Chapter 7: I'm Back as Lucian Again?! (3)
The afternoon sun lingered low over the Blackstar estate like a weary sentinel, its amber gaze spilling across marble corridors veined with silver and windows fringed in stained glass that caught the light in fractured rainbows—crimson saints and azure skies bleeding into one another like half-remembered dreams. In the distance, the estate stirred with the subdued rhythm of hidden lives: the muffled patter of servants' footsteps on polished stone, the quick hush of chatter silenced at the echo of approaching shadows, the faint clink of porcelain trays borne like offerings to indifferent gods. It was the quiet machinery of privilege, oiled by deference and duty, yet in its hush, the air hung heavy, laced with the unspoken weight of scandals that no amount of gold could fully bury.
Lucian lingered by the window long after the hour of lunch had slipped away uneaten, a ghost in his own skin, watching the sunlight fracture through the panes like shards of a shattered vow. The warmth brushed his cheek, tentative as a lover's hesitant touch, but it stirred no fire in his veins—only the echo of a chill that no hearth could chase. It was the same indifferent glow that had gilded the snow on his grave in the frozen north, the same light that had danced mockingly across Seoryeon's lips in her final, fading smile, turning frost to fragile crystal before stealing her breath entire.
He rose then, a shadow unfolding from its vigil, the creak of the floorboards beneath his boots a soft protest in the room's gilded silence.
'Rest,' his father would decree, voice like iron wrapped in velvet. 'Reflect,' his mother would murmur, her words a silken noose disguised as counsel.
But reflection had become his curse across lifetimes—a mirror held too close, revealing not wisdom but the endless loop of regrets etched like scars upon the soul. He had peered into enough abysses, felt the weight of enough worlds upon his shoulders. No, rest was for the unbroken; he carried fractures too deep for slumber's balm.
Instead, he turned the porcelain knob and stepped into the corridor, the door whispering shut behind him like a secret confessed to stone.
The halls stretched before him in cool, echoing expanse, their walls a gallery of frozen legacies—portraits of ancestors gazing down with eyes painted in oils of unyielding pride, their features sharp as quills dipped in judgment. Dukes with jaws like granite cliffs, duchesses with smiles curved like scythes, all clad in the black-and-silver heraldry of House Blackstar, their stares a silent tribunal weighing his every faltering step. They whispered in the flicker of torchlight, accusations woven into the warp of canvas: Weakness. Disgrace. The stain upon our eternal name. The air tasted of old varnish and older expectations, heavy as chains forged in the fires of lineage.
Lucian met their eyes without flinching, his own gaze a still pond reflecting nothing back—measured steps carrying him forward, his expression a mask carved from quiet stone, unreadable as the cipher of stars.
His path wound beyond the mansion's heart, past the servants' garden where humble herbs bowed under the weight of untended blooms, through the old gate half-forgotten amid ivy-cloaked arches, its iron hinges groaning like the sigh of buried secrets. Beyond lay the hill—a gentle rise, overlooked and unclaimed, its slope a quiet rebellion against the estate's manicured tyranny, crowned by a solitary sentinel of a tree whose ancient boughs reached skyward like the arms of a forgotten prayer.
It had been his sole harbor in this world's first cruel awakening—the one corner untouched by the venom of courtly intrigue, the frost of familial disdain, or the inexorable grind of a fate scripted for ruin. A sliver of earth where the wind sang without malice, and the grass cradled without demand.
'Peace,' he thought, the word a fragile bloom in the garden of his mind. 'I remember its shape, faint as a half-heard lullaby.'
But the courtyard doors loomed yet, their heavy oak promising passage to the open air, when a voice cleaved the stillness like a blade through mist—familiar, edged with the frost of entitlement.
"Lucian."
He halted, the echo of his name hanging in the corridor like a summons from the grave.
Turning with the slow grace of autumn leaves yielding to breeze, he beheld his brother at the hall's far end: Damon, tall and unyielding as a lance forged in the empire's armories, broad shoulders filling the black uniform of the Blackstar heir like a shadow claiming its throne. Golden hair caught the slanting light in careless waves, framing a face chiseled for command—high brow, square jaw, eyes like shards of glacial ice, sharp with the unassailable certainty of one who had never tasted doubt's bitter draught.
"Damon," Lucian replied, the syllable soft as exhaled smoke, carrying no warmth, no challenge—merely acknowledgment, like naming a storm one knew would pass.
Damon folded his arms across his chest, the motion a barrier of muscle and cloth, his gaze narrowing to blue slits that dissected without mercy. "Where do you think you're going? Skulking about like a thief in your own home?"
Lucian held his silence a beat longer, letting the question dissolve into the air like mist under sun. His brother's features twisted—irritation blooming into disbelief, a vein pulsing faintly at his temple like a crack in porcelain resolve.
"You've got some nerve, striding these halls as if the world hasn't shifted beneath your feet," Damon pressed, his voice a cold current laced with venom. "Do you grasp the shame you've dragged through our gates? The muck you've smeared on our name, on Father's legacy? The whispers in the capital—they're carving us into caricatures, brother. Fools led by a fool."
Lucian met the onslaught with the calm of deep waters, undisturbed, his gaze a veil drawn over ancient tempests. Silence stretched, taut as a bowstring unloosed.
"I asked you a question," Damon snapped, closing the distance in three strides, his boots striking the marble like judgments hammered home. "You paraded your disgrace before the imperial court! Forced Her Highness to sever the betrothal with her own royal lips! Do you know what they're calling us now? What they're saying over goblets in the halls of power?"
Lucian's voice emerged then, even and low, a murmur woven from the threads of weary stars. "They'll always find words," he said, the truth plain as river stone. "Whispers for the rising sun or the falling rain, for the bowed head or the lifted chin. I've grown deaf to their chorus."
Damon recoiled a fraction, as if slapped by an unseen hand. "What?"
The question hung, bewildered, and Lucian offered no elaboration, his tone unchanging—neither rising to the bait of fury nor dipping into sarcasm's shadowed pool. "Whether I draw breath or yield it, bow low or stand tall, their tongues will twist the tale to suit the hour. I've stopped lending them my care."
His brother's face hardened, a mask of familial thunder cracking at the edges. "You... what's happened to you, Lucian? This isn't the firebrand who stormed these halls, spitting venom and vows. You were furious about the annulment—raging for retribution, swearing oaths that could topple thrones. You vowed to—"
"—burn the empire to ash?" Lucian completed the echo, his voice a flat tapestry devoid of the original's blaze, stripped to the bone of recollection. "Yes. I remember the shape of those words."
He moved then, brushing past Damon with the unhurried drift of a leaf on autumn's breath, his coat whispering against the marble like a secret shared with stone.
Damon's hand twitched, rising half-formed as if to seize collar or wrist, to anchor the unraveling thread. "You think slinking away will mend this fracture? You're still the petulant child, dodging shadows instead of facing the storm you summoned—"
Lucian paused in the doorway, sunlight cascading over his shoulders like a mantle of molten gold, gilding his ashen hair to fleeting fire. He glanced back, just enough for his eyes—those void-deep wells—to catch the light, still as midnight ponds under lunar hush. "Do what you will, Damon. Chase the whispers, mend the fractures, play the heir to perfection's throne. I'm weary of the roles the world penned for me in haste."
The words landed simple, unadorned—no thunderclap of rage, no barbed twist of scorn—mere truths laid bare like stones upon a riverbed. Damon faltered, mouth parting on retorts unvoiced, braced for the familiar gale of his brother's pride, the venom that had once defined their fraternal fray. But this—this serene unraveling, this echo of a soul hollowed by unseen wars—was a blade turned inward, cutting deeper than any shout.
It was as if he gazed upon a man who had already crossed the veil once, returning not whole, but forged in fires that left no room for petty tempests.
"Lucian," Damon ventured, his voice fraying at the edges, laced now with the uncertainty of one who glimpsed the abyss in kin's eyes. "What... what happened to you? This isn't—"
Lucian offered no bridge across the chasm. He turned fully into the light, the courtyard's promise pulling him onward, his coat trailing soft as a sigh against the threshold.
Damon's pleas dissolved into the wind's indifferent murmur, carried away like leaves surrendered to the gale.
The back door yielded with a faint creak, an old friend's reluctant greeting, and Lucian stepped into the embrace of the outdoors—a rush of scents enfolding him like a long-lost verse: the deep, loamy breath of turned soil, the resinous tang of weathered wood, the shy sweetness of spring grass stirring from winter's hush. The sky arched vast above, brushed in strokes of fading gold and blooming crimson, the mansion's spires rising behind like a fortress of flawless marble, too pristine, too remote—a monument to lives unlived.
He traced the narrow path that snaked behind the estate, a vein of wildness amid the tamed expanse: past the old garden where once-vibrant petals had surrendered to neglect, their withered heads bowed in silent testament to time's quiet siege; through the weathered archway, ivy-clad and moss-kissed, its stones softened by years of rain's gentle erosion.
Each footfall drew him farther from the gilded yoke of nobility, from duty's unyielding collar, from the suffocating weave of lineage that bound like chains disguised as crowns. The wind freshened as he climbed, cool fingers threading through his hair, tugging at the edges of his coat like an invitation to forget.
And then, the crest: the hilltop unfurled before him, a humble throne of earth and sky, crowned by the great tree unchanged—a colossal guardian whose roots coiled through the soil like the sinews of the land itself, branches laden with leaves that murmured secrets to the breeze, a verdant canopy woven from whispers of forgotten seasons.
A soft smile ghosted his lips, faint as dawn's first blush—tender, unguarded, a rare bloom in the barren garden of his heart.
'Still the same,' he thought, the words a quiet hymn to constancy amid chaos. 'After all the turning wheels, the shattered worlds... you endure.'
He approached with reverence, palm pressing to the trunk's rugged bark—rough-hewn, uneven, pulsing with the slow heartbeat of centuries. Beneath his touch, echoes stirred: the younger Lucian's huddled form, fleeing the mansion's judging eyes; the foolish boy who had carved dreams of solitude into this bark, dreaming of peace while the world branded him pariah.
He leaned into its steadfast bulk and sank to the grass, the earth yielding soft as a mother's sigh, blades bending to cradle him in verdant hush.
The sunlight ebbed now, the sky deepening to amber's glow and violet's velvet sigh, painting the hill in hues of farewell.
For the first time since his eyes had snapped open in this borrowed shell, his chest unfurled—a knot long-tied loosening its grip, breath flowing free as river to sea. The silence here was no oppressor, no vault of echoing voids; it wrapped him gentle as twilight's cloak, a balm for wounds too deep for words.
'I used to flee here after the betrothal's blade fell,' he recalled, the memory a lantern lit in memory's dim hall. 'The only refuge where eyes saw not monster, but merely man—flawed, seeking.'
He let his head loll back against the tree's unyielding embrace, eyes drifting half-shut, lashes veiling the world in softened blur. Above, leaves rustled in ceaseless dialogue with the wind—a melody woven from silk and sigh, the only song that asked nothing in return.
'In Murim, peace was a thief's fleeting glance,' he mused, the north's chill ghosting his thoughts like frost on a windowpane. 'Only blood painting the snow, blades singing dirges, and her smile—ah, Seoryeon—fading into the storm's white maw.'
His hand drifted to his chest, fingers splaying over the steady thrum beneath—a heart once thunder for vengeance's roar, for love's fierce blaze, for redemption's hollow chase—now a cavern echoing with absence.
'Eun Seoryeon...'
The name wafted through his mind like mist over a midnight lake, ethereal, untethered.
'You were the sole light I cradled against the dark, fierce and fleeting as a winter dawn. And still, I lost you—to fate's indifferent scythe.'
A faint sting bloomed behind his eyes, hot as embers banked too long, but no tears breached the dam. He had wept oceans across lifetimes—in shadowed temples, on bloodied fields, beneath skies that offered no solace. Now remained only the ache: a quiet, relentless tide that lapped at the shores of his soul, unyielding as the grave's pull.
The breeze sharpened, carrying the night's first shiver. The sky surrendered to dusk's deep indigo, stars pricking the vault like hesitant diamonds scattered by a careless hand.
Lucian reclined there beneath the great tree's watchful boughs, hands laced behind his head, gaze adrift among the celestial sparks beginning their slow waltz across the heavens.
'This world,' he pondered, the thought faint as a whisper on water, 'it's a cruel jest to summon me back to these shores. But perhaps... perhaps in the turning, I'll unearth a path to rest—a quiet harbor beyond the storm's reach.'
The leaves overhead stirred anew, their rustle a murmured reply, secrets shared on the wind's unseen wings.
He closed his eyes.
And for a brief, fragile interlude, the cursed second son of House Blackstar—once the Blade Demon Immortal forged in frost and fury, once the shadowed guardian of Northern Palace—permitted himself the simple grace of breath: in, out, a rhythm as old as the earth beneath him.