Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 417 - 411: You won’t exist anymore

Chapter 417: Chapter 411: You won’t exist anymore

"I was never yours."

The world tilted. Just slightly. A breath held between one heartbeat and the next...

And then, someone laughed.

Not Olivier. Not Gabriel.

It came from the far end of the crumbling shard, where the mirrored corridors twisted in impossible shapes and the broken architecture of a dying illusion refused to fall completely. The laugh was slow, deliberate, and drawn out, like an old wound being exposed to air.

Dry. Amused. Unapologetically cruel.

Goliath stepped into view with the kind of casual elegance that didn’t belong in a battlefield. One hand tucked behind his back, the other lightly brushing the edge of a ruined pillar as he passed, eyes gleaming like something that knew far too much and cared far too little.

"Oh, Olivier," Goliath drawled, the laugh still clinging to his tone. "You really thought Hadeon would last?"

Olivier turned, eyes wild.

The laughter didn’t stop. If anything, it deepened, like it had been waiting years to surface, coiled beneath centuries of silence. Goliath moved with no urgency, no tension in his frame, as if the shard’s collapse around him was just the background music to an opera only he found amusing.

Olivier turned, eyes wild. Unhinged. Desperate. "You..."

"...set you up?" Goliath offered with a slight tilt of his head, that faint, infuriating smile never quite leaving his lips. "Oh, I did more than that, dear nephew. I opened the door, lit the fire, and poured you a drink while the palace crumbled."

"You lied..."

"I told you what you wanted to hear," Goliath cut in, his voice silk over iron. "You wanted power. You wanted a legacy. You wanted Gabriel." His gaze flicked toward the still figure at the center, Gabriel unmoving, bathed in quiet light that had nothing to do with the shard. "But he was never yours to claim."

Olivier took a step back, blood pooling under his feet, his hands twitching at his sides. "You’re not even real... this place isn’t real..."

"Olivier," Goliath said simply, without malice, without haste. "I’m real. You made me real when you carved this place open and trapped me here like some broken relic you thought you could use."

He took another step forward, the shifting shard beneath them groaning like a beast exhaling its last breath.

"You wanted an alliance," Goliath continued, voice sharpening like a blade drawn slow. "You thought if you left me caged in your little memory world long enough, I’d grow tame. You and your pathetic half-god, half-coward Hadeon, whispering in your ear while you twisted the world into something unrecognizable."

Olivier’s lips trembled. "He said you were..."

"...dead?" Goliath’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. "He wished I was. That’s why he poisoned my ether. Laced it with that rotting poison of his ambition, tried to burn me out from the inside while you stood there and watched."

He stopped a few paces away, shoulders squared, voice lowering to something dangerous.

"Did you really think I wouldn’t take revenge?"

Olivier’s mouth opened, but no words came. Just the sound of the shard cracking louder beneath their feet, echoing like bones breaking in the hollow of the world.

"You see," Goliath said, almost gently, "you and Hadeon destroyed each other trying to hold a flame neither of you understood. But I... I waited. I waited while your memories eroded, while your fake kingdom twisted itself into nothing. And then Gabriel remembered."

His gaze flicked to Gabriel, calm and watchful at the center of the dissolving dream. "You really thought we’d play your little memory game?" Goliath’s voice sharpened, disdain curling at the edges. "That everything I taught him, every scar, every command, every inch of survival I carved into his bones, was just to follow your script? That I’d hand him over to be another puppet in your theater of gods and failures?"

He took a step closer, the shard beneath him cracking again, deeper now, lines of ether unraveling with each word.

"Gods, you’re useless," Goliath said, voice low and contemptuous. "You think power is about control. About rewriting memories and carving contracts into children. But it’s not. It never was."

He nodded toward Gabriel without turning his head. "You want to know what real power looks like? Look at him. He remembered you and didn’t flinch. He saw what you did and didn’t break. That’s what I gave him. Not your leash. Not your lies. Just the will to destroy you."

Olivier’s mouth twisted, blood clinging to his teeth as he staggered a half-step closer, the collapsing shard world groaning underfoot like a dying beast. "Then I’ll take you with me," he spat, voice raw and fevered. "If I’m going to be erased, you’ll fall with me. I’ll drag your soul into the dark and make sure you scream every second of it—"

Goliath laughed, freely, like someone who had already died once and didn’t fear what came after.

"Oh, Olivier," he breathed, eyes glinting. "Still clinging to the idea that you matter."

He stepped forward, the world parting around him, his body limned faintly in gold as if even the collapsing shard couldn’t strip him of what he was.

"You don’t get it, do you? I passed the trial."

His eyes flashed with molten gold. Not the soft shimmer of a palace-born noble, but the kind of gold that had been earned in the depths of battle and sacrifice, the mark of someone who had bled for the Empire and been chosen by it in return.

"I died," he said, with a tilt of his head, as if explaining something to a slow child. "And the Empire tethered me to its core. I won’t fade. I can’t. I’ll be reborn when it chooses, maybe in the bloodline of Damian and Gabriel, maybe as a nephew, a cousin, or a child who hasn’t yet been named. But I’ll return."

He leaned in, smiling like a man who already knew how this ended.

"You, on the other hand, never even touched the trial tower. Too afraid. Too arrogant. You stitched your soul into contracts and stolen ether and still failed. And now?"

He glanced at Gabriel, then back at Olivier, who stood shaking, fragments of his being visibly pulling apart.

"Your soul is shattered. Your anchors are gone. There’s no tether, no second chance. When this world dies, you die. Not a death with glory or fire, but a quiet, pathetic end. You won’t be remembered, Olivier."

He turned his back as Olivier let out a final broken snarl.

"You won’t even exist."