Portal │ ONC 2025

"My daughter's dying. A curse. An Umbrakin's mark. It's killing her slowly, like rot from the inside."

Um. Okay, I don't know if I can take anymore grim details of why I am needed here, to either heal someone or bring back the dead. Which, I have not yet told Dane. I still don't know how to break the news to her that I can't bring back her family...

Dane stepped forward, broad-shouldered and tense, her beautifully handsome face showing the wariness in her expression. "...She was cursed?" she asked, low.

The General hesitated, jaw clenched. "Yes. And I know whose mark it is."

Dane stilled.

"Your mother's," he said, deadpan. The silence that followed was thick.

"So," I said carefully, breaking the ice, "you want me to break the curse."

"Yes," the General said. "And once you do, peace will be restored."

Dane laughed. It was hollow, harsh, almost a bark. "Peace? You razed the Red City. Desecrated the Sacred Lands. You murdered children—my kind—and called it a cleansing."

Damn, clearly I missed out on a lot of the history lesson. Syla, standing just off to the side, drawn her bow in a blink, string stretched taut with an arrow pointed squarely at Dane's heart. "Hold your fucking tongue," she snarled.

Dane didn't move. She just stared at Syla like she was already dead.

"Syla," the General said, voice like iron dragged through gravel. She didn't lower her aim. He turned his head, his hand lifted. A silent command. Syla held her stance a moment longer than she needed to, eyes locked on Dane like she was daring her to speak again. Then, with a sharp breath, she eased the bowstring and let the arrow dip back down.

The General's tone turned colder. "Your kind brought the plague. The rot. You dance in the shadows of forgotten gods and wonder why we fear you." He glared at Dane with disgust. "You are the reason my daughter suffers. Your existence is a wound on this land."

He stepped closer. "She screams through the night. Your curse—made sure that no healer, no magic, nothing but the Chosen One could release her."

Then he turned to me, and for a second, I almost felt sorry for him.

He didn't look like the monster Dane had painted him to be. He looked like a father begging the world to be fair, and finding nothing but locked doors. I wondered... if someone I loved were slipping through my hands like that—would I have burned the sky for a chance to save them?

Dane's face was locked in anger, jaw tense. By the way Dane looked at the floor, I could tell—some part of her knew he might've been right.

Still.

"...It doesn't make it right." My voice didn't rise, but it hit the space between us like a stone dropped in still water. "It doesn't make it right to obliterate an entire kind—just because you're hurting. You murdered innocents who had nothing to do with your grief."

The General didn't look away.

"I know it doesn't make it right," he said, his voice cracked—just a little. "You think I haven't buried the faces that begged for mercy? That I haven't seen what's left after a city's been turned to ash?"

He stepped toward me, slowly. His gaze never dropped. "But right doesn't bring her the healing she needs. Right doesn't hold her hand when she thinks she's dying."

He looked at Dane again—longer, colder.

"You curse the world and pretend it's just your nature. But it leaves the rest of us picking through the ruins."