Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 2478

Chapter 2478: Deeper

Sylas continued watching Cassarae through the connection to Earth while another challenge formed around him. Her sword moved against Tomoe’s, her Will carrying a freedom he had never felt from her before, yet his thoughts had gone too far inward for even the battle to hold them for long.

He had spent the last several minutes questioning how well he knew his wife, then his father and grandfather, and eventually himself. Once he started looking, memories he had spent years accepting without examination began returning with different meanings.

Cassarae was seventeen the first time he became afraid of himself around her. She had told him she had a surprise, and Sylas had expected some stupid prank right until she stepped out of her bedroom flushed from head to toe, nervous in a way he almost never saw from her.

He still remembered the sheen of sweat along her collarbone and the way her heartbeat showed beneath it. What he remembered most clearly was the thought that entered his mind before he had time to dress it up as anything more civilized, had time to hide it beneath the veneer of fakeness he was used to facing the world with.

She was his.

The feeling had been violent in its simplicity. He wanted to take her, keep her, mark something into their relationship that would make the question of who she belonged with irrelevant forever, and the ease with which those thoughts came had frightened him more than anything Cassarae could have done.

He had pushed her onto the bed before his own mind caught up with him. Cassarae’s eyes had held shock and a little fear, but there had been anticipation there too, and somehow seeing that she wasn’t entirely repulsed had only made Sylas more uncertain of himself.

Her excitement faded while he sat trapped inside his own head. She touched him, worried that she had done something wrong, and Sylas had been too busy wondering who the hell he was to give her an answer.

Years later, he had finally understood part of what happened. His desires had collided with what Cassarae might want, and for perhaps the first time in his young life, another person’s desires mattered enough to make his own feel dangerous. But maybe more importantly than that, it had forced him to face just how little he showed the world of his true self.

He had broken up with her soon afterward.

At the time, Sylas could have given himself several explanations for the decision. Looking back now, stripped of all the language he had once used to make sense of it, one remained more convincing than the others.

He had been scared.

Another crimson fracture spread beneath Sylas’ cheek while Rheos spoke somewhere across the challenge space. Nosphaleen shifted closer when she noticed it, though she remained silent this time and allowed Sylas to continue staring at something neither she nor Rheos could see.

There had been other warnings.

Sylas remembered the child with bloody hands.

The image had first come to him under the influence of Greed, so he had always found it easy enough to file away as another expression of a Madness Seed. A small boy sat over something dead or dying and opened it with his bare hands, carefully pulling apart flesh and exposing whatever lay beneath with none of the revulsion a child should have felt.

The boy wanted to know how everything worked. Which pieces were necessary, what could be removed without ending life immediately, how long the body would continue functioning after each part disappeared. The blood on his hands had meant less to him than the unanswered questions inside the corpse.

Then the child had looked up.

Sylas had seen his own face.

He had known the memory wasn’t real. His recollection stretched back farther than most people’s, and there was no missing childhood afternoon where four- or five-year-old Sylas had carved apart a living creature to satisfy his curiosity.

Yet the image had returned in different forms ever since. He had thought of it while dissecting enemies, while studying creatures that should have terrified him, and in those moments when the desire to understand something became strong enough that the method of reaching the answer stopped carrying much weight.

Maybe Greed hadn’t created that child. Maybe it had simply found something inside Sylas that already understood him.

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