When Cassie first plunged into the freezing, turbulent currents of the Great River, the absolute weight of the Third Nightmare threatened to crush her mind instantly.
She was blind, plunging into an expanse of water that flowed not through space, but through the crushing current of time itself.
Yet, almost immediately after the waters closed over her head, her heightened senses brushed against something massive, familiar, and terribly wrong.
A ship.
The sacred wood of the Chain Breaker was resting on the water mere dozens of meters away.
But the majestic vessel did not radiate the soaring, defiant hope it once had.
Instead, it bled a suffocating, sickening aura of pure Corruption.
Cassie had pulled herself from the liquid glass of the river and climbed aboard the creaking deck.
She had come prepared to face the horrors of the Tomb of Ariel, armed with countless prophecies and Machiavellian strategies intricately woven to save her friends.
But nothing could have prepared her for what was waiting on the deck.
Sitting beneath the shadow of the mainmast, waiting for her, was Torment.
Her future self.
Her Corrupted self.
For an entire day, the two blind oracles sat across from one another on the silent, drifting ship.
The blinding light of the seven suns washed over the ancient planks, but in the space between the two women, the air was heavy, frigid, and thick with unspeakable dread.
They did not speak a single word aloud.
They did not need to.
To speak was to convey information linearly, a crude and cumbersome method for beings whose minds drifted through the boundless web of fate.
They conversed in visions, in shared premonitions, and in the heavy, crushing weight of foresight.
Cassie could feel the sheer, agonizing battle waging within Torment’s soul.
Unlike the Mad Prince, who had anchored his shattered sanity to the screaming, single-minded madness of the Sin of Solace, Torment had no such crutch.
She was enduring the Defilement raw.
The Corruption was a living, rotting disease inside her mind, constantly gnawing at her ego, urging her to tear her own flesh, to slaughter, to drown the world in blood.
She was balancing on a razor’s edge, holding onto a sliver of her original identity through sheer, terrifying force of will and prophetic discipline.
She was managing herself, but the effort was slowly tearing her soul apart.
And yet, that internal war was nothing compared to the absolute, catastrophic truth they shared in their silent communion.
The threads of fate had violently snapped.
The intricate, desperate plans Cassie had spent years formulating to break the loop were gone.
Turned to ash.
They both saw it.
They both felt the exact moment the timeline had shattered.
The Mad Prince had not played his part.
He had not guided Sunless.
He had not fallen to the paradox.
He had taken a black jade blade and driven it through his own uncorrupted heart.
He had killed Nephis.
He had killed Sunless.
And in doing so, he had achieved the impossible.
He had hijacked the Nightmare Spell.
The Mad Prince was no longer a rogue horror wandering the Great River as a glitch of the Defilement.
The absolute laws of the Dream Realm had recognized him.
He was the Challenger now.
He had become a supreme, sovereign entity within the Nightmare, unchained and holding the authority of the Spell itself.
And they both knew he was coming for them.
After hours of paralyzing, suffocating silence, Cassie finally stood up.
Her delicate face was pale, her blind eyes hidden beneath her golden hair.
She did not say a word of comfort.
There was no comfort to be given.
She turned away from the Corrupted horror wearing her face, walked to the edge of the Chain Breaker, and lowered the small emergency raft into the sparkling waters of the Great River.
Cassie left the ship, floating away into the endless expanse of the river, leaving Torment entirely alone.
It was a cold, calculated move.
A necessary sacrifice.
One of them had to leave to salvage whatever broken shards of fate remained, and one of them had to stay behind to receive the monster’s wrath.
Torment sat cross-legged on the deck.
She waited.
She waited for a long time.
The seven suns rose and fell, painting the sky in alternating hues of lilac dawn, blinding blue day, and the bloody crimson of dusk.
The ancient wood of the Chain Breaker groaned against the current.
The silence of the abandoned ship was absolute, save for the erratic, heavy beating of Torment’s corrupted heart.
Days bled into one another.
And then, she felt it.
It did not arrive with a roar of wind or the crashing of waves.
It arrived as a sudden, catastrophic absence of light.
The temperature on the deck plummeted to absolute zero.
The shadows cast by the masts elongated unnaturally, stretching across the wood like seeking claws, blacker than the darkest night.
A presence boarded the Chain Breaker.
Torment’s soul sea shuddered.
The sheer, suffocating density of the entity standing behind her was incomprehensible.
It was a pressure so immense that the ambient essence of the Great River itself seemed to buckle and warp in its proximity.
Seven Titan cores, burning with lightless, cosmic fire.
She did not turn her head.
She remained perfectly still, her blind eyes staring blankly at the wooden deck.
Footsteps echoed softly against the planks.
Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
The Mad Prince walked slowly around her, his movements fluid, silent, and dripping with an ancient, terrifying grace.
He stepped into her field of view, looking down at her with eyes like twin pools of abyssal obsidian.
He was pristine.
Alabaster skin, raven hair fluttering in the dead wind, clad in black silk that seemed to absorb the light of the seven suns.
But his aura was a nightmare of pure, concentrated malice.
The Mad Prince tilted his head, a cold, dry smile stretching slowly across his cracked, pale lips.
“Well, well, well,” his voice rasped, sounding like dry leaves scraping over a tombstone.
“What am I seeing right now?”
She kept her face entirely blank, suppressing the rabid, violent urges of her Corruption.
The Mad Prince let out a low, dark chuckle.
He took another step closer, looming over her sitting form like a god of death.
“Sitting alone on an empty ship, waiting for the executioner to arrive. Tell me, little oracle… are you waiting for me to devour you? Is this your grand sacrifice?”
His smile widened, pulling the skin tight across his cheekbones, revealing rows of sharp, blackened teeth.
“What intricate, Machiavellian plan are you spinning this time? What tiny, invisible threads are you pulling in the dark? Are you trying to buy time for that fragile, naive little past version of yourself? Hoping she floats far enough away to weave another one of your pathetic traps?”
The Mad Prince slowly crouched down until his face was level with hers.
The smell of him was overwhelming—ozone, crushed shadows, and the sweet, sickening scent of ancient blood.
“Make your plans,” he whispered, his voice dropping to a terrifying, absolute purr that vibrated directly against her bones.
“Do your work. Pluck your little strings of fate. But remember this, Cassie…”
He leaned in, the dark aura surrounding him pressing against her skin like physical blades.
“…you will never make a fool out of me again.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of the Great River churning against the hull.
The hatred radiating from the Mad Prince was not just anger; it was a boundless, immortal resentment that spanned multiple lifetimes, born from the Forgotten Shore and refined in the crucible of the Defilement.
Slowly, agonizingly, the Mad Prince raised a pale hand.
Torment stiffened, her muscles locking as every instinct screamed at her to flee, to summon her corrupted Aspects, to fight.
But she forced herself to remain completely still.
His hand reached her face.
His fingers were as cold as deep space, rough and cracked like ancient stone.
He grabbed her jaw, his grip impossibly strong, forcing her head up to face him.
Torment’s breath hitched.
The Mad Prince’s thumb moved slowly, tracing the delicate, pale line of her lips.
The touch was a horrifying violation, a mocking parody of tenderness layered over an ocean of pure sadism.
He dragged his cracked finger across her mouth, pressing slightly, feeling the minute tremors of her suppressed terror.
“Not bad,” he murmured, his obsidian eyes scanning her delicate, stoic features.
“Not bad at all. You’ve maintained your mind far better than the others. A fragile little mind, trapped in a rotting shell.”
He leaned closer.
So close that his cold breath washed over her face.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of her.
He smelled the pristine, ethereal beauty of the blind oracle, intertwined with the sickening, sweet rot of the Corruption eating away at her soul.
But more than that, beneath her carefully maintained stoicism, he smelled the faint, metallic tang of absolute, primal fear.
The Mad Prince exhaled, his dark smile returning, sharper and more vicious than before.
“It would be a heavy loss,” he whispered, his cracked thumb pressing harder against her lips, bruising the pale skin.
“To simply kill you right now. A waste of such a potent, wretched tool. You have sight that I require. You know the currents of this accursed river.”
His grip on her jaw tightened until the bone threatened to splinter.
His obsidian eyes bored into her blind ones, empty of any mercy, empty of any humanity.
“I am going to wring every last drop of foresight from your mind,” the Mad Prince hissed, his voice dripping with pure, unadulterated venom.
“I am going to use you to break this tomb wide open. And when I am finished, when there is nothing left of your visions but broken glass…”
He released her jaw with a sudden, violent shove, standing back up in one fluid, terrifying motion.
“…then I will kill you, you filthy bitch.”