Chapter 5 #2
The words echoed through the empty chambers of Garrett’s looted mind, and the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
The brutal reality of what the Dragon King with whom he shared his soul had been doing finally washed over him.
Han wasn't hoarding the memories out of cruelty.
He was playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek with a Demon Lord.
Every time Garrett pulled an image of Sydney to the surface, he was painting a glowing target on her back for Leviathan to trace.
Garrett sank back into the internal darkness, the phantom images of blond curls and blue sneakers completely erased, leaving him entirely hollow.
But this time, the fury didn't return.
He looked at the towering, impenetrable vault Aodhan had constructed inside their shared soul. He felt the crushing weight of the amnesia he had been fighting so bitterly.
“Keep it locked,” Garrett commanded, his mental voice turning to liquid steel.
The decision was absolute. Before, Han had been forcing the blindness upon him, dragging him kicking and screaming into the darkness to save his life.
But now, the choice belonged to the Guardsman.
Garrett looked directly into the face of his own erasing history and willingly surrendered it.
He would live as a ghost. He would let his mind remain a hollow shell and actively participate in the destruction of his own happiness.
He would consciously sacrifice the memory of Sydney, simply to ensure that Sydney stayed alive.
Violent, physical tremors shook the internal chamber. The quiet shattered. The silver rod was ripped from his flesh and bone.
Garrett’s eyes snapped open a split second before he landed on the floor with a vicious, bone-shattering thud. The stone floor beneath his cheek lurched. The prison was changing… morphing… breathing?
The slow, heavy churning of the primordial waters beyond the walls suddenly spiked, accelerating into a fierce, rhythmic thumping that vibrated right through Garrett’s bones.
To his left, the ancient, serpent-like sigil of the leviathan began to pulse, a sickly, iridescent black light emanating from the center.
With every heartbeat of the symbol, a new fracture spiderwebbed across the weeping stone walls, accompanied by the sharp, terrifying sound of primordial rock groaning under immense load.
Then came the pull.
It wasn't a physical hand gripping his torn and tattered clothes.
It was a terrifying, magnetic drag on his very soul.
Garrett gasped, feeling his essence being stretched outward, pulled toward the weeping black walls as if something on the other side were trying to siphon his life force straight out of his body.
Deep within his mind, Han flared to life, his timeless presence instantly transforming from solemn sorrow into pure, unadulterated alarm. The Dragon King slammed his pure White Magic against the internal walls of their consciousness, fighting the invisible tide.
Garrett didn't understand the mechanics of cosmic geometry. He didn't know the word ‘anchor’. But as he lay unmoving on the cold, stone floor, he could feel the terrifying reality of how they were being used.
Watching the patterns of the chamber, his tactical mind mapped the ragged and raw energy shifts.
Every time his breathing turned shallow, and his heart rate slowed toward cessation, the invisible pressure beyond the walls pushed harder.
The stone cracked wider. But the moment his Dragon Magic flared up to keep him breathing, the pressure retreated.
The shadows locked back down into place.
The contradiction hit him with a jarring clarity.
Leviathan wasn't merely keeping him alive as a trophy. His continued existence– the raw, vibrating force of a Dragon King tethered to a more-than-mortal vessel– was actively containing something vast and terrible on the other side of that black stone.
Whatever was squatting, seething beyond that weeping pile of rocks desperately wanted Garrett to die. It wanted his heart to stop. It wanted the barrier to fail so it could break through.
Yet, Leviathan’s forces kept intercepting his death, poisoning him just enough to cripple him, but always stepping in to keep his heart beating.
Why? Garrett thought, his mind spinning as the black sigil pulsed against his blurred vision.
Why would a Demon Lord build a cage to hold back a monster, while using a tortured Dragon King and the Guardsman with whom he shared his soul to pin the door shut?
What kind of game was Leviathan playing with the universe?
The temperature in the chamber instantly plummeted. The weeping condensation on the walls turned into a razor-sharp glaze of frost.
The cracking stone ceased its groaning. The frantic, churning rhythm of the dark waters smoothed out, flattening into a dead, suffocating silence.
Leviathan had returned.
The Demon Lord didn't arrive with a grand explosion of Dark Magic or a violent display of rage.
He merely manifested from the shadows near the weeping doorway, his presence eerily controlled.
The severe wounds Aodhan had inflicted upon him during their last confrontation appeared completely healed, but beneath his pristine, terrifying facade, a chaotic, archaic fury rolled like lava under ice.
Leviathan didn't reach for his weapons. He didn't fuel the phantom fire burning in Garrett's lungs.
Instead, he casually walked to the center of the room, his dark gaze locking onto the iron spike lying next to Garrett on the floor. His expression wasn't one of sadism. It was one of pure, calculating curiosity.
And that was infinitely scarier than any physical violence.
“Who is she?” Leviathan asked. His voice was smooth, carrying the deep, resonant echo of a creature that had watched empires crumble.
Garrett stared back through a glaze of sweat and agony, his jaw locked.
But the terrifying truth was, even if he wanted to scream an answer to protect himself, he genuinely couldn't. Aodhan’s vault was perfectly sealed.
The name Sydney was a ghost, a baseline vibration without a face or a history attached to it.
Leviathan tracked the empty, fractured patterns of Garrett’s pupils and smiled faintly. It was obvious that he knew the memory banks were looted. He knew the amnesia was all-encompassing.
Shifting his trajectory, he inquired, “What is she?”
Garrett remained quiet, his breathing a shallow rasp against the frost-covered stone.
“She reached into The Abyss,” Leviathan murmured, tilting his head as he stepped closer, his heavy shadow falling completely over Garrett’s face. “My Abyss. No normal light should have pierced these waters. No standard Magic should have been able to trace the path of your pathetic cry.”
Garrett’s tactical mind, even half-destroyed by silver poisoning, caught the sharp weight of the phrasing. My Abyss were the words the Demon Lord had used.
The question ignited like a flare in the dark corners of Garrett's consciousness.
Did Leviathan, the personification of Envy, truly own this primordial rot?
Did he command the crushing weight of these elemental, folding bolts of Time and Space?
Or was he merely a squatter– a powerful parasite hiding in the dark, using a captured Dragon King to anchor a door he didn't fully understand?
Leviathan’s smile widened, turning razor-sharp as he looked down at the bleeding Guardsman. “She will come,” the Demon Lord whispered.
Garrett’s entire body went ice-cold. A wave of profound dread bypassed his physical pain and struck his very core. She will come.
That was the nightmare. That was the singular, catastrophic outcome he had manually destroyed his own mind to prevent.
He had sacrificed his memories, his Magic, and his sanity to build a wall of silence around her.
He had screamed into the Void with the last shred of his strength, commanding her to flee the blast radius.
He had told her to run.
But as Leviathan’s quiet, confident chuckle echoed off the weeping black walls, Garrett stared into the shadows, a horrifying question settling into his chest.
Was she running, or was she already on her way?
Leaning down, Leviathan’s eyes turned to pools of inky, mocking ebony as he savored the cold terror radiating off Garrett.
“You sacrificed so much to build your little fortress of silence,” the Demon Lord murmured, his voice a smooth, toxic purr.
“Yet it matters not. Mates are so terribly predictable. Give them a suffering beloved, and they will walk willingly into any cage you construct for them. She is already tracking you. She will march straight into my Abyss, and she will hand herself over simply to touch your face one last time.”
A violent spike of panic erupted in Garrett’s chest. The mental image of a cage snapping shut around the woman with the blond curls and the light blue Converse sneakers made his breath freeze in his throat.
He tried to move, to get up and beat the Demon Lord to a bloody pulp as his soul screamed in denial.
But suddenly, something changed. Deep within the recesses of his looted mind, the panic was unceremoniously cut short.
A sound resonated through the dark chambers of his soul. It wasn't a growl, and it wasn't a snarl.
Han was laughing.
It wasn't an outward sound. Leviathan heard nothing in the physical room. But inside Garrett’s mind, the Dragon King let out a deep, rolling, seismic rumble of pure, unadulterated amusement.
The tectonic laughter shook the foundations of the internal vault, washing away Garrett's rising panic with a wave of ancient, arrogant confidence.
Garrett’s mind fractured with confusion. “What in the hell is so funny?” He demanded, mentally staring at the shadow of the Dragon King. “He’s going to trap her!”