Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 411 - 405: Shattering world (3)

Chapter 411: Chapter 405: Shattering world (3)

Gabriel returned to his chamber with unhurried steps, each one echoing faintly along the hollow marble corridors of the von Jaunez manor. The air remained still, artificially tempered, touched by the faint hum of background ether.

He paused at the threshold of his room, a space too curated to be anything but another part of the illusion. The doorknob turned beneath his fingers without resistance. No guards. No eyes. No locks. It should have unsettled him more, but it only confirmed what he suspected: Olivier still didn’t know.

The room was the same as he had left it, perfect and faintly wrong. The curtains hung too still. The bed was untouched. The window framed a view that didn’t quite hold together if you stared at it long enough. And Gabriel did. Just long enough to see the blur where the world fell off the page.

He crossed to the desk, fingers grazing its edge. Nothing in the ripples of the shard had changed. No tremor in the script. No flare of attention. Olivier hadn’t noticed Peter’s disappearance, or if he had, he hadn’t written a consequence for it.

’So much for the all-powerful,’ Gabriel thought, mouth tightening into something that could’ve been a smirk if not for the underlying edge. ’You let your script run wild, Olivier. You assumed I’d play my part.’

Gabriel drew the chair back with a muted scrape, its weight familiar beneath his hand. He sat down at the desk slowly, carefully, and stared at the old computer in front of him, the one Olivier had chosen to replicate from his childhood. The casing was the same off-white, with a slight crack still visible near the edge where Charles had once dropped it. The keyboard had that faint yellowing along the spacebar, the screen’s glow a low and steady blue like dusk behind glass.

It was convincing. Down to the scent, faint plastic, old paper, a trace of ozone from the power supply.

But that was the thing with Olivier’s world. It was too convincing. Every detail perfectly preserved, every glitch tucked away where most would never look. But Gabriel had learned to see what wasn’t there.

He leaned back in the chair, its worn leather creaking softly under his weight. His head tilted toward the ceiling, lashes lowering over sharp, dark eyes. The hum of the shard ran low through the walls, a static presence beneath the stillness. But his ether had quieted again, pulled tight within him like a wire strung to tension.

He breathed in, slow, deep, and let his senses drift past the shell of the illusion, into the edges where his mind could still remember what wasn’t scripted.

And then deeper.

The desk faded. The chair. The room. All of it dulled behind the rhythm of his pulse and the memory of Damian’s warmth.

—

The nannies had given up.

Three of them had tried, each taking turns, offering bottles, warmth, lullabies. But Arik, heir to the empire, had screamed red-faced and inconsolable until Damian finally dismissed them all with a quiet look that brooked no further attempts.

Now he stood alone in the nursery, bare feet silent against the polished wooden floor, the soft weight of their son shifting in his arms. Arik was still hiccuping from the last of his cries, his small fists balled against Damian’s shoulder. His breathing was uneven, shuddering, like he’d fought through a storm and wasn’t yet convinced it was over.

Damian swayed gently, instinctively, even though his mind was already elsewhere.

"Easy," he murmured, voice low and quiet, the way Gabriel would have said it. "You’re safe."

The nursery was dim, golden light filtering through the carved screen that separated the crib from the wide corner windows. The scent of lavender lingered, faint, but not strong enough to matter. What calmed Arik, what finally began to draw the tension from his small frame, was the faded trace of Gabriel’s scent still clinging to the blanket crumpled in Damian’s hand.

It was all that was left.

Gabriel’s body remained in the imperial hospital, held together by a network of high-order ether machines humming around the clock. His chest rose and fell with mechanical rhythm, muscles sustained, organs fed, and every vital function carefully monitored. But his mind, his soul, didn’t return from the shard.

Not yet.

Gabriel’s body remained in the imperial hospital, held together by a network of high-order ether machines humming steadily around the clock. His chest rose and fell with mechanical rhythm—heart stabilized, muscles sustained, organs fed through an array of crystalline conduits. Every vital function was accounted for, every parameter carefully monitored. But his mind—his soul—had not returned from the shard.

Not yet.

It had been less than twelve hours since Gabriel collapsed. Less than twelve hours since Damian had been forced to leave his side, trusting the imperial medics to hold the line while he handled the storm Gabriel had deliberately triggered. For the first hour, Gabriel had remained stable. Quiet. Still breathing on his own. Then something changed.

His ether signature began to flicker like a signal slowly drifting out of reach.

By the time Damian had been alerted, the degradation had already begun. Slowed heart response. Lowered brain conductivity. Irregular channel pulses.

The head physician had made the call with cold precision: full life support, full magical reinforcement, and the shard containment link fed directly into the primary ether lines.

That would keep him alive long enough for the shard to end. From six to seven days as preconized at the beginning of his state, now the entire imperial medical board, together with the engineers of the ether grid, had gotten it down to three.

Three days.

Three days of calculations, recalibrations, and restructured channel flows. Three days of silence from the person Damian trusted above all else to outmaneuver gods and illusions. Three days where the line between faith and madness had never felt so thin.

Damian exhaled slowly, head bowed against Arik’s soft hair. The boy had finally stopped trembling, his little breaths growing slower, more even, the exhaustion of too much emotion finally weighing him down.

He didn’t know.

Of course he didn’t.

He didn’t know his other parent was fighting a world that shouldn’t exist. That Gabriel’s body was only a vessel now, empty, quiet, tethered to life by design alone. That what remained was somewhere unreachable, walking on borrowed ground and counting on Damian to hear him before it was too late.

But Damian had always heard him.

He closed his eyes, rocking Arik once more, and lowered the child gently into the crib. The faint remnants of Gabriel’s scent remained in the blanket, but Damian had folded a strip of his own scarf into the bedding too, anything that might feel familiar, safe.

The screen caught the lamplight as he stepped back, golden patterns blooming across the floor like warmth against the cold silence. Arik didn’t stir.

A pulse.

Faint. Subtle. Barely a ripple in the atmosphere.

Damian’s eyes snapped shut.

Gabriel.