Leonidas’ [Cataclysm Core] hummed with a thirst for annihilation while he sat on the edge of his bed, staring down at the floor, with his forearms on his knees and his fingers twitching slightly while his hands hung limp toward the floor. His mind was a seething mass of disjointed and complex recollection that warped his perception of what was present and what was not.

He understood that he was in Ceruviel’s Mansion, and yet a stubborn part of his mind insisted he were still able to speak to Lyara, and find solace in her kindness and warmth. He understood he was no longer the Hero of Elatra, and yet he still felt the mounting pressure of delivering the world, and of defeating Azrageth—even at the cost of his own life.

Not his physical self, which he had long ago resolved to turn into a weapon; but his existence as a person, his mental fitness, and his right to a normal life. The isekai process he had undergone was often romanticized in common media, and his expectations of a similar experience had lasted right up until the first day of his training with Miranda.

Miranda.

His mentor’s name conjured the image of the olive-skinned blonde’s penetrating green eyes, and the grim look of resolve she’d often demonstrated throughout his time knowing her. What would she have thought, if she’d seen him sitting there with his mind unraveling from the latent stress of his time on Elatra, and the subsequent shocks to the system that returning to Terra had given him?

The very thought of his former mentor’s consternation and disapproval inspired a bitter laugh, and he reached up to run his fingers through his hair as the ringing in his ears subsided somewhat. His [Cataclysm Core] continued to offer sibilant whispers of deliverance, and sing its ode to destruction within the center of his being.

The temptation to allow his Core to pursue its natural impetus was overwhelming in as much as it was repulsive, and Leonidas found himself leaning toward the idea of letting it run rampant if only to stop the stress and the anxiety in their tracks. He could feel his psyche barely holding together, thanks as much to his own force of will as it was to the stability—frayed as it may be—of his own self.

Reality being what it was, Leonidas knew that he hadn’t simply woken up to the mental devolution he was experiencing: he’d been putting it off, shoving it down, and running away from the building cacophony within his mind for weeks, months, perhaps even years. He’d never addressed the pain, the confusion, or the consuming trauma of what he’d encountered as the Hero.

Instead he’d relied on Lyara’s help suppressing it, and Caricus’ aid in drugging himself so thoroughly he never needed to relieve the terrible things he’d seen—or done with his own hands—during the desperate war against Azrageth. Hero had been his title, but as once reflected; he’d likely have been thrown into a deep, dark, forgotten cell of the most secure prison humanity could find if he’d done even a tenth of what he had on Elatra while still on Earth.

His time in Elatra had scarred him more than he’d ever cared to admit, and without Lyara’s soothing presence and Caricus’ calming dream tonics, he was being forced to face a cresting and crashing wave of guilt and trauma that had been held firmly at bar for the better part of all five years he’d been on Elatra.

Between the reminder of Miranda that Ceruviel represented, the reminder of Lyara that Aylar represented, and the calamitous pile-on of stress and shock each hour of his first day back on Terra; it was simply a miracle, he surmised, that he’d lasted as long as he had.

Battle was something of an escape for Leonidas, admittedly, but that was not any better than the trauma he was in theory attempting to escape or run from. Battle merely offered an outlet, and one that was ironically adding more fuel to the smoldering fire even as it alleviated some measure of immediate stress and concern.

The Goblins had been a breaking point, where his [Cataclysm Core] and its violent energies had eroded some measure of the shield he’d forged around his mind, and sloughed away a chunk of the barrier keeping his delirium and pent-up stress in place.

The Hive Tyrants had been another step along the process of that unraveling, as had his agreement to work with Ceruviel—and the subsequent hearkening back to Miranda that came from that alliance.

When Sinalthria had measured his power in the Guild Hall, another piece of the wall had been stripped away, and then when he’d actually seen his Cataclysm Mana for the first time, something inside of him that opened up to the possibility of truly letting it run rampage there and then. It had been both disturbing, and beguiling in equal measure, and it had excited him in a subconscious way.

The Slayer Trial had been another stepping stone toward that unraveling, whether he’d realized it or not, first when he’d dispatched Zalaza and then Pheona, and nearly murdered Luciaro for simply being his opponent.

Synthra had been the icing on the cake, and his use of the Cataclysm Mana there had—whether he’d realized it or not—opened up a solid crack in the shield around his psyche, and left room for his passive trauma and [Cataclysm Core] both to lightly and steadily widen the crack until it was a gaping wound.

Then there was the Princess.

Meeting Aylar had tipped the scale firmly over the edge, and obliterated what remained of his mental defenses. His trauma, his memories, and his unexplored desire for the woman she so reminded him of had reached a kind of internal critical mass that had finally detonated after his retirement into his new apartment—and now he was reaping the result of that multi-stepped devolution of his mental capacity.

“How did it come this far?” he asked hoarsely into the silence of the room.

“{You were too young for what you experienced, Achilles,}” Ceruviel’s voice responded, and snapped Leonidas’ eyes up as a result. The armored and fully attired Dusk-Lord viewed him with faintly glowing purple eyes from the door, and her expression was a mix between careful and intently focused.

“You don’t get it,” he replied to her quietly, and then looked back down at his hands, which he squeezed into fists out of frustration, “I’m not crazy.”

“I know,” Ceruviel responded in English, while stepping forward and coming to a halt near the edge of his four-poster, the right side of which he was seated upon. “You are many things, Achilles, including relentlessly driven and full of contrary views; but you are certainly not mad.”

“My Core wants me to unleash it on this place—and everything around here,” Leonidas said with a muted sense of partial dissociation. He took a breath after he spoke, and tried to tune out the siren song of his [Cataclysm Core] and its hungry offer of sweet oblivion. “I can find peace if I let it consume everything, but I don’t know if I really want that.”

“I don’t think you do,” Ceruviel agreed while stepping closer, and resting her shoulder against one of the posts of the immense bed. “I don’t think you want to unleash it any more than you want to tell me why you asked for Princess Aylar to come and see you, in a fit of disturbed anger.”

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“Aylar? I didn’t. I asked for Lyara, not—oh…”

“The only Lyara I personally know, Achilles, is no Princess,” Ceruviel continued conversationally. “She’s a baker’s daughter in the Residential Quarter.”

“It’s… it’s hard to explain,” he muttered.

“You’ve been hiding something rather massive from me, and I understand why, Achilles. You’ve known me almost exactly for twenty-four hours as of an hour ago, and you’re carrying a burden heavier than anything I’ve sensed even in the King of Altera,” Ceruviel observed while her purple eyes, still aglow, narrowed on him in consideration. “When Jefferies first informed me you’d cracked, I intended on seeing whether or not I needed to put you down like a rabid hound—but now that I’m here, I can see that this is far less about you cracking, and far more about you needing help.”

“I suppose you’re regretting your pronouncement yesterday,” Leonidas said with a hollow chuckle. After all, who wanted an emotionally unstable twenty-something as a King? He still thought the whole idea was insane, himself, so perhaps some good would come of his devolving mental state.

“On the contrary, I am more convinced of my plan than ever before,” Ceruviel stated with supreme confidence he couldn’t emulate on his best day, and which seemed so very like Miranda that he felt a crack of reality around his perception as the blonde human’s image momentarily flickered into overlay upon the silver-haired Haelfenn Duchess.

“Why?” Leonidas asked simply.

“Because your weakness only increases your potential for greater strength, Achilles,” Ceruviel said without missing a beat, or blinking her focused eyes. “Lesser minds may see this as a critical failure, but I do not. What I see is a boy that became a man, forged and tempered in a crucible that even the most veteran of Alteran warriors would struggle to comprehend. I do not know how you came to partake in the kind of horrific nightmare I have glimpsed on the surface of your mind—and I do not, despite all suspicion to the contrary, rightly care.”

“How can you not?” Leonidas asked in bewilderment, while idly reaching up to rub at his aching temple. “How can you so easily dismiss my memories as ‘not relevant’, and respect my privacy? You baffle me, Ceruviel. By rights, you should be scouring my mind!”

“Do you want to murder me, Achilles?”

“Excuse me?” Leonidas asked with such surprise that his mind momentarily stabilized with pure focus on her question.

“Do you want to murder Aylar?”

“Of course not!” he said with indignant anger.

“Do you want to murder the people of Dawnhaven?” Ceruviel pressed.

“That’s absurd!” Leonidas answered with more anger. “I am haunted by ghosts, Ceruviel, or perhaps memories—but either way, those things are not the fault of the people in Dawnhaven!”

“Then you know why I am not fileting your mind like a carp,” Ceruviel responded in the same calm tone of voice, with that standard edge of authoritative dictation. There was absolute, and supreme confidence to her voice while she spoke, “I am a very, very powerful Psionic, Achilles. What many others struggle to understand, I know with instinctive immediacy. Where I Uriel, then yes, perhaps you would be seen as an unstable element—or a threat to be culled.”

The Dusk-Lord lifted her right hand lazily, and made a circle by moving her forefinger idly. “I could psikinetically implode your skull with as much effort as it would take someone else to lift a sheet of glass, or perhaps even less given your untempered state. My interest in you has always been about your potential, Achilles, and not your actual power at the moment.”

“I’m still a threat, though,” Leonidas said with a mix of confusion and doubt.

“Your trauma does not make you a threat, Achilles, it makes you a young man sorely in need of help,” Ceruviel said in what Leonidas thought might have almost been an empathetic tone, not a sympathetic nor pitying one. He wondered if the elven woman was perhaps speaking from some measure of experience. “We have ways of dealing with that in Dawnhaven, but since I have no desire to simply lobotomize your mind, we will need to approach it more delicately.”

“You sound as if you know what it’s like,” Leonidas said simply.

“Of course I do,” Ceruviel said with a snort and a shake of her head. “I am three hundred and sixty-nine years old, Achilles. My hair color may be the only thing that’s changed since I reached adulthood, but that does not mean I have not experienced my fair share of trauma. I have seen family, lovers, and friends die—and I have committed atrocities in the name of my homeland.” Your hands are no more stained than anyone else’s Achilles; you simply do not have the centuries of experience to cope with the weight of it and press onward.”

The Dusk-Lord reached up to brush some of that silver hair from her eyes, and fixed him with a firm stare while pointing her right forefinger at him decisively, “were it not for the limitations of my station on Altera, I would already be at my seventh or eighth tier. It is only providence disguised as misfortune that kept me below level sixty, and allowed me to make the journey to Terra. I have been where you are, Achilles, and I have emerged out of the other side stronger for it. So will you.”

Leonidas stared at Ceruviel for a long moment, and once again he was lost for words. Why, he wondered once more? Why did this ancient, powerful, and capable woman seem so insistent on helping him? By rights, she should have put him down or exiled him to drown in his own demons, and yet now she was giving him a pep talk, of all things, while he was in the middle of a pseudo-psychotic break.

“I can barely make reality out from memory right now,” Leonidas admitted after several long moments of confused silence, “and that is not for lack of trying. I know where I am, but sometimes I—”

“—go somewhere else,” Ceruviel finished simply, “and then the people around you are someone else, and then your mind struggles to find fact from fiction, and your terror at that turns to violence, or internalized loathing, and along that path lies…” she sighed quietly, “something not worth discussing, I suppose.”

Leonidas grimaced at her words, and reached over his abdomen to squeeze at the [Cataclysm Core] humming aggressively in his solar plexus. It was becoming even more insistent, despite Ceruviel’s calming words. He could feel his control slipping.

“I can help you,” the Dusk-Lord said after a moment. “I can help you focus with my powers, and teach you how to hold the pain at bay—but I need to know what I’m dealing with, Achilles. I promised I would not extract the information until you felt ready, but either you must tell me, or tell a stranger paid to guide you through. I, at least, can help you use your powers in the process.”

Leonidas looked up at her when she spoke, and a mix of hesitation and trepidation flooded through his mind. Ceruviel was right, of course, in that a therapist would only be a perfect stranger—and one no longer beholden to the privacy laws that once governed the world, if they even believed him in the first place. They lacked the capacity for discerning the truth that the Dusk-Lord possessed, and couldn’t even offer him a meaningful way of managing his trauma anyway. Not in a reliable timeframe.

Ceruviel could. She could teach him to not only manage it, but master it.

He let out a ragged breath, and his eyes unfocused again when Miranda’s specter overlaid Ceruviel one more time.

What do you think? He asked the ghost silently.

Miranda simply stared at him, and finally gave a small nod.

We are all weak sometimes, Leonidas. What matters is knowing when to accept another’s aid, not pretending it never happens.

He nodded slightly at his mentor’s remembered words, and turned to Ceruviel.

“I want you to promise this stays between us, no matter what. I have only known you a day, but… I can’t live life trapped by my own trauma, or haunted by my own power.”

“You have my Oath,” Ceruviel said without blinking or breaking eye contact.

“I trust you,” Leonidas said simply, and was surprised to realize he meant it, too. The Duchess might have been abrupt and manipulative, but honed instinct told him she was also a woman that would always keep her word. Miranda had been like that, too.

Ceruviel graced him with a half smile, and then Leonidas took a breath, and told her everything. He spoke from the heart, starting from his day of transmigration, and even the source of his name and why the whole thing was so ironic and amusing for him when it first happened. Then he told her about Elatra, about Miranda, and about Lyara… and more.

When he started speaking, he didn’t stop, and Ceruviel didn’t interrupt other than to ask clarifying questions.

And for the first time since fighting Azrageth, he started to feel like himself again.