Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 415 - 409: Olivier’s failed possession

Chapter 415: Chapter 409: Olivier’s failed possession

Hadeon didn’t notice the impact.

His skin was blistering from the pressure of being rewritten, bit by bit, syllable by syllable. Every ounce of greed, every hungry calculation, every time he had said "just a little more," the shard swallowed it all.

The ward lights shattered one by one. The room no longer responded to him. The ether lattice bent away from his signature like iron from rust. The console flickered in response, then hissed out of existence.

And then it began to speak.

Not aloud, but through the marrow of his bones and the blood running backwards in his veins. The voice of the shard, of the soul fragment within it, was velvet and rot, the voice of something that had waited far too long to be invited back in.

"You wanted power," it whispered, coiling around what was left of him. "So now, we share."

Hadeon’s mouth opened, jaw trembling from the strain, but no words came. Only the choking, raw realization that he had been so certain. Certain that Olivier had died screaming. Certain that the last shard was just that... a shard. Harmless. Silent. Dead, or so he thought.

His hands scrabbled against the polished stone like they no longer belonged to him, like every nerve had been rewired to obey someone else’s rhythm, because they had. The mark on his thumb was gone now, devoured in a single breath by the shard’s awakening. What replaced it wasn’t a seal. It was a brand. A bond. A final, unspoken contract inked in his very own ether.

His mouth opened again, not in a scream, those had burned out minutes ago, but in a rasp, cracked and jagged, barely human. His voice didn’t carry. There was no audience left. Just the cold and the hum and the crawling realization that the pain wasn’t passing. It was deepening.

Olivier wasn’t content to possess.

He was peeling.

Layer by layer, thought by thought, stripping Hadeon down to bone and breath and the last dregs of intent. The air around him thrummed with pressure, folding inward as if reality itself were bending to accommodate a force it had once exiled. His thoughts frayed at the edges, then tore. Names vanished, his officers, his sons, his lovers, his victories. His own name flickered next, as fragile as paper soaked in flammable oil.

He fought.

Gods, he tried.

He reached inward for the core that had driven him all his life, for ambition, for hunger, for the cruel gravity that had made him a kingmaker and a destroyer both, but found only silence. Emptiness, vast and echoing. A cathedral gutted of its god.

And still, he didn’t fall.

Hadeon Lyon, the last tyrant of Donin, clung to the edge of himself with fingernails cracked and bloodied, holding fast to the one truth left to him, that he had mattered. That even if his name was erased, his shadow would remain. That the wars he started would continue to burn long after his voice fell silent.

But Olivier had no use for shadows.

The shard pulsed once.

And then his body stopped. Every muscle locked, twisted, contorted as if the corpse refused to admit its state. The eyes, still open, filmed over like glass clouding in winter. His lips parted in a final twitch, but no breath escaped...

A finger moved.

Just barely. A twitch. The kind of involuntary spasm that lingers in the space between death and something worse. Another followed, this time from the shoulder, sharp and mechanical, like wires yanked too tight inside ruined flesh.

The body jerked. Once.

Then again, harder... shoulders seizing upward, head snapping back at a violent angle, jaw gaping with a soundless click as if trying to form a shape no tongue had permission to speak.

Olivier was pushing through.

You could feel it in the way the skin stretched too thin across cheekbones, in the slick sheen of black ether pulsing beneath the veins, a current not meant for the vessel it now tried to claim. It was wrong.

The ward beneath the floor began to scream in ether, not in audible tones, but in something more terrifying in its coldness, leaving the two officers breathless.

A high, keening frequency that vibrated through the bones of the command deck, shrill and splintering, as if the structure itself knew it had housed something forbidden and wanted it out.

And then it happened.

A tremor started in the base of Hadeon’s spine, sudden, convulsive, and violent, climbed upward in waves that rattled his teeth and dislocated his shoulders with a crack that echoed through the room like gunfire. His mouth stretched wider, too wide, the corners splitting at the seams as if the body itself was rejecting the invasion.

Olivier tried again. You could see it, black lines spidering under the skin, clustering at the temples, curling down the arms like tendrils of rot.

But the host was failing.

Too damaged. Too degraded. Too alive in all the ways that mattered, still tangled with the last threads of Hadeon’s spite and rotten will.

The tremor peaked.

And then, without warning, the body folded. The spine snapped inward, ribs collapsing like broken scaffolding, a final seizure that lifted him clean off the ground before slamming him back down with a sickening thud. The lights above burst. Every screen in the chamber went dark.

Smoke curled from the sockets of his eyes.

And in the center of his chest, just beneath the skin, something burst. A pulse of ether, sharp and jagged, like a scream cut short mid-throat. It flared once and then dimmed, curling in on itself like ash collapsing into cold marble.

The room fell still.

Hadeon Lyon lay broken, body twisted in refusal, not even a corpse anymore, just waste. The shard, now cracked in three directions, hissed once and then split down the middle, the last echo of Olivier’s soul escaping in agony.

—

Gabriel felt it.

The crack wasn’t loud, but it moved like pressure underwater, a shift in gravity, a fault line waking beneath his feet.

The shard was breaking. A deep fracture groaned through the fabricated sky above the von Jaunez manor, splitting the painted clouds like glass veined under heat. Dust trickled from the archway as one of the eastern walls of the estate split down its spine, bricks shimmering briefly before flickering, unreal, uncertain.

Gabriel didn’t wait.

He turned, already moving through the west corridor, past the lacquered doors and pale-green curtains he hadn’t touched in over a decade. The floor didn’t creak, but the air grew heavier with each step, like the shard was trying to remember whether he belonged.

It didn’t matter. He knew exactly where it was.

The old room. The wall, the third panel from the left behind the tapestry, hidden before he’d even understood the full shape of what Olivier was. He had carved the rune in the night, fingers still bloodied from climbing the outer ledge to avoid detection, and sealed it under a false knot in the wood.

He dropped to one knee. The floor trembled.

His palm pressed flat, ether already threading beneath his skin like lightning drawn to a rod. The rune pulsed once, soft, gold, and then answered with the sound of a lock turning, deep and old and final.

Without a breath of hesitation, Gabriel pushed his weight forward and vanished.