The chains shattered like glass as Ezra surged upward, blood cascading from his wounds to pool at his feet in steaming crimson circles. His glare swept across the professors - Vaun's clenched fists, Vinlius's whitened knuckles around her cane, Krill's barely concealed tremor. Only Grimm stood utterly still, his milky eyes tracking Ezra's every twitch.
"I knew something was off about you," Grimm murmured, stroking his beard with fingers that left trails of frost in the air.
Ezra staggered forward. One step. Two. The professors held their ground until he was close enough to see the old scars webbing Grimm's neck. He reached out-
The temperature plummeted.
Frost exploded across the floor with a sound like cracking bones, racing up Ezra's legs faster than thought. Ice crystallized over his thighs, his hips, his abdomen - each layer forming intricate fractal patterns that burned like liquid nitrogen. By the time it reached his sternum, only his head remained free, his panicked breaths fogging the air in ragged bursts.
Grimm leaned close, his breath smelling of winterburnt herbs. "I suggest you don't move." He tapped Ezra's frozen torso with one fingernail. The resulting chime resonated through Ezra's bones. "Unless you fancy losing everything below the waist?" A glacial smile. "Even you can't regenerate from shattering, boy."
Grimm turned his back—dismissive, already bored.
Then the screaming started.
Not Ezra's.
The ice's.
A sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering at once tore through the chamber as Ezra's frozen leg exploded. Not just broke—detonated, sending dagger-like shards of enchanted frost impaling the walls, the ceiling, Vinlius's shoulder. Blood—Ezra's blood—hung in the air like mist before reversing course, slithering back toward the ruin of his thigh in glistening, sentient threads.
But it wasn't blood anymore.
It was alive.
The professors watched in mute horror as the liquid rearranged itself—not into a leg, but something worse. A grotesque, twitching mass of sinew and shifting light, fingers of bone pushing through the surface before retracting, as if testing its new form. The thing that had been Ezra's limb pulsed like a second heart, wet and gleaming.
Then Ezra laughed.
A sound that wasn't his. That wasn't human.
Grimm's frost magic lashed out again on instinct—but the moment it touched Ezra's skin, the ice screamed, blackened, and rotted in midair, crumbling into ash.
"You wanted to see what I was hiding?" Ezra's voice was a chorus now, layers of whispers beneath each word. "You should have looked closer."
His remaining leg split open from thigh to heel, flesh peeling back like a blossoming wound—and inside, instead of bone, instead of muscle—
Eyes.
Dozens of them. Lidless. Pupils slit like a serpent's. All blinking, all watching.
Vinlius retched, bile splattering across the frost-rimed floor. Vaun made a wet, animal noise in his throat—half-groan, half-whimper.
Krill, ever the scholar, whispered the truth they'd all been too blind to see:
"That power…it can't be—"
The door screamed off its hinges.
Theodore stood in the threshold, silhouetted by the hallway's flickering torchlight. For a fraction of a second, he was utterly still—taking in the scene with the detached curiosity of a surgeon assessing an incision:
-The bloody knife embedded in the wall.
The eyes writhing in Ezra's split-open flesh.
The discarded limb twitching on the floor, fingers still spasming.
Then he smiled.
"My, my," he murmured, stepping over Grimm's frozen corpse without a glance. "And here I thought you'd wait for me, little celestial."
Ezra couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe. The thing inside him recognized Theodore—recoiled even as it hungered.
Theodore cupped Ezra's face, thumb brushing the blood from his lips. His touch burned like dry ice. "Shhh,"he soothed, as Ezra's body ruptured further, ribs splitting like petals to reveal a second, smaller mouth behind them.
Theodore's smile didn't reach his eyes - those remained cold and depthless as a shark's. His fingers traced Ezra's jawline with terrifying tenderness, leaving frost patterns on the boy's feverish skin.
"Ah-ah," he chided softly when Ezra's newly formed mouth snapped at his wrist. The emerging entity inside Ezra recoiled even as it bared needle-thin teeth, its growl vibrating through multiple dimensions - a sound that made the remaining professors clutch their ears as blood trickled from their nose and ears.
Theodore's palm burned like dry ice against Ezra's sternum. The boy's flesh rippled violently beneath his touch, muscles writhing like snakes beneath skin.
"Still defiant?" Theodore murmured, almost fondly.
The second mouth in Ezra's ribs screamed again - but this time, the sound fractured mid-air, cut off as Theodore's other hand clamped over it. His fingers dug between the jagged edges of Ezra's ribs, nails scraping bone.
"There, there now," he crooned, wiping blood and ichor from Ezra's face with his sleeve. The fabric came away blackened, smoking slightly at the edges. "You don't want more blood on your hands, do you? Poor Professor Krill barely kept his tongue."
A terrible coolness spread from Theodore's touch. Ezra felt it moving through him like liquid mercury - freezing the writhing thing inside him piece by piece. His vision swam as the burning pain receded, leaving only a hollow, gnawing absence where the power had been.
His legs gave out first. Then his spine went liquid. Theodore caught him easily, one arm sliding beneath his knees, the other supporting his back like a bridegroom carrying his new-made wife.
"Shhh," Theodore whispered as Ezra's eyelids fluttered. The last thing Ezra saw before darkness took him was Theodore's smile.
Consciousness came in knife-blade slivers.
The world resolved into sensations before sight: the bite of cold steel against his bare back, the reek of iron and spoiled incense, the nauseating sway of whatever prison-on-wheels carried him. Ezra tried to scream - only to choke on the leather gag wedged between his teeth, its surface soaked with something cloying and herbal that made his thoughts swim.
His restraints were obscenely thorough.
Not mere chains - these were ceremonial bindings. Plates of blackened steel etched with glowing sigils clamped over each major joint. The manacles weren't just bone, but fused vertebrae , still oozing marrow that burned where it touched his skin. Worst were the needles threaded along his inner arms, their hollow points drinking sluggishly from his veins.
The light didn't come when he called.
Not silenced. Extinguished.
The armored hatch hissed open with a sound like a dying man's last breath.
Two sentinels entered with predator grace, their boots making no sound on the riveted floor. No Nexus enforcers these - their armor was too fine, too old. Gothic plate carved from obsidian, so dark it hurt the eyes to focus on. Their visors were seamless mirrors, reflecting Ezra's battered face back at him in grotesque distortion.
Then he saw the insignia blazing on their pauldrons:
The Ouroboros Crown.
Arkanis' mark.
His Highness' personal sigil.
One guard tilted its helmet with mechanical precision. Its voice echoed from the walls themselves—a chorus of dead tongues laced with the king's cadence:
"The guilty Valentine awakens."
Guilty? Ezra's thoughts reeled. Guilty of what?
The armored door burst open.
Theodore stumbled in, disheveled and breathing hard, as if he'd fought his way through hell to get here. The guards pivoted in eerie unison, spears flashing to his throat.
"You are not permitted here."
Theodore flashed a bloodstained grin. "Relax. I've got special permission." He sidestepped a spear—too fluidly, like he'd known its trajectory before it moved—and crouched before Ezra. His fingers hovered near Ezra's gag, but another spear hissed between them, slicing air.
"Do not touch the condemned."
Theodore sighed. "Ask your captain" His voice dropped to a whisper only Ezra could hear. "But I could reduce you both to stains without lifting a finger. And honestly?"
He glanced at the guards with something like pity. "My student's watching. I'd love to show off."
The door whispered open.
"Stand down."