Veil Hides Mercy

Chapter 28: Veil Hides Mercy

(Fragmented Memories–IV)

━━━━━━ʕ• · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·•ʔ━━━━━━

When that stopped working against me.

She couldn’t stop me with force alone.

She took a different approach.

She started sealing me in every cycle

Just… chained.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘…]

My wrists and ankles were bound by something that looked like veins made out of light. They pulsed faintly.

I tried to move.

The veins tightened.

I turned my head.

She sat on a chair opposite the slab I was pinned to. She swung one leg lazily, robe slipping to reveal a bare ankle pale as candle wax.

“Finally awake?” she asked.

“Untie me,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Then kill me,” I said.

She pretended to think about it.

“Hm. No to that as well,” she said.

My jaw clenched.

“What’s the point of this, then,” I asked.

“Experiment,” she said. “I’m curious how much you can watch before you finally crack.”

She snapped her fingers.

The wall behind her turned transparent.

Outside, a city spread under a grey sky. People walked. Laughed. Lived.

Far above them, a dark smear marked the coming storm.

She stood.

Her fingers traced a slow circle in the air.

Buildings trembled.

Cracks opened in the streets.

Screams drifted faintly through the barrier.

“Stop,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s pointless, you actually think I care?” I said.

She laughed.

“Ahaha… you say that now,” she said. “Let’s see how long that lasts.”

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

She didn’t always use grand magic.

Sometimes she just walked through a marketplace and brushed her hand along a row of stalls. People shrivelled where her shadow fell, turning to husks mid‑sentence.

Sometimes she whispered into the soil and watched as sickness crawled up through roots and into crops, then into children.

I saw all of it.

Every version.

Bound to that slab, veins digging deeper into me each cycle, I watched until my eyes bled.

She grew more creative when my reactions dulled.

At first, my body flinched at every crack and screamed. I shouted. Cursed.

Later, I went quiet.

The quiet seemed to bother her more.

She started cutting.

At first it was my arms.

“Let’s see what happens if you lose this,” she murmured, fingers brushing my skin.

Her nails elongated into claws. Mana gathered at the tips.

My left arm separated from my shoulder in a clean, burning line.

I stared at the stump.

Blood didn’t flow.

The veins wrapped around the wound tightened, pulsing brighter, knitting flesh just enough to keep me conscious.

No shock. No blackout. Just sharp, relentless awareness.

“Ahaha. Look at that,” she said. “Still glaring.”

She took the right arm next.

Then my legs.

Organs after that.

She was meticulous.

She removed my liver and weighed it in her hand like a strange fruit.

“Do you need this?” she asked.

She flicked it at the wall.

It splattered and slid down, leaving a dark trail.

“You are so fucking miserable,” I said. “And you deserve it.”

“I am bored,” she corrected. “Insanity is just what boredom looks like when you stretch it over a few thousand years.”

When she finally tired of dismantling me, she left me as a head, a chunk of upper torso, and a mess of glowing veins.

Eyes.

Always the eyes.

“The eyes are important,” she said. “What’s the point of a witness who can’t watch?”

So I watched.

She wanted me to break.

To scream. To beg. To start agreeing with her that the world deserved it.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

I didn't.

Even when–

All my limbs

were laid out like a feast,

my organs catalogued

on silver platters.

Like objects,

like playthings—

the heart from my chest,

no longer beating,

Only my eyes were left to watch,

to witness what I had become.

Even when I had lost all meaning,

there was nothing worth left

I didn't stop.

Clinging to life,

to survive

Even now,

Was it hate?

Hate for her. For the System. For the faceless thing that had written all of this in cheerful font.

Or maybe it was because of a promise... I made so long ago, that I couldn't even remember.

Please live on.

Find happiness.

Sometimes, in the quiet between disasters, when she wandered off to play somewhere else, when all I had was the sound of my own bloodless pulse in my ears, a voice echoed in the static.

I didn’t remember the face.

I didn’t remember the name.

My brain clawed at empty space whenever I tried.

But my soul clung to those words.

She had said it once, long before this place, long before this elf, long before the tree and the glass and the endless, looping nights.

Please live on.

So I did.

Not because I believed in happiness.

Because I refused to betray a promise, even if I couldn’t picture who I’d made it to.

Even when I had lost myself.

Even when my body was no longer mine.

I didn’t bend.

I never stopped.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

Eventually, strength catches up with stubbornness.

It wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t a sudden power‑up with glowing aura and triumphant music.

It was numbers.

Experience carrying over quietly under the sadism. Techniques learned in one life resurfacing faster in the next. Reflexes honed by a thousand deaths.

And her.

She had patterns.

Even madness has a rhythm.

When she laughed a certain way, lightning followed. When she hummed a particular tune, the dead climbed out of their graves. When she said “Watch this,” something big broke.

I started moving earlier each time. Cutting sigils into the ground before she reached them. Collapsing towers she liked to stand on before she could see the view. Pulling civilians away from fault lines before she cracked the earth.

Her fun got harder.

Her laughter sharpened.

“Oh?” she said once, hovering above a capital city she’d drowned seven cycles in a row. “You’re in my way already. Impressive.”

“Move,” I said.

“No,” she said.

We clashed.

Magic against whatever hateful thing I’d become.

I lost.

Again.

Losing slower each time.

Until I didn’t.

· ─ ·𖥸· ─ ·

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘…]

The first time I cut her ears off, silence swallowed both of us.

My blade bit into the long, elegant point.

Her ear hit the ground.

For a beat, nothing moved.

Then she screamed.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

She clutched the bleeding side of her head, fingers slick with silver blood.

“You— you—!” she gasped. “You vile little—”

Her veil trembled as her jaw clenched.

“Stop faking,” I said.

Her remaining ear flattened.

“Hah, you really are cruel,” she whispered.

“You taught me,” I said.

The second ear came off cleaner.

Her balance tilted.

She laughed through gritted teeth.

“Ahaha… finally learned how to hurt me,” she rasped. “Congratulations.”

[࿐𝄞𝄢℘…]

She didn’t stop talking.

Even chained.

Even mutilated.

Even when I pinned her under layers of runes and stone and veins of my own making, she kept up a steady commentary.

“How many cycles has it been now?” she mused once, dangling upside down from the ceiling of the cell I’d made into her prison. “Do you ever get tired of my face?”

“I got tired of it the first time,” I said, tightening the bindings.

“Liar,” she said. “You like me. I’m the only one who keeps coming back to see you.”

[♪♪♪]

“AH-AH-AHHH!!! GHH--NH!!!”

“Stop making weird noises–”

“Ahaha–ngh..…”

I cut her tongue out three loops later.

The cell went blessedly quiet.

Her eyes didn’t.

They glittered.

Amused. Annoyed. Something like impressed.

She still managed muffled sounds through the blood.

I learned to ignore them.

I thought binding her would fix it.

She couldn’t snap her fingers if they were broken. She couldn’t summon meteors if every nerve in her hands was woven into the sealing circle.

The world didn’t reset immediately after that.

Time moved.

Days. Months. Years.

I lived.

I woke up without [♪♪♪]

I slept without expecting the sky to crack mid‑dream.

It felt weird.

But it held.

For a while.

I got old.

It crept up slowly.

At first, it was just slower healing. A stiffness in joints that used to spring. A white hair threaded into the mess of black when I caught my reflection by accident.

Then it was breath catching on stairs I’d run up before. Cuts that took longer to close. Nights where I woke from dreams of fire to feel my heart stumbling in my chest.

I didn’t die in battle.

I didn’t die in some noble sacrifice.

My body simply… wore out.

By then, she was more chain than elf.

Her arms were ribbons of pale skin and scar tissue, held together by the magic that kept her conscious.

Her legs were gone entirely, replaced by a tangle of roots that sank into the floor of her cell.

Her veil was still there.

Her eyes behind it had changed.

The madness hadn’t left. It never would. It was etched too deep.

But something else had crept in between the cracks.

Quiet.

I visited her more than I admitted to myself.

Not to gloat.

The gloating had stopped being satisfying decades ago.

I went because the world outside the cell was… busy.

People rebuilding. Children fighting over scraps. Merchants arguing. Priests pretending they’d saved everyone.

Inside the cell, there was just her.

And me.

“Why are you here,” I asked once, leaning against the cold stone opposite her.

I meant on this side of the door.

She couldn’t answer with words.

No tongue. No lips for shaping them.

She made a low sound instead, something that might have been a laugh in another life.

Then I felt it.

A brush against my mind.

Light. Hesitant.

Like a hand reaching out in the dark, afraid of being slapped.

I didn’t pull away.

You’re bored too, her voice said in my head.

It wasn’t really a voice. More like the echo of one. Thoughts shaped like words.

“I’m tired,” I said.

Same thing, she said.

Silence stretched.

You kept me, she went on. You could have killed me. Again. And again. And again. You didn’t.

“Killing you resets everything,” I said. “I got tired of losing my progress.”

Liar, she said.

There was no heat in it.

You kept me because I’m the only one who knows what you are.

“What am I,” I asked.

Broken, she said. Like me. Just smaller.

Her eyes crinkled above the veil.

If she’d had a mouth still, she’d have been smiling.

“You’re not flattering yourself much,” I said.

I don’t need to flatter myself, she said. I already know I’m magnificent.

She sent the memory of a mountain erupting under her hand. An ocean swallowing a continent. A sky cracking because she’d pushed the wrong place out of spite.

Old pride.

Old boredom.

Underneath it, a thin thread of something else.

Loneliness.

No matter how many times she tore the world apart, no one turned to look at her.

Except me.

“Why did you thank me,” I asked her, one day when the pain in my chest made every breath a negotiation.

Her eyes widened.

I hadn’t said the words aloud before.

The last time I’d died, the very last loop before this one, just before the void dragged me away, she’d looked at me from across a field of glass and corpses and mouthed something.

I hadn’t heard it then.

I heard it now.

Thank you.

She blinked slowly.

Then sent the memory to me.

Cold cell. My hair more white than black. Her body more scar than skin. The air thick with stale mana.

I lay on a bed someone had dragged in when my legs started refusing to work.

She was chained to the opposite wall, eyes dim.

The veins that held her pulse in place had lost some of their light.

You’re finally going to stop, she’d thought then, watching my breath hitch.

I’d stared back.

Too tired to curse.

Too stubborn to look away.

She’d laughed silently.

If her throat had still worked, it would have sounded the same as it always had.

You really lasted this long just to spite it, she’d said.

“Maybe,” I’d whispered.

And then she’d done something she’d never done before.

She’d bowed her head.

Just a little.

Thank you, she’d said. For staying. For watching. For seeing me.

Her thoughts now pressed against mine, soft and raw.

No one else ever did, she said. Not once. Not in all the cycles. They just… walked through me. Around me. I shouted. I broke their cities. I shattered their gods. Nothing.

She lifted her gaze.

But you, she went on. You cut me. You chained me. You cursed me. You screamed at me. You would not look away.

She laughed again in the memory.

It sounded more like sobbing.

It was irritating, she said. And nice. In a disgusting way.

Her eyes met mine across the cell.

“…You’re welcome,” I said.

The words tasted strange.

I still couldn’t forgive her.

Not for the cities she’d drowned. Not for the people she’d twisted. Not for the countless little deaths she’d made me watch from that slab.

But sitting there, with my own body quietly failing and hers trapped in a prison I’d built around her, I understood something ugly and simple.

We were both playthings.