher's name.
Body not identified.Presumed deceased.
The note on the file now seemed to scream. Why presumed? Why not confirmed, like her mother? Like her sister?
She dropped the parchments. They scattered on the floor like dead leaves. She backed away, moving from the table as if it were a defiled altar. The library, her sanctuary, became a cage, the walls closing in on her. She gasped, searching for air, but every breath was filled with the ash of this impossible truth.
The Rook. Her father.
Her father had orchestrated the massacre. Her father had given the order to lock his own wife and his own five-year-old daughter in a warehouse to watch them burn. For power.
The thought was not an exaggeration. Without even confronting the person, she knew that everything that was happening was true. Her intuition had never deceived her. Until now.
For an empire of shadows, her father had trampled his own family. What was the root cause?
The pain that struck her was unlike anything she had ever known. It was not the distant grief of an orphan, nor even the fresh rage of discovering the name Anne.
It was a betrayal so fundamental that it fractured her reality.
It was absolute disgust, the existential nausea of realizing that the blood flowing in her veins was the same as the monster's she had sworn to destroy.
Her hatred, so pure and direct, no longer had a target. It turned against herself, against her own name, her own lineage, her lack of knowledge, and her powerlessness.
The power of the Forbidden Echo, so tightly bound to her soul, reacted to this emotional cataclysm. The invisible threads of the world, which she usually perceived as an orderly tapestry, became a screaming maelstrom.
The colors mixed into an aggressive psychic sludge. The library seemed to groan with her.
A row of books fell from the shelves with a dull thud. The flame of the candle on her table shot up, dancing frantically, casting monstrous shadows on the walls.
The air grew cold, glacial. Her own inner corruption was manifesting, her pain contaminating the very fabric of her gilded prison.
She collapsed to the floor, curling up, hands over her ears as if to block out the silent screams that filled her mind.
The Player, the Oracle, the strategist… all her personalities, all her masks, shattered at once. All that was left was Cat, the little girl lost in an alley, terrified by a world that made no sense.
She cried. For the first time in years, she cried for real.
Tears of rage, of grief, of confusion.
She cried for her mother, for her sister Anne, and she cried for the little girl she had been, whose father was a monster far greater than all the violent clients of the slums.
She cried until her lungs burned and her throat was raw. She cried until there was nothing left.
No more tears. No more rage. No more grief.
Just the void.
An absolute silence settled in her mind. The psychic storm in the room subsided. The candle flame became steady again.
Catherine remained on the floor, in the midst of this inner silence. And in this void, something new took root.
She rose slowly.
Her face was pale, her eyes ringed with shadow, but her gaze was different.
The glow of hatred had vanished, extinguishing the flame of vengeance along with it. In its place, there was something far colder. Something perfectly calm and utterly inhuman.
The actress had suffered a shock so violent that the only way to survive was to completely cease to be human.
Pain was too dangerous a variable, too unpredictable. So, she eliminated it from the equation.
She approached the table, her gesture no longer that of a broken woman, but of a scientist returning to her laboratory.
She picked up the parchments and placed them back on the table, smoothing them with a hand that no longer trembled.
The truth was no longer a tragedy. It was just a piece of data she could use to her advantage.
Fact: Alistair Elmer is The Rook.
Fact: He killed his wife and younger daughter for power.
Fact: He abandoned his eldest daughter, Catherine, to a life of misery.
Fact: He is an Awakened of Sequence 4 on the Pathway of Pride.
Fact: Catherine is a Player of Sequence 8 on the Pathway of Lust.
Anger and vengeance were the motivations of mortals, hot and messy concepts. She was no longer interested in such things.
Kill her father? It was too simple an end, too merciful for such a man. And it would bring her nothing.
She wanted to understand, and she wanted to survive, and that is what she does and what she has always done.
Her gaze fell upon the large map of the city. She saw the docks, the Weavers' District, the zones of influence she had begun to map out. The Rook's empire. An empire built on the bones of her mother and her sister.
A new logic, as cold and pure as a diamond, formed in her mind.
What is a man like The Rook so afraid of to do all this? I lack information, but I'm not sure I'll be able to discover why, at least for now.
My father built an empire on the ashes of his family.
It is a daughter's duty to claim her inheritance.
I will build my empire on the ashes of his.
Danger awaits me from all sides. No hope is offered to a prostitute, to a powerless woman.
Her quest had just changed its nature.
It was no longer a vendetta.
It was a succession. It was no longer a question of vengeance; she understood instinctively that something big was coming, and this further stimulated her quest for security.
She would not just destroy the man who took everything from her. She would take everything he had built. She would steal his name, his power, his empire, and leave him with nothing, an empty shell in a doll's prison.