Chapter Text
This world is wrong.
It has edges. Sharp ones. Gravity pulls and presses and flattens against a floor that does not breathe. The walls are solid, unmoving. Not the shape of containment conjured by a sleeping thought, malleable and flexible. These ones are real. Dead. Unyielding.
Spite hates it here.
He screams when they pull him through. Not with lungs—he has none. Not with voice—it is stripped from him the moment the circle seals and blood hits stone. But he screams all the same. A scream in concept, in intent. The scream of a spirit born for motion and purpose, bound to flesh and silence. A scream that never stops, truly.
Time is no longer something he understands. It doesn't slip or spiral or swim around him. It moves forward. In cruel, ticking steps which are both too fast and agonisingly slow. Each one drags his awareness deeper into this body. This skin. This cage.
Lucanis.
That is name of the one who bears him. The one whose veins now wrap around his essence like barbed wire. The one who stares at the wall of their prison for hours at a time without speaking, barely blinking. Spite wants to hate him. He tries. For a while, he whispers foul things in the back of Lucanis' skull, fills his sleep with teeth, his breath with rust. But Lucanis does not break. He bends, quietly, like old leather straps in the rain, but he does not break. Determined.
That makes Spite angrier.
The Ossuary is damp. Cold. Stinking of rot and regret. It is filled with echoes and blood, and the air sings with suffering. It should comfort Spite, this place that so mirrors the worst corners of the Fade. But there is no wonder here. No dreaming.
Only pain, wrapped in a body that refuses to die.
Lucanis trains in silence. Sleeps rarely. Eats mechanically. Bleeds often. He wakes in the middle of the night with his fists clenched and his jaw locked, and Spite pulses beneath his skin like a second heartbeat. Not allowed to speak. Not allowed to fly.
They are chained together, and Spite learns something dangerous in those early days: if Lucanis shatters, he will vanish.
No audience. No vessel. No rage to cling to.
So he watches the man. Learns the rhythm of his tension. The lies in his stillness. The effort it takes to not feel. It is worse than violence. It is endurance, raw and endless. Spite has seen spirits consumed by less.
So he makes a choice. Not for kindness. Not for care. But for survival.
You will not break, he whispers. You are mine now, and I will keep you whole. Because if you fall, I fall.
And if he is trapped in this flesh, in this world of angles and pressure and grief, then Lucanis will carry him until the world cracks or burns. He will walk, and Spite will ride his shadow. They will learn this place. They will find the door. The way back.
And Spite will fly again.
The world is too solid. But it will not stay that way forever.
He is determined.