When Judgment Learned to Kneel

Tessa shattered the suffocating quiet, stepping half a pace ahead of me.

"I'll go first."

Veyra offered a predatory nod of approval and instantly shifted into instruction mode, physically manipulating Tessa into the precise, rigid stance supposedly required to wake the altar.

It looked utterly, painfully ridiculous.

Tessa planted herself on the dais between the two desecrated dragon skulls, pressing a small, pale hand against each blazing ruby.

The exact second her skin met the crystallized blood of my murdered friends, the stones shrieked to life. Luminescent, blood-red magic erupted outward in jagged, branching streaks, crawling through the heavy ambient air like veins of molten glass.

Tessa’s breath hitched, her eyes blowing wide as the violent light coiled tightly around her arms and snaked over her shoulders.

Veyra threw her head back and began to chant in a deeply bastardized dialect of Draconic. "Zhren sari wer irthir di wer treskri ekess majak ve wer dastudr ekess vucot svabol jalla ti qe vucat ini tikil lyrik loupon wer opsola kagh dask di nomeno drekim."

The translation bled into my mind instantly, uninvited and unwelcome: Let the knowledge of the world flow through me. Grant me the strength to know what should remain known only to the father and mother of this being.

Absolute fucking pageantry.

The incantation bore zero arcane tether to the actual identification magic being deployed. This entire ritual was a manufactured farce—a rudimentary, threadbare spell draped in just enough draconic mysticism to con generations of starry-eyed acolytes into believing they were part of something sacred.

Seraphine would have hated it. Ilyon would have mocked it mercilessly.

And both of them would have unleashed absolute hell at seeing their hollowed corpses weaponized as glittering props for a monastery's theatrical performance.

Completely oblivious to the absolute disgust radiating from my corner of the room, Veyra stretched both arms outward. Several thick tendrils of crimson aether curved toward her, wrapping intimately around her wrists before slithering up her forearms.

She closed her eyes. The stolen data funneled through the magic.

Tessa, meanwhile, looked completely captivated.

I couldn't really blame her. To an untrained, mortal eye completely blind to the sickening mechanics beneath the spell, the spectacle was undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful.

Heavy minutes bled by before the ritual finally crested.

Every single ribbon of red magic suspended in the cavernous chamber dead-stopped.

Then, they began to vibrate.

A low, concussive hum rolled through the Stonehouse, rattling my teeth, right before the strands violently reversed their trajectory. The magic snapped backward, slamming directly into Veyra's chest.

Her irises flashed a bright, predatory scarlet.

Then the glow evaporated like smoke, leaving her standard, calculating silver-gray stare behind.

"Interesting." A sharp, knowing grin sliced across Veyra's face as she appraised the girl. "Our little Tessa is definitely half-elven, but the underlying composition is highly unusual. Moon elf and Wood elf."

Tessa’s expression fractured from breathless fascination into outright bewilderment. "Both?"

"Apparently." Veyra circled her once, analytically dissecting the result like a jeweler appraising a raw gem. "The Wood elf lineage is significantly more prominent, so I’m not concerned about having to radically alter your training regimen."

Tessa dropped her arms, stepping carefully off the bone altar as if the stone might burn her. "What kind of training does it actually recommend, Master Veyra?"

I had already retreated into the shadows of one of the cavernous support pillars, leaning my weight against the cold stone beneath a warped, draconic sconce.

Veyra hummed thoughtfully. For a long, drawn-out moment, she simply stood there—ostensibly giving the 'ancient magic' time to formulate whatever absolute nonsense it wanted to dictate.

Finally, she looked back at Tessa. "You should probably change weapons."

Tessa frowned instinctively, her hands twitching as if reaching for the phantom weight of her familiar blade.

Veyra lifted a placating, elegant hand. "Not abandon the scythe entirely. But you need an armament that complements fluid, evasive movement rather than anchoring your center of gravity." She tapped a finger against her chin, her eyes alight with terrible ideas. "You also require a martial discipline built entirely around hyper-flexibility."

Crossing the room, Veyra rested both hands heavily on Tessa’s delicate shoulders. "The ritual recommends training you as a tav kudiyar."

A battle dancer.

I almost laughed out loud.

Because it was entirely, wrong.

The spell had tasted a single, recessive drop of Moon elf blood and instantly decided she should be wrapped in silk, pirouetting her way across a slaughterhouse. It blatantly ignored her agrarian background, the brutal, sweeping mastery she possessed with her scythe, and every feral, desperate survival instinct she had forged in the dirt long before walking through these monastery doors.

Either Veyra was filtering the magical results through her own arrogant, aesthetic bias, or the spellcraft was profoundly flawed.

I cast my senses outward, probing the ambient aether hanging in the room.

Nothing. No divine distortion. Not even the faintest, lingering whisper of celestial magic breaching the veil. Whatever was happening in this room, fate had absolutely nothing to fucking do with it.

Tessa, unfortunately, looked entirely convinced.

She nodded slowly, a spark of dangerous hope lighting in her eyes. "A battle dancer."

Veyra beamed, looking entirely too pleased with herself. "I think it could suit you beautifully."

Tessa pivoted toward me. Her expression was a volatile cocktail of frayed nerves and pure adrenaline, a frantic tension she’d worn like a second skin since crossing the threshold.

"It’s your turn, Caelen."

Every instinct coiled in my blood screamed at me to refuse. I wanted to turn on my heel, walk out of this suffocating cavern, and leave them to worship their bastardized little ritual without ever discovering the monster it would try to unearth in me.

But refusing came with a steep cost. I would have to fight Veyra tooth and nail over the validity of her precious magic, and any argument sharp enough to cut through her dogma would require knowledge a simple mortal like Caelen had absolutely no business possessing. Eventually, I would either expose myself as Lendys or spin a web of lies so elaborate it would violently collapse under its own weight.

Neither appealed to my fading patience. It was already bad enough that Tessa knew the truth—though, to the girl’s credit, she had been far more discreet than I ever expected from an acolyte raised inside this cult.

"Fine." I pushed my shoulders off the cold stone pillar. "But whatever you learn stays strictly between us."

Veyra’s demeanor fractured instantly. Suspicion hardened her silver-gray eyes, turning them to flint as she stalked across the chamber toward me.

"And why should I agree to that, Caelen?"

There it was. Not cruelty. Authority. The deeply ingrained arrogance of a Master accustomed to hoarding secrets and deciding exactly who was worthy of them.

The ancient thing inside me went dead cold.

"Because you need to keep your cards close to your chest," I murmured, my voice dropping to a dangerous, velvety octave.

Her brows snapped together.

"And because you need me."

That did it. A hot flush of color rushed into her cheeks. She closed the distance and stabbed a finger hard into the solid center of my chest.

"You have no fucking right to say that, or to be that condescending when you’ve been here for barely—"

She choked on the rest of the sentence.

I simply crossed my arms, looking down at her, as immovable as a mountain.

"Just because you…" She stopped again. Veyra glared up at me, her eyes darting fiercely as she visibly hunted for a weapon sharp enough to use, only to find her arsenal completely empty.

The silence stretched until it turned brittle. Her gaze roamed my face, as if the answer to her sudden hesitation was written in the hard lines of my jaw.

Finally, her shoulders dropped a fraction. It wasn't surrender, exactly. It was a compromise. She crossed her arms, mirroring my guarded stance.

"Could you at least tell me why?"

It was a reasonable demand. Inconvenient as hell, but reasonable. I couldn't hand her the absolute truth. But the lie I actually needed was so obscenely outrageous that no sane mortal would swallow it without proof. Even a magical compulsion would only force temporary compliance, not erase the sheer absurdity of it afterward.

So, I settled on a far more reliable weapon. A truth wrapped elegantly around a lie.

"My lineage is complicated," I said softly.

Veyra held her breath, waiting.

"My father’s blood was celestial and draconic." Not exactly false. "And my mother’s was infernal and draconic."

There it was. The lie.

Veyra’s jaw physically dropped. I barely had half a heartbeat to savor the shock before she lunged at me.

"Hold still."

"What are you—"

Before I could finish the threat, she seized the hem of my dark tunic and violently yanked it upward, baring my torso to the cavern air.

I stared down at her, absolutely unamused. Somewhere in the shadows behind us, Tessa made a choked, strangled little sound.

Veyra ignored us both. Her eyes raked over the hard planes of my chest and the breadth of my shoulders with clinical, frantic intensity. Her hands ghosted over my skin, searching for any physical proof to corroborate the impossible claim I had just made. Scales. Arcane sigils. Celestial burns. Infernal corruption.

Anything.

But my glamour was flawless. It gave her absolutely nothing but mortal human flesh.

The frantic energy slowly drained from her expression. She took a step back, her eyes narrowing into slits.

"Are you lying to me?"

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I let out a slow, measured exhale through my nose. Of course it couldn't be that easy.

"No." That, technically, was also a lie.

I deliberately loosened my iron grip on the glamour. Just a fraction. Just enough.

A faint, impossible shimmer of dark, ancient magic rippled violently across the surface of my skin.

The glamour fractured, and the truth bled through.

Platinum scales broke the surface of my skin first, catching the flickering torchlight in pale, iridescent facets. They crested along my sternum, tracking upward to map the strong column of my throat and the right curve of my neck.

My hair bled of its dark, mortal disguise, turning the striking, silvered ash of my natural state.

Then, the eyes.

The unremarkable blue sharpened into something blinding and abyssal. My pupils narrowed into lethal, draconic slits, haloed by the thin, glowing ring of celestial white I had carelessly let slip during the sparring match.

In the periphery of my enhanced vision, I caught Tessa literally fanning her flushed face.

I rolled my eyes toward the cavern roof. For fuck’s sake.

Veyra, meanwhile, had entirely stopped breathing.

She took a slow, mesmerized step closer. Then another. Her fingertips brushed the armored plating over my heart. The initial contact made her violently recoil, a primal instinct warning her of the apex predator standing before her.

But the intoxicating lure of the divine won out.

She reached out again, tracing the hard edges of my scales with agonizingly slow, reverent care, following the celestial pattern up toward my collarbone. A cold wash of gooseflesh rippled across my mortal skin. It wasn't born of attraction. It was the skin-crawling sensation of being dissected. I had spent entirely too much of this cursed second life enduring the prodding hands of those trying to decipher whatever the hell Bahamut had stitched together.

Veyra was blind to my mounting disgust. Her world had narrowed to the impossible evidence beneath her palms.

She followed the scales up the column of my neck. Then, both hands came up to frame my face.

"Master Veyra—"

"Quiet," she breathed.

Her palms settled against my cheeks. She dragged my head down just a fraction, forcing my gaze to meet the absolute awe swimming in hers.

"Blue." Her voice dripped with reverence. "Platinum scales..." She turned my face slightly, catching the light. "It is as if Bahamut's own bloodline is standing right in front of me."

That sentence sent a dark, jagged chill down my spine.

Closer than you fucking know.

"I cannot speak to Bahamut’s lineage," I murmured, holding perfectly still while her thumbs brushed the lethal edge of the scales at my jaw. "But now that you’ve had your fill of the real me, can I trust you to keep whatever this stone tomb unearths to yourself?"

Veyra nodded, completely entranced.

Then, she froze.

Her gaze snapped past my shoulder, landing squarely on Tessa.

"Oh, shit." She dropped her hands, stepping back. "Tessa."

The half-elf was already taking a cautious, retreating step toward the shadows of a massive pillar.

I snatched Veyra’s wrist before she could dart after the girl. "She already knows."

Veyra whipped her head back to me. "She what?"

"She saw me like this on the mountain."

Tessa didn't miss a beat. "He slaughtered the other acolytes," she chimed in.

Veyra's face went completely deadpan.

Tessa raised both hands in a gesture of absolute innocence. "Then he basically looked at me, dripping in blood, and casually mentioned that if I valued my life, I wouldn't breathe a word of what I saw." A perfectly timed pause. "And, as you can see, I am very much alive."

Veyra stared at the girl. Then at me.

Her arms dropped in disbelief. I saw the punch telegraphing a mile away. I let it land anyway. Her fist slammed hard into the solid wall of my chest, leaving a faint, stinging red bloom on the mortal skin beside my scales.

"Really, you arrogant asshole?"

I glanced down at the mark, then back to her fuming silver eyes.

"Is there anything else you’ve conveniently neglected to mention?" she demanded.

A dark, genuine laugh scraped its way out of my throat before I could swallow it. "There is an entire universe I am leaving out, Master Veyra. But the less you know right now, the safer it is for everyone involved."

I yanked my tunic back into place.

The instant the fabric settled, the glamour violently snapped shut. The radiant platinum vanished, swallowed by fragile mortal flesh. My hair darkened into shadow. The celestial rings melted from my irises, and Caelen's unremarkable mask settled back over my bones like a heavy, suffocating cloak.

"And going forward," I warned softly, "I would greatly appreciate it if you didn't start digging in the dark unless I decide you are actually worthy of my trust."

Veyra scoffed. For a tense heartbeat, I watched the argument assemble behind her eyes. She wanted to pull rank. To remind me she was my Master. To demand the secrets I was hoarding, to point out that withholding information from the woman responsible for training me was spectacularly unreasonable.

But then, the fight just drained out of her. Her shoulders slumped in a bitter, weary defeat.

"Fine."

I blinked, genuinely thrown. "Fine?"

"You win, Caelen," she muttered, dragging a tired hand down her face. "I won't breathe a word of this to the other Masters."

A ragged, heavy exhale of relief slipped past my lips. "Thank you." And for once, I meant it.

But that fragile truce only temporarily leashed the immediate threat. The true catastrophe was waiting just over her shoulder. The bone altar. The sickening amalgamation of Seraphine’s crystallized blood and Ilyon’s desecrated skull.

It was anchored by an invasive, parasitic magic engineered to rip away all deception and scream a soul's absolute truth. What the hell would it unearth when it sank its ethereal claws into me? It might project Caelen, the mortal miracle. Or the fabricated bastard son of Bahamut I was masquerading as. Or perhaps just the stitched-together fragments of this reconstructed demigod vessel.

But if that magic burrowed deep enough? It would violently excavate the absolute truth chiseled into the very bedrock of this tomb.

Lendys.

One of the mythic, primordial dragon gods currently staring down in painted judgment from the vaulted ceiling.

If Veyra's necrotic parlor trick dragged that reality into the light, what then? Could I magically compel her into absolute, unbreakable silence? The sheer, crushing weight of that revelation would likely shatter her sanity, or send her sprinting straight to Draelic. Would I be forced to execute her right here, spilling her blood on the cold stone to bury the secret?

The lethal contingency bloomed in my mind with a cold, terrifying efficiency. I hated how effortlessly the impulse to murder came to me now.

Especially here. Not in front of them.

I stood suspended between the desecrated skulls and crystallized blood of the two people who had spent lifetimes trying to teach me that murder wasn't the answer just because it was the easiest option.

Gods, I wished they were actually breathing beside me.

Seraphine would have known exactly what to say to untangle this mess. Ilyon would have offered some infuriatingly cryptic observation that sounded utterly useless until six hours later when I realized the bastard had been right all along. Either of them would have found a better contingency plan than execute Veyra on the altar if this goes sideways.

A small hand shoved hard between my shoulder blades.

“Up you go.”

I stumbled a half-step forward. Veyra pointed a sharp finger at the bone dais. “Stop brooding.”

“I wasn’t brooding.”

“You were absolutely brooding.”

Tessa snorted from the shadows. Traitor.

I dragged myself onto the raised platform. The two colossal skulls waited in the gloom, flanking me like silent judges. I pressed my bare palms flat against the bloodstones.

For one suffocating, terrible heartbeat, absolutely nothing happened.

Then, Veyra began to chant.

Magic stirred against my skin. The sensation was violently immediate. A low, thrumming hum buzzed through my palms, climbing the veins in my arms and sinking deep beneath muscle and bone.

I froze. I knew that magic.

It wasn't the crude ritual spellcraft. It was them. Seraphine. Ilyon. What remained of their raw power pulsed through my veins with an intimacy so familiar it physically ached.

A gossamer veil of energy unfurled from the crimson stones, wrapping slowly around my body like translucent silk caught on a phantom breeze.

And then, the colors violently shifted. Gold. Blue. Abyssal black. They erupted from the rubies in jagged, blinding streaks. Some bled from the stones. Others... others tore straight out of me.

Veyra’s ironclad composure shattered. “What the fuck?”

Good question.

The magic surged, vibrating with catastrophic intensity. She lunged toward the dais. “Caelen, take your hands off—”

Too late. The veil snapped shut over my face.

The world stopped. Not metaphorically. It literally ground to a halt.

Veyra’s hand froze mid-air, inches from my chest. Tessa stood paralyzed in the shadows behind her. The streaks of gold, blue, and black hung suspended in the cavern air like colored fractures spiderwebbing through thick glass. Every sound stretched, warped, and bled into absolute nothingness.

And then, two silhouettes materialized in the frozen quiet behind Veyra.

Blinding white at first. Humanoid. They stepped effortlessly through the paralyzed room, moving straight toward me. One was taller, broad-shouldered. The other carried herself with a lethal, fluid grace I recognized before her face even coalesced from the light.

My heart stopped dead in my chest.

The violent glare of the magic finally burned out, leaving the chamber drowned in heavy shadows. But they were still there.

Seraphine stood directly in front of me, with Ilyon anchoring the space at her side. They were translucent—a glowing, spectral projection of the family I thought had turned to ash a millennium ago.

Sera tilted her head, her delicate features sliding into that infuriatingly familiar smirk—the exact, devastating look she always weaponized right before saying something deliberately provocative.

"Well, well." A razor-sharp smile sliced across her face. "If it isn't our glorious leader and oldest friend, Lendys."

I stared at her, completely, terrifyingly paralyzed. This was a fabrication. It had to be. A necrotic echo stitched together from the residual trauma bleeding out of their calcified remains. It was nothing more than a twisted, parasitic illusion hijacking my grief, wearing my dead family’s faces to pacify me.

I shook my head vehemently, rejecting the phantom outright. "No."

Sera’s smirk instantly fractured. But Ilyon—the exact same hyper-observant bastard he had always been in life—clocked the rapid, spiraling panic in my eyes. He closed the distance without a single sound. His spectral hand clamped heavily onto my shoulder.

And I actually felt it.

It wasn't the icy, hollow brush of a phantom. The grip was impossibly warm, solid, and violently real enough to punch the breath right out of my lungs.

Before my fractured mind could even begin to process the impossibility of it, an absolute, blinding white light detonated across the chamber. The sheer, catastrophic force of it swallowed the Stonehouse entirely, forcing me to squeeze my eyes shut against the brilliant shockwave.

When my vision finally began to clear, the Stonehouse was gone.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Freshly baked bread. Something rich and savory roasting nearby. Then, a sharp wind moved through my hair. The biting cold of mountain air brushed my skin.

I knew this place.

I was lying flat on a bed. But not the stiff, unfamiliar cot Veyra had assigned me. It was older, crafted with the simple, heavy timber of a bygone age. I shot upright, my stomach dropping into an endless void. I was in the Cloud Peaks, yes, but not the monastery as it stood today.

I was at the beginning.

This was the sanctuary Seraphine and Ilyon had known. The room was flawlessly preserved, rendered exactly as I remembered it on the morning I had walked away to hunt Liliana’s twisted brood.

For a long, fractured second, my lungs simply forgot how to function.

Neatly folded fabric sat at the foot of the cot. I reached for the garments, but my hand jerked to a halt mere inches away. They were wrong. These weren't the archaic leathers I had worn centuries ago. They were Caelen’s clothes—the exact dark tunic and trousers I had been wearing moments ago inside the tomb.

A tether. A deliberate, psychological anchor designed to remind me that this reality was a flawless fabrication. Interesting. Whatever dormant, ancient intelligence governed this blood ritual possessed a terrifying level of self-awareness.

I dressed meticulously. Crossing the timber floor, I stood before the open window and forced myself to take a single, ragged breath. That was all it took. The crisp, biting mountain air flooded my lungs, dragging a profound, devastating peace in with it—a tranquility so absolute, so suffocatingly pure, I instantly resented it. The heavy, rotting baggage of the waking world evaporated. The lethal magnetism of Maire's gaze vanished right alongside the corrosive guilt of manipulating Veyra and Tessa. Even the phantom weight of Bahamut's constant, silent judgment receded into the dark.

There was only the wind. The cold stone. Home.

The illusion was so flawlessly rendered that the jagged edges of my actual reality began to fray. I reached for the heavy iron latch of the door, but the timber swung inward before my knuckles even brushed the cold metal.

Ilyon filled the threshold.

He stood broad, imposing, and terrifyingly healthy. My chest seized. That was a glaring chronological anomaly. At this specific point in my timeline, he should have been bedridden, his strength slowly rotting away to a poison none of us had yet identified.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," he said preemptively, his voice a deep, resonant rumble.

"You should be rotting in a bed," I shot back, the words razor-sharp.

Ilyon simply raised a placating hand. "Lendys."

The sound of my true name falling from his lips flash-froze the air in my lungs. I went entirely still.

"We manifested your modern garments intentionally," he explained, his gaze anchored with an ancient, unbearable weight.

My eyes narrowed to slits as I ruthlessly dissected the phantom standing in front of me. "To tether me. To ensure I remained acutely aware this is an illusion."

"Why?"

His expression softened, shedding the unyielding stoicism of a warrior for something far more devastatingly vulnerable. "Because we need to talk."

A sickening twist of dread coiled tightly in my gut. He stepped aside, sweeping a broad arm toward the dimly lit corridor. "Walk with me."

I didn't move a fucking muscle.

Ilyon paused, his attention drifting down the hall toward the faint, melodic echo of voices deeper within the mountain hold. "Sera is tending to the children."

The grinding gears of my mind violently snapped to a halt.

"Children?"