Aelthyria felt the moment her connection detached from him.

  Not completely — never completely — but far enough to leave him alone.

  Deliberately. The doors behind her closed soundlessly. The castle responded to her will, not to touch. The halls of Limbus opened before her like chambers of thought — ancient, watchful, shaped by countless cycles of silent dominion.

  Limbus was no planet in the classical sense.

  It was a node.

  A place where opposites were not resolved, but preserved. War and peace. Freedom and bondage. Faith and doubt. The Thirteen had not created it — they had claimed it, shaped it, tamed it like a wild beast.

  Every witch ruled here. None alone.

  Thirteen bloodlines. Seven origins. Thirteen races whose existence was no coincidence.

  Mortals, daemons, elves, constructs of thought and matter — offshoots of hexic decisions. Tools. Heirs. Collateral damage. And yet: necessary.

  Aelthyria strode through a gallery of black stone and living light. Old seals glimmered in the walls — memories of wars no one spoke of any longer. Here power had always had its price.

  And it had always been paid.

  And now you, she thought.

  The runes of her child surfaced before her inner gaze, clearer than any inscription on the walls.

  The outer ones she understood: order seals, bindings to reality, runes of stabilisation, causality, limitation. She had laid them herself — not with hand or voice, but with decision. They ensured that his existence did not shatter beneath the weight of what he carried.

  Yet beneath them…Beneath them lay lines that did not originate from her. No foreign hand. No intervention.

  Something older. Deeper. A resonance that did not press, but waited. Runes that knew no script, but were meaning.

  Shadow.

  Not as opposition to creation.

  But as echo. Aelthyria paused.

  And in that moment something flared that rarely showed itself: memory — the necessity of Limbus as it once was.

  The halls had seen it — adults who shattered before they ever awakened. Their screams echoed in the walls, the souls scattered, crumbled, were forgotten. Only the young had a chance to be shaped, receptive to what was to come.

  Earlier they had attempted the rituals of soul rapture and mental transcendence on adults. Almost all died. The survivors shattered mentally within months. The failed attempts had filled the halls of Limbus with dead gazes, with souls that found neither rest nor strength. Fortunately their failure was no loss. To sacrifice their petty existences to the eternal cycle was ultimately their fate. And in the probable event of a premature demise their souls were returned to the cycle. Perhaps their transcendence would succeed on the next attempt. Until then their existence was nothing more than an eternal pendulum between life and death.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Out of necessity the subjects grew younger — adolescents, then children — more malleable, more receptive to manipulation. Whoever had once awakened, whoever had devoured their first soul, could never return. Every people had their own practices, and some experimented still today. Even aeons later the mortality rate was high. Most shattered at the first soul. Yet in Aethyrael's case it had not been a single soul. The souls of the star had been the price of his existence. And he had endured it — without a single scream — in the heart of the darkness that had descended upon Elendiel that day.

  For Aelthyria these souls were no individuals. They were throughput, raw material, cattle. All that mattered was order. All that mattered was the survival of the system. And the system demanded necessity. Consequence. Only thus would the Thirteen endure. And should souls ever grow scarce, it would be time to extend their grace to other stars. Until then however: to feed upon the cycle and preserve the order in decadence and pleasure. Earlier she had been forced to compel this process. Rituals. Selection. Sacrifice. No longer.

  The little star rendered it obsolete. He was the next step. Everything else was merely expendable.

  And so she wandered, lost in thought, through the shadows of her castle. The cosmic eyes of her child were no tool.

  They were obligation and necessary consequence. Eyes of that kind did not merely see — they bound. They altered not space or time, but meaning. Whoever encountered them became part of an equation that could not be undone. And that was precisely what was dangerous.

  Not because he would misuse them.

  But because one day he might understand.

  Since the day of his creation they had been bound together. She knew: seven full cycles it would take until the true power of his eyes was fully unfolded. Every cycle a progression, every stage a step into the inevitability of his fate.

  With every cycle, with every development of his runes, the seal that had bound his eyes until then loosened.

  The seal — a cosmic chain — held the entire power of his eyes under control, regulated what he could see and effect. It was necessary. Without it his existence would have torn the balance apart. Too soon. Uncontrolled.

  And equally inevitable: with every unfolding he lost more of what had been bound to his old soul — memory, connection, the last remnant of his humanity.

  That was intent.

  Plan.

  Law.

  Aelthyria would leave nothing to chance. Not with him. Not with the binding she had claimed for herself across aeons — and would claim. She continued on her way, deeper into the castle, past assembly rooms that would soon carry voices again. The other witches would come, ask questions, demand, conceal envy beneath wisdom. They would believe power was everything. As always. Her child was no ruler.

  And no tool.

  He was a point of possibility.

  And possibility was the only thing that could alter even infinity.

  Behind her she felt the quiet flickering of his curiosity. No outburst. No error. Only awareness.

  Good.

  She left him unsupervised — because control did not mean proximity. And because every step he took without her was worth more than a thousand commands.

  Aelthyria smiled imperceptibly.

  Become, she thought.

  But never forget whose blood carries you.

  And somewhere in the heart of Limbus the runes answered.

  The shadows of the past whispered quietly — the remnants of countless attempts, the shattered, the failed — yet the star was untouched, a new point of order in a system that endured eternally.