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The Threshold was utter chaos, but for Viego, it might as well have been completely empty. He was immersed in that apathetic limbo he retreated to every afternoon, trying to ignore the lawyers' shouts about his own legal troubles and, above all, the dull ache of his divorce, the kind he could only channel through music.
It was another one of those gray days when his mood simply wasn't up to it. Kayle would often tell him, with her usual condescension, that if life was such a burden, he should get a damn therapist. But Viego refused; shouting his emotions into a microphone was the only effective therapy he knew, and the only one his pride allowed him to accept.
Around him, the studio was a seething cauldron. Karthus kept grumbling in a corner about the band's inactivity, obsessed with releasing a new cover or any song that would drive the fans wild after years of silence. And Seraphine… the option of commercially exploiting the pink cupcake wasn't even on the table anymore. Until Thresh untangled the legal loophole surrounding his dealings with the upper echelons of Los Angeles, Pentakill couldn't make a single cent with the new voice from the depths.
That's why his grumpy old manager had left first thing that morning, dragging Sera with him to the city to start sorting out all that corporate crap.
Viego frowned, annoyed with himself. What the hell was he doing wasting his time thinking about a puppet who had just lost her identity? He figured it was easier to obsess over other people's disasters than to confront the void in his own mind. He forced himself to ignore the fact that, deep down, he was pissed off at having so rudely pushed away the only person who, perhaps, had the capacity to hear what his soul sounded like beneath the thunderous guitar riffs and the savage drumbeat.
He locked himself in the booth with a slam of the door, instantly muffling Olaf's insults for having pushed him out. The silence inside was thick, almost suffocating, broken only by the electric hum of the amplifier and the crackle of his guitar cable as it plugged in. He put on his headphones, blocking out the last vestiges of the outside world, and looked for Sona's gaze on the other side of the glass. He gave a curt nod. The signal.
It was the first song he'd written after the breakup. He'd cried a lot while writing it, pouring the remnants of his broken heart into the lyrics as he described his feelings of not belonging in a world where Isolde wasn't by his side. He knew he wouldn't play the acoustic versions again because they brought him down (or maybe it was just the depressing feeling the melody conveyed), so all he had left was rock.
He turned his back immediately. He didn't want any witnesses. It was humiliating enough having to bare his soul through the microphone in front of the band without them seeing his teary eyes.
Through the headphones, the clean, measured arpeggio of "Creep" began to float. A cold, steady sound that forced him to exhale a trembling breath before placing his lips on the microphone.
"When you were here before…"
Oh… the first verse was a real struggle. His voice came out lower than usual, a dense murmur that carried the weight of several sleepless nights. Each word was like building a stone wall.
"...Couldn't look you in the eye."
He struggled to breathe. He knew that if he got caught up in the agony of the present, he wouldn't get past the first verse, so he forced his eyes to focus on the guitar's neck, observing the position of his own fingers. He let the hypnotic melody pull him back, turning his mind into a movie screen.
He reveled in the screen of his mind, expanding the memory until he could almost smell Isolde's perfume mixed with his morning coffee. He remembered the time when his life wasn't measured in tours, or the approval of fans, but in the inches of mattress she occupied beside him. It was a damn addiction. He had become so accustomed to speaking in the plural, to planning his months based on his schedule, to being that indivisible package that the world assumed to be a single piece, that now half of his own bed felt like a cliff.
In his mind, the film sped up to an ordinary afternoon. Isolde sat on the apartment floor, her eyes fixed on him as Viego hummed a clumsy melody on the piano. He remembered the warmth of her hand slipping between his fingers when he hit a wrong note, the way she assured him, without hesitation, that he was the most special musician she had ever known. She was his anchor, the mirror he looked into to know who he was.
And that was the real problem. He had become so intertwined with her, so much a part of her, that now that Isolde was gone, Viego didn't even know what the hell to do with his own hands when they weren't holding hers. He didn't know who the man was who saw himself reflected in the bathroom mirror in the mornings if Isolde wasn't behind him complaining that he was going to be late. The whole package had broken, and the pieces he was left with didn't fit anywhere.
He opened his eyes in the dimness of the booth, his breath ragged, realizing the track was still playing in his headphones. The clean arpeggio was coming to an end.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sona tense up subtly on the other side of the glass. The happy short film was over. The last smile of Isolde in his memory froze, pixelated, and shattered into a thousand pieces as the drums and the two sharp cracks of the distorted guitar—CHUN-CHUN!—exploded inside his ears.
The time for memories was over. It was time to spit out the remains.
The distortion hit his eardrums with the force of a freight train, and Viego closed his eyes, clutching the microphone as if it were the only thing keeping him anchored to the booth floor. He pressed his lips to the metal grille, feeling the air drain from his lungs, and released all the air he had been holding in with a frenzied roar.
“But I’m a creep…!”
His voice came out broken, raspy, scraping his larynx in a way that would have made Karthus throw his hands up in despair. But Viego didn’t give a damn about technique. In his mind, that “creep” wasn’t just a word from a song; it was the label seared into his memory. The stark realization that he’d screwed everything up by being an idiot.
“I’m a weirdo…!”
He screamed louder, stretching the note until his chest ached. With each ragged vibration, the tip of the iceberg of his own mistakes began to emerge, chilling him to the bone. Because the divorce hadn’t been an unforeseen catastrophe; it had been the result of his own suffocating hand. The late-night arguments flashed through his mind, the echo of his own absurd jealousy that he had once disguised as “absolute love.” He remembered how possessive he became whenever Isolde wanted to step outside the circle he had drawn around her. He had wanted to keep her in a glass case, controlling who she spoke to, where she looked, who she applauded… He had been so possessive, so utterly toxic and all-consuming, that he had ended up draining the room of oxygen.
The controversy in the music press, the whispers in Pentakill’s dressing rooms about his unstable temper… Everyone saw it but him. He had turned his adoration into a noose.
“What the hell am I doing here…?”
He opened his eyes, but he didn't see the recording studio, the analog controls, or Sona. He only saw the devastation he had left in his wake. The microphone picked up the trembling hiss of his breath before the next lyrical blow. He felt like a fucking intruder in his own life. Someone who had held the greatest treasure in his hands and crushed it simply because he didn't know how to let go of his fists.
The music subsided for a few notes, giving the drums a deceptive respite, but in Viego's head, the silence only served to amplify the echo of his own demons. He gripped the guitar neck with white knuckles, swallowing the bitter taste of humiliation.
“I don’t care if it hurts…”
A lie. It did matter. It hurt so much he could barely keep his eyes open. But the real pain wasn't the absence; it was the complete loss of control. He, who had always run his life as he pleased, was now drowning in a mire where none of his tantrums were of any use.
“I wanna have control…”
He gritted his teeth, intoning the line with a mixture of pleading and suppressed rage. What he'd done in the end to keep her… God, remembering it made his stomach churn. Those desperate calls at three in the morning, the veiled threats to ruin his own career, the cheap emotional blackmail that was just embarrassing. It had been awful, pathetic. He'd tried to force the chains, and the result was that Isolde fled even faster. And the worst part? That a petty, selfish part of his mind still thought it was unfair. Hadn't he given everything for her? Didn't adoring her to the point of madness justify his actions? Being out of his comfort zone, reduced to a melancholic wreck on a studio floor, was driving him crazy.
“I want a perfect body… I want a perfect soul.”
His voice trembled subtly in the booth. He glanced sideways at his blurred reflection in the glass. What a stupid, recurring thought. Sometimes he caught himself fantasizing about being someone else, someone different. A man free of obsessions, someone with a perfect, balanced soul who didn't need to devour what he loved to feel secure. If he had been that kind of man… Isolde wouldn't have left. She would have stayed by his side.
“I want you to notice… when I'm not around.”
That was the core of his misery. He wanted her to suffer his absence. He wanted the silence of her new life to sting her as much as his own stinged him. He wanted to be indispensable, but the legal void of the divorce papers on the mixing board reminded him that for Isolde, right now, he was just a chapter she needed to forget.
“You're so fucking special…”
The track crackled with static again, the prelude to the storm. Viego took a step back, moving a couple of inches away from the microphone, filling his lungs with stale air. In his mind, the image of Isolde was no longer sitting in the apartment of his memory; she was standing in front of him, her back to him.
“I wish I was special…”
He whispered, just before the clean arpeggio finished dying and the headphones flooded with the prelude to disaster. The happy movie was gone forever. In its place, the memory of the last night in their shared house flashed before his eyes with terrifying clarity. The door slamming. The jingle of keys.
The drums exploded again, but this time the analog noise wasn't a shield; it was the detonator that blew the last walls of his sanity to bits. The song's tempo accelerated, pushing him into the abyss of the cursed verse. He clenched his fists around the microphone, his eyes squeezed so tight his forehead ached.
"She's running out the door…"
He sang it with blind desperation, because in his mind the movie had become terrifyingly clear. He relived the exact scene of the papers on the table. He remembered the paralyzing confusion, that stupid shock that had left him speechless while Isolde signed the document without a tremor in her hand. He hadn't understood. In his mind, things were bad, yes, but not this bad. While she gathered her things, Viego had remained frozen in the living room, trapped in a suffocating incomprehension, unable to see that Isolde had been silently mourning for months over a relationship he had already killed. He was barely beginning to bleed when she had already healed.
On the other side of the glass, the atmosphere in the soundboard had suddenly changed. Sona wasn't alone. The rest of the band, who just a few minutes before had completely ignored his laments, had been approaching in a sepulchral silence, magnetized by the sheer violence of the pain that Viego was channeling through the microphone. Karthus watched with his arms crossed, his eyes fixed on the mixing console levels that were nearing their limits; Everyone knew it, but no one was going to say it out loud: what Viego was pouring out in that booth was the band's next big hit. It was pure gold, monetized pain in its wildest, most visceral form.
At that precise moment, the heavy door of The Threshold opened with a soft groan. Thresh entered first, adjusting his tie with his usual corporate shark-like deliberation. Behind him, Seraphine stepped into the studio. They'd come from the city, the echo of phone calls and legal loopholes still ringing in their ears after spending the entire morning sorting out the mess with the higher-ups.
But the cupcake froze halfway through.
Through the main monitors, Viego's voice flooded the room with a force that made the walls vibrate. Sera looked up at the booth and saw him. She saw the selfish king, the dramatic and haughty type who had greeted her condescendingly, completely disarmed, clinging to the microphone stand as if he were drowning in his own depths. She felt a chill as she connected for the first time with the immense and uncontrolled emptiness of his soul, stripped of the thunderous riffs that usually camouflaged it.
And then, oblivious to the audience watching him from the shadows, Viego took a breath. The drums exploded in his headphones for the final assault.
“She's running out…”
The echo of her footsteps leaving the apartment mingled with the frenzied riff of his own guitar. The adrenaline of the shock suddenly transformed into a dull, self-destructive rage.
“She run, run, run, run…”
Tucking his chin to his chest, he began to string together the verses, losing control of his breath. Each “run” was a punch to the gut of his own pride. He saw himself chasing her down the hall, demanding explanations, pleading with the broken arrogance of someone who still believes he can command love by decree. He hadn’t wanted to see the signs. He had been a fucking emotional illiterate.
And then he reached the limit of his lungs. The climax of the song. The moment to stop being the wounded king and accept, once and for all, the stark reality of his own stupidity.
He pulled his lips away from the microphone by a millimeter, gathered all the poison, the guilt, and the pain of having destroyed his own life, and let out the final scream.
“RUN…!”
It wasn’t a musical note. It was a heart-rending scream that sprang straight from the pit of his stomach and broke mid-air, shattering his voice into a harsh, dirty, and purely human crackle. His larynx burned as if he'd swallowed broken glass. In that final tear, everything was gone: his self-indulgent pride, the confusion of shock, and the painful certainty that he had lost the love of his life because he had been a suffocating monster. He had squeezed his own heart out of the gutter and left it empty.
He leaned against the microphone stand, his chest rising and falling violently, swallowing hard as the track in his headphones transitioned to the final verse. On the other side of the glass, the band's silence felt heavier than ever. It had been an emotional bloodbath.
He swallowed hard, forcing his lips to the microphone once more. There was no strength left in his voice, only a tired, broken hoarseness.
"Whatever makes you happy..."
He closed his eyes, absorbing the weight of defeat. In his mind, those words were no longer a declaration of generous love; they were a termination agreement. Accepting that Isolde was gone meant accepting the wall she had built between them. It pissed him off. It seemed a brutal injustice that he had been banished from his own story, but he knew exactly where the line was drawn. He remembered the cold warning from her lawyers, the divorce terms Thresh had read to him in a monotonous, dispassionate tone. That explicit mention of restraining orders, of the harassment charges if he dared to show his face on her street or call her number again. He would respect that distance, yes, but reluctantly, chewing on the shards of his own wounded pride. He would do it only because the alternative was being dragged into court by the woman he adored.
“Whatever you want…”
He whispered, letting the sentence die before it could finish. «Whatever you want, Isolde. Even if it leaves me broken.»
“You’re so fucking special… I wish I was special.”
He delivered the verses with bitter envy, head bowed, staring at his own boots on the booth floor. She was out there, rebuilding her life, being special far from the disaster. He was just the residue left in the studio.
The song entered its final stretch, but there was no explosion. The last chorus came in with a purely peaceful tone, a floating, languid, and defeated melody. Viego no longer had air in his lungs or the strength to pretend he was the Ruined King; he was just a tired man.
“But I’m a creep… I’m a weirdo…”
This time the chorus was a quiet whisper, a defeated confession that barely registered on the mixing board. There was no anger in those words anymore, only absolute resignation. It was what it was. He had ruined the only pure thing he had in his life, and there was no guitar solo, no record deal, no tantrum that could change that.
“What the hell am I doing here…?”
He slowly opened his eyes, taking in the acoustic wood paneling on the walls, the cables coiled on the floor, the cold, analog reality that surrounded him. He didn't belong on the surface, he didn't belong in the spotlights of Los Angeles, and certainly, he no longer belonged in Isolde's life.
“I don't belong here…”
The arpeggio played its final note, letting the track fade out, carrying away the last thread of his voice.
“I don't belong here.”
Silence.
Viego released the microphone, which swayed slightly on its stand, and ran a trembling hand over his face, pushing his damp hair back. The song was over, leaving him completely exposed, empty, and without a single shield to protect his pride from the gaze of everyone on the other side of the glass.
He pulled off his headphones with a clumsy, jerky movement, wishing with all his might that the studio's silence would swallow even the echo of his ragged breathing. It took him a few seconds to muster the courage to lift his head and look through the glass.
Turning around, he blinked a couple of times, disoriented. He saw the whole band staring at him, motionless in the dimness of the control room, their eyes strangely moist and glistening… Or at least, that's what he thought, given the moisture clouding his own. So exposed, the dissonant member of Pentakill did something completely unusual, something he would never admit to under torture: he blushed, feeling a sudden, uncomfortable heat creep up his neck.
He tried to reassert his mask of corporate coolness, but the carnage was already burned into the system.
On the other side of the glass, the band members' minds were working at very different speeds. Karthus abruptly broke the trance, clapping his hands in the air as he mentally calculated the Spotify profits. For him, Viego's teary eyes translated into cash; this wasn't just a tantrum, it was the damn platinum single Pentakill needed to blow up the market after years of inactivity. Olaf, for his part, simply scratched his beard vigorously, letting out a muffled snort. The drummer didn't understand a damn thing about divorces or sentimental grief, but he respected raw violence, and the scream Viego had just unleashed was sharp enough to peel the paint off the walls.
Sona, however, kept her fingers hovering over the potentiometers, maintaining absolute respect for the channel. She didn't need Viego to blush or try to camouflage his pain behind his usual arrogance; her magic allowed her to feel the exact pulse of that squeezed heart and the legal void that burned within him.
And then there was the cupcake.
Seraphine stood motionless by the door, the crumpled papers Thresh had forced her to sign still clutched in her hands. She'd entered the studio mentally grumbling about the Los Angeles contracts, but Viego's brutal display had completely disarmed her. She no longer saw the insufferable, spoiled, elitist guy who looked down on her. Now she saw the tip of the iceberg: a desperate man, trapped in a destructive cycle, using music as his only therapy to keep from completely losing his mind.
Sera, who had always boasted about singing to heal others, realized in that instant that The Threshold wasn't just a rehearsal space for Pentakill. It was a field hospital. And the grumpy cat now trying to salvage its pride in front of the glass was its most urgent patient.
Viego didn't wait to hear Thresh's financial projections or Yorick's macabre flattery. He shoved open the booth door, stared at the floor to avoid Seraphine's gaze, and strode across the studio. He left with his tail between his legs, consumed by unbearable humiliation, seeking refuge in the parking lot to catch his breath.
But the universe—or rather, Olaf's clumsy finger—had other plans.
By the time Viego reached his car and turned on his phone screen, his notification menu was overflowing. Olaf, in a clumsy attempt to "record the rehearsal to check the drum rhythms," had pressed the wrong button. Viego's emotional outburst, with his broken voice, suppressed tears, and the raw scream of "RUN!", had already been uploaded to Pentakill's official Instagram Stories for twenty minutes. It had thousands of views, screenshots circulating on Twitter, and hundreds of thousands of fans commenting that the new album was going to be "killer".
Viego nearly smashed his phone against the windshield. He was exposed. Naked before the internet because of some caveman with drumsticks.
Entering the comments section with a churning stomach, he saw that the internet had already split into two irreconcilable camps. On one side were the fans who justified the vocalist's outburst, applauding the raw power of his musical return; On the other hand, a wave of criticism and tabloid press claimed, with considerable cynicism, that it was all nothing more than a pathetic emotional blackmail tactic designed to publicly pressure Isolde into returning.
A disgusting controversy he had never asked for and now had to swallow whole. His grief, his misery, and the dull pain of his divorce reduced to a fifteen-second clip for the public debate of millions of strangers. On the other side of the bunker's glass, just a few meters from where he was parked, he knew perfectly well what was happening. His band might be scolding Olaf for his digital clumsiness, yes, but inside they'd already be calculating the profits on Spotify and rubbing their hands together. For them, his tears translated into cash. For him, it was absolute emptiness.
Viego turned off the screen, threw his phone onto the passenger seat, and rested his forehead against the steering wheel in the car's dimness. The silence of the night felt thicker and more hostile than ever, making it clear to him that his own subsoil had just become a fucking uninhabitable place.