2 Chapter 2
Dane couldn't believe what he had just heard. With unsteady fingers, he grabbed his communicator from within his pocket and powered it on. He ignored all his notifications and called her immediately. Once, twice, five times, ten times, and a dozen times…
With each line fizzling out, his heart beat faster. He turned to texting her, and upon opening her contact, he was shocked to find messages.
[Dane, you cheeky bastard]
[ Since you're not here, I'm going back to the Citadel]
[But when I get my hands on you this afternoon…well, don't cry cause you did this to yourself, prick]
His mind blanked, and the communicator fell from his grasp.
Everything seemed to be in a daze. He felt hands on his shoulders, guiding him into the house, and heard supportive voices trying to calm him down. But he couldn't make heads or tails of anything with his mind stuck on her message.
When he came to again, he was seated on the sofa. The servants glanced at him sadly from the kitchen, pity in their eyes.
But he couldn't care less about their looks. That message was all he could think about.
The implications of it were clear. She had left for the Dream Realm because he wasn't there and had died. If he had been there, she wouldn't have left. She would still be smiling at him devilishly as she made him recite the alphabets of every known runic language in under an hour.
He had killed her.
In a sense, he wasn't wrong, but he knew that he wasn't right either.
No sane person would blame themselves for this. It wasn't his fault. There were a thousand things that could have gone wrong and some that did. For something to attack Eliana's Citadel and kill her, a Master, many things must have gone wrong. But he wasn't very sane at the moment.
Both were impossibilities in Dane's mind.
But how would such things matter if she wasn't there to deal with them?
His head spun again, his heart seemed to jump out of his chest, and hot tears streamed down his face. His lungs seemed to seize, and he coughed violently, unable to catch his breath. The Awakened tried to calm him down, but nothing got through to him.
Eventually, he passed out.
***
A week passed, and Dane refused to leave the house, even for Eliana's funeral. There was no corpse to bury, so he didn't bother with the pleasantries.
He spent all his time beneath the manor, in the sprawling underground workplace and residence, within the family's art gallery. His eyes were bloodshot with deep bags and dark circles under them.
Most people would have fallen unconscious by now, resting in the cool embrace of sleep, but he hadn't. So, it had become known that the Nightmare Spell had infected him.
His fears had come true, but he didn't feel the exhilaration he thought he would. He would mutter phrases such as "I'm sorry" or "It's all my fault" until his throat couldn't bear it, and his voice failed.
Quite frequently, his stomach rumbled, begging for food, but he refused to bat an eye. His eyes lay frozen on a painting that hung in the darkest corner of the exquisite gallery.
Before the cruelty of the Spell descended, this painting was famous. And it still was. It held an emotional quality that modern art didn't have, making it desirable. That was why his grandfather had bought it.
The painting was titled 'Ivan the Terrible and his son.'
It depicted a distraught father holding his dying son after he struck a fatal blow to his head in a raging fit. And it portrayed his son, serene and gentle in his father's embrace, not a shadow of anger nor sadness in him.
The painting held profound meaning for many and plagued them with a reverie of philosophical meanderings. It bore no such meaning for Dane.
All he saw was the surface, and the shallowness of it drowned him.
Guilt, that was all there was to it.
Hours passed as his bloodshot eyes grew droopy against his wishes, and he struggled to stay up. Slapping himself awake, as awake as possible, he left the gallery.
Somewhere along the way, he was attended to by two Awakened who guided him to an armored room.
His eyes were barely open now, and he was close to submerging into a deep slumber, so the Awakened rushed to place him inside a comfortable pod to sleep in.
Neither of them bothered giving him any advice. He was a legacy, born and raised to be a lethal instrument of war.
No words they could muster would measure up to the generations of wisdom imparted to him by his sister and the machinations within his head, no matter how muted due to grief.
As soon as his body sank into the cushioned bosom of the pod, his mind drifted into the dark clutches of sleep.
Within the darkness, a faintly familiar voice rang.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial…]
