The blade fell toward his skull.
It didn't shimmer. It didn't burn. It didn't even move quickly.
It simply descended—like a judgment that had always been waiting.
Ezekiel saw his reflection on its surface, distorted by the obsidian's swirling grooves. A small face, pale with shock. Eyes wide. Mouth open, but no scream came.
He felt the blade connect.
It was not like being cut.
It was like being erased.
His vision flared white, then red.
Then nothing.
---
He dropped to the ground like a rag doll. Not crumpling—collapsing. As if some final thread had snapped inside him and the body no longer remembered how to hold itself together.
A terrible wet crunch echoed through his skull.
The floor struck him hard, but he was already losing feeling.
He couldn't see out of his left eye.
His left arm—
Gone.
He couldn't turn his head far enough to see it, but he didn't need to.
He could feel its absence. The cold air licked at a shoulder stump slick with blood. His torso had opened like a scroll, his ribs visible through torn robes and glistening muscle.
His breath came in ragged gulps.
Not air—instinct.
Every part of him screamed in silence.
The world around him blurred—statues twisted in strange posture, the mirrored floor flickering with impossible reflections. Somewhere above, the dragon-shaped statue still loomed. Its blade now wet with his blood, held like a pen above a signature.
But it didn't strike again.
It simply waited.
As if the sentence had been passed.
As if this was all Ezekiel had ever deserved.
---
His thoughts slowed. Like a page left out in the rain, soaking until the ink slid free.
So this is what it's like.
He couldn't even summon anger.
Not toward Velric.
Not toward the cousins, or the Empire, or even the gods that had built this cage of a world.
Just… cold.
Just the taste of copper on the back of his tongue.
Just silence.
And then—
Something moved.
Not around him.
Not in the dome.
Inside him.
A pressure. A warmth.
A terrible, crushing presence blooming in the marrow of his bones.
And then—a voice.
---
> "Boy."
Ezekiel's remaining eye shot wide.
The room hadn't changed. But something beneath it had.
The statues did not move.
The obsidian blade stayed frozen.
But something heard him.
---
> "You are not yet ended."
The voice came not with sound, but sensation. It slithered beneath language. It thundered behind thought.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't angry.
It was final.
> "You bleed. And bleed. And bleed. But you do not curse."
A tremor rolled through the stone beneath him. The ground shifted, like it was exhaling.
Ezekiel's teeth chattered from the chill, though his body was on fire.
He couldn't speak.
He couldn't even will the thought forward.
But the voice continued.
> "You are not meant to live, little heir. They have chosen. They have ruled."
> "But I ask: will you disobey?"
---
Ezekiel's heartbeat skipped.
Disobey what?
The Law?
The throne?
Death itself?
He didn't know.
But he remembered Amelia. Her arms around him. Her laugh that no one could ever silence.
He remembered his mother's voice, telling him he was born from quiet—but not made for it.
He remembered being overlooked.
Pushed.
Stripped of worth.
He remembered pain.
And he remembered not breaking.
---
He couldn't nod.
He couldn't whisper.
But a single, broken breath left his mouth—and it carried the shape of his answer.
Yes.
---
The reaction was immediate.
The dome shuddered.
The air collapsed inward.
Black light ignited across the floor—like ink catching flame.
And Ezekiel screamed.
Sound returned to him, all at once.
He screamed like something ancient clawed its way up his spine.
His left arm burst into flame—not fire, but living script, crawling down from the stump like vines of judgment. Veins of white-hot energy shot across his chest. Bones cracked—and reformed.
The voice came again.
Closer now.
Inside him.
> "Then rise."
> "Law has chosen flesh."
> "Let judgment be tempered by suffering."
---
The statues fell to their knees.
Even the obsidian dragon bowed its head.
And Ezekiel, ruined and remade, opened both eyes.
One silver.
One still gray.
But both now saw the world differently.
Because it no longer had power over him.
Not anymore.