“This is why their name isn’t registered,” Leopold said. “Because this scum, Harmus, joined the Cult of Paradise.”
Like a stone cast into the well. Lina caught it, a peculiar echo. A certain hatred in the Arkmarschall’s eyes, sharp enough to cut, when he spoke the cult’s name. “It was confidential, best that you two never talk about it.”
Halwen and Lina nodded faintly.
Lina’s gaze shifted to Vierna. The mask of Ash Gray held, but her pupils shrank, her breath caught shallow, and a faint tremor rippled across her lips.
“Arkmarschall, Vierna’s face,” Lina whispered.
Leopold looked at Vierna.
Halwen spoke instead. “Fear is the strongest of emotions. Seeing her uncle again must have shaken her so much that even Ash Gray cannot dull it fully.”
The silence pressed heavy, broken only by the hum of the needles. Lina forced her eyes back to the projection as the memory shifted, drawing them deeper into Vierna’s past.
Through the shimmer, her thoughts leaked. Her small hands fidgeted in her lap, fingers tangling together, loosening, then clutching again. Her lips pressed tight, pale, while her eyes flicked to the side and back, never holding him for long.
Harmus droned on, his voice rising and falling with the cadence of a sermon. But he only praising himself. Over and over he declared that envy was a curse, a sickness all men carried, and that only one man was strong enough to shoulder it. Him. Because unlike the rest of the world, he was its opposite. He was generosity incarnate, the kindest of men alive.
To Alice the words were vile, slick with self-adoration, each one fouler than the last. Every syllable reeked of madness dressed as martyrdom.
And then, as if his delusion were mercy, he claimed he would save the world by making it as one. One being, one self, until envy itself no longer had room to exist.
The thought made her stomach turn, every rasp of his voice curdling in her gut. Still she showed nothing. She nodded, murmured agreement, kept her eyes wide and obedient.
It was survival: keep him amused, keep him talking, and maybe he would not kill her or her mother. Inside, though, she wanted only to cry, to vomit, to banish him from the room and from her mind.
At last, the corridor cracked with the sound of footsteps. Sylvaria appeared from the corridor, her hands steady though her face betrayed strain. She carried a plate, steam rising faintly from the golden folds of an omelet. She set it down before Harmus with a composure that seemed carved, as though each motion was held together by sheer will.
“Ahhh, even the smell brings me back, my dear Sylvaria.”
Harmus took the plate, lifted the spoon, and began eating. His table manners were impeccable—each bite measured, each gesture refined. To any outsider, he might have looked the perfect nobleman, savoring a simple meal. One would never imagine that the man eating so neatly was a lunatic who literally drained another human being.
“It is exactly as you used to cook for me every morning,” he said between bites, his tone warm with memory. “Oh, how I miss those days. Just the two of us, against the world.”
“...”
Alice glanced at her mother.
Harmus noticed. He smiled, savoring not just the food but the silence. “Oh, you didn’t know, Alice?”
She shook her head.
“Sylvaria was once my wife,” Harmus said, voice calm, matter-of-fact, like he was discussing the weather. “My legal wife, with certificate and vows and all the rest.”
“Mom?” Alice whispered, looking at her.
Sylvaria did not look back. Her gaze stayed fixed on the floor, as though lifting her eyes might shatter her.
“We used to love each other so much,” Harmus went on, his voice polished smooth, but his one eye gleamed too sharply. “I met her when she was a dancer, a vision, entertaining crowds with her beauty. It was love at first sight. And she felt the same.”
“...”
“Back then, though I was the firstborn of House Erbenzram, I was not the heir. Edwin was. He was the talented one. Everything my parents wanted.” His fork scraped against the plate, the sound sharp, grating. “I endured every humiliation, every insult, every scorn. Edwin never let me forget it. Always rubbing it in my face. But it was fine. Because when I came home, I had my wife. My Sylvaria.”
Harmus kept eating, but Alice could see it—the way his hand tightened on the spoon, the way he chewed too long, too hard. Each movement carried a weight that wasn’t hunger but anger, simmering, choking the air around him.
“...”
“But no, Edwin couldn’t leave it at that. He wanted my position, my inheritance. And even that wasn’t enough. He coveted my wife.” Harmus’s smile twisted, rage flickering under the veneer of refinement. “Tell me, child isn’t your father selfish? who even—”
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“YOU KILLED OUR CHILD, HARMUS!”
Sylvaria’s voice ripped through the hall, cracking the air like a whip. Alice’s own breath suffocate her. She wasn’t sure what to think about that information, that perhaps she should have a brother or sister came from a different father.
Harmus’s eye blazed. “LIAR.”
“YOU STABBED MY BELLY WHEN I SAID I WAS PREGNANT!”
“IT WAS EDWIN’S CHILD!” he roared. For the briefest instant, Alice’s breath caught—his face, whole only moments ago, seemed to vanish, like a mask stripped away, leaving a blank absence.
She blinked, and it was there again, intact. But the image seared itself into her mind, a glimpse of the void beneath his skin.
“Harmus, I never spoke with Edwin. Not until the day he found me bleeding on the floor after you stabbed me.” Sylvaria’s voice cracked.
“I SAW HIM GETTING OUT OF OUR HOME BEFORE!” Harmus roared, his voice cracking the air, “IT WAS HIS FUCKING BASTARD.”
“HE WAS TRYING TO FIND YOU HARMUS.” Sylvaria said, hands trembling with a certain fire which she couldn’t hold any longer. “I really did try. I truly believed you would someday snap out of it—your jealousy, your envy of Edwin. I didn’t leave you when you started hitting me, burning my skin until I couldn’t even leave our home. I didn’t tell anyone, because I thought… sometimes you just had to get it out of your system. Every time someone asked why I was injured, I gave them excuses, reasons as absurd as they sounded. At one point, I didn’t even step outside our chamber. So tell me, Harmus—how could I have been with Edwin when our chamber was filled with ten scrying eyes you set at every angle? Answer me!”
“You never loved me, Sylvaria.” His words came soft, almost mournful, but his eye burned. “All of this was so you could be with Edwin.”
Her lips parted, but no words came.
Harmus’s calm shattered again. “Even when I was allegedly killed, no one blamed him! Everyone praised him. The ‘Golden’ Edwin! Not even my own damn wife searched for my corpse. I was buried under the rug—forgotten, worthless, erased!”
Sylvaria’s voice cracked, but she forced the words out. “YOU WERE GOING TO ASSIMILATE THE DOCTRINE, HE HAD TO KILL YOU THERE TO SAVE YOU FROM YOURSELF!.”
“I DID NO SUCH THING!” Harmus’s roar slashed the air like envy itself cutting into conscience. His voice shook the hall, raw and jagged. "During the subjugation, I alone faced the previous Pontiff of Covetousness. I DUELED HER! And when I beat her, when I reached to secure her doctrine, Edwin—because of his lust for you—pulverized half my face off.”
His breath came heavy, uneven, and then he struck his chest with his palm. “I fell from the cliff before he could retrieve the doctrine. It chose me. It assimilated into me. Do you think I wanted this? No. It just happened, like everything else in my cursed life. And I endured it, like I always had to. Tell me if he really did trying to retrieve the Doctrine, why didn’t he came down the cliff for my corpse and it?”
“HE DID DO THAT, BUT HE SAID HE CAN’T FIND YOU OR THE DOCTRINE.”
“BULLSHIT!”
He straightened, his voice swelling into a sermon. “The universe throws its filth at me, and I endure. That is the difference between me and Edwin. He was born with everything spoon-fed, while I had to adapt, had to claw, had to survive.”
“Then I found the truth of Envy.” He continued, “Not the rot others see, but its hidden core. The burden one man must bear so others can be free of it. And the doctrine chose me because it knew I could understand it. It knew I could ERASE IT.”
His eye gleamed feverishly, his grin stretched too wide. “DO YOU THINK THE OTHER PONTIFF ARE LIKE ME? NO! THEY JUST DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY PLEASE. But me? I am different. Even among the Pontiffs, I am the only one who is kind. The most generous being that God—if such a thing even exists—ever created.”
Alice sat frozen, the storm crackling between her mother and the man who called himself Pontiff. She wanted to speak, her throat moved, her lips parted, but no sound came. The voice that should have carried her words betrayed her, shrinking to silence.
She turned to her mother instead.
Sylvaria’s lips trembled. Alice knew she still had words to throw at him, accusations and truths sharpened by years of scars. But Alice also saw the faint gleam in her eyes, the one that said it was pointless. Nothing she said would matter. Harmus would never listen. So she withheld, swallowing her fury like glass.
Harmus’s gaze widened, then softened into a crooked smile, as though her quiet were concession, as though silence itself was proof he had won.
He flicked his fingers, conjuring a ribbon of water that coiled like a snake through the air. It washed his plate clean in a single sweep, but he made no effort to contain it. Droplets sprayed across the table, the floor, the walls. Curtains dripped, and candlelight guttered in the damp. When the last streak slid from his hand, he dried the dish with a snap of heated air, polished it with almost delicate care, and set it down with a click that rang like finality.
He then sat for a while. Both Sylvaria and Alice stayed silent, not because he was right but it was pointless to argue with a mad man.
“You see, Sylvaria,” he finally said, “if you had been like this in our marriage, so obedient and so silent, then perhaps Alice would not be Edwin’s child, but mine. And we could have lived happily.”
He stepped toward her, boots leaving wet prints across the oak.
“I know you hate me,” he said, voice low. “If you could kill me, you would. But you never could. You chose to dance instead of fight, chasing dreams instead of discipline. Back then your mana nearly matched mine and Edwin’s, but you wasted it. Five years of service, nothing more. A fool’s dream, not a realist. If I had met you sooner, I would have freed you from that lie.”
Sylvaria said nothing. Her silence was not agreement but resignation sharpened into steel.
Harmus’s smile stretched wider.
“But despite everything, Syl,” he leaned close, “I enjoyed those three years of ‘love’ you gave me, even when I knew it was fake. And because you never once seemed satisfied, because you acted as if all I did was not enough, it means there is a debt.”
His hand dropped toward the floor.
With a crack like splitting bone, a magic circle flared beneath his palm, dark green, jagged, and alive. Its lines twisted in uneven arcs, glyphs writhing as if carved from envy itself. Black smoke hissed from the seams, the stench of rot and copper flooding the air. The sigils did not glow steady like normal runes; they pulsed like wounds, each beat spilling venomous light across the soaked floor. The circle felt less like a spell and more like a curse dragged from the bottom of a swamp, eager to devour.
From its center, something rose. Shrouded in green linen, its shape hidden, its weight undeniable. The cloth writhed faintly, as if whatever it covered had a breath of its own.
Harmus’s voice softened, reverent. “This is my payment for those three years.”
He raised his hand and the green veil stirred, rising without touch, as if his will alone pierced the shroud of mourning itself. The cloth lifted slow, deliberate, trailing droplets of that sickly green light like tears unspilled.
Their gazes locked on the object beneath, the so-called payment Harmus so eagerly unveiled.
What do you think was behind the Veil?
