The Sovereign

Shiro's deep, exhausted sleep created a false dawn of peace in the sanctum. But into this fragile silence, Kuro's torment began to seep, not as a whisper, but as a scream building in the marrow of his bones.

They both leaned closer, a synchronized movement of concern. "Kuro?" Nyxara whispered, while Statera's hand found his, her fingers checking his racing pulse.

His good eye was open, but it was not seeing the sanctum. The pupil was a black abyss, reflecting an internal horror. His breathing hitched.

"The stars…" he mumbled, his voice thin. "Why don't they match? The charts in the observatory… Father's charts… they're so clean. The lines are perfect. But when I look up… when I really look… the stars are… messy. They drift. They pulse. His charts are a lie." His voice rose, tinged with a young scholar's frustrated confusion. "The charts are wrong! He'll know. He always knows when I see it."

"There are no charts here, our storm," Statera said, her voice a calm, Polaris counterpoint to Nyxara's fierce tenderness. "You are safe with us."

But he was gone. His body jerked violently. "No! I can prove it! Look above! Right here!" He gazed at the ceiling as if he could gaze through it. His voice shifted, taking on the cold, booming authority of King Ryo. "The charts are divine law, boy. They are the architecture of my will. To question them is to question me."

Kuro's own voice returned, small and terrified. "But the sky… the real sky doesn't lie…"

"THE SKY IS WHAT I SAY IT IS!"

The hallucination was so vivid it seemed to suck the air from the room. Kuro let out a sharp, agonized cry that was more than memory, it was a re living. The sound of a dry, sickening snap seemed to echo in the sanctum, though it existed only in his mind. He screamed, a raw, high pitched sound of absolute agony, clutching his right wrist to his chest as if the bones were freshly shattered. He curled around the invisible injury, his body convulsing. "My wrist! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I saw it! I'll unsee it! I'm sorry father!"

A cold fury, absolute and identical, crystallized in the hearts of both mothers. Statera was no longer seated; she was at the divan's edge, her hand not on her mouth but gripping Nyxara's shoulder, a silent pact of shared rage. Their horror was a synchronized wave, their resolve a unified front.

Before Nyxara could speak, the fever pitched higher, yanking Kuro into a fresh nightmare. His thrashing head stilled, his eye fixing on the empty air with a look of dogmatic recitation. "The constellation Cetus…" he whispered, his voice flat, a puppet's voice. "It is the loyal hound of the void… its seeming chaos is a complex obedience… a testament to the King's intricate design…"

Then, his own spirit flickered through, a spark of rebellion. "But the old bestiaries… the ones he burned… they called it the Chaos Beast… a wild, untameable thing of the deep… it doesn't serve… it consumes…"

The reaction was instantaneous and terrifying. Kuro's head snapped back as if from a brutal grip under his chin. A choked, gurgling sound erupted from his throat. His hands flew to his neck, clawing at an invisible, crushing pressure. His face began to turn a blotchy red, his eyes bulging. He was being strangled by a ghost.

"I… take it… back…" he gasped, kicking out weakly, his back arching off the divan. "Cetus… is… loyal… a good… dog… your… dog…"

The phantom grip released. Kuro collapsed, wheezing, sucking in great, ragged breaths. But the punishment wasn't over. His body jack knifed as a brutal, unseen impact slammed into his stomach, the memory of a kick that stole his breath and his dignity. He vomited a thin, bitter bile onto the furs, sobbing and retching simultaneously. "I'm… sorry… please… I can't breathe…"

This was no longer an exorcism; it was a dismemberment of a soul. The princely demeanour was not just a mask; it was a suit of armour welded onto a child's body by repeated, calculated acts of violence. Every independent thought, every glimpse of a truth that contradicted Ryo's, had been met with bone breaking, breath stealing, throat crushing correction.

His movements became a chaotic, pathetic scramble. He tried to crawl away, to hide, his limbs flailing without coordination, tangling in the furs. He was an animal in a trap, chewing its own leg off to escape the memory of the hunter. A continuous, low wail of pure, undiluted terror came from him. He wasn't just seeing his father; he was being systematically dismantled by him, all over again.

"He's in the stones!" Kuro shrieked, pointing a trembling finger at the wall. "His face is in the cracks! He's in the sound of my heart! He made it! He owns it!"

The sight of his complete psychological dismemberment was a physical blow to both women. They did not hesitate; they moved as one unit, a dual front against the phantom tyrant.

"His body is remembering the trauma as if it's happening now," Statera said, her voice a low, urgent thrum of Polaris diagnosis as she pressed her hands against Kuro's heaving chest, trying to physically still the panic. "We have to break the cycle, Nyx. We have to be louder than the memory."

"Then we will be a thunderclap," Nyxara vowed, her voice trembling not with fear, but with incandescent rage. She framed his sweat slicked face, forcing his wild, unseeing eye to the space between them. "Kuro! Look at us! Your fathers lie is a ghost! We are the reality! Your mothers are here!"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

But he was lost in the sensory prison of the past. He flinched violently, a phantom blow landing on his ribs. "Not again… please, not the library floor… the slate shards cut my knees…"

"You are on furs, my storm baby," Statera insisted, her voice weaving a counter spell of present safety in her mind. "My furs. In your mother's home. Feel them. Smell the pine soap we bathed you in. That is real."

His good eye darted between them, the terror warring with a dawning, desperate recognition. "He said… no one would ever… that I was unlovable… a broken tool…"

"He was wrong," they declared in fierce, tear choked unison. Nyxara pulled his head against her shoulder while Statera wrapped her arms around his back, creating a living, breathing fortress of their bodies. "You are our son. You are loved beyond measure. You are not a tool; you are a treasure."

His trembling began to subside, not all at once, but in waves, each fierce sob a little weaker than the last as the reality of their presence slowly overwrote the memory of his isolation. He was no longer a lone child facing a tyrant; he was a son protected by a pair of queens.

"Breathe, Kuro," Statera instructed softly, her voice a steady rhythm beside his ear. "Match my breath. In… and out. Your body is yours to command, not his to break. Feel it obey you, not the ghost of his hand."

Nyxara rocked him gently, her cheek resting on the top of his head. "That's it, my little storm. Let it out. All of it. Every broken piece of that lie. We are here to catch it. We will put you back together, stronger than before. We are your sanctuary."

From the shadows, Lucifera observed the brutal efficiency of the memory, the way a child's mind could be so perfectly shattered and reassembled into a cold, useful weapon. It was a masterwork of psychological torture, and part of her could not help but analyse its horrifying elegance. But then she saw the two queens, their own bodies shaking with the effort, using their very beings as a shield against the past. Where Shiro's cries had felt like a fracture, Kuro's systematic dismantling felt like a corrosion, an acid eating away at the foundations of a person. And the mothers love was the only neutralizing agent. The clinical part of her mind noted the efficacy. The new, fractured part of her heart felt it as a necessary, vital counter weapon in a war she was only just beginning to understand.

Nyxara's heart shattered. The intellectual, strategic anger she had felt moments before was incinerated by a mother's raw, desperate grief. She did not think. She acted.

They surged forward as one. It was not a gentle embrace from a single mother. It was a takeover by a dual force. Nyxara enveloped his thrashing upper body, while Statera anchored his legs, her hands firm on his calves, stopping their frantic kicking.

He fought her with a wild, insane strength born of pure panic. "He'll see! He'll punish you! He'll kill you for touching me! LET GO!"

"LET HIM COME!" Nyxara roared, her voice a lioness's cry, echoed by Statera's lower, more dangerous vow. "Let him try to break what we have built," Statera hissed, her Polaris light flaring, not with healing warmth, but with the cold of a star that could freeze worlds. "He shattered one child. He will not break the family we have made."

She rocked him, not with a gentle lullaby's rhythm, but with the fierce, steady rhythm of a heartbeat in a battle. "You are not his! You are ours! Your mind is yours! Your stars are yours! Your Cetus is a glorious, beautiful monster, and it is yours to command, not his to leash!"

Slowly, imperceptibly, the violent thrashing against her chest began to subside. The screams died in his throat, muffled against her skin, replaced by deep, shuddering sobs that seemed to tear him apart from the inside. The terror was still there, but it was meeting an immovable object. Her love was a wall against which the phantoms broke.

He clung to them, his hands twisting desperately in the back of her gown, his body shaking with the force of his weeping. The arrogant prince, the cold strategist, was gone. In Nyxara's arms was just a boy, sobbing for the childhood that had been stolen from him, for the bones that had been broken, for the breath that had been crushed from his lungs.

"He's… not here?" Kuro whimpered, the question a tiny, broken plea from the depths of his ruin.

"He is nothing," Nyxara vowed, her voice shaking with the intensity of her promise. "He is less than the dust on my boots. His words are poison, and we are the antidote. His hands bring pain, and ours bring shelter. Sleep, my son. We have you. We will always have you."

A long, shuddering sigh escaped him, a final surrender. The tension fled his body, leaving him utterly limp and heavy in her arms. The frantic pulse at his throat slowed, syncing with the steady, sure beat of hers. The fever had broken, not in a sweat, but in a flood of tears against his mother's neck. Within moments, the deep, exhausted breath of true sleep finally took him.

Nyxara held him for a long time, her own body trembling with the aftershock. The sanctum was silent, the air thick with the ghosts of tyranny and the overwhelming power of a love that had just fought a war and won. They had not just soothed a fever; they had stormed the fortress of his trauma and planted thier flag on the ruins. The battle for his body continued, but the war for his soul had reached a turning point. And the mothers knew, with a certainty that was as cold and sharp as a blade, that they would burn the world to keep that flag flying.

The storm had passed. In its wake lay a profound, bruised quiet. Kuro's breathing was now deep and even, the terrible tension finally gone from his limbs. He was hollowed out, but he was clean, the psychic poison purged for now.

With movements synchronized by exhaustion and a shared, unspoken understanding, the mothers worked together. Nyxara, with arms that trembled not from weakness but from the aftermath of her ferocity, carefully lifted his upper body. Statera, her Polaris light a soft, guiding luminescence, supported his legs. They did not speak. Their communication was in the gentle firmness of their grip, the shared burden of his weight, the synchronicity of their steps.

They carried him the short distance to where Shiro slept, his own face finally peaceful in the grip of a less violent exhaustion. With infinite care, as if handling the most fragile and precious of relics, they settled Kuro beside his brother. Their bodies aligned, a mirror of shared suffering and survival.

Then, as if performing a sacred rite, they each leaned down. Statera pressed her lips to his damp forehead, a kiss of Polaris blessing, a spell of mending for the mind. Nyxara kissed his uninjured cheek, a queen's seal of protection, a vow etched into skin. The kisses were not just affection; they were incantations. They were the final, quiet weapons in their arsenal, sealing him into a safety woven from their very essence.

Stepping back, the two women looked down at their sons, side by side in the furs. The battlefield was still. The guardians stood watch.