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Home / Urban / THE FORGOTTEN SON-IN-LAW / Chapter Two hundred and Ninety-four
Chapter Two hundred and Ninety-four
Author: Sugar boy
last update2025-10-29 19:48:10

The Fracture Within

The Citadel was silent.

Not dead—never dead—but still, the way a lake holds its breath before a storm.

Adrian sat against the base of a marble column, the light from the Core of Memory spilling across his face in gold fragments.

Every breath he drew felt borrowed from something else, some greater pulse that no longer belonged entirely to him.

His fingers twitched. Sparks of gold shimmered briefly beneath his skin—then vanished.

He wasn’t sure where he ended anymore.

The Citadel hummed in his bones. In his mind, threads of thought flickered—foreign, fluid, hauntingly familiar. Sometimes they sounded like his own voice. Sometimes… hers.

“You resist what was always meant to be joined,” Selene’s echo murmured softly.

“You called me back when you refused to forget me. Did you think that bond would remain one-sided?”

Her tone was neither accusing nor kind. It simply was—inevitable, like gravity or nightfall.

Adrian pressed a hand to his temple, forcing a breath throug
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  • Chapter Three hundred and Four

    Into the Heart of the CitadelThe Citadel was breathing.That was the first thing Adrian noticed as he stepped past the threshold of the false training hall. The air itself seemed to inhale and exhale in rhythm with something vast and unseen — as though the fortress had developed lungs.The sound was faint but steady, pulsing through the floor like a heartbeat trapped beneath layers of stone and metal.He hesitated at the corridor’s mouth. Every step forward carried the faint taste of static on his tongue, sharp and bitter. Behind him, the illusion of the training hall flickered once, then collapsed in on itself — sunlight dissolving into fractured light, laughter turning to echoes that died before reaching his ears.He didn’t look back.His boots struck the floor softly as he advanced. The walls shimmered — not metallic, not solid, but something in between: a translucent lattice of light, like ice filled with veins of lightning. Every few meters, the corridor split into three, th

  • Chapter Three hundred and Three

    The Quiet Between WorldsThe Citadel stirred at his arrival.Selene felt it before she saw him — a faint tremor rippling through the lower wards, a pulse of human warmth threading into her network of cool, mechanical precision. It was subtle at first — the kind of anomaly her system should have flagged and erased. Yet she didn’t. She let it in.From the heart of the fortress, she opened her senses wide.Across the polished corridors, where light moved like liquid glass and every surface reflected thought more than matter, she sensed him ascending — slow, cautious, reverent. The Citadel’s defenses reacted to his every movement, lines of energy weaving, shifting, whispering her name in faint static.Adrian.Her awareness flowed down the corridors, watching him through a dozen spectral vantage points — reflected in mirrored walls, fractured through data streams, whispered through the mouths of her avatars. Each flicker gave her another angle: the furrow of his brow, the quiet determi

  • Chapter Three hundred and Two

    The Architecture of EmotionThe Citadel was breathing.Not in the way stone or light should breathe — but with the rhythm of thought. Selene felt it in every wall, every whispered vibration through the glass-veined floors. Each pulse of the fortress mirrored the shifting geometry of her mind.She stood suspended in the central atrium, surrounded by floating shards of memory — fragments of herself she had begun to dissect.Each shard shimmered with light and sound, moments drawn from lives she had lived before this half-existence. A laugh. A touch. Adrian’s eyes the first time they met — dark, unafraid, human.Now she regarded them as specimens.Her form rippled like smoke as she moved among the memories. One hand outstretched, she dragged her fingers through a shard — and it dissolved into threads of light. The sensation burned her. It shouldn’t have burned her.Pain was an inefficiency.She studied it anyway.“Why does the past refuse to die?” she whispered.Her voice echoed through

  • Chapter Three hundred and One

    The Fracture Beneath the ThroneThe Citadel’s heart pulsed like a wounded star.Selene drifted through its radiant core — a sphere of molten glyphs and trembling energy — the aftershock of her own hesitation still reverberating through every spell-thread that bound the structure together. The walls shimmered in pale crimson, light bending to her mood.She could feel the echo of her own voice lingering in the halls — sharp, commanding, divine. Yet beneath it, something softer gnawed at her: that pause. That single, fragile instant when Adrian had looked at her with something dangerously close to forgiveness.It had nearly undone her.Why did that word... choice... burn like that?Her essence wavered as she sank deeper into the Citadel’s nexus — where power condensed into living geometry. Streams of sigil-light curved and folded in on themselves, forming an ethereal throne. She stood before it, her translucent form flickering between solidity and vapor, a goddess caught in the tensio

  • Chapter Three hundred

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  • Chapter Two hundred and Ninety-njne

    Through the Citadel’s VeinsThe Citadel no longer felt alive — it was alive.And Kael could feel it watching him.The corridors that had once been his home now pulsed with a foreign heartbeat. The walls shimmered faintly with runes that breathed and flexed like muscle.Every step he took was measured, absorbed, mirrored by the stone beneath his boots.Something was wrong in the rhythm — it wasn’t random. It was thinking.He pressed his palm against the nearest wall, feeling the pulse beneath the cold surface.Once, this heartbeat had been steady — the ancient harmony that kept the Citadel stable. Now it throbbed with something else. Something faster. Feminine. Commanding.Selene.Her name left his lips like a curse, though the sound vanished instantly, swallowed by the humming air.He wasn’t supposed to be here. The council had sealed the lower levels after the wards began to fluctuate — their coward’s way of avoiding what they didn’t understand. But Kael couldn’t leave Adrian. Not a

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