The victory in Elaron was ash in Retour's mouth, a bitter contrast to the sweet wine and roaring cheers that echo through the conquered city's streets. While rebels celebrated in the grand square, their jubilant shouts filtering through the thick stone walls of the commandeered captain's quarters, Retour stood alone in the oppressive silence of the room. The space still carried the ghost of its previous occupant—the faint scent of old fear, spilled ale, and polished leather. Every triumphant cry from outside felt like an accusation. He had bought this celebration with a piece of his soul, and the hollow ache where that piece had been was a colder companion than any solitude.
He stood before a heavy oak desk, its surface scarred by decades of use. Upon it lay the Red Codex. The book seemed to drink the dim light from the single guttering candle, its dark cover appearing less like leather and more like a shard of solidified void. It felt alive in a way that was deeply wrong, a passive-aggressive presence that seemed to mock his hesitation. His fingers, still trembling slightly from the effort at the gate, hovered over it. He didn't want to open it. The memory of the last vision—the monstrous Red King and the screaming fragment of himself trapped within—was a brand seared onto his consciousness. Yet, it called to him, a siren song of dreaded knowledge. He was a drowning man, and the Codex was the only thing that promised either a rope or a swift end to the struggle. With a shuddering breath that felt like tearing cloth in his chest, he lifted the cover.
The world did not melt away this time. It detonated.
He was no longer a passive observer of two divergent paths. He was violently flung into them, living each in a dizzying, disorienting cascade that shredded his sense of reality.
One moment, he was walking through a sun-drenched market in a rebuilt Asterfell. The air was rich with the smell of baking bread and the delicate perfume of blooming lindens. The sounds were a symphony of life—the chatter of merchants, the laughter of children, the clatter of craftsmen at work. A young girl, no older than six, her hands and smock stained purple from berry-picking, broke from her mother's side and ran to him. She smiled up at him, a gap-toothed grin, and pressed a clumsily woven crown of small, white star-flowers into his hands. "For the king who brought back the sun!" she chirped, her voice clear as a bell, before darting back to her mother's skirts. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face, the rough, living texture of the flower stems, the profound, uncomplicated joy of the moment. It was so devastatingly real he could taste the sweet, clean air.
The very next instant, he was choking on a thick, gritty dust that carried the coppery stench of old blood. The same market square was a charnel house. The stalls were splintered wreckage, the cobbles slick with gore. Bodies were piled high like discarded cordwood, and the white star-flowers were trampled into a bloody pulp. He stood over the devastation, but it was not him. It was the Red King—a towering, shifting form of condensed crimson mist that wore his features stretched into a silent scream of agony and ecstasy. He was not thinking the creature's thoughts; he was feeling them. They were not words, but pure, addictive sensation: the exhilarating, bone-deep rightness of absolute power, the searing contempt for the fragile, pulsing lives that surrounded him, the sheer, visceral, almost sexual pleasure of unmaking. And from the very core of this monstrosity, a faint, desperate whisper, his own true consciousness, screamed in eternal, silent torment.
The visions began to flicker faster, the transitions between hope and horror so jarring they induced a physical nausea. His mind became a battleground for these two warring realities.
Golden sunlight filtering through the leaves of a restored royal garden. Ciski was there, whole and vibrantly alive, her laugh a sound of pure joy as she skillfully peeled an apple, the skin falling away in one long, unbroken, curling ribbon. The sight filled him with a warmth that was almost painful.
A brutal cut to a grey, desolate sky. Ciski's lifeless eyes, clouded and vacant, stared up at nothing. A horrific wound gaped at her throat, torn open by a claw of solidified mist. The Red King raised its hand, and a long, crimson tongue, like that of a lizard, licked the gore from its mist-formed fingers. Retour didn't just see it; he tasted the iron-rich blood and felt the creature's savage, primal satisfaction ripple through him.
Dean, his hair more grey than brown, his face a roadmap of a hard-won peace, clapped him on the back in a great hall filled with light and the faces of friends. "We did it, lad," the old knight said, his voice thick with emotion. "By all the gods, we actually did it." The feeling of camaraderie was a solid, warm weight in his chest.
A sickening crunch. Dean's proud, armored form was now a corroded shell, the steel rusted through in an instant, flaking away like ancient parchment. His body crumbled into a pile of reddish dust at the Red King's feet. The last look on the face that was once Dean's was not of peace, but of ultimate, shattered betrayal.
It was a torturous, endless loop of his most cherished hopes and his most profound fears, each playing out with a hyper-realistic clarity that threatened to break his sanity. But woven into the very fabric of this nightmare was a new, chilling element. A cold, dispassionate presence, like an unseen surgeon observing a subject on a slab, dissecting his every emotional twitch and flinch. He felt it most strongly in the monstrous visions, a subtle, insidious push, an amplification of the dark pleasure the Red King felt, a psychic whisper that made the path of absolute, destructive power feel not just inevitable, but deeply, seductively desirable.
"This is your doing!" Retour snarled into the chaotic void of his own mind, his psychic voice cracking with strain and rage. "Stop hiding! Show yourself!"
A dry, intellectual chuckle echoed in the non-space between the visions, the same multi-layered, torn-throat voice from the catatonic Ravager. "We are merely... curating the exhibition. Arranging the stimuli. Presenting the data for optimal observation. Your emotional and physiological responses are most instructive. The significant spike of terror and protective instinct when you see the child in the market—fascinating. The deeply addictive, opioid-like quality of the power surge you experience in the other timeline—even more so. We are compiling a comprehensive profile, Retour Monarc. Learning what truly motivates you, down to your basest instincts. It is not duty. It is not love for your people... it is fear. A deep, abiding terror of powerlessness. And the corresponding, even more powerful hunger to never, ever feel afraid again."
As the voice spoke, the vision of the Red King swelled, its dark euphoria overwhelming the fleeting image of the sunny marketplace. The intoxicating pleasure of absolute, unchecked control became a deafening roar in his soul, a siren call to surrender. It would be so easy. To stop fighting the tide. To let go of the exhausting struggle and simply become the storm. To feel that power as his own, without the guilt, without the cost.
"Yes," the voice whispered, cold, clinical, and yet intensely encouraging. "Embrace the underlying logic of power. It is the only universal truth. All else is sentimentality. Weakness."
With a gasp that tore at his lungs and felt like his last breath, Retour wrenched his consciousness back into his body. He slammed the Codex shut with such violent force that the heavy desk shuddered, and then he violently swiped it off the surface. It flew through the air and landed on the stone floor with a definitive, heavy thud that echoed in the sudden silence. He was on his feet, his chest heaving as if he'd run for miles, his skin clammy with a cold sweat. The raucous celebratory noises from outside now sounded grotesque, naive, and a million miles away.
He stared at the book lying on the cold stone. It was no longer just a repository of forgotten history or a key to understanding his curse. It had been transformed into a weapon, a sophisticated instrument turned against him. The "artisan" wasn't merely waiting for an opportunity to attack his mind; he was using the Codex as a direct conduit, conducting a slow, deliberate, and horrifyingly precise psychological dissection. He was not just finding the cracks in Retour's will; he was methodically widening them, studying the debris, and learning exactly how to make the entire structure collapse.
The victory at Elaron was meaningless. He hadn't just eroded a fragment of his humanity to win a fortress. He had handed his most cunning enemy a detailed.
The blueprint to the deepest, most vulnerable parts of his soul. The real siege, he realized with a clarity that was colder than the mist itself, had not ended when the northern gate turned to dust. It had simply moved its theater of operations inside the crumbling walls of his own mind, and the enemy was not at the gates. He was already deep within the citadel.