"You think your eyes are a window to truth. Fine. Maybe they are. But tell me, grandmother— —are you a god?"
Erin paused.
Not out of surprise—she had felt the weight of many insolences in her lifetime.
But because for a moment, as his words echoed through the hall, she realized she had never been spoken to that way.
Not by Damien. Not even by her greatest rivals.
The question—to call her a god—was no flattery. It was accusation. A torch held to her face.
She stood silent, the room suspended in that breath between speech and ruin.
His words cut deeper than her mana ever could. The shame of her own lineage, the years hidden in shadow and vision, the fractured threads of her own identity—they all echoed.
She did not raise her voice. She did not summon a wave of power. She simply... stopped.
Her eyes, pale and still, held his.
Then, softly, she spoke.
"And when you forget everything else—when every mask, every lie, every thread unwinds—what will you call me then?"
