The cold came through her palms immediately, a deep cold with nothing natural in it, the cold of places where nothing has lived or will ever live.
The soul barrier rose to meet her.
It came not as a wall, but as a flood of memory. The final stand. The roar of battle. The heat of blood and iron, the copper tang thick in the air. Men shouting themselves hoarse, voices cracking as they hurled defiance into the face of annihilation. The ground trembling beneath charging feet. The moment where fear was swallowed and replaced with something sharper, brighter.
Conviction.
Liria did not push against it with force.
She let it wash over her. Felt the weight of it. Acknowledged it.
You served something worth serving, once.
Her palms pressed harder into the armor. She let her will flow through the contact, steady and unyielding, threading itself through the fractured remnants of those long-dead souls.
I know. I will remember.
The air around them felt thick, as if the world itself were holding its breath. The faint green glow in the ground pulsed once, then again, slower this time.
I'm sorry it ended like this.
Time stretched.
The corrupted vestiges of ancient lords gave way before her. She could feel the strain, the way their conviction bent in a direction it had never chosen.
She followed that strain.
Traced it backward. Through layers of corruption and distortion, through the weight of imposed purpose, back toward something purer.
Let go. She said, quieter now. Return to your rightful rest.
The barrier cracked.
I will carry on your legacy.
The death knight shook like something caught in a high wind, the obsidian armor rattling, the held sword vibrating in its locked grip. Seris made a sound that was almost a word. Then the barrier gave, all at once.
The dead god's presence surged against her, cold fury and a century of festering denial pouring through the connection. She felt it as a pressure behind her eyes, a taste of copper and old ash at the back of her throat, a whisper at the edge of perception that was not language but would have been hatred if it had the patience for specificity.
In a layer of consciousness beyond reason and thought, the World Soul stirred, ancient and vast, demanding the excision of this foreign taint. Liria joined her will with the world's will and commanded the dead god's malign whisper to Cease.
The voice went silent. The death knight crumbled from the feet up, armor losing its coherence as the animating will departed, obsidian plates clattering against each other as they dissolved into ash and shadow.
The contact lasted but a fraction of an instant.
In the perfect stillness, Liria could finally see past the fury and denial to what lurked beyond.
She found a divine soul, fractured and incomplete, seated at a nexus of threads. A cold and contemptuous intellect trapped beyond existence, each thread connecting it to a vessel of its power somewhere in the living world.
Each thread pulsed.
They carried thought. Intent. Influence.
Some were faint, barely clinging to existence. Others burned with recent activity, taut and vibrant. All of them converged on that central presence, feeding into it, sustaining it.
And it was aware.
As she gazed into the abyss, the abyss gazed back at her—
The connection cut.
When Liria first rewound time, she had expected the dead god's remnants to be mindless. Easy to deal with.
She had been wrong.
The last of the death knight continued its slow dissolution before her, sword fading into nothing.
The shield went last, its dark surface holding its shape a moment longer than the rest, as though reluctant to release Seris, before it too dissolved into a faint green luminescence that the ground absorbed in silence.
The shadow-bonds around Seris's wrists vanished with it. He dropped the last few inches to the pale ground and immediately sat down hard, as though his legs had made a unilateral decision.
Liria stood still and let the pieces fall into place. The battle had felt disturbingly familiar—the vindictiveness, the hostage, the tactical retreat. It felt just like facing Serivhal. And that brief contact at the end…
In a bygone future, amid the ruins of a burning city, Serivhal once gloated to her about how he "mastered that mindless mass of power with his peerless intellect, and bent the last vestiges of a dead god to his supreme will."
It was meaningless information at the time. Serivhal had no reason to lie, so Liria had taken his words at face value.
It turned out the “mindless mass of power” was not so mindless after all.
Serivhal had swallowed his pride and insulted his past self just to mislead her. In a perfectly unguarded moment. Concerning a perfectly mundane topic.
That conniving undead thing. Was there a single thing he told her that was true?
But beneath the anger, Liria felt something that took her a moment to identify.
Relief.
Serivhal was a completely separate entity from Seris. He was not a mortal corrupted by a dead god's essence. He was the lingering consciousness of the dead god himself, and Seris was the poor child whose body and soul he had consumed.
She sat with the realization, letting it settle.
No, not Serivhal. Vhal. Liria decided right then and there, drawing a clean line between the two. Henceforth, she would refer to the Lich King and dead god remnant as Vhal.
Her sweet younger brother was perfectly innocent. She could freely love him without feeling guilty towards the companions who had died protecting her.
It was a future only she remembered, and it was a truth only she cared about. The only one she needed to convince was herself, and Liria was sufficiently convinced.
From this moment on, this was going to be her truth, and that was that.
Her magic settled around her like a comforting blanket. A quick healing spell reattached her severed ear with a faint warmth, a brief sensation like sunlight returning after a cloud passes. A Clean cantrip erased all traces of dirt and blood, lifting the grit and copper smell from her skin, leaving her robes white and weightless like new-fallen snow.
Liria turned to face Seris, looking fresh and unruffled as if her previous struggle had been a lie.
Which it was, for the most part.
Seris hit her at a dead run, sobbing with relief.
His arms locked around her waist with the desperate grip of a child who has been frightened beyond his ability to reason, and the shaking moved through him in long, uncontrolled waves. His whole small body trembled against her, face pressed into her chest, his breathing coming in the ragged, irregular rhythm of someone who had been holding it together by sheer force of will for as long as they could and had just, finally, stopped.
Liria gently hugged him and waited.
The dead god's presence within Seris was still overwhelming to her senses, but at least his touch no longer burned. Summoning the death knight must have emptied his mana reserves. She held him and felt the absence of pain. If it was now…
She tried casting Clean on him, hoping against hope.
Please let it work.
Seris flinched the moment the magic made contact.
Liria hastily canceled her spell. He stilled again almost at once, burrowing closer, oblivious or forgiving or both.
Liria stared over his head at the pre-dawn sky.
It wasn't just Seris' mana that was tainted. The dead god's presence had gone deeper than that, winding itself through his constitution at a level where the distinction between curse and person was no longer clear.
Even if she could trace the corruption to its source, negating it might kill him.
She patted his back and set the thought aside for later, feeling troubled.
The Ashen Wastes were quiet. The green glow in the ground faded slowly. Above them, the sky gradually began to lighten, the black overhead softening toward a gray that held no warmth, but at least belonged to a world preparing for morning.
When the crying finally wound down to something shaky and exhausted, Seris spoke into her chest without lifting his face.
"Big sister." His voice was hoarse. "I know you said it's risky. I know it might hurt me or change me." A hitching breath. "But I don't want to wait anymore."
He pulled back just far enough to look at her, his expression resolute.
"Cure me. I'd rather die than see you get hurt again."
Liria froze.
Oh. Oh no.
She knelt so that they were on the same eye level, and steadily held his gaze. Her voice was calm and gentle, betraying none of her confusion and guilt.
"Listen to me, Seris. You have nothing to be guilty about," she reassured him. "I was just acting to lower the death knight's guard. I was never in any real danger—"
"But you still got hurt because of me!" Seris angrily cut her off. Fresh tears were beginning to gather in the child's eyes, trembling at his lashes, the redness in his cheeks deepening with the force of the feeling behind the words.
"Like I said, I was just acting—"
"Your acting got your ear cut off!" Seris shouted.
He wasn't listening to her; this wasn't working. Liria hesitated, then decided to come clean.
"Calm down, Seris. You're only feeling this way because big sis played a mean trick on you," she confessed. "I let you believe I was hurt because I needed you angry. Enough to stop the death knight. Big sister was bad—"
"So what?" He impatiently interrupted her again. "I needed the push. Big sis did nothing wrong. And I am calm."
Seris looked intently at her, his gaze measured. The expression on his face was one she had not seen before, or had not noticed before: careful, considering, older than his years. Gone was the puppy-like child who tripped over himself to please her.
"Tell me, big sis," he asked her. "What hurt you more? Fighting that death knight? Or hugging me?"
Liria went silent. The question sat between them, patient and precise. Seris nodded, taking her silence as confirmation.
"Big sister," he pressed on, his expression desolate. "Have you slept at all since we met? Did you stay up all night just so I could sleep?"
"How do you know all this?" Liria had questions of her own. "Who told you, Seris?"
Once again, Seris clammed up, his face showing the same fear he’d worn all day. Apparently, the ground had become irresistibly fascinating.
"I know about the voice inside your head, Seris," Liria sighed. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Seris' shoulders shook.
"I…" he began, then thought better of it, falling silent once again. Liria patiently waited. The pale sky continued its gradual brightening above them, unhurried, indifferent, giving no indication of what it thought about any of this.
"The voice…" Seris said finally. His face had gone pale. The words came out slowly, as if each one cost him something. "It claims... that it's me."
He looked up, and the careful composure cracked open. "But it can't be me," he said, his voice climbing. "Because I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate everything it says and everything it makes me feel, and I—" The words jammed against each other. He drew a ragged breath. "Please, big sister. You have to believe me."
"It is not you," Liria said. Her voice left no room for doubt. "Do not listen to it. It's lying."
Seris fell silent. The measured scrutiny was back on his face, the careful, watchful steadiness she was coming to recognize as belonging to the part of him that had survived on its own for longer than it should have needed to.
Liria erased all hesitation from her mind. She had to calm him down first. Everything else could wait. There will be no alternate theories. No second-guessing herself.
"That voice is an evil spirit trying to steal your body," she warned him. "It claims that it's you to blur the boundaries between you, making its takeover easier. Do not listen to it."
Seris considered this with visible care, turning it over the way he had turned the medallion in his hands that morning. The tension drained from his body gradually, like a fist slowly unclenching. "Tell me more, big sister."
Liria searched her mind, trying to piece together what everyone knew with what she had discovered in her battle against the death knight.
"A century ago," she began her lecture, "a great Outer God tried to invade this world and was slain by the Three Goddesses…"
Seris listened to her intently, his expression brightening as comprehension dawned in his eyes. Liria felt more relieved than she would readily admit.
"Its severed head fell on the principality of Brighthold, reducing it to the Ashen Wastes." She continued. "Its blood became black rain, corrupting all it touched, and its remnant soul lingered beyond existence, whispering into the ears of those who bore its taint." She held his gaze. "It is its voice you hear, Seris. You are its chosen vessel to resurrect itself in the living world."
Seris was quiet for a moment. Then: "Why me?"
It was a fair question. Liria considered her answer.
"The dead god Vhal revels in corrupting all that is beautiful," she said. "I believe it chose you because you are a good and kind child, born with the purest soul. So be proud of yourself; you have nothing to be ashamed of, Seris."
Even as she comforted him, Liria found herself becoming convinced of her own reasoning, the logic of it settling into place with the satisfying weight of something that fits because it is true. At this point, it would not surprise her if Seris turned out to be this generation's Saintess of Light.
She carefully wiped the tears away from Seris' face, her thumb tracing the line of each cheek in turn, the gesture so natural and unthought that she was halfway through it before she realized she was doing it. The child was blushing now, face red as an apple, warm and living under her hand, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips despite everything.
When he finally looked up again, his face was more resolute than ever. The blush was still there, but behind it something had settled and hardened into certainty.
"Then that's all the more reason I must be cured immediately. No matter the cost. I'm ready."
Oh.
"I told you that method is too dangerous, Seris," she said weakly, once again trying to dissuade him. Her words sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
"More dangerous than giving a dead god time?" His counterargument came immediately, and Liria paused.
Seris had a point.