Skill Activated: Sensory Dystonia.
Daegon raised one hand, and the air in the cell folded around a shape that hadn't been there a moment before: a middle-aged man, greying at the temples, standing with the exact posture Remus had spent thirty years learning to read the mood of before he'd said a single word.
Akira's breath caught audibly. "Who is that?"
It took Remus a full second longer than it should have to answer, some part of him refusing, right up until the last possible moment, to let the recognition land. "Why did you make him look like my father."
"Because he sits at the root of what you're carrying," Daegon said. "Tell me what he was like."
"He wasn't a bad man," Remus said. "Most of the time."
"We don't have hours for you to circle the honest answer," Daegon said, and threw something small and dark, too fast to track, into the side of Remus's neck.
Poison Detected: Truth Serum.
"What did you do to him," Akira said, sharp, already stepping forward.
"A serum," Daegon said, entirely unhurried. "It shuts down one organ at a time until he tells the truth, or until it kills him slowly instead. The only cure is honesty, delivered promptly."
"You've gone too far," Akira said, rounding on him. "There had to be a gentler way to do this."
"There likely was," Daegon agreed, without a trace of apology in it. "I didn't have the patience to find it. Now." He turned back to Remus. "What was your father like the rest of the time?"
Remus felt something twist low in his gut, sharp enough to double him over half a step. "He had a temper," he said, forcing the words out flat, clinical, the register he'd have used to describe a load failure on a bridge. "I failed a quiz in the fourth grade. He beat me until I blacked out and told the doctor I'd fallen down the stairs."
"There it is," Daegon said, quiet now, none of the theatrical edge left in it. "Did you ever answer that in kind?"
"No," Remus said. "I graduated college and stopped speaking to him. That was the whole of my revenge. Silence."
The image of his father dissolved, replaced a moment later by a woman, soft-featured, tired around the eyes in a way Remus recognized before he'd fully processed who he was looking at.
"My mother," he said, before Daegon could ask.
"And what did she do to you?"
Remus said nothing, jaw locked, and a heartbeat later a fresh spike of pain doubled him fully over, both hands going to his side.
"Your liver," Daegon said, entirely unbothered. "Silence doesn't satisfy the serum. Only the truth does."
"Sometimes she said nothing while he hit me," Remus ground out between breaths, "and sometimes she said things first, on purpose, to make sure he would. I never asked her which one she thought was kinder."
"And her, too, you never confronted," Daegon said. It wasn't a question.
"No," Remus said. "Same silence. Same door, closed the same way."
The second image dissolved, and in its place stood a third: younger, familiar in a way that hit differently than the first two, because this one Remus had spent real, waking hours across an actual table with, in this actual life.
"Gregory," Remus said, before Daegon asked, voice gone rough.
"What did he do."
"I bailed him out when nobody else in this kingdom would hire him," Remus said. "Built him a company. Built him a sword. And the first real chance he got, he walked out the door and didn't look back."
"Did you tell him that."
"No," Remus said. "I told him it was fine. I told him we were still family. I smiled the whole time he was saying goodbye to me, and underneath the smile I wanted to put my hands around his throat and ask him exactly how many more people he intended to leave standing in a doorway before he was done."
The admission left him faster than he expected, and it cost him nothing physical this time, no fresh spike of pain, only a hollow, exposed feeling in his chest that felt, if anything, worse than the liver had.
"Now," Daegon said, quieter than before, almost gentle in a way that made the cruelty of what came next land harder rather than softer. "Tell your father, precisely, what you would say to him if he stood here now instead of a conjured shape."
"I hate you," Remus said, and felt his left eye go hot and strange, and when Akira gasped he understood, without needing a mirror, that it had gone black.
"Your mother."
"I despise you," Remus said, and the same heat spread to his right eye.
"Gregory."
Remus opened his mouth to say something smaller, something closer to what he actually felt, which was less rage than a bone-deep exhaustion at being left again by someone he'd tried, in his own clumsy, controlling way, to make sure never had a reason to leave. What came out instead, dragged up from somewhere the serum had clearly decided was truer than the rest, was flatter and uglier than he meant it to be.
"Burn in hell," he said, and the words tasted like something he'd regret keeping, even as the System answered him.
Skill Acquired: Dark Soul Magic.
He sat with that a long moment after, both eyes gone back to their ordinary color, Akira's hand steady on his shoulder without either of them commenting on it, and thought, in the small, unguarded space before Daegon spoke again, that a man could learn to hate the exact things that had once loved him and still not be entirely sure, afterward, whether the hatred had made him any lighter to carry or simply heavier in a different, less visible place.
"It's done," Daegon said, and something almost like reluctant respect had crept into his voice. "Go make your swords. I hope, for both our sakes, you have better luck teaching your own rage to sit still than I ever did with mine."
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