Bloodline: Sovereign's Awakening - Chapter 29

Chapter 29: What Should Not Be

A tremor of light raged in the air, splitting the vast chamber into a storm of silver radiance.

Sionan’s Meteoric Stardust rained down like divine judgment, a celestial tempest swallowing the space where Dasig and Leon once stood.

The air warped in a cascade of shimmering threads, their woven essence sealing the impact zone, twisting reality itself to contain the devastation.

The world flickered—light expanding, then collapsing into an eerie silence. The attack did not burn. It did not search. It dissolved a force that shattered existence into particles finer than dust, their remnants lingering in a thick, luminous fog. The scent of scorched ether and something faintly metallic clung to the air, sharp and otherworldly.

Sionan stood amidst it all, his form illuminated by the dying brilliance of his conjuration. His emerald cloak rippled, untouched by the lingering motes of cosmic fire, his golden eyes reflecting the slow cascade of stardust. He chuckled—soft, smug, convinced that nothing remained of the two beneath his wrath.

Yet certainty was a dangerous thing.

A thunderous crack split the mansion’s stillness, a pulse of energy rippling outward. The resounding force surged through the walls, vibrating the marble floors, sending a ripple across the grand arched ceiling. At that moment, the mansion itself reacted—a subtle tremor, a whisper of unseen forces pressing against the edges of reality.

And then—the guards arrived.

The weaver guards of Tala rushed forth in disciplined formation, their uniforms lined with silver filigree, woven threads of protection thrumming beneath their armor. Their hands hovered near their conduits—ornate bracers inscribed with luminescent glyphs—ready to summon their defenses at a moment’s notice.

Yet as they entered the corridor, the scene before them was… unnatural.

The meteor storm had not yet fully settled. Particles of light still drifted, creating a fog of cascading brilliance. It was neither smoke nor ash but something far more ephemeral—a shimmering haze, weightless, yet pressing against the skin like a charged current.

The very air crackled, the remnants of warped space distorting movement, creating ghost-like echoes of every step they took.

One of the leading guards, a Tala Weaver Captain, narrowed his eyes beneath his helm. The magical filaments laced into his vision flickered, struggling to adjust to the heavy presence of residual energy. This wasn’t normal.

Before he could speak, Sionan raised his hand, palm outward, fingers relaxed in a careless gesture.

“No need for alarm,” he said, his tone effortless.

“Everything is under control.”

His voice carried a languid amusement, as though they had merely stumbled upon him dusting off an old tome rather than obliterating two souls in a flood of celestial annihilation.

The weaver guards did not lower their stance. They were not fools.

One of them—a woman with streaks of gold in her dark hair—stepped forward, her eyes sharp.

“Lord Sionan, what exactly happened here?”

Sionan let his lips curl into an easy smirk. “A minor anomaly,” he said. Hardly a concern, a small crack appeared—a dimensional tear. A monster, birthed from accumulated dark emotions, nearly slipped through. I handled it before it fully manifested.”

A pause. A flicker of silence.

The guards exchanged glances. A dimensional tear? Here?

Workers installed the Pagadianara, the Empyrean Shield, just weeks ago—an immense, city-scale magical bastion, woven into the very air of Pagadianara’s skies. It was an unparalleled defensive marvel, a shield designed to negate breaches of both physical and metaphysical origin and reinforce city defenses by purifying emotional corruption, preventing monster births inside.

At its core, the Empyrean Shield functioned as a cosmic loom, continuously reweaving the space it protected, reinforcing reality itself with celestial threads. It filters and disperses negative energies, ensuring that monsters either weaken, even Carrion Lord monsters, upon entry or fail to form at all.

No monster could manifest within its reach.

No dimensional crack could naturally form, not without an immense disruption or an equally powerful force bending the laws that governed the weave.

And even more impossible—this mansion was under the protection of a powerful spirit, its unseen watchfulness ensuring that nothing unnatural could enter or escape unnoticed.

The Tala Weaver Captain did not speak, but the weight of his silence was louder than words.

Something was wrong.

A hush settled over the chamber, but it was a silence laced with unspoken doubt.

The training of Tala’s weaver guards included recognizing the impossible; Sionan’s claim—a dimensional tear in Pagadianara’s most protected sector—was exactly that.

A seasoned guard would have held their tongue, but among them stood a newcomer, young and yet untempered by the weight of hierarchy.

“Is that even possible?” he muttered, his voice low but loud enough to be heard.

Sionan’s eyes snapped toward the source of the voice, his golden irises gleaming with momentary sharpness. A flicker of irritation. The voice struck a nerve.

But then, almost too smoothly, his lips curved into a deceitful, practiced smile.

“It is very much so,” he replied, voice velvety and calm, as if speaking to a child too naïve to grasp reality.

And yet, beneath that facade, his mind worked with cold precision.

This one will need to be dealt with.

Sionan did not like being questioned—especially not in front of a captain of the clan’s elite guards. That single, careless murmur had irritated him more than the guards’ wary silence. He had spent too much effort weaving this cover story, and the last thing he needed was doubt, even in its smallest form.

His gaze lingered on the newcomer’s face, memorizing it, cataloging the name. He would make sure to cut this insignificant thread before it became troublesome.

But before he could dwell further—

A sudden, violent burst of energy tore through the space.

A starburst radiance erupted from the heart of Sionan’s attack zone, a pulse of raw, untamed force that shattered the protective barrier he had meticulously woven. The containment threads—once shimmering like woven silver—tore apart like a fragile paper wall.

The very air cracked. The walls of the mansion groaned, bending under the unseen pressure.

A force too potent, too uncontrolled, surged outward, not an aftershock but a defiance—something pushing back.

Sionan’s smile vanished.

The light-drenched fog of stardust rippled violently, dispersing in an instant. The crackling remnants of his celestial magic scattered like frightened motes, revealing the space beneath.

And in that moment, as something tore away the veil—

Something still stood.

And it was not supposed to.

The air within the grand chamber thickened, folding upon itself like fabric twisting in unseen hands. Sionan’s golden eyes, sharp with arrogance only moments ago, flickered with the first traces of unease.

His Meteoric Stardust, a force capable of erasing existence itself, had failed to claim its victims, as it seems both Dasig and Leon stood still in their positions before his violent strike.

And yet, he could not linger on that maddening impossibility.

And then—

A deafening tremor rippled through the mansion.

The very air convulsed, reverberating with a deep, guttural hum—not sound, but a force, something ancient and visceral pressing against the walls of reality itself.

The floating orbs of the mansion’s alert system flared into life, their glowing threads twisting like panicked fireflies.

They pulsed with an urgent, frantic rhythm, amplifying the emergency message that rang out across the entire domain.

“Emergency! A dimensional crack has appeared within the residence’s space!”

The words—no, the truth within them—drove a blade of cold realization into every soul that heard them.

This was not merely an attack.

This was wrong.

The Empyrean Shield outside the Mansion, the grand bastion woven into the very sky of Pagadianara along with the towering Weaver Pillars and Negation Obelisks, made the formation of such a crack impossible—even more unthinkable inside their well-protected space. And yet, here it was—born within the mansion’s own dimensional pocket, a void birthed from the impossible.

Sionan turned sharply toward the nearest Weaver Guard Captain; his smirk had long vanished. The leader of the guards, a man of sharp discipline and unwavering control, did not hesitate. He grasped Sionan’s shoulder—not in deference, but in warning.

“Fix what you have started.”

He clipped his words; his tone was a command, not a plea. There was no time to entertain Sionan’s arrogance, no room for posturing.

Then, in a blink, the guards were gone—vanishing like streaking stars, threading through the air with impossible swiftness toward the alarm’s source.

From the eastern section of the estate, where the branch family of Elder Marcon resided, a cube of woven light emerged in midair. Its lattice of glimmering threads formed an intricate, floating construct, delicate as a celestial artifact yet pulsing with dire urgency. Each of its sound lenses twinkled as the emergency message resonated through the estate.

The voice that followed was raw and frantic—its owner could barely contain the terror sinking into his bones.

“A crack… has formed within the Sanctuary!”

The tremor in his words was not just fear—it was helplessness, a bitter truth rarely admitted by those who served the Tala Weaver Guard.

Then his voice faltered.

He gasped—a sharp, strangled sound.

The cube flickered.

Then, silence.

Not the silence of a message completed, but the dreadful stillness of a connection abruptly severed.

Somewhere in the depths of the mansion, a new sound emerged.

It was not an explosion. Not a quake. Not even the warping howl of unstable space.

It was a low exhale.

A presence.

Breathing.

Watching.

And then—the stars vanished.

The grand sky within the dimensional pocket, once an endless tapestry of glimmering constellations, winked out all at once. The shift was immediate and suffocating. Absolute darkness swallowed the once cosmically lit mansion.

A pressure descended, thick and suffocating, pressing against the very idea of space. It was not mere emptiness—it was absence, a void where light had once belonged, where reality had once functioned.

One of the remaining guards choked out a breath. His knees buckled. His bracer flickered, the woven glyphs within struggling to stabilize his form against an unseen weight pressing down on him.

And then… they felt it.

The gaze.

A thing unseen, unspoken. Something now existed where there had once been nothing.

And it was looking directly at them.

As they felt the shift in gravity, this presence… this thing….

It did not belong in any woven reality.