Sarethvane had read his mother's Will the way he read the dead in every cemetery he had ever lain down in, and he found it all there waiting for him. Years of pain she had carried underneath that soft voice, folded away where no one could see it.
But in every way she interacted with the world, tidbits would always be left behind. A stranger who saw an odd cough, a stumble up an easy ramp to climb, a weariness in the night caught by the reflection of the moon… He saw it all.
She had hidden it from him, perfectly, right to the very end.
Everyone showed their true face when they died, and hers had been the truest and the most beautiful thing he had ever seen… He hated it.
What was it if not another lie? Another arrogant, ugly lie?
What was that if not the same fakeness he saw in every bloviating fool who thought he was more than he was? She had put forth such a brave face, such a good and gentle face, and she had done it while dying, and she had done it while looking right at him like he was no different from the same fool.
Did she not think that he could help?
Did she believe him too weak? Too weak to carry it with her, too weak to search, too weak to find a cure to the impossible?
Was that all he had been to her? A thing to be protected from the truth? An ego so fragile and frail that it couldn't be jostled or shaken?
The fury that rose in him then was the same fury that had risen the first time, and it had never once cooled in all the years since. It was the reason he lay in cemeteries. It was the reason he loved to watch the grand and the imposing get put in their place, because they had all made themselves out to be more than they were, and every one of them found out in the end that he was more worthy than they were.
That he was more than worthy of knowing.
And now here was Gentrixaul.
A God. A True God. Whispering into the mind of a broken, bleeding C-tier because he could not reach further than that. A being who had failed to kill a mortal, and then failed again, and had now been reduced to triggering events, dangling inheritances, and begging for the loan of a body, his own body.
He wanted to show Sarethvane the gap between a God and the weak, but Sarethvane could already see it.
His mother had hidden her dying from him for years and never once let it show. She had the patience of a saint and the grace of a Goddess, the warmth of the sun and the light of the moon. She had more Will and Character in a single fang than Gentrixaul had throughout a body that could span galaxies and crush star systems with a twitch.
Gentrixaul wasn't even as strong as his mother and he wanted to take his body?
"Fuck you," Sarethvane said coldly.
The voice in his skull stopped for a moment, surprise leaking out. Then it all instantly burned away.
"Die." The word carried the weight of Gentrixaul's fury.
There was nothing Sarethvane could do about it. His Will was in fragments, scattered endlessly and through an impossible number of threads. A sliver of Gentrixaul's Will and a breath of time would be all it took to crush him to pieces.
The system would make him answer for it, sure. Interference like this certainly would e with some sort of backlash. But Gentrixaul could weather that, and by the time the backlash arrived, Sarethvane would already be gone.
So what difference would it make?
Impotent system, indeed.
Sarethvane felt the pressure closing over the pieces of himself and understood, very clearly, that he was about to die.
He sneered anyway.
He thought about a soft voice that had never once plained, he thought about the years she had folded away her pain where he could never sense it, and he found, at the very end of everything, that he wasn't angry about it anymore.
To think that after all this time of looking for the most perfect form of arrogance to crush, he would realize that he had lost his chance as a child the day she breathed her last. What point was there if she was already long gone?
Then he drew what he thought would be his final breath…
Only for a Will to descend.
It came down over the graveyard and over Sarethvane and over the sliver of Gentrixaul both, and the strange thing was… it somehow felt more substantial than the God's.
It felt heavier.
Above him, Sylas finally took his hand out of his pocket, facing a palm downward. Runes unfurled and danced, Vipermancy following suit. No… maybe they were one and the same.
Sarethvane's scattered Will was seized before it could finish falling apart, every fragment caught and drawn inward, and then chains laid over all of it. It was a plete and utter suppression. It was the same suppression every Serpentes felt in Sylas' presence, the instinct that told them they stood before their sovereign.
Whatever of Gentrixaul had been sitting in Sarethvane's mind was Serpentes Will too, and without the full backing of the God it came from, it was ruthlessly suppressed much the same.
The suppression rolled over it without so much as slowing, and the sliver of a God was pressed flat and ground out. Sylas didn't even bother to speak as though Gentrixaul wasn't worth his time.
Sarethvane lay in the dark and felt his own Will settle back into his chest, chained, quieted, and whole. Slowly, a healing energy spilled into him.
—
[Contracts]
…
[4. Sarethvane: Lv. 199]
—
Sarethvane felt the chains pletely bind him, and for a moment, he didn't know what to feel.
Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked up at the man standing above him with his hand outstretched with that same indifferent expression on his face… the expression that he had once wanted to wipe away.
But before Sarethvane could find the words, he and his coffins were pulled into the Hibernation Realm.
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