"You will be executed at dawn, mongrel."
Bound not by the chains around him but the void those words formed in his brain,
Lunas let his legs go numb. The ground was of less comfort than he felt it would be, but the impact of his head against the wall was just enough to clear his mind of panic.
He had to break the chains around his wrists if he wanted any chance at escape and yet he had no idea what to do. Despite the momentary calm, his heart was still beating out of his chest, but the pain he felt from the guard slamming him earlier was almost gone.
Despite that, there was a burning beside his heart that wouldn't go away and seemed to be getting even worse.
Control over his breathing faded as the pain deepened along with the size of his breathes. Lunas's wrists were getting torn apart by the restraints as he thrashed against the pain that wouldn't relent.
While each breath got deeper and deeper and his lungs burnt with the strain, realization struck.
The stress of the last couple days had forced one of the thirteen seals every human has on their soul to start cracking. His father had warned him and his brothers about the risks of breaking a seal this way, specifically the pain that came with one's innate ether mixing with the world's ether which is less than happy to coexist with his.
His heartbeat began to slow down, synchronizing with his out of control breathing, and instead of pain, he felt an unfamiliar but soothing sensation rolling across him from the opposite side of his chest as his heart.
Ether was saturating Lunas' body, and he tried to recall the meditative technique Miss Laurel had shown him and Palin to prepare them for unsealing, but it just couldn't cut through the pain he still felt. His breathing was coming under control as he tried to feel his Soulspace the way he would the breeze on his chest, but he couldn't reach it.
He felt something there, a vast and untouched region of his very soul but before he could really feel the signature of his ether, foreign ether began flooding it through his lungs.
A wicked and unrelenting burn reached his heart, but the second it touched the barrier of his Soulspace it ceased. He felt the flow of the ether, but it didn't burn like his father and said it would. It actually felt quite amazing. The shock of his exile, imprisonment, and imminent execution took the backstage of his consciousness letting the ecstasy of ether attunement wash over his mind.
The tension holding his body taught burned away as the flow of ether began to cease and the weight of his restraints was fading to his surprise. He opened his eyes to see the skin on his wrists healing at a visible rate, and to his surprise, the blood that dripped to the ground burned with a white hot effervescence as it melted both the ground and the bottom of his shackles.
'Dawn is in… when? Gods this has been a never ending nightmare.'
Lunas knew that dawn would come sooner rather than later, and he felt he had a chance to survive it. He had broken the first seal and with it came the beginning of an Unsealed physique. Now that his restraints were 'broken' he thought about what came next.
He had to be ready when the guard came, otherwise there was no doubt that he would notice the steel dripped on the floor or the giant hole in his shackles.
Lunas felt for his Soulspace again, this time feeling a hurricane of strangely familiar forces crash against him. He saw a mass of white flames rushing towards him and raised his hand to protect himself, only to discover they didn't hurt.
His hand fell with his jaw as he saw forest as far as his eyes could reach. White flames danced and writhed amongst blackened leaves, like a living being nurturing and purifying the branches. There was a a taller type of tree which grew much more sparsely than the blackened type of tree. One of them was right beside Lunas and towered over him as it reached into a sea of white flame high above him.
The roots of the tree were wrapped in Astral Flame the same as the shorter trees all throughout his Soulspace, and seemed to be deepening their grasp on the earth beneath them. White veins of fire flowed through the roots and spread down into the roots, as if it was the conduit between the sea of Astral Flame above and the rest of his Soulspace.
The Astral Sun which orbited alongside the sun itself was in fact not a sun, or even some kind of star. It is a hole in existence, pierced through to another realm by Ophelia, Manifestation of Hunger, one which Neiva orbits around. The Astral Sun leaks it's living ether constantly, and in it's pure form, it burns away at the Ambrosia in the Calamities.
Lunas didn't think the strange flames from his blood and in his Soulspace could be Astral Flame in it's pure form, as it would have eaten his divinity as well, weakening whatever facet of his existence was amplified by the breaking of the first seal. He just hoped it wasn't already weakening him.
He made a bit of the Ether in his Soulspace flow around, hoping to instinctively figure out what had been unsealed, but he worried fumbling around would cause more harm than good when he remembered the flames he saw outside of his Soulspace.
Instead, he tried to focus on the flames. He took a deep breath, this time with the intent of taking in as much ether from within his Soulspace as possible, and then he felt it. There was an itch between his heart and where the Soulspace resided that spread towards his hands. His hands began to glow as an almost liquid mass of white fire emanated from them.
It was barely a cups worth of liquid flame, but it floated and spun around and across his hands like a hyperactive snake. He tried to reach out to it with his mind, perhaps to gain some semblance of control over it, and it reacted instantly.
The fire stretched and contorted into a thin copy of his face right in front of him. The disheveled look it had with knotted hair and half-shut eyes shocked him, but he felt like it was wrong. Sure he was half-beaten, exhausted, and definitely looked as bad as it, but he felt stronger.
He was full of ether and knew he could at least guide the Astral Flame, even if he didn't fully know how.
He called his consciousness back from his Soulspace and straightened his back. He was ready to turn that bastard guard's armor to scrap metal.