It came free with a sound like lightning striking inside his skull.
And then—finally—the first tear fell.
A single droplet sliding down his blood-streaked face. His father's reconditioning had restored many of the emotional barriers Sebastian had already begun breaking down during his time with the orcs. This tear marked not his first true feeling, but his reclaiming of what his father had tried to take from him again. The salt of it stung against his raw skin, mixing with the sacred waters.
One tear became many. A trickle became a flood.
Sebastian's cry echoed off the chamber walls, a wounded animal's wail that seemed to come from somewhere beyond himself. The emotions he'd begun to experience among the orcs, then lost to his father's reconditioning, returned with overwhelming force. Not just returning, but amplified by what he'd done, by the deaths he'd caused with his own hands.
He screamed until his voice broke, tears mixing with blood on his face, streaming down to join the waters around him. He screamed for his brothers; not as they had been at the end, cold and mechanical, but as they had once been. Children, running through the citadel gardens, laughing despite their father's disapproval. Zarek, teaching him to fence with wooden swords before either of them had received their first regulatorycomponents. Dominic, sneaking him books of poetry that their father had deemed unnecessary.
He screamed for what had been done to them all. For what they had become. For the way his father had spoken of "improvement" while systematically stripping away everything that made them who they were.
One by one, Sebastian attacked the visible components, each removal unleashing more of the emotions that had been trapped inside him for centuries. Each extraction was more excruciating than the last as his body's ability to regulate pain decreased with each device he tore out. Blood clouded the water around him, then slowly cleared as the Tree's magic purified it.
Some components were too deep, too integrated with vital systems to remove safely. Others were concealed within bone or nestled against organs. But he removed what he could reach, each extraction a small liberation. His chest and arms became a landscape of open wounds and exposed tissue, mechanical parts still gleaming amidst the torn flesh.
Throughout it all, he wept and screamed and sometimes laughed. Wild, unhinged sounds that echoed through the chamber. The emotions he'd begun to experience during his time with the orcs returned in tidal waves, intensified by grief and guilt. His brothers' deaths at his hands. His betrayal of his house. The centuries wasted serving a father who had seen him only as a project to perfect rather than a son to love.
Between extractions, the same thought echoed through his mind, becoming a silent mantra that pulsed with each beat of his heart. I chose. I chose. I chose. Not a justification, but an acknowledgment. A reminder that even as he tore himself apart, he was doing so because of a decision he had made with full awareness of its consequences.
Like the previous time in the Heart Tree, the ancient natural magic wove its way into the deeper components, renderingthem useless again, after his father’s artificers had used vampire magic to reawaken them.
Hours passed. The water around Sebastian turned crimson, then cleared, then clouded again as he continued his brutal self-surgery. His strength began to fail as blood loss and shock took their toll. His movements grew sluggish, his vision blurred.
Still, he continued, even as his fingers slipped on blood-slick components, even as his consciousness began to fade at the edges. He needed to be unmade before he could begin anew. Needed to tear out as much of his father's influence as his body could survive losing.
Finally, Sebastian's legs gave way. He sank beneath the surface of the pool, too weak to keep himself upright. The water closed over his head, crystal light refracting through crimson clouds around him.
A strange peace settled over him as he drifted downward. Not the artificial calm imposed by regulators, but something deeper and more genuine. He had done what he could. Removed what he could reach. Magic from the tree had worked again, faster than before. The rest would require help, or time, or both.
As his consciousness began to fade, the water around him shifted. Energy from the Heart Tree flowed through the sacred pool, cradling his broken body. The water glowed, the Tree's magic responding to his presence, to his need.
Through half-closed eyes, Sebastian watched as the torn flesh of his chest began to knit together, not healing completely, but stabilizing, preventing him from bleeding out from his self-inflicted wounds. The water cushioned him, suspended him in a state between consciousness and oblivion.
In that twilight state, he thought of Boarstaff on the other side of the sealed door, surrounded by his people. The warchief drawing strength from his community. Wounds being tended by healers, decisions made by the council.
While Sebastian needed the tree’s help: isolation, darkness, submersion. Space to break apart without witnesses. Space to rebuild himself, not as his father had designed him, but as something else entirely.
As he drifted in the sacred waters, more memories surfaced; memories his father's reconditioning had tried to bury. Zarek's face when they were both still human boys, gap-toothed and smiling as they raced each other through their birth village. The day they had found a wounded bird and tried to nurse it back to health in secret. The night before they were sold, neither of them knowing what was coming, making plans for adventures they would never have.
He remembered Dominic's arrival at the citadel; how different the experience had been from his own. By then, Cornelius had refined his methods. Less crude physical pain, more subtle psychological conditioning. Sebastian had watched the boy change over the decades, watched the spark in his eyes dim with each new enhancement. He remembered finding Dominic in the library once, century-old fingers tracing forbidden poetry in ancient texts, a moment of humanity that Sebastian had pretended not to see.
Blood clouded the water around Sebastian's head as he pulled at another component near his temple. The memories became sharper, more painful as each regulatory device was removed. He remembered standing beside them at countless diplomatic functions, the three of them presented as Cornelius's masterpieces, his perfect sons, not by blood but by design. They had been weapons fashioned from human children, brothers in their shared destruction.
He had killed them. But the truth was, his father had killed the people they might have been long before Sebastian's blade had found their hearts.
Sebastian floated in the sacred waters, surrounded by the evidence of his self-destruction, broken components at the bottom of the pool, blood slowly dispersing, torn flesh partially closed by the Tree's magic.
Pain radiated from every wound, but it was clean pain. The kind that promised something better on the other side, if he survived.
Through half-closed eyes, he watched crystal light play across the water's surface. The Tree's energy pulsed around him, through him, neither hurrying nor hindering his process.
Sebastian wasn't healed. But as he drifted in the sacred waters, surrounded by the broken pieces of what his father had made him, he finally felt something true.
His own heartbeat.
It was enough.
