Chapter 782: [The Rewritten Lost Past] [22]

"Strengthen your mind," Aniha warned quietly beside him. "As long as you do not let her in, she should not be able to reach you."

It was protection, yes, but only one more layer among many. Another precaution in a place already built on restraint, sealed by countless circles, hidden behind walls of divine force. Even here, even with Aniha beside him, some part of the danger still rested on him alone. If Nevia reached his mind, no barrier in this chamber would matter.

Amael gave a short nod.

Aniha remained where she was, silent and unmoving, and he understood that as permission to go forward. He stepped toward Nevia.

Then he saw her shoulder shifting.

It was such a small movement that he almost thought he had imagined it. Slowly, Nevia rose from her resting position and straightened into a seated posture.

"Nevia," Aniha called.

For a moment, Nevia did not react.

Then Amael blinked, and she was standing directly in front of him.

He recoiled at once, taking a sharp step back before he could stop himself.

"Wow."

The word escaped him under his breath, startled.

There was still a barrier between them, some invisible wall set in place for a reason he no longer needed explained. Even without touching it, he could feel its presence. Amael steadied himself and looked at her properly, forcing himself not to give in to that first instinctive fear.

She was already looking at him.

And for a second, he forgot everything else.

No story his father had told him, no warning, no whispered rumor had come close to preparing him for what she truly was. Beautiful was too weak a word, too ordinary. She did not look like a woman in the simple mortal sense of it, even if she wore that shape. She looked like something untouched by imperfection, something made from a purer law than flesh.

Then again, perhaps that was exactly what she was.

Her face was smooth and pale as carved ivory, flawless to the point of being almost unreal. Long white lashes framed eyes that were not merely white, but strange luminous in their own still way. Their irises seemed woven into the rest of the eye in crystalline rings, so seamless that Amael could not tell where form ended and emptiness began. Looking into them felt less like meeting someone’s gaze and more like standing at the edge of something measureless.

In that instant, he understood what Nihil had once meant.

Blood meant very little here.

Whatever tie connected them through their father was insignificant beside the gulf that separated what he was from what she was. She was not simply stronger, not simply older, not simply more divine. She belonged to a different order of existence altogether.

Still, Amael made himself speak.

"Nevia."

She gave no answer. She only kept staring at him, not coldly, not warmly either, just with that unreadable gaze.

"Do you know me?" He asked.

The moment the question left his mouth, it felt foolish. Of course she knew him. She was the Goddess of Prophecy and Fate. If anyone in creation knew who stood before her, it would be her. But the question had already been spoken, so he waited.

Nevia lifted one hand.

The gesture was slow and delicate. She reached toward him as though she meant to touch his face, and her fingers met the unseen barrier with a soft, soundless stop.

"Do not be afraid," she whispered.

Amael frowned.

"Afraid of what?"

He did not like the way those words were told.

They sounded too much like a warning, and warnings from beings like Nevia were never simple. A pulse of unease went through him. For a brief moment he wondered if she was about to tell him something, give him some prophecy he would spend the rest of his life trying and failing to escape.

Silence followed.

Instinctively, he glanced at Aniha.

What he saw made him tense.

Her eyes were closed.

She stood in perfect stillness, expression empty, as though she were detached from the scene entirely. Amael did not understand whether that was trust, vigilance, or some deeper method of observing things beyond sight. But the sight of her like that weirded him more than if she had been watching openly.

He turned back to Nevia, and froze.

Her eyes were glowing.

Not brightly at first, but enough.

Then it happened.

Images burst into his mind in a violent flood, so fast and so numerous that he could not separate one from another. Faces. Fire. Ruin. Shapes without names. Fragments of places he did not know and yet somehow felt he should. Every second carried a hundred more, each vision colliding with the next before he could understand the last.

Amael let out a broken sound and clutched at his head.

Pain tore through him instantly. It felt as though something had forced open the inside of his mind and flooded it with too much meaning at once. His thoughts lost their order. For a moment he thought he might collapse. He tried to shut her out, tried to gather himself, tried to remember Aniha’s words and hold his mind together before it splintered apart.

Too late.

The visions kept coming.

He gritted his teeth, breath shuddering, every part of him straining against the torrent. Then, little by little, through the pain and confusion, his mind began to seize hold of what it was seeing. The fragments no longer felt entirely random. They were still unbearable, still jagged and blinding, but something within them was arranging itself.

And as that truth started to form, Amael’s face slowly drained of color.

His eyes widened with horror.

...

...

Aniha watched in silence.

From the outside, almost nothing had happened. Amael stood before Nevia without speaking, held in place by the same dazed stillness that had overtaken many before him. It was not unusual. Even the false Nevia in Eden’s Realm had that effect on people. They would stand before the illusion, speechless and transfixed, as though their thoughts had been left behind somewhere outside the chamber. Awe alone was often enough to reduce them to silence.

So at first, Aniha allowed it.

Then she noticed the change.

Amael had leaned forward slightly. Both his hands were now braced against the invisible barrier between them, as though he needed it to remain standing. His head was lowered. His face had turned pale, and his breathing had become uneven, too shallow, too strained. Slowly, almost unconsciously, his fingers curled against the unseen wall until his hands tightened into fists.

Aniha stepped forward.

"Are you alright?" She asked.

Amael gave a small nod.

"Nevia," Aniha said, her voice colder now. "What did you do?"

She had been monitoring the room the entire time. None of the Edenic Circles had broken. No seal had been tampered with. No divine breach had rippled through the chamber. By all appearances, nothing should have happened at all.

"Strengthen your mind, you said," Amael said at last.

His voice sounded strained, roughened by effort.

"It’s my fault."

Aniha’s gaze remained fixed on him for a moment before she answered.

"I told you she was dangerous," she said. "Are you done? I cannot let you stay here any longer."

He gave a silent nod.

For a brief moment, he lifted his eyes toward Nevia again.

Why had she shown him that?

What was he supposed to understand from it?

The questions followed him even after Aniha led him away. They gnawed at him in silence refusing to leave him alone. Once they were far enough from Nevia’s chamber, and just before Aniha turned to leave him, Amael finally spoke.

"Why did you let me see her?" He asked.

Aniha paused and looked at him.

Her expression did not change much.

"Because you needed to see her," she said at last. "You needed to understand what kind of power you are playing with."

Amael’s eyes narrowed immediately.

"I am not playing with anything."

Aniha said nothing to that.

She only looked at him one last time, then turned and walked away without another word, her pale figure disappearing after leaving him to the mortal realm.

Amael remained where he was.

Still.

Silent.

The image Nevia had forced into his mind would not leave him.

What she had shown him had not been some vague omen or shapeless nightmare. It had been too precise for that. Too cruelly clear. He had seen another man, someone who did not entirely look like him and yet felt disturbingly close to him. A man with silver eyes.

His silver eyes.

Even though Amael had already given his own eyes to Lisandra and Sylvia.

So how could that be?

Had something happened in the future? Had the eyes somehow been returned? Had the power he had passed on found its way back into another body? Or into the body of the one Nevia had shown him?

That man...

He looked eerily like Nyrel.

His past life.

Amael’s breath caught.

What was he supposed to make of that?

The more he tried to think through what he had seen, the more every path led him toward the same conclusion, and that conclusion filled him with a dread so deep it almost hollowed him out from within.

He was not going to survive.

That was what it felt like.

He had wanted to become the perfect Vessel of Samael while still preserving control over himself, over his choices, over the course of his own life. He had fought for that possibility, clung to it, tried to believe he could walk that line without being swallowed by it.

But Nevia’s vision had felt like a verdict.

As though all of that would fail.

Amael raised a hand to his head, pressing his fingers against his temple as if he could somehow force his thoughts into order. His eyes narrowed, then shut tightly.

"That... was me," he whispered.

Nyrel Loyster.

That had been Nyrel.

And Nyrel was him.

But Nyrel had died.

Hadn’t he?

Nihil had disposed of that body, didn’t he?

That day in Tokyo...

What happened when Nihil reached out his hand...

He couldn’t remember.

Amael knew only that much.

So what was the meaning of what Nevia had shown him? Was it resurrection? Rebirth? Possession? Or something even worse, some merging of identities he had never fully understood?

None of it made sense.

And yet the dread remained.

No matter how hard he tried to untangle the vision, what lingered most was not clarity, but fear.

Without wasting another moment, Amael left.

He returned to Xenithia immediately.

He needed to see Lisandra and Sylvia. He did not know exactly why, only that the need had become overwhelming, almost desperate. As though some instinct inside him was warning him that time was narrowing around him and that if he did not reach them now, something irreparable would happen.

What was this terrible feeling pressing down on him?

What was waiting in the future?

The only thing he knew for certain was that Nevia had not shown him that vision for nothing.

After nearly two hours of careful maneuvering through the ways, Amael finally reached Xenithia.

He had been more cautious than usual on the journey back, and not without reason. No matter what explanation Aniha had given him, something about it felt wrong.

Of all people, she was the last one he would have expected to allow him access to the real Nevia. Between her and Nihil, he would have thought Aniha the more immovable one, the less likely to bend.

That alone made the whole thing suspicious.

By the time he arrived, his unease had only grown sharper.

He headed straight for the cave entrance set into the mountain, landing with barely restrained unease. The moment he stepped inside and saw Lisandra and Sylvia there, a breath of relief escaped him before he could stop it.

They were safe.

For the moment.

"M-Mael?!" Lisandra stared at him, visibly startled.

Sylvia looked no less surprised.

Amael frowned, his gaze moving quickly between them.

"Is something wrong?" He asked.

Lisandra blinked. "Weren’t you at Sancta Vedelia?"

Amael’s expression hardened with confusion.

"Why would I be there?"

He had not gone anywhere near Sancta Vedelia that day. Not after the warning he had already given Sirius months ago. He had stayed away from that place and from everything tied to the Blood Moon War for a reason.

Lisandra and Sylvia exchanged a glance.

A very uneasy one.

At once, Amael felt his stomach tighten.

He stepped closer. "What happened?"

"It’s your mother," Sylvia said.

"My mother..." Hee repeated, and he felt his heartbeat spike fast.

Sylvia nodded, her face twisted into unease. "She sent one of her falcons to ask whether you were here. She believes you’re at Sancta Vedelia, with Sirius, in the Blood Moon War."

Amael stared at her in disbelief.

For a second, it was as if the room had dropped away beneath him.

"W-What...?" He said, the word catching in his throat. He almost never stuttered, but now even his voice seemed to betray him. "Where is she?"

Lisandra answered this time hesitantly.

"She went there. To find you." Her voice faltered. "We tried to stop her. We wanted to go with her, but she refused. She told us to stay here where it was safe."

Amael’s face went white.

"No," he breathed.

He took a step back.

"No!"

He was gone almost immediately, launching himself away at high speed.

A terrible feeling had already been tightening around him since Nevia’s vision, but now it flared into something far worse.

This could not be happening.

He did not understand why his mother believed he was there, but that was exactly what terrified him. It fit too closely with the dread he had been carrying since leaving Nevia. Too many things were aligning in the worst possible way.

"Amael!"

Lisandra and Sylvia rushed after him, following him out into the open air. They flew behind him at once, but Amael stopped abruptly and turned back to them, his expression grave.

"No. Both of you stay here. It’s dangerous."

"You are not stopping us now," Lisandra snapped back immediately, glaring at him.

"You don’t understand," Amael said. "Something is wrong. This can turn disastrous. Sirius... he is dangerous. And the Vampire Witch might be there too. None of this feels right—"

"Then that is all the more reason for us to come with you," Sylvia cut in.

One hand rested against her chest.

"We are stronger than we were before, and at the very least, we can help your mother."

Amael looked at them both in silence.

For a long second, he said nothing, clearly torn. Then, at last, he gave a small nod.

"Give me your hands."

They hesitated only briefly before obeying.

Amael took hold of their arms and closed his eyes.

At once, Lisandra and Sylvia both shuddered. Red lines, threaded with fine symbols, began to coil across their skin, moving like living markings as they slipped beneath the surface of their arms.

Both of them stiffened in shock.

"I’ve given both of you Xenithia’s Key," Amael said.

Lisandra’s eyes widened. "W-What? Why?!"

Sylvia stared at him no less stunned, unable for a moment to even understand what he meant.

The Key of Xenithia was not something handed over lightly. It was not a gesture. It was not reassurance.

It was a precaution.

A last one.

"Just in case," Amael said, offering them a bitter, strained smile.

"Amael—" Lisandra began.

"Listen to me," he cut in before either of them could protest further.

The look in his eyes stopped them cold.

"I need you to prioritize my mother. Do you understand?"

There was something almost pleading in his voice now.

Lisandra and Sylvia exchanged one more glance, both their faces complicated with worry, confusion, and rising dread.

Then they nodded.

The moment he saw their answer, Amael turned and took off again.

This time they followed without another word.

Together, they headed straight for Sancta Vedelia, toward the height of the Blood Moon War.