Vander closed the flimsy bathroom door behind him, finally allowing his mask of stoicism to crack as Alice and Tris shared an emotional moment. The motel bathroom was cramped and dingy—yellowed linoleum peeling at the corners, a rust-stained sink with a dripping faucet, and a shower curtain mottled with ancient mildew patterns. The fluorescent light flickered overhead, creating a nauseating pulse that matched the throbbing of his wound.

  He clutched the edge of the sink as a wave of agony tore through his chest. The bandages Alice had so carefully applied were already seeping with luminescent golden ichor. Vander's trembling fingers fumbled with his shirt, peeling it back to reveal the full horror beneath.

  The wound wasn't healing—it was unraveling.

  Where Neph Mark 1's obsidian blade had penetrated, a sickly blue-gold light pulsed beneath his skin. Each heartbeat sent fresh streams of golden blood oozing through the damaged tissue. The pain was... untranslatable. Not merely physical, but dimensional—as if the weapon had cut through every layer of his being simultaneously.

  Vander bit down on his knuckles to stifle a scream as he peeled back the sodden bandage. The sound that escaped was barely human. The wound gaped obscenely, revealing glimpses of organs that glowed with ethereal light. This wasn't just a physical injury—it was a quantum disruption, a tear in the very fabric of his multidimensional structure.

  "Sweet Godhead," he whispered, watching his life essence drip into the stained sink, where it sizzled against the porcelain.

  Another spasm wracked his body, driving him to his knees on the hard floor. The pain transcended ordinary experience—a white-hot explosion of agony that threatened to consume his consciousness entirely. It felt as if someone had inserted a star into his chest and was slowly allowing it to go supernova.

  Memories flashed before him—twenty-six thousand years of waiting, of planning, decades infiltrating the Kennedy bloodline, all for this moment. All for Tris. For Solaris. Just to give him an actual chance this time at uniting the Monad.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  "Not yet," Vander growled through clenched teeth. "Not. Fucking. Yet."

  With shaking hands, he tore a towel from the rack and stuffed a corner into his mouth. Then, summoning millenia of disciplined focus, he plunged two fingers directly into the wound, probing for the source of the disruption. The pain exploded behind his eyes, vision whiting out as his body convulsed. Golden blood spattered across the cracked mirror, the stained toilet, the peeling wallpaper.

  Twenty excruciating seconds later, his fingers found it—a microscopic shard of obsidian, pulsing with malevolent energy. It burned like absolute zero against his fingertips as he extracted it, a splinter of void that had no right to exist in this dimension.

  The shard came free with a sickening squelch, trailing threads of corrupted tissue. Vander held it up to the flickering light—barely visible to the naked eye yet resonating with power that could destabilize reality itself. With a final, defiant gesture, he dropped it into the toilet and flushed, watching the dimensional anomaly swirl away.

  The relief was immediate but partial. The wound remained grave, potentially fatal even for a being of his nature. But now, perhaps, healing could begin—slow, agonizing, but possible.

  Vander carefully repacked the wound with fresh gauze, taping it with meticulous precision despite his trembling hands. The bandage was already beginning to show golden seepage before he'd finished securing it. He knew with absolute certainty that he should be resting, possibly for weeks, to properly recover from such an injury.

  But there was no time. Tris—Solaris—needed him. Twenty-six thousand years of waiting, of carrying that promise across millennia... what was this pain compared to that?

  He splashed water on his face and cleaned the golden blood from the bathroom, careful to remove all evidence of the true severity of his condition. Then he straightened, squaring his shoulders despite the grinding agony that radiated from his chest with each movement.

  The face that stared back at him from the cracked mirror fluctuated between his human appearance and flashes of his true leonine form as his control wavered. His eyes—those down-turned dark green eyes—remained constant even as the rest of his face blurred with pain.

  "For Solaris," he whispered to his reflection, the words both promise and prayer, oath and affirmation.

  With one final, steadying breath, Vander turned away from the mirror and reached for the bathroom door.