A dull, relentless pounding echoed in Kain's skull, each beat of his heart seed extra loud and would send a shard stab of pain that was syced with his sluggish pulse.
He let out a slow breath, trying to pull himself out of the suffocating fog wrapped around his mind.
His limbs felt like lead, his body weighed down by exhaustion so deep it clung to his very bones.
He shifted, trying to force his heavy eyelids open. The world around him was a ss of blurred edges and dim lighting.
His breath hitched as he registered the distinct feeling of being watched. A sharp, wary presence.
His vision swam as he turned his head, blinking rapidly to clear the haze. Malzahir sat nearby, his posture tense, eyes trained guardedly on Kain. But the mont their gazes t, Malzahir flinched. Flinched. In very apparent fear of Kain.
The reaction sent a cold chill creeping down Kain's spine. A deep, gnawing unease curled in his gut as his mories pieced themselves back together.
The hunger. The way his vision had warped, everything tinged in violet light. The way he had looked at Serena. The way he had almost—
His stomach twisted violently, nausea rolling through him. He had almost lost control. He had almost done sothing unspeakable.
He swallowed hard, trying to steady his breathing. Malzahir had never seen him absorb the fragnts before.
The man had always been asleep, exhausted from travel or training. But now Kain realized—with a sick certainty—that although Malzahir might not have consciously witnessed the changes in him, his instincts had. The honed senses of a warrior, sharpened by years of experience, had detected sothing wrong. Even in sleep, Malzahir had known.
And now, he was afraid of him.
The realization stung more than it should have.
Malzahir shifted, breaking the thick silence that had settled between them. His voice, when he spoke, was deliberately asured, but Kain could hear the tightness beneath it.
"Serena," Malzahir called out in a heavily accented voice, not looking away from Kain. His forced calm was like glass—thin, fragile, one wrong move away from shattering. "Kain awake."
Kain heard hurried footsteps, and then Serena's face entered his still slightly blurry vision.
She was breathing slightly harder than normal, as if she had run. Her blue eyes flickered over him, scanning his face, his posture—taking in every detail with sharp, clinical precision.
Kain forced himself to hold still, to not move too suddenly, to not give her any more reason to look at him like he was sothing unpredictable.
Then, after a long pause, she let out a slow breath. A breath of relief.
That should have reassured him. It didn't.
Because underneath that relief, there was sothing else. A flicker of sothing she had never directed at him before.
Caution.
Kain clenched his jaw, willing the pounding in his head to drown out the sickening realization clawing at the edges of his mind.
Serena was afraid of him too.
"You've been out for days. I was worried." She said with a cold expression. Kain had a feeling that the major source of her worry wasn't about his prolonged sleep. But rather…
Serena straightened, arms crossing as she studied him with cool scrutiny. "You lost control." It wasn't a question.
Kain swallowed against the dryness in his throat. "I—" His voice ca out hoarse from not speaking in days. He licked his lips, trying again. "I didn't an to."
Her expression didn't change. "That doesn't matter."
The bluntness of her words made his fingers curl into the sheets beneath him.
Malzahir flinched a short distance from them as Kain moved, but said nothing.
Serena continued, her voice sharp but not unkind. "Do you even rember what happened?"
Kain hesitated. He rembered flashes—his body vibrating with power, the pulsing hunger that had nearly swallowed him whole. And Serena, standing before him, backlit by the violet glow of his own madness. His stomach turned. "Enough," he muttered.
A silence stretched between them.
Serena's fingers twitched slightly, a movent so subtle he barely caught it. "Then you know this can't happen again."
Sothing in Kain bristled at her tone. "You think I wanted this?" His voice was still rough, but heat bled into it now. "You think I planned to—" He stopped himself, jaw clenching so hard it ached.
Serena exhaled slowly. "I think you've been reckless." Her gaze flickered toward Malzahir, then back to him. "And I think it's catching up to you."
Kain t her stare, sothing twisting in his chest. He wanted to refute her. Wanted to tell her she was wrong, that he had control.
But she wouldn't believe him. And worse, he wasn't sure he believed himself either.
Kain lowered his head in silent resignation while Serena and Malzahir walked away to give him so privacy with his thoughts…as much privacy as could be offered in an open cavern.
Kain exhaled slowly, waiting until their footsteps faded into the distance. His head still pounded, his limbs felt like dead weight, but he forced himself to focus. Sothing had been gnawing at the edges of his mind—sothing important, buried beneath the haze of exhaustion and pain.
Then, it hit him.
The System.
His System that had been increasingly silent and playing, if he were to be completely honest, less and less of a role as his strength increased.
Warnings. Updates. A string of notifications flashed across his mind in the monts before everything went black.
From what he'd vaguely rembered, the cause of the system notifications had been the fragnts of energy he was absorbing, and potentially Pangea as well
He had been too far gone to process them then, but now...
He closed his eyes and willed the System's interface to surface. For a mont, there was nothing but the lingering ache behind his eyes. Then a flood of missed notifications—
*Warning: Unstable Synchronization Detected*
*Entity 'Pangea' is undergoing forced adaptation and troubleshooting*
*System recalibrating... Error. System intervention is required.*
*...*
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