The heavy, psychic silence of the Plaza of Screams was broken by Nyxara's call. "Statera? I need you."

The urgency in her voice, layered with a rare, maternal fear, acted like a spell, snapping the tension inside the fissure. The intimate bubble of grief and reunion surrounding Shiro and Statera burst. Statera's head jerked up, her councillor's instincts overriding her aunt's heart for now. She gave Shiro's shoulder one last, reassuring squeeze before rising, her expression shifting from soft compassion to one of sharp, focused intensity.

"Stay here," she murmured to Shiro, her voice already adopting its professional tone. He nodded, wiping his face with the back of his hand, his own emotions receding behind a mask of concern for his brother. The raw connection they had forged was now a steady, silent undercurrent, a new foundation upon which the immediate crisis could be faced.

Statera followed Nyxara out into the oppressive mist of the Plaza. Kuro stood a few feet from the entrance, his posture rigid, his face averted, a stark silhouette against the pulsing, jaundiced gloom. Nyxara stood beside him, her multi hued eyes dark with a worry that was both regal and deeply personal. Without a word, Statera's gaze, sharp and diagnostic, dropped to the arm Kuro was subtly cradling against his body, a gesture of protection that spoke volumes.

"Show me," she said, her voice not unkind, but devoid of any preamble. This was her domain, her purpose.

Kuro hesitated, a flicker of shame crossing his features, shame at the weakness, shame at the visible proof of his father's vile ownership. Nyxara gave him a slight, encouraging nod, her presence a silent vow of solidarity. With a reluctant exhale that fogged in the cold air, he extended his left arm.

The sight made Statera's blood run cold. Even in the jaundiced, sickly light of the plaza, the corruption was hideous. The veins from his wrist to his elbow were not black, but a deep, venomous blue that seemed to glow with its own sickly luminescence, like foxfire on a rotting log. They were not just discoloured; they were grotesquely transformed, twisted and raised against his skin like thorny, petrified worms trapped beneath the surface. They pulsed with a slow, rhythmic throb that was utterly alien to the steady beat of a heart, a parasitic rhythm. The flesh around them was an angry, inflamed red mixed with the luminescent blue, taut and shiny, stretched painfully over the corruption beneath. A faint, acrid smell of spoiled meat and bitter odour emanated from it, a stench of profound wrongness that made the very air taste metallic and foul.

Statera's breath hitched. "By The Light of Polaris," she whispered, her clinical detachment vanishing for a second, replaced by pure, unadulterated horror. She stepped closer, her eyes narrowing to slits as she examined the vile markings, her mind already racing through dusty tomes of healing lore and blight identification. "Inside. Now. I need to see this in proper light. I need my herbs."

She didn't wait for agreement, turning on her heel and striding back into the fissure, a woman on a grim mission. Nyxara gently placed a hand on Kuro's back, guiding her son to trust Statera with a slight nod.

The resistance hideout, still thick with the emotional aftermath of the last hour, fell into a watchful silence as Statera commandeered a quieter corner. Ryota and Juro exchanged a glance but said nothing, giving her space. Haruto, ever the pragmatist, immediately brought over a lantern and a small, travel worn chest that served as her field apothecary kit. Statera cleared a low crate of supplies, creating a makeshift examination table. "Sit," she instructed Kuro, her movements efficient and sure. The warm, dancing flame of the lantern was a stark, welcome contrast to the plaza's malevolent glow, carving out a small, intimate infirmary from the darkness, an island of nascent hope and focused skill in the sea of despair.

Kuro sat on the offered stool, his posture deceptively relaxed, but his storm grey eyes, fixed on Statera's preparations, betrayed a deep seated unease. He watched her every move with the hyper vigilance of a soldier assessing a new weapon, a wild animal unsure of the healer's touch. He trusted his Aunts judgment implicitly, but this was different. This was cold, clinical, and it involved exposing the most tangible, grotesque proof of his father's ownership to a stranger's scrutiny.

"What exactly is this?" he asked, his voice steady but carrying a sharp, wire tight edge of anxiety he couldn't quite conceal. He gestured with his chin to the corruption, as if giving it a name might grant him some power over it.

Statera didn't answer immediately. She struck a flint, lighting a small brazier. Into it, she crumbled a bundle of dried, fragrant herbs, pungent sage and sharp, clean frost heathen. Aromatic smoke curled into the air. She took his wrist, her grip firm but not unkind, and passed his arm through the smoke. They all watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the smoke seemed to actively recoil from the corrupted flesh, twisting away as if repelled by an invisible field of vileness, refusing to even touch the glowing blue veins. Her expression was one of intense, furious concentration.

"This is a twisted, defiled form of Polarisia," she finally said, her voice calm and authoritative, though her eyes blazed with a cold, purifying fury. She looked up at him, her gaze grave. "A rare, silver leafed plant that grows only in the highest, most sacred and secret peaks of Nyxarion. It is one of our most cherished resources, a gift from the mountain itself, known for its unparalleled healing properties, particularly for catastrophic burns and wounds that scar not just the flesh, but the spirit." Her lips thinned into a severe, bloodless line. "But this… this is not the Polarisia I know. It's been corrupted. Blighted by a malice I can scarcely comprehend. It has been forced into a symbiotic nightmare with your body." She met his eyes, ensuring he understood the full weight of the violation. "Whoever did this didn't just mark you, Kuro. They weaponized a symbol of our healing. Perverted a thing of life and purity into an engine of torment. They made a mockery of our most sacred natural law."

Kuro's eyes widened in dawning, sickening disbelief. "Polarisia?" The word was foreign on his tongue, yet hauntingly familiar. "That's… a children's tale. A legend from my mother's forbidden storybooks. The texts said it was so scarce it bloomed only under the brightest light of Sirius, once every two years, and that its petals were guarded by the spirits of the mountain itself." His voice trailed off as the horrifying implication, the sheer scale of the transgression, sank in. The cost, the impossibility… "How… how could he possibly get his hands on something like that? How could he even know?"

Statera's expression darkened, her face a mask of grim shadows in the lantern light. "It is no myth. It is real, and its hidden groves are protected by oath and blood by the Lumina of the Polaris Council and a select few of her most trusted healers. Their locations are our most fiercely guarded secrets, passed down through whispers and bloodlines, never written on any scroll. To obtain it in any quantity…" She shook her head, her gaze becoming distant, looking at a betrayal only she could see. "It would require either an act of sacrilege so profound we would have felt its echo across the kingdom, or…" She paused, the word hanging in the air like a toxic vapour. "Or a betrayal from within the highest, most trusted circles of my own council. A heart I trusted has poisoned the well." Her voice dropped to a horrified, furious whisper. "This is not just a personal attack on you, Kuro. This is a declaration of war on our most sacred trusts. He has not just harmed you; he has poisoned a wellspring of life itself and used it to defile both of you."

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The scale of it left Kuro reeling. His arm wasn't just a punishment; it was a message. A trophy. A symbol of his father's limitless reach and his utter contempt for anything good, anything pure. It was a violation that stretched from his own skin into the very heart of Nyxarion's mysteries.

His jaw tightened, the shock and horror hardening in his gut into a cold, sharp determination. As if the mere discussion of its origin had given it strength, a fresh, throbbing ache began to pulse deep within the corrupted tissue, a dull, insistent drumbeat of pain. "So, can we fix it?" he asked, his voice low and firm, cutting through the grim revelations.

Statera met his gaze, her own resolve mirroring his, a healer's steel in her eyes. "Yes," she stated, without a hint of doubt. "But first, we must understand how deep this corruption runs, how it has intertwined with your life's blood. This will not be a quick process. It will take time, and careful, painful treatment. This is but the first skirmish." She reached into her apothecary chest and produced a small, unadorned clay vial. Unstopping it revealed a thick, mercurial salve the colour of liquid moonlight, which seemed to hold a faint, gentle glow within its depths. It was beautiful, and as the vial was opened, the air around them was suddenly cleansed, smelling of clean snow, high altitude pine, and cold stone, the very essence of the sacred mountain.

"This salve is made from genuine, pure Polarisia, harvested with prayer and gratitude under the winter moons," she explained, holding it up so the lamplight caught its soft sheen. "It is the absolute antithesis of the corruption within you. It will seek out the blight and attempt to purge it, to strangle the vile synergy and force the plant's essence back toward its original purpose: healing." Her eyes held his, filled with a professional compassion that was somehow more reassuring than mere sympathy. "But I must be clear, Kuro. This will not simply 'hurt'. The blight is a living thing, a malicious intelligence woven into you. It will not relinquish its hold easily. It will fight back. It will feel like…" she searched for the words, her face a landscape of grim certainty, "…like cleansing fire being poured directly into your veins. Like your blood is being replaced with molten lead. The pain will be… exceptional. It will be a battle fought inside your very body. Are you ready?"

Kuro didn't hesitate. He had endured a lifetime of his father's particular brand of cruelty. Pain, in all its forms, was a language he was fluent in. He held out his arm, his hand remarkably steady. "Do it."

Statera nodded, a flash of profound respect in her eyes. Using a smooth, polished goose feather, she dipped its tip into the vial, gathering a small amount of the silvery substance. With the reverence of a scribe illuminating a holy text, she applied a thin, precise layer of the salve over the length of the largest, most fiercely glowing blue vein.

For a heartbeat, there was nothing. A cool, soothing sensation, a blessed numbness.

Then the reaction was immediate and violently alchemical.

Where the salve touched the corruption, a fierce, sizzling hiss erupted, the sound of water splashed onto a white hot forge, a sound of elemental conflict. Thin, writhing tendrils of acrid, blue tinged steam rose from his skin, carrying the stench of scorched venom and burnt ozone. The luminescent veins beneath the salve seemed to convulse, the light within them flaring from a sickly glow to a vicious, angry sapphire blaze, as if the blight was screaming in outrage at this purity invading its domain.

Then the pain hit Kuro.

It was not a wave; it was a cataclysm. A white hot, acid fire agony that lanced from his fingertips to his shoulder blade, so intense and sudden that Kuro's vision swam with black spots and erupting stars. A strangled, animalistic gasp was torn from his throat, his back arching violently off the stool. He squeezed his eyes shut, his teeth grinding together with such force that the coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth. It felt exactly as she had said: molten metal was being injected into his bloodstream, burning and scouring everything in its path. He could feel the two forces, the pure, icy light of the Polarisia and the hot, vicious blight, warring inside him, using his nerves and sinew as their battlefield. His muscles in his forearm corded and knotted, seizing up with the intensity of the conflict. A cold, clammy sweat broke out all over his body instantly, and he trembled violently from the scream that ripped out.

Through the blinding haze of agony, he was dimly aware of Nyxara's hand on his good shoulder, her grip firm and steady, a tangible anchor to reality. He focused on that point of contact, on the pressure of her fingers, using it as a lifeline to stop himself from being completely swept away by the storm of fire in his arm.

Unbeknownst to either healer or patient, so focused were they on the brutal battle being waged on the stool, another pair of eyes watched from the shadows near the infirmary entrance.

Shiro had followed the commotion, drawn by a brother's primal concern. He stood half hidden behind a natural rock formation, his amber eyes wide and unblinking, reflecting the flickering lamplight and the fierce, hissing reaction on Kuro's arm. He saw the terrifying distortion of pain on Kuro's face, a face usually set in a mask of defiance or cold indifference, now pale and beaded with sweat, etched with an agony so profound it made Shiro's own heart clench in shared suffering. He saw the fierce, unyielding concentration on Statera's face, the deep worry etched on Nyxara's. He saw the corrupted, violently glowing veins on his brother's arm, a horrifying visual representation of the evil they were all fighting, a poison delivered by the father they both shared in their own ways.

But he was just a shadow in the periphery. A silent, forgotten observer. His own recent vulnerability, his own cathartic tears in Statera's arms, were completely forgotten, subsumed by the visceral reality of Kuro's immediate, physical torment. He didn't step forward into the light; he didn't speak a word of comfort. He simply watched, his presence utterly unnoticed, a silent sentinel for his brother's pain, a lost child bearing witness to yet another brutal battle in a war that had already stolen their mothers and was now trying to claim their very bodies.

The fierce, hissing conflict on Kuro's arm subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving behind a throbbing, deep seated ache that was a dull echo of the previous, blinding agony. The venomous blue luminescence of the corruption had faded to a sullen, bruised purple, the veins less raised, as if the pure Polarisia salve had forced the blight into a temporary, sullen retreat. The air still smelled of scorched venom and bitter herbs, but the acrid stench was now undercut by the clean, cold scent of the salve.

Statera let out a long, slow breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. The intense focus that had held her rigid broke, and she swayed slightly on her feet, the Polaris light around her dimming to a soft, weary glow. With gentle, precise movements, she applied a final, thick layer of the silvery salve before wrapping his forearm in clean, soft linen bandages.

"There," she said, her voice husky with exhaustion. She stepped back, surveying her work with a critical eye. "The corruption is contained for now. The salve will continue its work, drawing the blight to the surface. We must change the dressing often and monitor it closely. The pain will be… persistent." She looked at Kuro, her expression a mix of professional assessment and maternal concern.

Kuro flexed his bandaged arm carefully, a sharp wince twisting his features before he mastered it, his face settling into its usual stoic mask. But the gratitude in his storm grey eyes was unmistakable, a rare and raw emotion he made no effort to hide. "Thank you, Statera," he said, his voice low and sincere, the words carrying the weight of a debt that went far beyond a simple healing.

A small, genuine smile, the first truly warm expression she had offered since the revelation of her sister, touched Statera's lips. "It is my honour," she replied softly, her own gaze flickering to Shiro for a moment, binding the two acts of healing, one of the body, one of the heart, together.

It was into this fragile, tender moment of relief that Shiro chose to make his entrance.

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