Chapter 1074: The Weight of Malice
Vitaliara remained where she was.
Lucavion had closed his eyes, and from the gradual easing of his breathing, he was at least making a sincere attempt to follow her instruction. His head had sunk slightly farther into the pillow, one arm resting above the blanket while the other remained loosely beside him, fingers curled without tension. A few strands of black hair had fallen over his forehead, enough to soften an expression that usually carried some trace of amusement even when he believed himself alone.
She watched him for a while.
Sleeping quickly had never been difficult for Lucavion when circumstances demanded it.
Vitaliara had learned that fairly early during the years after his desertion. She had missed the period when he lived entirely according to the rhythms of armies and battlefields, yet she had accompanied him through enough wilderness, ruined roads, mercenary camps, monster territories, and half-collapsed shelters to understand what those years had taught his body. When sleep became a luxury measured in minutes rather than hours, a person either learned to take it whenever the world allowed or eventually paid for the inability.
Lucavion had learned.
Give him a tree with enough roots to keep his back away from wet ground, and he could sleep. Give him a carriage rattling across a broken road, and after checking the doors, windows, driver, surrounding mana, and every person travelling within ten paces, he could sleep there as well. He had once fallen asleep against a stone wall while three adventurers argued loudly over whose turn it was to keep watch, waking less than an hour later because one of them had shifted his sword from his left side to his right.
Vitaliara had found that last part irritating.
Useful.
But irritating.
What most people would have misunderstood was that comfort often made the problem worse.
Whenever Lucavion entered an environment where his instincts found little immediate danger, his body seemed to interpret the freedom almost perversely. He would read. Train. Sharpen a weapon that already possessed an edge. Walk somewhere without purpose, return, then decide he had remembered something else worth doing. Sometimes he cultivated until his mana circulation began slowing from mental fatigue, and on particularly troublesome nights, he simply sat beneath the open sky until Vitaliara grew tired of watching him pretend he had forgotten what beds were invented for.
His reconstructed body had encouraged the habit.
Twice rebuilt through forces that should have killed him, it could endure deprivation far beyond ordinary human limits. Several days without proper sleep left his muscles functional, his reactions sharp enough to deceive most observers, and his mana circulation capable of carrying him farther still.
His mind paid the price instead.
Vitaliara had told him that.
Repeatedly.
He usually smiled.
That was often the end of the discussion.
’Infuriating human.’
Her tail shifted across the blanket.
She had long since discovered that Lucavion possessed a peculiar relationship with exhaustion. He disliked surrendering consciousness while energy remained available to spend, almost as though sleeping before his body forced the matter meant wasting something precious. There were nights when she could sense him deliberately tiring himself through exercise or cultivation, waiting until his thoughts became too dull to wander before finally lying down.
She had nagged him about that too.
Whether any of it remained in his head longer than the duration of her lecture was another matter.
Tonight, however...
Vitaliara’s gaze moved slowly across his face.
His breathing had already deepened.
The muscles around his eyes, tightly drawn when he first lay down, had begun to loosen, and the hand resting near his side had opened against the sheet. There was very little of the restless alertness she usually sensed from him when he attempted to sleep somewhere safe. His vitality, although still disturbed beneath the surface, had fallen into the heavier rhythm of genuine exhaustion.
’You really are tired.’
Her irritation from earlier faded.
Physical strain could be troublesome, but it was straightforward. Wounds could be closed, depleted vitality replenished, damaged pathways encouraged toward recovery. Even the strange architecture of Lucavion’s reconstructed body followed rules once she studied it long enough.
The mind was more troublesome.
Especially his.
Vitaliara lowered herself onto the blanket, forepaws tucked beneath her chest, and continued watching him as a memory of her own surfaced.
A hall filled with gold.
Music.
Too many perfumes competing beneath the scent of food.
Nobles wearing enough ornaments to purchase villages.
And Lucavion walking beneath all of it with her stretched across his shoulders.
The entrance banquet.
She remembered the change in him long before she understood its cause.
Lucavion had crossed the threshold wearing exactly the expression he had prepared for the evening, that faintly amused look which suggested the entire ceremony existed primarily for his entertainment. His steps had remained even, his shoulders loose, and his attention had spread through the hall with the same quiet thoroughness he used whenever entering unfamiliar terrain.
Yet beneath her paws, his vitality had shifted.
At first, Vitaliara had attributed it to the banquet itself.
She knew enough of his past by then to understand that noble halls carried memories he rarely discussed, and the moment he entered, those memories had begun catching against him. His pulse changed. His breath became deliberate. Something inside him tightened around old wounds whose names he had never given her.
She had called to him then.
[Lucavion.]
He had responded.
Eventually.
Valeria had helped more than Vitaliara expected. The pink-haired knight caught his attention from across the hall, and the moment Lucavion began teasing her, his vitality gradually returned to a shape Vitaliara recognized. His amusement became genuine; his posture settled; his mind found something in the present strong enough to pull him away from whatever banquet existed inside his memories.
Then he saw someone else.
Vitaliara’s tail became still.
Platinum hair.
Lavender eyes.
A girl standing beside a dark-haired young man whose presence carried the rigid polish of royalty.
Isolde.
Back then, the name had meant almost nothing to Vitaliara.
Lucavion had changed that.
He had not spoken.
His body had barely moved.
Yet Vitaliara, seated directly across his shoulders, had felt the reaction pass through him with enough clarity that she remembered it even now.
His vitality had recoiled.
Then reached.
Those two movements had occurred so close together that, for the briefest instant, Vitaliara wondered whether she had mistaken one for the other.
She had not.
The instinct that treated Isolde as danger had risen from somewhere deep inside him, sharp enough to tighten the pathways around his heart and spine. At almost the same moment, another part of him recognized her with a familiarity so old that his body responded before his thoughts could interfere.
Danger and recognition.
Aversion entwined with something softer whose name Vitaliara had chosen against giving too quickly.
She had needed to steady him then.
Tonight, she had needed to do it again.
’What happened between the two of you?’
The question remained unanswered.
Vitaliara glanced toward Lucavion’s face.
Asking him directly would accomplish very little.
That, at least, she understood.
He would smile. Perhaps he would begin with a technically truthful sentence, pause halfway through because some word displeased him, replace it with another, then redirect the entire conversation until Vitaliara discovered they had somehow begun discussing whether mythical beasts were legally permitted to own Academy property.
She could already imagine it.
Annoying.
Impressive, in a very limited sense.
And painfully Lucavion.
There were moments when Vitaliara wanted to seize all the things he kept inside himself, scatter them across the floor, and force him to look at them one by one.
Yet she also knew why she never tried.
He carried things carefully.
Her golden eyes softened.
’You carry them carefully.’
Perhaps too carefully.
Lucavion frequently behaved like a charlatan wandering through someone else’s tragedy, smiling at threats, irritating enemies, and turning the sharpest subjects into jokes before anyone could decide where to place sympathy. To most people, that ease became proof that little reached him.
Vitaliara knew better.
There was something beneath it.
She had sensed pieces of it for years, particularly when his control weakened through pain, exhaustion, or memory. It curled inward rather than spreading through his vitality, dense and strangely quiet, accumulating around the parts of himself he guarded most closely.
If someone demanded that Vitaliara give the feeling a human name, she might have chosen malice.
Perhaps.
The word remained imperfect.
Malice suggested simple hostility, the desire to wound because one hated what stood before them. Lucavion’s was heavier than that. Older, perhaps. It had been compressed so many times beneath restraint, purpose, affection, guilt, and sheer stubbornness that even Vitaliara sometimes struggled to separate what had originally created it.
Still, she knew its direction.
Lucavion turned it inward.
He folded it around himself.
When he hated, some portion of that hatred always seemed to return toward its owner. When he regretted, he sharpened the regret until it became another reason to move. Even anger rarely escaped him in its original shape; by the time he allowed the world to see it, he had already refined it into a decision.
That was why the smile could survive.
The poison had somewhere else to go.
’Though it cracks sometimes...’
Her gaze settled upon his sleeping face.
Tonight had been one of those times.
The banquet had been another.
Vitaliara’s ears angled back slightly as her thoughts returned to the woman responsible.
Isolde Valoria.
She had paid far more attention to the girl since learning the name.
Her appearance offered little that Vitaliara found remarkable by itself. Humans cared greatly about such things, and Isolde possessed the kind of beauty that encouraged them to lower their voices around her: pale hair, lavender eyes, delicate features, movements refined until every gesture appeared effortless. Her vitality told a more complicated story. Years of weakness had left traces even beneath a body restored far beyond what ordinary illness should have permitted, while the coldness running through her flesh carried qualities Vitaliara had yet to place comfortably beside either Light or Ice.
Those details could be explained eventually.
Something else resisted explanation.
Vitaliara’s gaze narrowed.
’There is something within that girl.’
She had felt it only faintly at the banquet.
At first, the sensation had hidden beneath the density of other people, ward formations, active mana, perfume, food, and the irritating accumulation of enchanted ornaments nobles insisted upon wearing. Yet when Isolde’s attention fixed upon Lucavion, the disturbance became easier to separate from everything surrounding her.
It was subtle.
Intimate.
Too close to the rhythms of Isolde’s own vitality to be called foreign with certainty, yet distinct enough that Vitaliara’s instincts had continued circling it afterward.
She had encountered creatures that lived inside other creatures before.
Parasites were part of life.
So were symbiotes.
Fungi that replaced roots, insects born within flesh, mana organisms that nested beside cores, spiritual creatures that exchanged strength for shelter; the world had invented countless arrangements long before humans began assigning moral significance to them.
This felt different.
Vitaliara shifted one paw against the blanket.
She could remember the moment Isolde’s gaze found Lucavion.
Something around the girl’s vitality had stirred with it.
Barely.
A thread pulling taut.
Or perhaps—
’No.’
Her ears twitched as she reconsidered the memory.
A thread suggested connection.
What Vitaliara remembered had felt more like pressure seeking somewhere to enter.
She disliked that distinction.
Her thoughts moved toward another word.
’Malice.’
This time, the word settled more comfortably.
Vitaliara had known malice in innumerable forms.
She had walked through battlefields after men butchered one another over borders whose names disappeared two centuries later. She had watched kings poison sons, children feed wounded animals, starving beasts kill simply because life demanded another life, and monsters slaughter entire settlements because something in their nature recognized suffering as pleasure.
Malice was hardly unique.
Yet Isolde’s carried an unusual direction.
That was what troubled Vitaliara.
Lucavion’s malice folded inward until it became part of the structure holding him together. It leaked sometimes, especially when something struck the fractures he kept hidden, but its first movement always returned toward himself.
Isolde’s...
Vitaliara stared toward the darkened window while she reconstructed the impression.
The girl smiled beautifully.
Her vitality remained composed.
Her mana sat beneath immaculate control.
And beneath all of it, that other sensation seemed to press outward.
Toward Lucavion.
Toward the people around her.
Toward the room.
Perhaps even farther than that.
Vitaliara’s claws emerged slightly into the blanket before she consciously withdrew them.
’How strange.’
Malice usually wanted something.
A person.
An enemy.
A wound answered with another wound.
Even the cruelest predators directed their hunger somewhere.
The thing she had sensed around Isolde felt broader.
As though whatever lived inside that carefully arranged girl had spent so long looking upon the world as something hostile that the distinction between enemy and everything else had begun to disappear.
Vitaliara’s gaze returned to Lucavion.
He slept on, unaware of the direction her thoughts had taken.
One man carried his darkness as though it were something dangerous he had sworn to keep close.
One woman seemed to carry hers as though the world itself had given her permission to spread it.
And for reasons Vitaliara had yet to understand, those two kinds of malice had known each other long before she entered either of their lives.