Chapter 187: Tell Me Everything
"Oh my." The voice arrived like something poured rather than spoken — sweet, melodious, threading itself through Aaron’s sentence and cutting it cleanly in half. "The young mortals sure are impatient~"
Every instinct in his body trembled and roared at once. The hair on his arms stood upright as goosebumps travelled in a wave down the length of him, crawling across his skin like a current he had no way of switching off.
It was similar to the feeling that had hit him when Bella had first appeared — that overwhelming, full-body awareness of something far beyond ordinary — but whatever he had felt then was a pale sketch compared to this.
This was that same sensation multiplied many times over, compressed and sharpened into something that pushed right up against the edge of what his human nervous system could process without short-circuiting entirely.
Shakily, with considerable effort, Aaron managed to turn his gaze toward the source.
A woman stood in the white room, contrasting so heavily with everything around her that she looked almost like a deliberate wound cut into the pale emptiness.
A revealing black dress. Goth-like accessories arranged with the kind of careless precision that suggested she’d worn them so long they’d become extensions of herself.
Black nails, black lipstick, black hair that fell around her with a weight and darkness that seemed to absorb the surrounding light rather than simply occupy space within it.
Everything about her followed that same consuming darkness — everything except two things.
Her skin was pale.
Not the pale of someone unwell, but the pale of something that had been designed to glow — the kind of white that didn’t fade into the white room but somehow popped against it, luminous in a way that made no optical sense and yet was impossible to look away from.
And her eyes... Those were something else entirely.
Multicoloured, the hues shifting and bleeding into one another within her pupils as though the colours themselves were alive, cycling through the spectrum in slow, hypnotic rotation like some form of magic that had simply decided to take up permanent residence in her irises.
Aaron recognised her immediately. Bella had shown him the picture, after all.
But the picture had done nothing. Less than nothing. Standing here with the actual woman a short distance away, his brain was staging a quiet revolt against the task of functioning normally.
"The picture doesn’t do justice at all..." The words left his mouth before he could finish the thought.
She was incomparably more striking in person than she had been in that suspended image.
The photo had been beautiful in the way that a description of fire is warm — technically accurate, entirely insufficient.
No matter how firmly Aaron instructed his body to maintain some basic level of composure, his hormones and blood refused to acknowledge the chain of command, rushing south and waking his little brother up with an enthusiasm that bordered on embarrassment.
"Picture?" Karen’s lips curved upward in slow amusement, and she took a step toward him.
Except that it wasn’t really a step... One moment she was at a distance, and in the next she was close, her body having simply relocated without the inconvenience of crossing the intervening space.
Her scent reached him before his eyes fully registered how near she was now, washing over him in warm waves that made him gulp.
He took a step back on pure instinct, driven by the very reasonable fear that if she got any closer he would lose whatever thin grip he still had on himself.
The wall met his back before he’d taken a second step.
He stood there, trapped between cold white nothing and the warm, impossibly beautiful reality of Karen standing directly in front of him, close enough that he could see the small red and orange designs worked into her black nail paint — intricate little patterns that seemed to carry a meaning he couldn’t decipher.
His throat went dry. His thoughts moved like something wading through deep water.
"Is my lovely sister showing my pictures without my permission?" Karen asked, her eyes tilting upward to find his, the question entirely rhetorical, her tone carrying the lazy amusement of someone who already knew the answer and found it more entertaining than irritating.
"Y-Yes, I-I mean, no!" Aaron shook his head quickly, the words tangling somewhere between his brain and his mouth.
Karen hummed, the sound low and unhurried, and her slender hand moved — slowly, deliberately — until one black-painted nail pressed lightly against his chest.
The muscles beneath tightened instantly on contact, involuntary and immediate, and a small, treacherous sigh slipped past Aaron’s lips before he could catch it.
His little brother, already at full attention, twitched and strained against the fabric of his underwear with a kind of desperate enthusiasm that threatened to become a problem.
’Reinforce underwear and remove the extra space! Just hold it down!’ He fired the command inward at the nanotech orb, his body ignoring every other directive he attempted to issue simultaneously.
The technology, to its credit, had absolutely no opinion about Karen or her otherworldly presence.
It responded with mechanical indifference, shuffling efficiently beneath the fabric, closing the available space and pressing his little brother firmly into submission. A small mercy in an otherwise deeply undignified situation.
Karen noticed it, which made her lips curl further.
"Must be hurting, no?" she murmured, her voice dropping into something low and velvety, each word sliding into his ear like warm water finding the path of least resistance.
Aaron nodded, not entirely sure he was capable of anything more sophisticated than that, and made a focused attempt to find somewhere else to look.
His gaze drifted sideways and found Plontis standing off to the side, watching the entire proceeding with an expression of complete, unaffected flatness.
Lips pressed into a thin line. Gaze steady and unblinking. No discomfort, no amusement, no commentary of any kind — just the quiet, practised neutrality of a man who had likely witnessed this exact dynamic play out enough times to have stopped registering it as remarkable.
Karen’s finger continued its slow trail across his chest, the nail dragging lightly against the fabric.
Up close, those painted nails were more detailed than he’d first registered — the small red and orange designs embedded within the black like something half-hidden, a language written in decoration that he lacked the vocabulary to read.
Not that the hidden meaning held much of his attention when the woman attached to those hands was intent on dismantling his composure piece by piece.
He was fully aware that if this continued much longer, something was going to give.
Either his restraint would fracture and he would embarrass himself completely, or worse — the instinct to reach out and touch her back would win out over the entirely rational understanding that doing so without invitation would cost him, at minimum, one hand.
He kept both hands firmly at his sides and focused very hard on breathing at a normal rate.
"So, the new little primordial consort~" Karen cooed softly, her actual height putting her a head below him yet somehow making that feel entirely irrelevant to the balance of power between them. "Tell me how your mission shows to be partially complete?"
"I-I don’t know," Aaron answered honestly.
"Oh really?" She held his gaze for a few unhurried moments. "Then would you mind telling me everything that happened in the realm, please?"
Aaron went rigid. The kind of stiffness that travels all the way through a person — Karen’s slowly tracing finger stopped pushing against his skin and simply slid across it as though he’d turned to wall.
He was thinking fast beneath the surface of his frozen expression, turning the request over and examining it from every angle he could access.
On one surface it seemed harmless enough. But beneath that surface lived several uncomfortable possibilities.
Speaking about Bella’s private realm without knowing the rules around doing so felt like the kind of mistake that revealed itself only after it was too late to correct.
And beyond that, something had been quietly forming at the edge of his thoughts — a faint idea about what might have caused the partial completion, a hypothesis he wasn’t eager to voice because the moment he did, it might cost him something he wasn’t ready to give up.
Denying a primordial outright wasn’t a realistic option either.
She had him pinned against a wall in every sense that counted, Plontis was entirely her creature, and the room had no exits worth considering.
"Is that... safe?" He fought his own subconscious for control of his gaze and lost, his eyes finding their way back to hers despite his better judgement.
There was simply no version of him that was capable of not looking at her.
"What’s safe?" Karen asked.
"Talking about the empress’s personal realm..." he said carefully.
"Well of course. Did you forget that Plontis was the one that sent you to that realm?" She laughed, bright and genuine for a moment. "Do you think he could’ve sent you there if it was so ’private’?"
Then the laugh stopped. Cleanly, without fading. Her eyes held his and the warmth in them stepped aside to reveal something underneath — not cruelty exactly, but an absence of softness that was impossible to misread.
The multicoloured pupils shifted through their slow, ominous rotation, colours bleeding into one another with a patience that felt almost like a threat.
"And, do not call her ’empress’ in my presence, the new little primordial consort. She is not the only empress in existence."
"Y-Yes." Aaron nodded without hesitation.
"Good." The coldness folded away as smoothly as it had appeared, warmth flooding back into her expression like a door swinging open, and she leaned closer still until the distance between them was something that could no longer be measured in comfortable units.
"So, tell me everything that happened there, Aaron~"