Dinner went by in a blur. Vaelir patiently walked Liria through the prep work while cracking jokes, but she couldn't help noticing how he kept a guarded distance from Seris the entire time.
She wasn't the only one who noticed. Seris looked hurt by the snub, and when she tried comforting him, Vaelir had frowned at her disapprovingly.
Don't get too attached, Liria. He admonished her.
My mission. My call. She shot back, more defensively than she would have liked.
Thank the Goddess her brother chose to drop the topic, but she could tell from the way Vaelir left immediately afterward that he wasn't too pleased. He left her with a magic pouch filled with supplies anyway, his brows furrowed in worry as he made her promise to call the moment she needed help.
It was now late in the night. The fire had settled into steady, low-burning coals, throwing amber light across the clearing. Liria kept watch besides Seris while he slept, feeling more than a little conflicted.
Why am I fighting with my own family over the accursed Lich King?
She tried to get up—take a walk to clear her mind—but Seris clung to her with the desperation of a drowning man.
"Please don't leave me." He mumbled, his voice so vulnerable and broken that her heart clenched in her chest.
Liria settled back down.
She thought of how shy and nervous he had been when he first asked to hold her hand as he slept, cheeks pink, eyes averted. The way he had fallen on the pork roast with barely contained tears of joy, then paused halfway through and shyly pushed the choicest portion toward her.
She remembered the look of awe and hope on his face when they first met.
When was the last time Liria had sighed this much?
Not the Lich King. Seris. The child's name is Seris.
Liria reminded herself once again. And she had a perfectly good reason for doing this beyond sentimental impulses.
Serivhal may have been the final survivor and bearer of the largest fragment, but he was not the only one who carried within him the essence of a dead god. Even if Liria stopped her ward from becoming the Lich King, there were others who could take his place. Helping Seris overcome his nature was not only an act of mercy. It was a golden opportunity to study necromancy at its source, to understand it well enough to prepare for whatever came next.
Therefore, Liria was being perfectly logical and pragmatic. Sentimentality had nothing to do with it.
She absentmindedly patted Seris's head with her free hand. He made a small, contented sound and leaned into the touch, giggling softly in his sleep.
How could he be so cute?
Liria smiled a troubled smile and stared into the fire.
Though she wanted to help Seris, their opposing attributes made this extremely difficult.
Normally, a single glance would have told her everything she needed: a person's strengths and weaknesses, their ailments, what they needed most. But the taint within Seris was so loud, so blinding to her senses that even after a full day together, she still couldn't determine something as basic as whether the child was a boy or a girl. Diagnosing his condition properly felt like a distant dream.
And their clashing mana meant that any attempt to use magic on him would result in pain and injury. So where did that leave her?
One option immediately came to mind. An unfinished ritual. A long-held regret. A grand endeavor, interrupted before it could turn the tide of the war.
This was Liria's chance to decisively resolve Seris' problem while validating her past.
For a moment, she struggled with indecision, but ultimately decided to let it go. Seris was a fragile child, not a corrupted holy site. The ritual was too extreme; it should only be her last resort when all else had failed.
Liria watched the fire and waited.
Seris's breathing gradually deepened, settling into the slow, even cadence of deep slumber. The night was very still. An owl called once from somewhere in the Silverwood and went quiet again. The coals ticked and shifted.
Any time now.
Green fire flickered under her gaze. Freed from the shackles of Seris' restraint, the necromantic taint within him was leaking out into the world, threading through the air in slow, hungry tendrils, darkening the grass where it touched. A beetle near Liria's feet went still, then began moving in the wrong direction, jerking and clumsy.
She gathered the worst of it into a contained barrier before it could spread further, then reached out with the art of Harmonic Ascension and drew a tiny wisp of corruption into herself.
Her current weakness wasn't entirely a disadvantage, she reflected. In her prime, she had burned away necromantic taint the way sunlight burned away morning mist, reflexively and completely. The only exception had been Serivhal himself, and whenever she was close enough to study him, she was too busy trying not to die. Studying necromantic energy this closely, patiently and deliberately, would have been impossible then. Some things could only be done from a position of fragility.
The wisp Liria drew from Seris was ideal for study: exceptionally potent, but purposeless and undirected, carrying only the raw character of the dead god's essence without the intent of a living practitioner behind it.
She just wished the process didn't feel quite so much like pouring acid into her veins.
The corruption blazed through her mana pathways, corrosive and wrong in ways words could not describe. She felt hollow emptiness, the desire to consume all life, an endless hunger that sought to taint her being, and beyond it… the lingering resentment of a dead god.
She reached for it with her mind, tracing toward its source.
The wisp burned out within her before she could reach it.
Liria let out a slow, careful breath, eyes still closed.
This could work.
The essence of all magic and martial arts is to impose one's will upon the world through the manipulation of mana. All that lived left behind traces of themselves after death to become part of the World Soul. The Three Goddesses' will was part of the world's guiding principles, and even now, a century after its death, the remnants of the dead Outer God still sought to corrupt the world's natural order.
Divine magic was the union of mortal and divine will to create miracles, while necromancy was harnessing the dead god's resentment to bring destruction and ruin.
If Liria could trace that resentment, isolate it, and snuff it out through the force of her will alone, she could create a method to negate necromancy that depended purely on the strength of her soul, independent of her physical limits.
While her soul had survived the time rewind mostly unscathed, her vessel was catastrophically weak. Even with a full day of nonstop cultivation, the Skill gain boost from her divine talent, the reward for completing her Epic-tier Personal Quest to purify the corrupted Silverwoods, and the XP gained from slaying every undead within its depths, Liria's existence level barely scraped past 100.
She needed a way to work around that, and hopefully help Seris without hurting him in the process.
Again.
She dove back into that sea of hunger and corruption. Each time a wisp of taint burned out within her, she surfaced, caught her breath, and dove again. Each pass took her a little deeper, stripped a little more of the uncertainty away, until she finally felt it clearly beneath everything else.
Contact.
The lingering will of an Outer God who sought to consume the world, only to be slain by the Three Goddesses. The origin of necromancy. The remnants of that which is dead but should have never died, and with its disbelieving wrath, even death was denied.
I am eternal.
The thought was not language. It was instinct—a primordial certainty that sought to warp the world in its image: neither dead or alive, forever hungry, forever unable to move on.
You are dead. Liria answered it. Be gone.
Her voice was the voice of the world. The slow breathing of forests. The grinding patience of mountains. The endless, unhurried circulation of oceans and clouds.
For a moment, the ancient hatred struggled against her will, but the dying embers of a dead god's divinity could not win against the World Tree's beloved daughter.
The end came in silence, without fanfare.
When Liria opened her eyes, a System Screen hovered before her, registering the successful creation of a new skill: Necromancy Negation.
She dismissed it and looked back at Seris's sleeping face.
This is only the beginning.
She practiced throughout the night. Each pass became faster, cleaner, more certain. By the early hours before dawn, she no longer needed to absorb the taint at all: she could simply reach out with her mind and nullify it the moment it leaked into the air, the way one might pinch out a candle flame.
One final challenge remained. The fragment of the dead god lodged deep within Seris himself.
She traced the necromantic pathways and dove.
Searching for the traces of the dead god, Liria wandered through a starless night, with only a faint point of light in the distance to guide her path.
Such a dark and desolate mindscape. What kind of life has this child lived?
She took an experimental step into an ominous patch of shadow, and Seris' trauma consumed her whole.
Liria suppressed a gag as the metallic, cloying taste of congealed blood overwhelmed her taste buds, and the putrid smell of sewage and decay filled her world.
The surroundings snapped into focus around her: some tiny alleyway in the slums, dark and claustrophobic, choked with garbage.
Absolute silence, broken only by the sound of chewing and the buzzing of flies.
She, or rather, Seris was kneeling in a ditch while gnawing on a dead rat, forcing each disgusting morsel down her throat even as her stomach rebelled.
A miserable sight, but the world refused to let the child do even this much in peace. Occupied with eating, Seris' control slipped for a single moment. Green fire flickered at the edges of her vision…
And suddenly, the dead rat she was gnawing on looked up at her with burning green eyes. A portion of its face had been stripped of all flesh, revealing the bleached skull beneath, and the remainder was a decayed mess, wriggling with maggots.
Seris' terrified scream filled the dark alley, and Liria watched through his eyes as he hurled the undead rat away with all his strength and fled.
He did not get very far. His stomach rebelled for the final time at this sudden exertion, and the stabbing pain made him collapse into a heap while throwing up.
As Seris choked on his own vomit, a single thought burned in his mind.
I am an abomination.
Liria's heart broke at the memory.
You are not an abomination.
She firmly contradicted him, projecting as much reassurance and comfort as she could.
You are a miracle. No other child could have resisted this curse as long as you did. Believe in yourself. Believe in a brighter tomorrow.
I will make you happy. I promise.
Liria vowed, both to Seris and herself.
The thought settled, and Liria felt Seris' mental world shift under her, invisible gears clicking into place as hope became belief.
She emerged from the memory into a changed mindscape. Faded memories of happiness from the times before the taint dotted the night sky. And in the distance, a brilliantly shining North Star lit her way.
What happened? This is a good change… right? But even if it's a good change, is it right for me to interfere with Seris' mind?
Liria stood under the night sky, torn between finishing what she started and retreating before she made any further changes to Seris' consciousness.
The shift only happened after she spoke to Seris. Theoretically, as long as Liria only watched and did nothing, everything should be fine.
She pressed on.
The next trauma came at her in heat and noise: the sharp crack of burning wood, the roar of a crowd, and the sick smell of smoke mixed with the particular sweetness of hay and pitch.
Seris was bound atop a pyre in the middle of a village square, flames licking at his feet as angry villagers threw stones at him. But Seris felt nothing. There was no fear or anger, and the curses being hurled at him barely registered as white noise. He was just so tired.
He closed his eyes, letting go of all resistance. Letting go of everything.
The taint within him burst forth like water from a broken dam, corroding the world. The ropes binding him decayed into nothing. The fire beneath him sputtered then turned a sickly green, losing all heat. The villagers turned and fled, their screams of terror soon giving way to the screams of wraiths.
The crowded square emptied. Seris collapsed into a kneeling position atop the green burning pyre. Exhaustion gave way to rage, and he screamed at the uncaring sky.
"Why won't you let me die? What more do you want from me? Why am I still alive?"
"You are still alive because you are a good and kind child. Because you deserve love and happiness." Liria answered him, the words spilling from her lips before she could stop them. "The worst is already behind you. Everything will be alright. I promise."
Seris's face crumpled. For a moment he fought it—Liria could feel the resistance, the exhausted reflex of a child who had learned that comfort was always followed by its withdrawal. His hands balled into fists against the dying green flames. Then something in him gave way, not all at once but in stages, like ice cracking under the first warmth of spring.
His tearful face settled into a peaceful expression, and his mental world once again shifted under Liria's feet. The blurry and faded mindscape gained sharpness and definition as belief crystallized into something far greater. Something that, once formed, would not bend.
Liria emerged from the memory into the darkness before dawn. The stars were gone, and the first light of the sun was beginning to spread across the heavens.
I've really done it now.
She resigned herself and walked toward the brightening horizon.
At least let me understand what I've changed.
Warmth enveloped her, more soothing than a beautiful dream, more comforting than a mother's embrace.
Color returned to a world that had been grey. White purer than new fallen snow. Gold, as brilliant as sunlight.
As Seris snuggled into the Goddess's embrace, hope became belief became conviction became faith.
I understand now. I am not an abomination, and my life had meaning. My suffering was a trial to prove that I'm worthy to stand by your side. I was born into this world to meet you.
This was the memory of their first meeting, moments after he first took her hand.
Liria pulled out of Seris' mind as if burned.
The dawn in his mindscape gave way to the dawn in the real world. The birds in the Silverwood had begun to wake, their calls filtering down through the high canopy. Seris stirred in her arms, turned over, and opened his eyes.
The weight of his adoration and worship as he looked up at her hurt.
All I wanted to do was comfort a crying child. Why does this always happen to me?
"Good morning," she said, keeping her voice very even.
"Good morning, big sister," Seris murmured, smiling like a child who had slept without nightmares for the first time in as long as he could remember. He probably had.