CHAPTER 68: THE CRAZED
The door creaked open slowly, letting in a beam of torchlight across the damp floor.
A woman stepped forward. John didn't recognize her at first.
He sat unmoving, bound tightly to the chair, his deep crimson eyes blank as he tried to figure out what was happening.
She was beautiful in a way that felt almost unnatural. Her dark, glossy hair fell in thick waves over her shoulders, framing her immaculate features. Her body was seductive, dressed in fine silks that clung tightly to her curves and dragged along the dirty stone floor.
Yet beneath her aristocratic elegance, there was an underlying aura that felt volatile and dangerous—almost malevolent.
Even after observing her intently, He didn't remember her. Not yet, anyway.
Then, a voice cut through the silence of his consciousness.
[Ahh... that sleep was refreshing.]
John stopped at the familiar sound. Echo's voice. It was back after weeks of silence.
Echo?
[Yes, minion. Did you miss me?]
Where have you been? John demanded mentally, his thoughts sharp.
You vanished without saying anything. You just left... and then, out of nowhere, I get this revelation about how you are my brother and-
[...wait, hold on, hold your horses. First off all, I wasn't gone, ok, just resting. And who are you calling your brother? I am old enough to be your ancestor ten times over.]
John's brow furrowed slightly.
What… but Alex said that you were…
[...Alex, who is he, a new friend of yours? Anyway, how is the trial coming along?]
John went into deep thought. Something was deeply wrong. Echo didn't remember fading away. It didn't remember Alex's message, the hospital room, or the revelation that it was a diminished fragment of his dead brother's soul…
But before John could press any further, the woman finally acted.
She walked toward him with a catwalk, slowly, her hips swaying with every graceful step.
She stopped directly in front of his chair. Then, without saying a word, she lifted her silk skirts slightly and sat straight down on his lap.
John froze, his restraints rattling as his body involuntarily tensed. Bound by the chains and suppression runes, he couldn't move a single muscle to push her off.
She raised a slender hand, tracing her cold fingers along his sharp jawline. Her touch was icy, but her eyes were burning with something wild and entirely unhinged.
She leaned in close, so close he could feel the faint heat of her breath against his lips.
Without warning, she kissed him.
She kissed him intensely. She bit down on his lower lip hard enough to puncture the flesh. Blood welled up instantly, and she greedily licked it away as fast as it appeared.
[What the hell did I walk into?] Echo asked inside his head, thoroughly bewildered.
John was at a complete loss. He didn't know what to make of this. He didn't know who she was, how she had captured him, or what she wanted from him.
Then she pulled back slightly. Her eyes were suddenly swimming with tears, thick drops spilling over her lower lashes and trailing down her pale cheeks.
She threw her arms around his neck, pulling his head hard into her chest. She held him tight—far too tight.
"I missed you," she whispered, her voice trembling with raw, unstable emotion.
Her fingers dug forcefully into his scalp, her nails catching his dark hair painfully. She didn't let go, squeezing the breath out of him as her body trembled against his.
John winced against the sharp pain, but he kept his expression entirely deadpan. He endured it, taking steady, shallow breaths.
Echo grew frantic inside his mind.
[Who is this woman?! What did you do to get entangled with someone like this? I sleep for a while, and this is what I find. What the hell have you been up to?]
John ignored Echo's panicked rambling and sifted rapidly through Ethan's lingering memories.
He dug through the memories of the arrogant nobleman's past, piecing together fragments of his life until the puzzle finally clicked together.
Angela.
Angela Crimson. Of House Crimson.
She was Ethan's former betrothed—his fiancée. Back in the capital, she had been his partner in cruelty. They had tormented servants together, abused their high status, and laughed at the suffering of commoners.
They were monsters together.
Then Ethan had abruptly broken off the engagement to pursue Princess Raven for political gain—for the alliance, and for the throne.
Angela clearly hadn't taken the rejection well.
[She makes me uneasy,] Echo said quietly, its usual cocky tone completely disappearing.
John understood why. Her aura was jagged and unpredictable, humming with an uncontained instability.
John looked at her, his voice hoarse and dry from disuse.
"What do you want?"
Angela froze instantly. She pulled back, her eyes widening in disbelief.
"You... you can talk?"
John blinked, his brow twitching.
"What?"
She let out a high-pitched scream of pure joy. She slammed back into him, hugging his neck again as her nails scratched painfully across his bare skin. He winced, but she didn't even notice the pain she was inflicting.
"Oh, my love! I was so worried! They said you were hurt and you might never wake up!"
John endured the suffocating embrace, his mind racing as he calculated his situation.
Angela raised a single hand away from his chest. Her Ether stirred, rising in a dark and eerie way. From a dark stone pedestal across the room, something detached itself and floated smoothly toward her open palm.
It was a small artifact… a recording artifact if he had to guess. It pulsed with a faint light that seemed to actively swallow the surrounding torchlight.
John's chest tightened violently. Deep within his soul, the red core in his inner domain reacted to the ether being released, pulsing wildly and painfully against his domain.
John could already guess what the red core was.
Echo.
[Hmm?]
What can make a Primordial Shard react?
Echo went silent for a moment.
[...how do you know that term?]
John didn't answer right away.
Just answer the question?
Echo's mental voice came back slowly, incredibly reluctant. [...anything that can make a primordial shard react has to be in the same tier as it, either another primordial shard or...]
A dark shard?
[…yes.]
John's blood ran cold.
He looked at Angela—at the dark artifact resting casually in her hand, and at the way her tear-streaked eyes gleamed with manic obsession.
She's a shard holder, John realized.
Just like me… but she has a dark shard instead.
Angela didn't notice his sudden shift in focus. She resumed kissing him frantically—his cheeks, his jaw, his neck.
She bit. She licked. She scratched. She hurt him with every touch, completely lost in her own twisted world.
John simply endured it, his deadpan face buried against her silk shoulder while his mind worked elsewhere.
Dark shard, he thought, staring blankly at the stone wall behind her.
Is that why she is acting like this, because of the shard?
[John, I don't know what you have been doing till now, but if a dark shard is inside that girl, then you need to be as far away from her as possible.]
Why? What is the dark shard?
Echo hesitated but in the end decided to answer.
[Long ago, at the dawn of creation, when the ten primordials still walked the earth, the first being created in all their likeness was a being termed the first creation but in the end he was enticed by the promise of power, wanting to control the source, and thus the great war happened, and he became known as the dark one, and the primordial vanished, leaving only a remnant of their power behind the primordial shards, and when the power of the sealed dark one corrupts a primordial shard, it becomes a dark shard]
[and when a dark shard appears inside a person's body, no exception, they are all bad news.]
It all made sense to john now. She wasn't just a crazy noblewoman. She was a victim of the Dark Shard's influence.
Angela finally pulled back, looking at him through tearful, glowing eyes. "I'm so glad you're awake, my love. We can be together now. Forever. No one will ever take you from me again."
John didn't respond. His eyes remained focused.
He was thinking about the Dark Being Alex had warned him about, and the catastrophic threat if Jynx ever got his hands on them.
He was thinking about how to break these suppression runes and escape this stone chair.
He was thinking about whether he had to save her from the dark shard's corruption... or if he would have to kill her to not let anyone take it to finish this trial.