Aden's fingers closed around the spectral blade in his gut—Ed Vasco's dagger, the one he'd given him years ago, now slick with his own blackening blood.
He wrenched it free with a wet schlick, but the wound didn't close. Instead, it breathed, pulsing like a second mouth.
Egmund circled him, his form flickering—one moment a towering demon wreathed in smoke, the next a perfect mirror of Aden, but with eyes like cracked obsidian.
"You feel it, don't you?" Egmund's voice was a chorus—Aden's own, layered with the screams of the dead.
"Your body is coming apart. Out there, in the real world, your flesh is splitting at the grounds."
Aden spat blood. "Then I'll drag you down with me."
He lunged, but the ground beneath him moved. The swords embedded in the earth twisted, their blades snapping upward like the jaws of a trap. One sheared through his calf, pinning him in place. He roared, gripping the hilt to rip it free—
—and the metal melted in his grasp, reforming into a gauntleted fist that punched through his chest.
Aden gasped, staring down at the armored forearm protruding from his sternum. He knew that armor.
Zwalter's.
His father's voice boomed inside his skull:
"Weak. Pathetic. You were never fit to lead."
Egmund laughed, and the fist yanked backward, taking chunks of Aden's ribs with it. He collapsed to his knees, his vision swimming. The sky above churned, the chains writhing like hanged men in a storm.
Then the real pain began.
nside the subspace, Aden was being eaten alive by his own regrets.
The throne of teeth had grown, its maw widening, the jaws gnashing as it dragged itself toward him. The hands of the dead clawed at his legs, their fingers hooking into his muscles, pulling him apart strand by strand.
Egmund loomed over him, now a towering abomination—Aden's face stretched over a frame of burning bones, his mouth a yawning void.
"You're nothing without me," he hissed. "I am the fury that kept you alive. I am the hate that made you strong."
Aden's right eye ruptured.
He screamed as hot, thick fluid filled the socket, his vision swimming in and out of focus. Egmund's clawed hand plunged into his gut, fingers rooting through his intestines.
"Let me show you what you truly are."
The world split.
Aden saw himself—not as a man, but as a thing of gnashing teeth and thrashing limbs, a patchwork monster stitched together from every life he'd taken, every failure he'd buried.
And in that moment, he broke.