Phei did not react... his face did not move. His eyes did not widen. His breathing did not change. Across the room, Cassiopeia — who had spent the last several days learning her master’s microexpressions with the cold, professional diligence watched Phei’s features stay exactly as they had been and understood completely.

Phei had not reacted.

Phei was also not denying it.

He was surprised.

Surprised in a register that lived underneath the face — too well trained, too ancient, too dragon to let the surface betray him — but that shifted every calculation happening in the room behind it like tectonic plates grinding in hell.

Cassiopeia could see it in the stillness itself. Phei had gone too still. An unsurprised man would have resumed moving by now. A surprised man would have flinched. Phei had simply become the calm eye of a storm that had not yet decided how it would annihilate the world.

Inside Phei’s head, a quieter, colder catastrophe was taking place.

Derek.

Derek Roth-Fairchild.

Not Marcus. Not Danton. Not Anderson. Not the heirs whose names had made every Legacy boy in the Circle of Cowards sit up straighter at the dinner table like dogs waiting for scraps. Derek. The one they bullied when there was no target, occasionally, when one of the other boys was in a foul mood and Derek was the softest, easiest target in the room.

The one who laughed too easily at jokes he didn’t understand. The one who went along with whatever Danton decided.

The most stupid one of them all, so much that it was very easy for Phei to trap him into helping the journalist, put him in the firing target of Bret and Anderson suing the David and his friends, later the whole legacy boys were looking for him.

Most times when Phei was being bullied, Derek would be next if he did something wrong, stupid or if he said something out of line.

Reason why Phei didn’t even bother touching him when he beat his muscles he’d brought with him in the class to ask Phei for Bret and Anderson files... because his very friends were going to deal with him personally, so why ruin it?

That Derek was the one they were afraid of?

Not Marcus — whose progenitor was the Original Angel itself, whose family sat at the apex of the Earth hierarchy, whose very presence in a room made every other heir shrink slightly. Not Danton — currently stronger than Phei, the World Serpent, Jörmungandr. Derek. The wreck.

The laughing-too-loud, drinking-too-fast, failing-every-course-he-took-unless-his-family-bought-the-grade Derek.

They had been getting their memories back.

That alone was information Phei had not possessed thirty seconds ago. Kyle had let it slip like it was nothing — like every Legacy heir had assumed Phei already knew — and it meant the timeline Phei had been working from was wrong.

He had been operating as if the progenitors were dormant, asleep, a future inheritance his enemies would claim someday. That someday was apparently now. Fragments of old-life memory trickling through into teenage bodies across the entire Circle of Cowards for who knew how long.

How did that even work.

The architecture of awakening as he had understood it was a singular event — a threshold, a sudden return, a progenitor surging into a body fully and at once, the way Danton’s had. Not a drip. Not a slow trickle of dream-fragments and déjà vu and feelings when they look at each other in a room.

Kyle had described something Phei’s cosmology did not account for. Which meant Phei’s cosmology had been wrong.

Which meant Kyle, for all the ruin Phei had carved into him, still knew things Phei did not.

And Kyle was not going to tell him.

Not willingly. Not with any amount of additional Void-Ice, not with any more cuts, not even if Phei peeled him apart in layers across the next several hours like a butcher with all the time in the world.

A man who had laughed this hard at Phei’s ignorance was not a man who would volunteer information under further duress. Kyle had just seen the nod Phei had been unable to suppress — and Kyle was going to treasure that flinch all the way into whatever came next, clinging to it like a dying man clinging to the last warm ember in a cold hell.

Phei understood this in the time it took Kyle’s wet triumphant laugh to finish resonating off the cracked drywall.

And then, slowly, Phei smiled.

It was not the cold smile from earlier or mockery.

It was a grin.

Wide. Slow-spreading. Showing teeth. The amethyst of his eyes catching the lamplight and refracting it into something with too many edges, something that belonged in the dark between stars — a boy had just been handed an unexpected gift by a dying man, and was now unwrapping it with unhurried, delighted anticipation.

Cassiopeia, on her couch, felt her stomach flip.

’Oh.’

’Oh, Master.’

Kyle, hanging in his Void-Ice chains three feet off the floor, saw the grin and his one functional eye flickered with a new kind of fear that realized the devil he thought he was taunting had just grown another set of fangs.

He had been expecting Phei to flinch further. He had been expecting Phei to step back. He had been expecting the threat — you have no idea what is waking up inside Derek — to land on Phei the way it had landed on him the first time he had heard it from one of his own Legacy brothers, with cold creeping certainty.

Phei was not backing off.

Phei was smiling like a boy who had just discovered a new flavour of hell.

A thin shiver worked its way through Kyle’s ruined body that had nothing to do with the arctic cold bleeding off the chains. His own toothy, blood-caked grin — the one that had been worn across his half-destroyed face a heartbeat earlier — began, involuntarily, to falter. The torn corner of his lip twitched downward.

A low wet whimper escaped his throat.

Because the grin in front of him was not human.

Phei looked delighted.

Phei stepped closer.

Looked directly into Kyle’s one remaining eye.

"You know what, Kyle."

"P— Phei — Phei please —"

"You and I are going to be such good friends."

Kyle’s breath stopped.

"Such good friends. So close. So inseparable — and I cannot stress this enough — that you will be unable to do anything, going forward, that I am not already a part of. Every breath. Every thought. Every little involuntary twitch of your ruined body. You and I, my friend — you and I are about to be constant."

"What — what do you —" Kyle’s bubbling mouth worked around the words, blood frothing pink at the corners. "What — hhh — what do you mean — what do you —"

Phei’s grin widened, slow and terrible.

"Cosmic Dragon Face."

The words were spoken the way someone might mention the weather.

The room did not agree.

Kyle’s body went rigid — not held rigid by the chains, but from the inside, every muscle locking simultaneously as something beneath his skin received the summons and began, unwillingly, to answer.

For one full second nothing happened. The world held its breath. Kyle’s one eye rolled back into his skull.

A bead of blood formed on the already-destroyed surface of his forehead, then another, then a third, spaced perfectly in a triangle.

Then he screamed.

It was not the screaming of the past hour of torture. This was new. This was the scream a body produced when its soul had just been told — at a register below thought, below consent, below anything human — that it was being requisitioned.

That the thing it had been housing was being called out.

That the millions-buried soul currently drip-feeding memories into its conscious mind had been ordered, by a voice it did not know how to disobey, to present itself.

The scream shattered what was left of the windows along the far wall in a glittering explosion of glass.

The room throbbed.

One long rolling pulse passed through the walls, the floor, the ceiling — the very architecture breathing around them like the lungs of some vast, ancient beast. Parquet heaved and settled. The drywall cratered further. A crack spiderwebbed across the ethanol fireplace and split it straight down the middle with a sound like breaking bone.

In the corner of Phei’s vision, the System chimed — polite, matter-of-fact, as if announcing a package had arrived.

[Ding! Progenitor Soul fighting the Cosmic Dragon’s influence!]