"Tell us, then. What was it like inside?"

That question pulled even Dominic's gaze toward him. The ever-stoic lord, who'd remained silent since Erin's declaration, was now attentive, his interest veiled but keen.

Damien exhaled lightly, setting his cup aside.

How was Cradle?

Where to even begin?

"It's not what….Well, it is actually what the name appears to be, though for some reason there is a glorification of the whole thing that should not be," he said finally. "It's not some divine test or a place to 'temper the soul,' as the priests like to claim. It's… chaos wrapped in silence."

Vivienne's fingers tightened around her napkin. Erin watched without blinking.

He went on, slowly. "The first day, I guess the day as the time was a bit hard to deduce, the air was thick enough to burn. Every breath felt like it was peeling layers off my lungs. The ground itself hummed, like it was alive—and you could feel eyes everywhere, even when nothing was there."

He remembered. The oppressive stillness. The hum of that impossible ecosystem. The way his body had rebelled against him, breaking and healing and breaking again.

"The worst part," he continued, "wasn't the beasts. It was what you couldn't see."

"Things that you could not see?"

"Correct. Initially I had been constantly getting attacked by something that I was not able to sense. The attacks just cut me through, and I was forced to run as much."

Damien's voice stayed calm, but the words carried the kind of still weight that came only from memory carved into bone.

"Until I was pushed to the brink," he said quietly. "Until I couldn't breathe, couldn't see straight, couldn't tell if the ground beneath me was shaking or if it was just me collapsing again and again."

He paused, the flicker of a memory brushing against his expression—a shadow, quickly hidden.

"And then," he continued, "I saw them."

Erin's eyes narrowed slightly. "You saw…?"

"The things that had been cutting me," Damien said. "The ones I couldn't sense before."

He leaned back in his chair, fingers brushing unconsciously against the faint line of his jaw, where an old scar had once been before healing erased it.

"They weren't invisible," he said softly. "Not really. They existed in a layer between—between mana and perception. I could only see them after I nearly burned my own core dry forcing my mana outward."

Vivienne's lips parted in quiet horror.

"When the pressure cracked enough, the world bent, and I saw them," he said. "Insectoid. Human-sized. Not like any creature I've seen before—no aura, no heartbeat, no natural rhythm. Their shells shimmered like glass when light touched them, but even that light seemed… wrong. Like it didn't want to stay."

He stopped for a moment, his fingers curling slightly against the tablecloth.

"I fought them," he said simply. "At least, I think I did. My body moved on instinct more than thought. The more I hit, the more they screamed—but their screams didn't come from their mouths. It was inside my head. My mana veins almost ruptured."

A beat passed, and then Erin spoke, her tone carefully measured.

"And then you lost control."

Damien gave a small, humorless smile. "Yes. My core overflowed. The system said I exceeded my body's limit by forty percent. I blacked out."

The air in the room seemed to still again, and then—his voice dropped lower, quieter.

"When I woke up, I saw it again."

"...It?" Vivienne asked softly.

"The Colossus."

That word fell like stone into water. Erin's eyes flickered, sharp, immediately parsing implications.

"You'd seen it before?" she asked.

Damien nodded. "Yes. The first time, it appeared just before the insects did. Massive—like a living mountain, its body half-buried in stone, its movements echoing through the Cradle like thunder. I thought it was just another creature, until it looked at me."

He met Erin's eyes briefly, and for an instant—just an instant—she saw the faintest tremor behind his composure.

"When I woke up the second time," he continued, "there were two of them."

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut through glass.

"Two?"

"Two," Damien confirmed. "They were fighting. Each step they took cracked the ground for kilometers. The mountain started collapsing. The air vibrated like it was going to split apart."

He exhaled slowly, as if the sound alone could dull the weight of it.

"I ran," he said. "There wasn't anything else I could do. Even the insects fled. I don't know what happened after that. The mountain fell apart. I barely escaped alive."

Vivienne's hand trembled slightly, fingers pressing against her lips. Erin said nothing—but her eyes had gone distant, following invisible patterns that no one else could see.

And then—

Damien's throat tightened.

His breath caught mid-sentence as if someone had pressed invisible fingers around it. The sound stopped, the words scattering from his mind like broken glass. His vision flashed white for half a heartbeat.

[Restriction Triggered.]

[Reason: Causal interference.]

He blinked hard, forcing a shallow breath.

'Again.'

"I—" He paused, grimaced.

"Damien?" Vivienne half-rose from her seat, concern sharpening her tone.

Dominic raised a hand up, steadying her with a small gesture. "It's… fine," he said. "It happened before. When he tried to explain this to me and Kael."

Vivienne's eyes met his, calm but assessing. "A restriction?"

"Something like that," Dominic said.

Erin Valeheart's eyes narrowed, her glass set down in absolute silence.

"Not allowed," she repeated softly.

For a moment, nothing moved. Then the faintest hum began to stir in the air. The candles flickered—one by one—until every flame leaned subtly toward Damien.

Erin rose.

Her motion was unhurried, elegant, but each step carried the measured authority of someone who had spent her life walking the line between reverence and fear. When she stopped before him, the world itself seemed to tilt inward.

Her mana didn't flare outward—it folded. The air turned heavy, not from pressure, but from attention.

"Hold still," she said quietly.

Damien's pulse ticked faster despite himself, but he didn't move.

Erin extended a single hand and laid two fingers against his temple. The touch was feather-light—cool, like running water—and then the world shuddered.

For her, the room bled away.

The threads appeared—gold and white, blue and black, twisting, countless, each one carrying the breath of something alive. Normally, reading a person's thread was a simple act of alignment, tracing where their story connected to the weave of the world.

But Damien's?

The moment she focused, the pattern broke.

Half the threads shimmered in perfect clarity—strong, defiant, pulsing with mana. But the others… they weren't threads at all. They were fractures. Light bent around them, refracting like glass under water. The more she tried to focus, the more her own perception warped.

And then—something looked back.

Erin froze.

It wasn't Damien's will, not exactly—it was something behind him. A layer beneath the layer, staring back at her through the cracks in his existence. No malice, no threat. Just the unbearable weight of something wrong.

She tried to breathe—and found that the act itself was being resisted. The threads of her own vision twisted, nearly snapping. Her hand trembled once before she yanked herself back with a sharp gasp.

The world slammed into focus again.

"—!" She caught herself on the edge of the table, shoulders shaking once before she straightened.

Vivienne shot to her feet instantly. "Mother!"

"I'm fine," Erin said. The voice was steady again, though the faint tremor in her fingers betrayed her. She drew a slow, deliberate breath, smoothing the folds of her robe before looking down at Damien.

Her gaze lingered on him for a long moment—then softened. Not pity. Not even awe. Just the quiet understanding of someone who had peered into something vast and come away humbled.

She reached out and laid a hand gently on his shoulder.

"You've seen things only few would," she said softly. "And you carry them well."

Damien blinked, surprised not by her words—but by the tone.

Then Erin turned slightly, raising her hand. A small, obsidian charm appeared in her palm—simple, oval-shaped, etched with fine, curling runes that shimmered faintly with violet light. It pulsed once as she infused it with mana.

"Here, from your grandmother."

It was a gift.

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