Chapter 6: I'm Back as Lucian Again?! (2)
Morning light slunk across the marble floor like a thief in the dawn, its golden fingers brushing the edges of shadows but finding no purchase in the chill that clung to the air. The room, a grand tapestry of luxury woven from silk and stone, should have hummed with the quiet symphony of privilege—the rustle of fine linens, the distant trill of birds in manicured groves, the soft hush of servants attending to unseen duties. Instead, it pressed in like a velvet noose, too bright in its opulence, too silent in its splendor, too utterly detached from the leaden weight anchoring Lucian's heart to the earth.
He perched on the edge of the grand four-poster bed, its carved mahogany posts twisting upward like the gnarled roots of ancient oaks, head bowed as if in quiet supplication to some indifferent god. His fingers laced loosely before him, pale and idle, the knuckles brushing like hesitant lovers who had forgotten the shape of touch. On the wall, a delicate clock ticked onward—a silver sentinel with hands of pearl, its rhythm a mocking heartbeat, each second a pebble dropped into the vast well of his solitude. Time, that relentless river, seemed to loop back on itself here, carrying echoes of laughter turned to ash, of fates scripted in ink that refused to dry.
Knock. Knock.
The sound pierced the hush like a needle through fine cloth, soft yet insistent. A voice followed, muffled by the heavy oak door, laced with the deference of one who navigated thorns disguised as petals. "Young Master Lucian, may I come in?"
He offered no reply, his gaze lost in the marble's veined expanse below, where faint cracks spiderwebbed like the fragile veins of a fading dream. The door eased open with a whisper of hinges, and in stepped the maid—young, perhaps twenty summers bloomed upon her cheeks, her frame slight beneath the formal livery of House Blackstar. The black dress hugged her like midnight's embrace, the crisp white apron a stark banner of service, a silver crest pinned at her collar glinting like a watchful eye. Her footsteps were measured, feather-light, as if the room were a sacred grove haunted by unseen spirits, each creak of the floorboards a potential summons to judgment.
"Good morning, Young Master," she ventured, her tone a gentle current navigating uncertain waters. "It's time for lunch."
Lucian remained a statue carved from sorrow, unmoving, his eyes fixed on the floor's unyielding gleam. Sunlight snared the edge of his ashen-white hair, gilding it to a fleeting halo of burnished gold, but the void in his eyes devoured it whole—twin abysses where light went to whisper its secrets and vanish.
"I don't want to eat," he murmured at last, his voice a low hollow, the timbre of a man adrift on an endless sea, who had long since forgotten the taste of salt or sustenance.
The maid faltered, her hands twisting the hem of her apron like a sailor clutching a frayed rope. "But, Young Master, the Duke and Duchess will—"
"Tell them I'm not hungry," he interjected, the words soft as falling ash, yet edged with a finality that brooked no tide. "Tell my father, Draven EverBlack Von Blackstar, and my mother, Lissette Imelda Von Blackstar. Tell them both I don't want to eat."
A pause stretched, thin as a spider's thread. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "And my sister, Lucia Samantha Von Blackstar. My brother Damon Von Blackstar too."
Her eyes widened a fraction, twin pools of polished oak reflecting a flicker of bewilderment. The formality hung in the air like incense too thick for the hour—each name invoked with the precision of a ritual incantation, distant and deliberate, as if he were reciting the litany of ghosts who shared his blood. She dipped into a quick bow, the motion a reflex to cloak her unease, her voice steadying like a flame cupped against the wind. "As you wish, Young Master."
She pivoted to retreat, but at the threshold, she cast a lingering glance over her shoulder—a hesitant bridge across the chasm between duty and concern. The boy in the room's heart bore little resemblance to the Lucian of her knowing: the one who once wielded commands like a lash, his smile a blade's cold gleam, his tongue a whip cracking through the servants' careful deference. This figure sat shrouded in stillness, eyes dark as untrodden wells, a stranger cloaked in familiar skin, exhaling the quiet ache of worlds unshared.
The door clicked shut, and silence reclaimed its throne, thicker now, a shroud woven from the threads of unspoken griefs.
Lucian lingered in his vigil, a marble effigy upon the bed's edge, his reflection across the room a silent sentinel in the standing mirror—still as a frozen lake, expressionless as the moon veiled by cloud. His lips parted just enough to birth a sigh, faint as the breath of a dying ember.
'So this is the day,' he thought, the words unfurling in the cavern of his mind like a scroll long sealed. 'The fragile dawn after the engagement's cruel unraveling.'
Memories surged then, unbidden as spring's first rain—clear as crystal shards, sharp enough to draw blood from the soul. This precise fracture in time, etched from his first awakening in this gilded cage: the day the empire's radiant princess, Celestia Silveria Van Lumina, had severed their betrothal before the royal court's unblinking gaze.
She had risen like a beacon in the grand hall, sunlight cascading through stained-glass saints to crown her in halos of rose and azure, her voice a clarion unyielding as forged steel. "The Lumina Empire will not wed its light to darkness," she had proclaimed, each syllable a lance piercing the vaulted hush—and deeper still, into the shadowed chambers of Lucian Azrael Von Blackstar's heart.
In that first life here, he had laughed—a brittle cascade, not from mirth's warm spring, but from the barren well of options exhausted. The nobles' whispers had swelled like a tide of vipers, his family's pride fracturing like fine porcelain under a careless heel, and the empire's "villainous son" had tumbled into caricature overnight, a jest scrawled in scandal sheets and sneered over crystal goblets.
That was the spark to the pyre. The unraveling's grim prelude, when alliances curdled to venom, loyalties frayed to dust, and everything he had feigned as armor burned to cinders in the flames of his own scripted fall.
He closed his eyes, lashes dark fans against pale skin, willing the visions to ebb. 'I thought I escaped that timeline—slipped its noose like a shadow through dawn's fingers.'
Yet even in the darkness behind his lids, a faint hum stirred in his chest—a dormant pulse of mana, coiling like a serpent sunning on ancient stone, both alien and achingly known. The essence of the Blade Demon Immortal lingered there, a quiet forge wrapped around his heart's fragile rhythm: the silver-black echo of qi tempered in murim's unforgiving crucibles, now muted in this vessel of youth, fragile as a reed before the gale.
'So it's true... I've been cast back to this precipice. Before the collapse swallows all.'
His hands curled into fists, nails biting crescents into palms—a small anchor against the tide of recollection.
He rose then, unfolding like a scroll from some forgotten archive, and drifted to the window, where tall panes framed the world beyond like a painting half-finished. Outside sprawled the Blackstar estate's verdant expanse—a symphony in green and stone, where manicured hedges marched in precise battalions, fountains wept silver arcs into marble basins, and statues of lineage's heroes loomed eternal: stern dukes with swords aloft, sorceresses wreathed in shadow-veils, their marble eyes blind to the living's quiet wars. It was all achingly beautiful, a jewel-box realm suspended in perpetual bloom, just as memory had preserved it—untouched by the frost of northern peaks or the bloodied snow of final stands.
House Blackstar: pillars of the empire's might, their vaults brimming with gold that sang of conquests past, their honor a blade honed on the whetstone of unyielding tradition, their bloodline magic a whisper of shadows that bent to the family's iron will—tendrils of night summoned to cloak secrets or choke foes in velvet darkness. Yet Lucian knew the rot beneath the polish: the dinners where silver clinked like accusations, the judgments veiled in silk-gloved silences, the eyes that appraised him not as flesh and fire, but as a chalice for legacy's bitter wine.
'Draven EverBlack Von Blackstar,' he mused, the name a shadow lengthening in his thoughts. 'My father—the forge-master who hammered compassion into slag, deeming it the rust that fells empires.'
'Lissette Imelda Von Blackstar—my mother, whose smiles bloomed only for the court's approving gaze, wilting in the hearth's honest light.'
'Lucia, the sister who dreamed of wings unbound yet chained herself to propriety's yoke, never daring the sky's wild call.'
'Damon, the golden heir, who polished our name's gleam while scraping me away like a blemish on silver.'
A quiet laugh escaped him—brief as a spark struck in gloom, devoid of warmth, echoing hollow in the chamber's vault.
'And me... the second son, branded by birth's cruel jest, loathed by an empire that feared its own reflection, forsaken by a love scripted for tragedy's stage.'
He leaned into the window's frame, cool stone pressing against his brow like a confessor's indifferent palm, his reflection ghosting faintly in the glass—a pale specter overlaid on the garden's verdant sprawl. The same aristocratic lines, the same cascade of ashen locks, the same void-eyed stare that had once armored him against the world's barbs. But the soul gazing back was no longer that boy's—scarred now by murim's tempests, tempered in the forge of Seoryeon's fleeting light.
The weight of those northern echoes bore down like iron manacles: the throne's unyielding chill beneath his faltering hands, the relentless seep of blood that mocked his vows, Areum's voice cracking through the snow like a plea to the uncaring stars.
'I died shielding what mattered—a fragile flame against the gale. Yet fate, that capricious weaver, reels me back to barren shores, where nothing blooms but thorns.'
He exhaled, the breath blooming fog on the pane like a winter's secret, veiling the world beyond in transient mist.
'No... this time, I won't dance to the world's scripted dirge.'
The door creaked once more, a hesitant hinge-song, and the maid slipped her head through like a fawn peering from cover. "Young Master, I've informed the Duke and Duchess as you asked."
He spared her no glance, his eyes adrift in the garden's illusory peace. "What did they say?"
"They... were displeased," she confided, her murmur soft as footsteps on dew-kissed grass. "The Duke ordered that you rest and reflect on your behavior."
A smirk ghosted his lips, faint as moonlight on shadowed water—wry, knowing, laced with the bitterness of old wounds reopened. "Of course he did. Reflection is the chain he favors most."
She dipped into another bow, a ritual of retreat. "Should I bring tea instead? Something to soothe—"
He shook his head, the motion rippling his hair like silver threads in a breeze. "No. Just leave me be. Solitude is balm enough."
"Yes, Young Master." The door whispered shut, sealing the hush anew—dense now, a cocoon spun from threads of isolation, wrapping him in its unyielding weave.
Lucian pivoted back to the mirror, his footsteps a quiet dirge on the marble, eyes locking once more with the youth's impassive stare. He lingered there, a poet before his verse, studying the canvas of his borrowed face: the high arch of brows like raven's wings, the lips curved in perpetual ambiguity, the jaw set with the quiet defiance of one who had tasted both throne and grave.
He raised a hand, tracing the line of his jaw with fingertips ghost-light, then upward to the shadowed hollows beneath his eyes—a gesture slow as the uncoiling of a river from mountain source. The touch was reverent, almost mournful, charting the map of a life relived.
'You again,' he thought, the bitterness a slow poison seeping through his veins. 'The puppet strung on destiny's cruel wires. The villain the stars aligned to drown in infamy.'
His hand clenched, knuckles blanching like frost on a midnight bloom.
'If I am Lucian once more... then I will etch new meaning into this name—carve it from the stone of worlds I've shattered and rebuilt.'
Beyond the panes, a faint rumble stirred the horizon—a low roll of thunder, velvet-cloaked, though the sky stretched blue and unmarred, as if the heavens themselves murmured a warning veiled in serenity.
Lucian turned from the mirror's unyielding truth and sank back onto the bed's edge, the mattress yielding like a sigh beneath him. His thoughts hung heavy as storm clouds gathering, yet his eyes—those fathomless wells—had begun to sharpen, shedding the veil of a broken boy's haze for the keen, unblinking gaze of one who had traversed the cruelties of countless realms, emerging not unscathed, but unbreakable.
'No more surrender to the script of the game,' he vowed to the silence, the words a quiet forge in his soul. 'No more chains of regret.'
He reclined against the bolsters, head tipping back to trace the ceiling's ornate arabesques once more—the same gilded expanse that had cradled his first awakening, a vaulted sky mocking the prisoner beneath. Symbol of a world he had once despised in its shallow gleam, yet was inexorably bound to relive.
This time, he would not tread its paths as a lost villain adrift in doom's current, nor as an immortal felled by love's quiet blade.
This time, he would walk it as both—shadow and steel entwined, a tempest cloaked in silk.