Ch 9.5: The Revel of Ruin (Luceran’s POV)

  The music was wrong.

  It pulsed like a heartbeat half out of rhythm, thrumming through the vaulted ceilings of the ducal estate he had repainted in blood and gold. Perfume and sweat and wine clogged the air, thick enough to taste. And Luceran Vaelen, Duke of something ruined, stood at the heart of it all like a crowned god of decay.

  They had clothed him in wealth again. Bck velvet, high-colred and gold-braided, tailored to a body leaner than memory allowed. His hair, once matted with captivity, now shone like dark silk, pulled half-back with a csp of obsidian. Jewels winked at his throat, cuffed his wrists, weighed down the severity of his frame. He looked every inch the man he might have been, if the world had not devoured him first.

  And still, he felt hollow.

  Around him, the revel burned.

  Tables had been stripped of their dishes and dressed instead with bodies—lovers and strangers both—sprawled like offerings, mouths open for wine, for kisses, for more. This lower body open, tilted just so to be used when the fancy struck. Dancers prowled every corner, their skins painted in feverish script—words of carnal lust and arrows pointed, inked onto hips, onto throats, onto the arches of bare feet. No corner of the hall was untouched; even the statues wept painted tears, masked revellers grinding against their marble backs.

  Touch was currency here. Worship was demanded.

  Luceran watched it all with the indifference of a man who had once begged for this and found it wanting.

  He moved through the crowd, each step parting bodies in reverence or terror—it was difficult to tell anymore. Someone, a courtesan or noble, dared to brush fingers against the embroidered cuff of his sleeve. He turned his head, slow and feral, and the would-be supplicant dropped to their knees in apology, shivering in the spill of broken divine current that shimmered in his wake. He crouched low, hand grasping their throat to pull them closer, and shoved his tongue into their mouth, taking the touch back that they had wanted to steal. Their gasp was a brittle thing against his lips, a crack of sound he swallowed whole, punishing them for wanting him.

  He could feel it under his skin—the Current—wild, corrupted, hungry. It licked at him with every passing heartbeat, demanding more. More touch, more surrender, more ruin. Luceran let the need hollow him out, let it drive him deeper into the crowd like a bde searching for a wound to bury itself in. His hands were everywhere, seizing hips, hair, mouths; strangers pressed themselves against him in offering, and he took without tenderness, without pause. Teeth scraped over his knuckles, fingers cwed at the fine velvet of his coat, someone sobbed against his throat as he bit down cruelly on a bare shoulder. No faces. No names. Only the endless grind of bodies and heat and breath. If he filled himself with enough skin, enough desperate want, perhaps he could forget for a moment the gnawing void inside him.

  He fed on them like a starving thing and found himself only hungrier.

  "My lord," a voice murmured at his shoulder, honeyed and trembling. A girl—or perhaps a boy painted into beauty—offered a cup of wine. Or perhaps themselves. It did not matter. It never had.

  Luceran took the cup, brushing their hand deliberately with gloved fingers, and watched as they gasped, as a pale sigil bloomed on their wrist—a mark of temporary devotion, a scar of contact.

  They had wanted a Duke.

  He would give them a god of thorns.

  He drank, the wine dark and bitter on his tongue, and climbed the dais at the room's heart—the type of spot where Nysera would sit, judging, preening, controlling. The crowd fell back, breathless. Somewhere, a lute cracked underfoot; somewhere else, someone sobbed into a stranger's hands.

  Luceran smiled. Slow. Crooked. The kind of smile that promised neither kindness nor cruelty, only inevitability.

  "There is no salvation here," he said, voice low but carrying, slicing through the drunken haze like a bde. "Only ruin. Worship it. Or drown in your own lies."

  Divine current pulsed outward from him, a shuddering, visible wave. Roses exploded from the cracks in the stone floors, bloomed, withered, and rotted in a single heartbeat. Paint dripped from dancers' bodies in molten streams, blurring their holy verses into bsphemies. The music rose higher, frantic, desperate, and the revel turned.

  It became something beyond pleasure. Beyond pain.

  Luceran watched it, drinking in their surrender, their hunger, their willing destruction—and felt nothing.

  Nothing except the faintest echo of a memory: a cage of silk and chains. A woman with a voice like ice, promising that love was obedience. A brother with eyes like his own, smiling as he signed away his life.

  The heat of the hall clung to him, heavy as blood. Luceran lounged in his carved throne, high-colred velvet coat open at the throat, gold embroidery catching the half-dead light. His hair was combed back, ink-bck and gleaming, and the ring on his finger—a new thing, a Duke’s ring, bought with betrayal and murder—cut against the throat of his goblet as he drank.

  He was too clean. Groomed like a prince, crowned like a king. But the hunger inside him gnawed and rotted, undiminished.

  A woman—painted in molten gold and little else—caught his gaze from where she danced atop a table, her bare hips a slow, taunting circle. When he crooked two fingers zily in her direction, she came.

  They all did.

  She stumbled into his p with a gasp, and Luceran caught her waist in a bruising grip, dragging her down until she straddled him, skirts pooling uselessly around them. Her perfume cshed with the wine and blood-slick roses trampled underfoot—too sweet, too sharp.

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  He kissed her without tenderness, swallowing her startled sound. His hand fisted in her hair, wrenching her head back to bare her throat, and he bit her there—not breaking the skin, but hard enough to mark, to make her whimper and writhe against him.

  A low, vicious sound escaped his throat.

  Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  With a sharp motion, he shoved her skirts higher and rutted against her, taking her in one brutal thrust that made her cry out, half in pleasure, half in shock. The revel around them didn’t pause—no one even turned to look. This was what the Duke of Thorns had promised them. A night where shame was forbidden, where ruin was worshipped.

  He set a punishing rhythm, each thrust snapping up into her hard enough to force broken sounds from her lips, teeth gritted against the void yawning wider with every desperate movement. The woman clung to him, fingers digging into the embroidered velvet of his coat, babbling pleas or prayers—he could not tell which. He didn't listen. Didn't care to. He didn’t want her softness, didn’t want her yielding, meaningless affection; he wanted resistance. He wanted to bruise and break and leave marks on flesh that would outst the fever of the night. He wanted to remind himself he was still a man, not just a beautiful hollow shell wearing a murdered man’s clothes.

  Power crackled along his skin as he moved, wild and unchecked, leaking from him in ragged bursts. Threads of divine current coiled and shed through the air like angry, dying things. The sigils that bloomed around them were wrong—crooked, fever-bright, burning too fast and too fierce to hold their shapes. The air shivered with it, vibrating against the marble pilrs and silk-hung walls. No one else seemed to notice. No one dared.

  Luceran buried his face against the woman’s throat, breathing her in—the salt of sweat, the cloying perfume, the sharp metallic tang of fear—and it still wasn’t enough. He rutted into her with punishing, furious abandon, seeking some proof he was still real, still alive, still something more than the wreckage left behind by betrayal and fire. Her cries blurred into the dull roar in his ears. His hands locked around her hips, forcing her to take every brutal, meaningless stroke.

  Still not enough. Still not enough.

  When he finished, it was with a low, shuddering groan ripped from somewhere so deep it bordered on a sob—not of satisfaction, not even of anger, but of grief, raw and vast and endless.

  The woman slumped against him, boneless, whispering praise or adoration or meaningless comfort into his hair. He let her cling for a moment, let her pretend it was affection.

  Then he pushed her aside without a word, standing and fastening his trousers with a vicious jerk.

  The woman slid to the floor like discarded silk, and Luceran did not look back.

  He stalked down the dais, boots thudding against stone slick with spilled wine and crushed petals. The revel writhed and howled around him, but he barely heard it anymore. He wore a crown of blood and gold now, but it rang hollow against the inside of his skull.

  He passed through the great hall, past the twin staircases and the shattered stained gss he had refused to repce. This was his estate—the home his brother had stolen, the home he had bled to recim. Every stone whispered of betrayal. Every shadow remembered.

  The scorched ruin of Nysera's pace had crumbled to ash the night he killed her. He had set it alight with his own hands, had watched the fmes eat through silk and marble and prayers stitched in false gold.

  But not her. Never her.

  He had pulled her body from the bze before the fire could cim her. He had cradled her burnt gown and perfect, untouched skin against him, and whispered promises into the smoke.

  Now, she waited.

  Hidden. Untouched. Perfect.

  Luceran stalked through a side corridor, where the revel’s roar dimmed into a suffocating silence. The air grew colder, stiller. Roses no longer bloomed here; they rotted in the corners, bckened and brittle.

  He pushed open a door reinforced with rune-carved iron, and stepped into the chamber.

  Nysera's body y on a stone sb at the centre, swathed in white silk, her hair arranged like a queen’s coronation, her hands folded over her chest. She looked like a statue, a martyr, a goddess sin at the peak of her own cruelty.

  A vessel waiting to be crowned.

  Luceran moved toward her, slow, reverent.

  He had pns. Oh, he had pns.

  There would be a temple built. Not to the Goddess who had abandoned him. But to this— To restraint and hunger and devotion so fierce it had devoured itself.

  He would build a shrine to the woman who had caged him, to the ruin she had made of him, to the love she had refused and he had never stopped craving.

  And when the world bowed to it, bleeding and desperate for absolution—they would not even realise what they were worshipping.

  Luceran touched the white silk at her throat, brushing his knuckles against cold, unyielding skin. His voice, when it came, was low, hoarse, dragged from the hollow of his chest. "Soon," he promised her. "Soon you will be the altar they kneel to. And I will be the god they cannot name."

  The divine current stirred faintly around him, a raw, broken pulse tasting of ashes and roses. He stood there a long moment, staring down at the frozen perfection of her—the mouth that had shaped his silence, the hands that had held his leash, the body that had denied him until he broke. He hated her. Gods, he hated her with a depth so pure it had hollowed him out, carved him into a vessel he did not know how to fill. And yet, for all the hate, for all the blood and fire and ruin, the ache inside him remained untouched, unhealed.

  This was all he had left. A corpse dressed in silk. A shrine built from loathing and need. A devotion rotted through with rage. He would crown her in the ashes of the world she had helped break, would sacralise the ruin she made of him until there was nothing left to bleed. Perhaps then—perhaps if he turned her into something holy, something monstrous enough to match the wound inside him—he would finally feel something. Anything.

  Luceran smiled then, thin and broken and holy, the gesture cutting across his face like a scar. Let the world burn for it. Let it burn, and let it beg for the ashes.