Chapter 91: The List (11)
The thunderous din of voices that had filled the gymnasium only seconds ago choked off into an unnatural silence, as if someone had stolen the very breath from the crowd.
The wooden floor of the dueling stage gleamed under the harsh glow of overhead lamps, the polished planks now marred with scuffs and sweat from the brutal exchange.
Two figures remained locked in the center, not moving, an image almost surreal in its stillness.
Lucien stood there with his head bowed, chest heaving in ragged jerks.
His grip was still iron around the fractured remains of his wooden saber, jagged splinters biting into the meat of his palms.
In his arms, Phillip slumped forward, his broadsword limply hanging from his hand.
The pose looked wrong, almost tender, almost intimate, like the aftermath of some tragic play rather than the savage conclusion of a duel.
Whispers crawled through the air like nervous insects.
“Are they… both out?”
“That helmet…did you hear that snap? Is he…?”
“Who won? Did they both knock each other out?”
“I can’t tell… who landed the hit first?”
“That swing…did you see it break his helmet? Gods, is he even alive?”
The bleachers creaked as students leaned forward, tension rippling across the gym like a living thing.
A few in the back stood on their seats for a better view, but even those loud-mouthed first-years had gone silent now.
It wasn’t excitement anymore.
It was confusion.
Near the front, the girl that had both hands clasped tight finally decided to open her eyes once more.
Her lips moved rapidly in silent prayer, eyes shut so hard the lashes trembled.
She’d been praying since Phillip stepped onto the stage, whispering his name like a mantra.
Now, as she dared to peek, her heart cracked in two.
Phillip wasn’t standing tall, basking in glory.
Phillip was broken, his head lolling, helmet split and blood streaking from his brow like crimson ink down parchment.
“No,” she breathed.
It came out strangled, barely a sound, and then louder.
“No… NO!”
Her legs moved before her mind could catch up, shoes hammering against the polished floor as she sprinted down the steps toward the arena.
Tears streamed down her cheeks in glittering rivulets, her voice rising in sobs that pierced through the murmuring crowd like shards of glass.
“PHILLIP!”
But no one moved to stop her.
No one even seemed to notice.
Their attention was shackled to the duelists.
Down there, the judge was already stepping onto the stage.
His boots struck the wooden boards with a hollow thud, the kind of sound that made the whole arena feel suddenly smaller, like the walls were inching inward.
His face gave away nothing as he strode between the two bodies locked in their strange embrace.
His sharp eyes flicked to Phillip first.
Two fingers pressed to the boy’s arm.
No response.
A frown tugged at the man’s face for the briefest second before it smoothed out into the same stony mask.
Then he turned to Lucien.
Lucien didn’t even twitch when the man’s shadow fell over him.
The saber, if you could still call the mangled thing that, hung from his hands like dead weight.
His breath came shallow and uneven, but he was upright, his body held together by sheer stubbornness and something darker gnawing behind his ribs.
The referee gave his arm a light shake, testing resistance.
Lucien swayed like a tree in a hurricane but didn’t go down.
Those cold, gray eyes of the older man narrowed as he read the truth in the boy’s stance.
Barely standing.
But standing all the same.
And then, in a voice that cut clean through the silence, the man raised his left arm high.
“The opponent is unable to continue! Winner- Lucien Crowley!”
The gymnasium exploded.
The silence shattered under a tidal wave of noise.
Cheers roared from every direction, rattling the rafters as fists pumped and feet stomped against the wooden bleachers in a thunderous rhythm.
Students screamed his name like a chant, voices colliding into a wall of sound that shook the very boards underfoot.
“LU-CIEN! LU-CIEN! LU-CIEN!”
Some students jumped so high they nearly toppled forward.
Others clutched their heads in disbelief, laughter spilling out in jagged bursts.
But not all celebrated.
The praying girl stood near the arena.
Tears carved pale lines down her flushed cheeks, her cries raw and jagged.
“Phillip… Phillip, no… please…”
Her voice was swallowed by the roar, but for those close enough, it burned through like a knife.
And above her on the stands near the north corner, three figures lived their own whirlwind of chaos.
Vaelira’s knees nearly gave out as the words hit her like an avalanche.
Her grip tore free from the railing as she threw her arms up, a strangled laugh ripping from her throat, wild and bright and soaked in relief.
“He did it… by the Stars, he DID IT!”
She screamed, the words tumbling out of her like a dam bursting.
Balt exhaled so hard his massive shoulders sagged like a mountain easing its burden.
His clenched fists loosened slowly, tremors of tension draining from his frame as relief flooded in.
A grin cracked his usually stoic face, small but burning bright as a sunrise.
Corin?
Corin didn’t bother with such restraints.
The man was a cyclone of energy, slamming his palms against the metal railing so hard the whole section rattled like a war drum.
“HELL YEAH! THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT, LUCIEN!” he bellowed, his voice a booming war cry that surged above even the crowd’s roar.
He grabbed Balt by the shoulder and shook him violently, laughing like a madman.
“DID YOU SEE THAT?! DID YOU SEE THAT SWING?!”
Balt winced but didn’t shove him off.
His eyes stayed glued to the stage, glimmering with pride, and something else.
Fear, maybe, because even from here, he could see it.
Lucien wasn’t celebrating.
He wasn’t smiling.
He wasn’t even aware of the noise crashing like a tidal wave around him.
Down on the wooden boards, the victor stood hollow-eyed and motionless, as if the strings holding him together were snapping one by one.
Phillip’s dead weight sagged against him, an anchor he didn’t have the strength to shake off.
The broken saber hung from his fingers like an afterthought.
And inside, inside Lucien’s skull, a different storm was raging.
***
The world didn’t sound like cheers.
It sounded like static.
It clawed at his ears, muffled and distorted, as though he were submerged deep underwater.
Faces blurred.
Colors melted into a gray smear.
The pounding of his heart drowned out everything else, each beat a sledgehammer reverberating through his skull.
‘Breathe. Just breathe.’
He tried.
But the air felt thick, viscous, like pulling tar into his lungs.
His shoulder screamed agony, sharp and searing, but he clung to it because the pain was real.
The pain was an anchor in a world that was unraveling.
And then came the image.
That smirk, the one burned into his bones.
Not Phillip’s boyish grin.
No.
Leonardo’s.
That smug curl of the lips, the quiet, poisonous condescension that had haunted him since the day everything shattered.
For a few seconds, the gym was gone.
The stage was gone.
The roar of students dissolved into a void as his mind hurled him backward, back to every sneer, every humiliation, every scar burned into memory like brands of fire.
His breath hitched.
“You think you’ve won?”
The phantom whispered.
“You haven’t even begun to crawl.”
His vision flickered, colors bleeding like water through ink.
The floor tilted beneath him, and the weight on his chest, Phillip’s body, felt like an iron slab dragging him into the depths.
The cheers swelled again, louder, closer, and yet, he heard none of it.
Only the hollow echo inside his skull.
Only the darkness rushing up to meet him.
***
The roar of the crowd splintered and fell away like glass tumbling into a bottomless chasm.
One moment, Lucien was on the stage, drenched in sweat and blood, feeling the trembling weight of victory, or something like it, and the next, the world fractured.
Sound became a faint throb, light drained like water sucked down a drain, and everything else dissolved into black.
It wasn’t like closing his eyes.
It was like someone peeled the world away from him in a single, merciless motion.
One second he was standing on wood slick, his nostrils burning, and the next, he was falling.
And falling.
And falling.
No ground.
No air.
No sense of up or down.
Just an endless plunge through ink.
The first sound wasn’t a scream.
It wasn’t cheering.
It was laughter, soft at first, rippling faintly through the void like the shiver of a violin string.
Lucien’s eyes snapped open, or at least, it felt like they did, but there was nothing.
Just the same infinite dark pressing against him like a second skin.
He couldn’t even see his hands, but he could feel his heart.
He could feel it hammering like a war drum inside his ribs, frantic and uneven, like it knew something he didn’t.
Then came the voice again.
“Thought you were clever, didn’t you? Thought you could crawl your way out of the pit dug for you?”
The tone was playful, but underneath it pulsed something venomous.
“Who-”
Lucien’s throat felt raw.
His own voice cracked and scattered like dust.
The laugh slithered back, louder now.
“Don’t pretend you don’t recognize me. You’ve carried me in your bones since the day you opened your eyes in this borrowed shell.”
Lucien tried to move, to twist, to swim upward, if upward even existed, but then, like some cruel joke, his fall stopped.
No sensation of landing, no jolt.
Just stillness.
His legs were straight.
His feet were planted.
He was standing.
Lucien stared down, and for the first time, something broke through the void: a floor.
If you could call it that.
Smooth, colorless, seamless like polished glass, stretching into infinity yet feeling solid beneath his boots.
He stomped once, twice, just to prove it wouldn’t give way. It didn’t.
The wrongness of it clawed at his skin.
“This isn’t real,” he muttered under his breath.
The sound came back warped, bouncing off unseen walls with a delay that made his teeth ache.
“This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”
But the voice chuckled again, and this time, it wasn’t from everywhere.
It was ahead of him.
Lucien froze, breath hitching.
For the first time, the black didn’t feel endless.
There was something out there.
“Go on,”
“You’ve come this far, haven’t you? Don’t stop now. You want answers, don’t you? You’ve always wanted answers.”
His pulse spiked.
His mind screamed at him to turn back, though back meant nothing in this place.
And yet… his legs moved.
One step.
Then another.
The sound of his boots striking the glassy surface was faint, yet it echoed endlessly, multiplying until it sounded like a hundred footsteps trailing after him.
He clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms, anything to remind himself that this was still his body.
“Pathetic,” the voice hissed now, shedding its playful tone like a snake’s skin.
“Clutching at scraps of pride. Holding your breath like it’ll stop you from drowning. Do you think anyone cares that you won? You think it mattered? You bled, you broke, you nearly snapped and for what? For their applause?”
Lucien grit his teeth, the words clawing deeper than he wanted to admit.
He walked faster.
The darkness didn’t thin, didn’t lighten, but the voice was louder now, pulsing like a heartbeat in the distance.
“You’re nothing but a stand-in. A shadow wearing borrowed skin. They wrote you into failure before you ever breathed your first lie in this world.”
“I’m not..”
His voice cracked like dry wood.
The laugh that answered him was cruel and endless.
“Say it louder. Maybe you’ll start believing it.”
Lucien’s pace turned into a march, then into a near-run, boots hammering against that impossible floor as the taunts wrapped tighter and tighter around his throat.
Every word was a chain, dragging him down even as he hurled himself forward like a beast trying to tear free.
“You think strength will save you? That breaking your bones will make you a hero? No one’s coming for you, Crowley. They never did. They never will.”
His breath tore out in ragged gasps, sweat, real or imagined, streaking down his temple.
His lungs burned, his legs screamed, but the voice was close now.
Close enough that he could feel it brushing the back of his neck, whispering straight into his skull.
“Open your eyes. See what you really are.”
And then, he saw it.
A door.
Plain.
White.
Standing alone in the void like some grotesque mirage, its edges too sharp, too perfect against the endless black.
No frame.
No wall.
Just the door.
It was left slightly ajar, a sliver of pale light leaking through the crack like the whisper of a smile.
Lucien slowed, every muscle trembling as he approached.
His heartbeat had become a roar now, pounding so hard it felt like it would split his ribs apart.
His fingers curled, hesitated, then stretched toward the brass knob gleaming faintly in that strange light.
Cold.
It was so cold it burned, sending a shudder racing up his arm.
For a heartbeat, his reflection shimmered in the polished metal, warped, broken, his eyes hollow pits.
“Go on,” the voice breathed, honeyed poison in every syllable.
“Push it open. You want the truth, don’t you?”
Lucien sucked in a breath that scraped like glass down his throat.
And he pushed.
The door creaked wide, spilling light so bright it drowned the darkness like a tidal wave.
Lucien stepped through.
