Deus Necros

Kaiser did not give the prisoner time to prepare.

His red finger stabbed into the man’s forehead.

There was no blood.

That made it worse.

The finger sank into flesh as if the skull had turned soft beneath it, but nothing split, nothing tore open, and no wound formed around the point of entry. Instead, the red finger twitched once, then began to turn. Like something alive. It wriggled beneath the skin, twirling slowly, searching through the prisoner’s head as if the man’s body were only a locked cabinet and Kaiser had decided the key was somewhere behind the eyes.

The prisoner screamed.

It was the sound of someone discovering pain in layers, each one worse than the last. His back arched against the floor. His chains rattled violently. His fingers clawed at the stone, nails breaking as his body tried to escape the finger inside his skull and found nowhere to go.

The Emperor watched.

Disgust crossed his face, brief but clear.

He said nothing.

Ludwig stood beside him, arms lowered, eyes fixed on the ritual. His Living Vessel did not react with nausea the way a normal body might, but something in him still recoiled. Not from sympathy for the Child Eater. That had died the moment Kaiser explained what the man had done. It was the magic itself. The way it moved. The way it ignored all the polite borders between body, soul, and curse.

Kaiser slowly pulled his finger back.

Something followed.

A translucent strand stretched from the prisoner’s forehead, thin and wet-looking, almost like water pulled into a string. It clung to Kaiser’s finger and shimmered faintly in the dim light of the candles, swaying with a sick elasticity. It looked less like mana and more like a trail of spit drawn from the soul.

The prisoner thrashed harder.

"Keep him steady," Kaiser said.

The Emperor stepped forward and placed one boot on the man’s chest.

The prisoner slammed flat against the floor as if a mountain had decided to rest on him. His ribs creaked beneath the pressure. His arms jerked uselessly against the chains, and his screams became shorter, choked things.

Kaiser pulled the translucent strand farther.

The line stretched across the ritual circle, trembling between the prisoner and the princess’s bed. It grew thinner the farther it went, but it did not break. Kaiser moved with careful slowness, his usual impatience gone. Each step was measured. Each breath of magic restrained.

When he neared Celest, the Emperor’s voice hardened.

"You are not planning on touching my daughter with that disgusting thing."

Kaiser did not turn around. "If you don’t want to see her awake, I can stop right now."

The Emperor’s expression tightened.

For the first time since Ludwig had entered the palace, hesitation showed on his face plainly enough to be named. The sword, the law, the crown, the command, all of it fell silent before the sight of the pale girl asleep on the bed.

"Trust the dark mage," Ludwig said.

The Emperor looked at him.

Ludwig gave a small shrug. "Awful sentence, I know."

The Emperor’s jaw clenched.

Then he nodded once.

Kaiser finished the link.

The translucent strand touched the sigil on Celest’s forehead and sank into it with a faint ripple. Celest did not move. The prisoner, however, froze so suddenly that even his screams cut off for half a breath.

Then Kaiser crouched and began twisting several of the symbols drawn on the floor.

The man twisted with them.

His body jerked left while his head snapped right. One shoulder swelled grotesquely beneath the skin, then deflated as his opposite leg shrank thin enough to look starved. His ribs bent out of shape, then cracked. A bone protruded from his side without blood following it, held in place by the ritual instead of nature. His spine arched, then collapsed, then reassembled badly. Every movement of Kaiser’s fingers on the floor found an answer inside the prisoner’s flesh.

The Child Eater tried to scream.

He could not.

The pain had gone past sound.

His mouth hung open, eyes bulging, throat working without voice. When his mind tried to flee into unconsciousness, his body betrayed him. Another bone snapped. Another organ shifted. Another swelling burst beneath the skin without opening it. Each new break dragged him back to wakefulness.

The Emperor looked down at the man beneath his boot.

No mercy appeared.

Only hatred wearing discipline.

Kaiser stood and stepped away from the ritual. "Now we wait."

Ludwig looked at him. "What are we waiting for?"

"Curses are mean things," Kaiser said. "They like to encroach on the weak. They are predators wearing rules. I made a link between these two. Once his body becomes tempting enough, the curse will travel across that soul link onto him."

The prisoner twitched. His body shifted again, one arm swelling until the chain around it bit deep into flesh.

Kaiser pointed at the translucent line. "I am basically tricking the curse into thinking these two bodies are one. It will then latch onto the weaker part of the body instead of the princess."

The Emperor’s eyes stayed on Celest. "How long?"

"Should be around a couple hours."

The Emperor looked at the man on the floor. His body was already broken beyond what any human should have survived. "He will not survive a couple hours."

"Unfortunately for him," Kaiser said, pulling a small vial from storage, "he has to."

He uncorked the vial and poured its contents over the prisoner.

The effect was instant.

Bones snapped back into place with wet cracks. Swellings shrank. Sunken flesh filled. The prisoner sucked in a breath so sharp it sounded like his lungs had been refilled by force. For one tiny, horrible moment, his body became almost human again.

Then the ritual took hold.

The next cycle began.

The screaming returned.

Kaiser tossed the empty vial aside. "And I have enough potions to keep him up for a long time."

Ludwig watched the ritual continue.

Part of him wanted to look away.

Not because the prisoner did not deserve it. The man had done things that made death too clean a mercy. But there was a difference between knowing someone deserved punishment and standing in a room where punishment became a craft. Kaiser worked with the calm precision of a surgeon and the moral interest of a butcher. The Emperor stood above the man with his boot planted down, unmoving, because for his daughter he would allow the law, the church, and his own disgust to burn.

Hours did not pass.

It only felt as though they did.

Time inside the ritual dragged.

The candles burned with gray flames. The lanterns pulsed red. The sigils on the floor darkened with each cycle. Kaiser occasionally adjusted a line, poured another vial, changed the angle of a candle, or pressed his red finger against the prisoner’s body to keep the link from tearing apart. Each correction made the Child Eater less recognizable.

Eventually, there was barely a man left.

Only a mangled, shuddering mass of tumorous meat and twisted bones, chained to the center of the ritual, breathing because Kaiser refused to let it stop. It could not speak. It could not beg. It could not move with purpose. It existed as pain given shape, linked to Celest by that translucent soul-thread.

Then the thread darkened.

Instantly.

Kaiser’s head lifted. "Oh. It’s working."

Ludwig leaned forward slightly.

Something moved along the link.

It was not visible the way water or smoke was visible. It was more like a shadow deciding to use the translucent strand as a road. A blackness crept through the line from Celest’s forehead, slow at first, then faster, drawn toward the ruined prisoner like a starving thing sensing meat.

Celest changed.

The paleness began to recede from her face.

Color returned to her cheeks in soft waves. The stiffness in her hands loosened. Her breathing shifted, not deeper yet, but more natural, less like a body being forced to imitate sleep and more like a girl finally allowed to rest. The room itself seemed to release a held breath.

The Emperor took one step toward the bed.

Celest’s eyelids fluttered.

Before they could open, Kaiser lifted his left hand.

"Sleep."

The spell was quiet.

A soft pulse moved over Celest’s face, and her awakening sank back down into slumber.

The Emperor turned on him instantly. "Why did you do that? Why put her back to sleep when she was about to wake?"

Kaiser looked at him.

Then at the floor.

Then at the mangled thing in the center of the ritual.

Then back at Celest.

"You are seriously asking that?"

The Emperor’s mouth closed.

Silence answered for him.

Ludwig barely held back his laughter. Not because the situation was funny, exactly, but because the Emperor, for one moment, had become so completely a worried father that he had forgotten the room contained a dark ritual, a soul link, child-blood sigils, and a human mass being used as curse bait. If Celest were to see that, she’ll be traumatized for life.

"Sorry about that," Ludwig said, clearing his throat. "Ahem."

The Emperor gave him a cold look.

Ludwig looked away with great discipline.

Soon, the link turned transparent again.

The darkness had fully crossed.

Kaiser moved quickly. He approached Celest, pressed two clean fingers against the sigil on her forehead, and cut the link with a sharp motion. The translucent strand snapped without sound. The remaining end recoiled into the prisoner’s mass, and the sigil on Celest’s forehead faded until nothing remained.

"That’s done," Kaiser said.

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