ZEPHYR: Reborn With A God System

CHAPTER 2 - GODSPARK AWAKENS

I couldn't close my eyes, so I lay there on the cold landing of the east wing with Sylene standing over me, her sword dripping, watching the light leave my face. She didn't wipe the steel or say a single word; she just gathered her rosary into her palm, turned, and walked down the stairs, her footsteps fading until the building held nothing but the sound of my own blood against stone.

The white light from whatever had flared inside me lingered behind my eyes, but my body went dead cold, and my skin grew stiff against the dust. My jaw locked, and one of my eyes stayed half open, staring at the ceiling beam above me. I lay like that through the whole dark hours, the wind freezing the water on my shirt while I watched the black slowly turn to gray, and then to the pale yellow while the sun rose.

Finally It was morning again, and the whole school erupted into discussions from the distant hallway.

Bells rang at a distance, and voices carried across the courtyard, and then footsteps entered the old wing heavily. A caretaker carrying a broom climbed the first landing, turned the corner, and stopped so hard the broom clattered on the steps.

"Gods," he whispered. "Someone get the guard, Master Draven's boy is dead on the stairs!"

Few minutes later, hands grabbed my shoulders and lifted me onto a stretcher…panicked, and they carried me out of the building while students stopped in the courtyard to point and whisper behind their hands. None of their voices made sense to me anymore; it all sounded like water over my head. They rushed me into the academy infirmary and slammed the doors shut behind us.

"He's lost too much blood," a doctor shouted, ripping my shirt open. "Get the stitches, hold his chest down!"

I felt the needle go through my skin again and again, but the wound would not hold. Blood kept pooling around his fingers, and every time he pulled a stitch tight, the flesh tore open again, weeping thin and dark like dirty water. Beside the bed, a glass box with a glowing needle began to pulse, a steady hurried beep echoing off the walls, getting slower with every second.

"He's slipping," a nurse said, her voice shaking. "Doctor, the heart's stopping."

"Press the wound!" Even after pressing the wound nothing happened…then the sound flattened into a single endless tone that filled the room, and the glowing needle stretched into a straight line across the glass, dead and still.

The doctor stopped working. His bloody hands hovered over my chest for three long seconds before he let out a breath and stepped back.

"Call Lord Draven," he said quietly. "Tell him his son didn't survive the tournament."

The nurse reached down and pulled the white linen sheet over my face, tucking it under my chin and covering my half-open eyes, and everything went dark again. The room cleared out, and the door clicked shut.

Under the cloth, my chest was completely still. No breath, no heartbeat. But right beneath that flatline in my ears, a calm voice from the night before spoke inside my skull, loud and clear.

[ Condition met. ]

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Heat hit my ribs like boiling water. The torn flesh pulled together under the sheet, sealing the hole in my chest until the pain vanished completely, and my lungs gasped for air, pulling the linen straight into my mouth. I sat up on the metal table, tearing the cloth off my head, and the tray on the side table crashed to the floor.

The door swung open a second later. My stepmother stood in the frame with two clan guards behind her, her face set in that cold, impatient look she wore whenever she had to deal with me.

"Have the carriage brought around back," she said looking into the hallway. "We'll take the body through the servant's gate so nobody… " She stopped mid sentence as she look at me, her face turning pale.

Her eyes locked on me sitting upright on the table with the bloody sheet pooled in my lap, and the color drained from her skin so fast her lips turned gray… It wasn't relief. It was pure, raw terror, the look of someone who had just seen a ghost walk out of a grave.

"You," she choked out. "You were dead."

"I got better,"

Heavy boots sounded in the corridor, and my father stepped past her into the room. Lord Draven Veyne looked at the flatline on the monitor, then down at the bloody floor, and finally at me. For one second his jaw clenched, because he had signed the death paper, and he knew what a corpse looked like. But the golden lion asked no questions. He didn't ask how a markless boy survived a blade through the heart, and he didn't reach out to touch me. He buried the shock behind his stone face before anyone else could notice.

"Get dressed," Draven said, his voice level and cold. "We are going home."

They took me back to Obsidian Fort in silence. No guards talked to me, and Vessral stared out the carriage window the entire ride with her knuckles white against her dress. When we entered the great hall, nobody mentioned the infirmary, nobody mentioned the blood on my clothes, and nobody asked who held the sword…nobody cared about what happened to me…By evening, they set the family table.

It was the first time in three years I had been allowed to sit with them for dinner, and I understood immediately that it was not honor but observation, because I was a strange thing now, and strange things get watched. Vessral presided, and Nyra kept her head down, picking at her meat without looking at me once, her face still bruised from our fight in the passage. Sylene sat across from me with her hands folded, wearing that same sweet, patient smile, her rosary wound tight around her right wrist, acting as if nothing had happened on the east wing stairs. But she hadn't touched her food.

Near the end of the meal, she stood up with a silver goblet in her hands, dark wine poured straight from the decanter, and walked around the long table to stop beside my chair, smiling down at me widely.

"You should drink, brother," she said softly, holding the cup out with both hands. "You lost so much blood today. Mother had the kitchen brew herbs into it to help your strength."

I turned my head and looked up at her, right into her eyes. Sylene smiled at me, waiting, then her smile faultered.

Her hands began to tremble, and she stared into my face with her pupils blowing wide, because the eyes looking back at her weren't the flat gray-brown eyes I had been born with. They were glowing amber, immediately she saw that, she froze then the goblet slipped from her fingers.

The wine spilled across the flags, splashing against the hem of her white dress. Sylene stumbled back two steps with her breath catching in her throat, her eyes glued to my face like she was staring at an executioner. Across the table, my father's knife stopped mid-cut then I heard the voice again [ First resonance: Tidecall. ]

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