Sing
"—Agh! N-no—!"
Regina's scream tore through the chamber again, sharp enough to bounce off the stone walls.
Ashen yawned. He sat beside her dangling body with one elbow on the armrest, as though they were sharing tea rather than dismantling her piece by piece.
"That one was weaker than the last," he said, glancing at Seraphine. "You think she is running out already?"
Seraphine leaned against the wall with her arms folded, watching Regina with an eerie calm.
"Could be." She tilted her head. "Or she is just stubborn. We must not confuse the two."
Regina's body was bound tightly in silver chains etched with suppression spells. Her wrists had gone red from struggling, her breathing was ragged, and the sleeves of her immaculate maid uniform were torn at the seams.
The neatness she had worn with such pride was gone, stripped away by blood, cries, and the miserable shape she now cut.
Beneath the pain, though, her eyes remained sharp.
She did not answer.
Ashen clicked his tongue. "That is becoming annoying."
He reached out and pressed two fingers against the side of her jaw, turning her face slightly toward him.
"Regina, darling. I am starting to feel insulted. We have been so gentle with you."
Her glare deepened. "Your idea of gentleness is obscene."
"See?" He sighed, almost offended. "That is why communication matters."
Seraphine let out a small sound through her nose.
"Do you remember Chris?" she asked idly. "Back in the tutorial phase."
Ashen's eyes lit up as if she had just brought up a beloved memory. "Ah." He smiled. "How could I forget?"
Regina's expression turned venomous at the sight of two people reminiscing about their apparently innocent past.
Seraphine pushed off the wall and strolled closer. "He can't be compared to this one, though. Chris was already soiling his pants when he saw me pick up my scissors."
Ashen snorted. "What pants, dear? He was pantless. He was too busy with that poor prostitute, remember."
He rested his chin in his hand, nostalgia blooming in his gaze. "I also remember how you pretended to be demure after stabbing him a dozen times. That was cute."
Seraphine smiled faintly. "Then we burned the whole place down. You were fidgety the entire time, afraid we'd be spotted."
Regina's expression turned incomprehensible.
Ashen tapped the armrest once. "Good times." He looked almost nostalgic. "Back then, everything was much simpler."
Seraphine nodded seriously. "All we had to worry about was death."
"Right. Now we have Miss Regina."
They both looked at her. The fed-up expression was identical on both faces.
Regina stared at them like she had been thrown into a fever dream. "You two are mad," she said hoarsely.
"Yes," Ashen said.
"Obviously," Seraphine added.
Then, after a brief beat, Ashen gave a small shrug.
"But it is not as if you are any saner, haha."
He straightened slightly and raised one hand. Dark threads of mana slipped from his fingers like thin veins, crawling slowly across her skin.
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The maid felt her nerves wake up screaming.
She bit down hard enough to draw blood from her own lip.
Ashen watched with mild curiosity. "Hm, still not talking."
Seraphine crouched in front of Regina, her smile polite enough to feel almost courteous.
Then she healed her, restoring every nerve perfectly, as if nothing had ever touched them.
"Let us try something easier, then." She tilted her head. "Where is your organization headquartered? Who gives the orders? What is the Heart of the Time God? Start with the small things. It makes the rest less painful."
Regina's answer was a spit of blood aimed at the floor between them.
Ashen sighed again, this time with genuine disappointment. "I was really hoping you would have more personality than this."
He rose and walked behind her, one hand drifting over the back of her neck.
"We are not even being cruel, Regina. At least not by our standards. You should have seen the first version of me. He was much less patient."
Seraphine's smile thinned. "Also much less clean."
Ashen gave her a look. "What? I am always clean."
"Baby, don't fret. I also love your dirty side." Seraphine winked.
"Oh… really~?"
Regina's jaw tightened. "You can forget about making me speak. I would not be in this position if I were a blabbermouth."
Ashen's eyes narrowed. "Is that a challenge?" A faint laugh escaped him. "You really know how to bring out my stubborn side."
"Oh no." Seraphine struck a melodramatic pose, hand to her forehead. "Now you have done it."
'I now know exactly how the next few loops will go.' She looked at Regina, and for the first time since the torture started, felt something close to pity.
***
As Seraphine predicted, for the next couple of months, the screams of the poor maid did not cease echoing through the castle.
Each day, Ashen grew more creative, eventually designing spells whose sole purpose was inflicting pain on vampires specifically. Regina, true to her word, did not succumb to his methods easily. But it was a losing battle.
Between sessions, she found herself briefly wondering why the primordial lord, with all his pride and majesty, was devoting every last scrap of his time and effort to torturing a maid.
'He clearly consumed the Lacrima Sanguis… so why…?'
The extinct flower was designed to make him completely obsessed with that mortal… 'So how can this be?!'
What infuriated her most was that it was the nun, powerless and merely human, who should have been trembling in fear, yet instead used every lull between sessions to approach him and seduce him.
'A mere mortal woman… acting as though the vampire lord were her kept man… Is this another illusion?'
Who was even really under the influence of the flower… she briefly wondered.
In the end, after roughly a year of his undivided attention, Ashen had extracted enough to form a clearer picture.
First, as he had speculated, the Heart of the Time God was a literal organ, harvested by the Final Order during the Reign of Terror.
The Time God had manipulated the time concept freely during his era, and only Miratheris, the planet's spirit, had kept him from unraveling the world's timeline entirely.
He had eventually fallen to the Darkness like the rest, but his corpse had not been lost. The heart, which held the bulk of his mana and the concept of time etched deep in its flesh, had stayed intact.
Carving a time loop spell into it had not been impossible. But it had conditions.
The bearer of the Heart and the one most deeply bound to them must both survive beyond the loop's designated duration. Otherwise, time resets and everything begins again.
That much alone made it clear who bore the Heart… and who was bound to them.
It was only then that Ashen finally understood every anomaly he had found surrounding Seraphine's heart.
It had been swapped with a god's…
One thing he found himself grateful for was that only the one bound to the Heart retained memories across loops.
But that premise only held if such an ending actually existed. Without it… the "romance" twisted into a nightmarish spectacle consisting of an endless loop of one's lover dying and dying endlessly, until either love itself eroded… or sanity did first.
But he was still glad for it.
If the path did not exist, then forge a path.
If sanity erodes, go insane.
If love faded, love again.
'As long as you give me a chance… as long as you stay alive… I am content.'
***
"That took four loops," Seraphine noted, watching Regina's ashes thin in the wind. "Should I be more impressed by your stubbornness or hers?"
"You should always be most impressed by your husband," Ashen said seriously. "And by others never."
"You baby. Are you getting jealous of the dead now?"
"She won't stay dead for long though."
"True." Seraphine agreed. "Now what?"
Ashen didn't hesitate. "Now we kill every last vampire in this castle."
"...Hm. Why? That sounds like a pain."
"As long as I can't read her memories, I cannot be sure there are no more spies. And what I am about to do next, I don't want anyone watching." He paused, his expression souring. "She also managed to plant a suggestion in me at some point. Before we started this, whenever I considered reading her memories, my instincts flagged it as dangerous. She steered me away from her mind without me noticing."
Seraphine followed the implication. "If she could do that, nothing says she couldn't plant more. And for all we know, she may have been fed false information from the start."
"Uh huh… and for all we know, they could have fed her wrong information."
"True… in the end… she didn't know much from the start anyway." Seraphine scrunched her nose.
"So… a massacre is the only way," Ashen concluded.
She sighed in acceptance. "...A massacre it is."
As they walked back to the throne room, Seraphine couldn't help but remark, "Say… do you remember that we were supposed to look for the one who caused the vampire race to go extinct…?"
"Yeah. We landed at a pivotal moment in history, and based on the records, the most pivotal moment of this time was the vampire race's extinction."
"Perhaps… it wasn't an external force that brought them down as we speculated, but the vampire lord who went mad?"
"..."
Ashen eventually nodded, "Perhaps."
"...but I don't really care."
"...me neither."