The house on the windswept plain of Creageuse breathed like a thing half-asleep, its wooden ribs creaking with the same tired cadence as the servants who kept it alive. Lamps guttered in iron sconces, casting low halos over polished floors and the endless, reverent motion of brooms. Hundreds of hands moved in ordered choreography: dusting, polishing, arranging—an industry of devotion performed for one name no one dared to speak without the collar of fear tightening.
In the great parlor, beneath a ceiling painted with long-forgotten saints, lay a coffin like a black mouth ripped open. Inside it, a man. His chest and skull gaped with cruel, improbably neat holes, too clean for accident, too precise for natural death. Around him the maids worked as if the house itself depended on their obedience.
"Why do we still do this?" asked a brown-haired girl, her voice thin with the brittle courage of youth. She paused, dusting the turned leg of an antique chair, and surveyed faces framed by coifs and stale daylight. "He's dead. We've buried him. Why do we keep cleaning for a corpse?"
A blond maid, older by a few years, looked up. Her fingers trembled where they gripped the duster. "If we stop," she whispered, "a curse will fall on us."
"A curse?" The word drew a hush like a veil. Even the clock seemed to listen.
"The Curse of the Ruthless God," the older maid said. "It promises immortality, but at a price. It rends bone and mind, snuffs joy, and leaves only an unending ache. It takes feeling but leaves pain."
A new voice—blunt, skeptical—cut through the room. The girl with blue hair, who had otherwise been quiet, straightened. "Curses are fairy tales," she scoffed. "Trinket stories for children."
The room recoiled as if at a struck bell. The air tightened. Something in the coffin stirred.
"You think it's fake?" The voice was low, amused—and then the man inside the coffin sat up.
He rose with the slow certainty of someone who had been waiting to be called. The maids' hands fell to their sides like clothes suddenly made heavy. Sweat opened at the temples of the brown-haired girl. "Good evening, sir," she stammered, the old manners bobbing up before terror could drown them.
"First," the man said, fingers closing around the blue-haired maid's throat as if words were not enough, "call me master." He hauled her up, and the soft breath left her in a small, frightened sound. Then he dropped her to the floor with a contemptuous shove. The room smelled of old perfume and iron. A single laugh, sharp and dry, left him.
"How do you know it's real?" the blue-haired maid managed, coughing.
He struck her once in the belly. It was not a violent blow so much as a demonstration. "Because I am cursed," he said simply. "By the Curse of the Mansion. The chain that held it was broken. The God of Despair—he released it."
He turned back to the coffin and slammed his fist into the wood until it cracked. Splinters spat like rain. For a moment the house itself seemed to shiver.
"DAMNIT—FUCKING COWARD, THAT GOD OF DESPAIR!" His voice rolled through the rafters, a sound that was more grief than anger. The maids resumed their work, their movements now hollow and mechanical; only the blue-haired girl fled. She reached the garden gate and then bent over abruptly, fingers clasping her head. Her scream cut the night like a brittle note. Something in her body snapped with a sound that everyone heard—the sick, shuddering snap of bone—and then she went quiet, collapsed, and the others, with tears wet on their cheeks, pretended not to have heard. "I'm sorry…" someone whispered into the dark.
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Far from the lonely house, in a cavern that smelled of cold stone, Achlys and Cryo watched as a thing of impossible geometry unrolled itself like some obscene flower. It unfolded petal upon petal of shimmering mana, and the air went blue with it—a blue that tasted of metal and far horizons.
"Master! Don't activate magic or skills!" Cryo's voice cut through the hum. Achlys nodded and set his sword on the ground with careful reverence.
The flower—if flower it was, shuddered and vomited mana into the chamber. A scar, deep and ragged, laced the wall behind them as if some colossal hand had scratched grievances into stone. Cryo ducked as the mark bloomed into being. He pouted with a thin smile as if disappointed at ruined art. "Aw, I missed. That's unfortunate. I wanted to start a new collection."
The petals split like ribs. Between them spread black wings, feathered not in purity but in shadow, and the room cooled. Cryo formed an ice-shield; it rose before him and before Achlys as a fragile dome of crystalline light.
"I didn't know angels could be evil," Cryo quipped, though his hands trembled only once.
The wings beat, and a figure stepped free of the mana-flower: a woman, pale as the first page of a book, hair like spilled ink, wings so dark they swallowed the light. Her eyes were blue and sharp as winter glass; metal glinted at her ears and brow—piercings, neat and cruel.
"I am not evil," she said. "You are. You trapped me."
With that she struck. The first blows arrived. Cryo's shields caught them, engraving thin, angry scars across the layered ice.
"Tch," he muttered. "She's fast."
The air thickened. The mana that fell was not the ordinary kind they had studied in dusty manuals; it pressed at them, heavy as a weather front. Achlys frowned. "Heavy mana?" he echoed.
Cryo nodded. "Denser—condensed. More…assorted." He ducked as a spade of energy lanced past.
For a moment, they thought the threat was done—the mana dimmed, the flower collapsed. Achlys rose, blade at the ready.
"Not yet!" Cryo said. The remaining blossom swelled again; this time its light ran crimson before it vanished. "Shield yourself, Master!" he barked.
Six shields erupted at once, brittle moons of ice and will, but the attacks came in a chorus that splintered them—one by one, they cracked and fell. A jagged strike bit into Cryo's chest; the air left him in a hiss. "Ice Body!" he cried, and as if answering a prayer, his wounds sealed into a crystalline shell. His skin turned hard and blue, his breath fogging in the cold that had become him.
"Use your Order," Cryo gasped. "Use Horizon!"
Achlys obeyed. The words rolled off his tongue. The room filled with a horizon's sweep, a blade of order that cut through chaos and reoriented the fight. Engraving scars crawled over Cryo's frozen form where stray energies had bitten, but still he endured. When Achlys called the Order again, the flow stuttered—something in the chamber interfered—and Cryo crumpled to his knees, the ice around him cracking and then melting to reveal bruised skin beneath.
"Cryo! Are you okay?" Achlys asked, the blade at his side now gentle, as if to a friend.
Cryo laughed, the sound brittle and honest. "Do I look okay?"
They advanced. Achlys prodded the fallen figure with his sword point, the way a child might tap a sleeping animal. "Hello? Hello? Are you alive?"
Her lashes fluttered open. A long, slow breath, and she stepped up, naked and unashamed and incandescent with that impossible otherness. Cryo's hand flew to his mouth; he was not the only one surprised.
"Oi—put something on! It's visible!" Cryo exclaimed, cheeks burning.
She lifted one shoulder in a small, amused shrug. "Can't handle my sexiness?"
Achlys, who had never been subtle in matters of propriety, shrugged off his cape and offered it. She accepted it like a favor and, with a movement both sudden and sweet, embraced him. The world narrowed to the soft press of fabric and the stranger's warmth against his face. "You are so cute," she murmured. "I will make you mine. Marry me."
Achlys felt color rise to his throat, then remembered Tiabishi—the name of another—and the memory was a splinter. "No," he said, halting. "I…already love someone."
Her laughter cracked like glass. She clenched one fist to her breast, then smiled through a sheen of something like tears. "Even so, I will not give up on my savior." The hug that followed was fierce and oddly tender. Cryo sat back with an exaggerated sigh. "I am still here," he grumbled.
When they all settled, the woman spoke plainly. "I am Lecia Ovendeil," she said, the name falling like a small bell. "Angel of Curses. First General of the God of Curses."
At that word, another voice, dry, metallic, amused, took the edge of the chamber. It was not a human voice but the voice in Achlys' sword.
"I haven't heard that name in a long time," Bellona said from the blade.
Lecia's expression shifted; the smile thinned. "You… I wish you were dead," she said, the words like knives.
"Well," Bellona replied, mockery and truth twined, "kinda. I am dead. Sort of."
Cryo, always the diplomat, wiped at his hair with an embarrassed hand. "Hey, ladies…can we not?" He laughed weakly.
"Why is this bird talking to us?"
"Because it needs shutting up," Lecia replied, and then, softer, as if to the memory of a name, "Achlys…Bellona. I thought that name had gone out with the rot."
"There is history between us," Bellona said, clipped as a blade's edge. Lecia's eyes went distant, and for a heartbeat, the cavern felt larger, filled with past wars and promises. Achlys felt something in his chest—less a memory than a puzzle piece sliding into place.
Cryo tried to steer them back to the present. "Let's explore the cave more. It's interesting. Fun!" He hopped to his feet with the boyish optimism that had seen them through worse nights
Lecia and Achlys exchanged a look, long, unreadable, and then, as if deciding that curiosity outranked caution for the night, they followed. The cavern swallowed their echoes and the faint glitter of mana as they moved deeper, three figures and one sword-bound god, stepping into a dark that hummed with the taste of unfinished things.