The metal was solid, yet one second its surface was white with black veins all over it, and the next the two colors reversed their positions. Davross absorbed the light instead of reflecting it, changing its appearance as if there were two colliding forces inside of it, battling for dominion.

Two ingots weren't enough to make anything out of them, but more than enough to start studying its properties and practice Lith's Origin Flames.

​​

"I guess you don't neem my technique to reach the violet core, correct?" Haug asked with a sad smile.

"Correct." Lith nodded, putting the ingots inside his pocket dimension.

"Do you want me to keep the events of Lightkeep a secret from the Council?"

"Let them know." Lith said with a scoff. "Scarlett becoming a Guardian will make them realize their foolishness, while my becoming a new species will make them value me even more.

"I can give up to a little privacy if it means more protections for my beloved ones. If even Baba Yaga can't protect her children alone, what does that say about people like you and me?"

Haug nodded and opened the door of the Travelling Tavern.

"I'm sorry if I can't bring you all the way in, but Derios has dimensional sealing arrays. We have to walk a bit." Once everyone got out of the building, Haug stored it inside his dimensional item.

The arrays of most cities of the Kingdom stopped solely Warps, not dimensional items.

Lith didn't wait for them and flew straight at the city gates and from there to the Distar Household. The hole in the wall had yet to be repaired while several Constables and members of the Knight's Guard looked for the slightest clue.

Brinja sat on the doorsteps of the house, bawling her eyes out and not caring one bit for openly showing her grief. She wanted the whole Kingdom to feel guilty for letting her mother die a dog's death and do the impossible to find the culprit.

The moment she saw Lith, she ran into his arms, hugging him tightly for an entire second before taking a step back and slapping him with all the strength she could muster.

"Where the fuck have you been? I've been calling you all night and day! Mom might have called you and you wouldn't even know. What kind of hero lets the woman who took care of him for so long die?

"Where were you when my mother needed you the most?" Her voice was filled with rage and grief as she desperately searched for someone to blame for what had happened.

"Mirim didn't call me. It's the first thing I checked when I got the news of her death." The sadness in his voice made her fury disappear.

Without it, there was nothing holding Brinja together and she started to cry again. Lith embraced her, sharing her pain and grief as if they were siblings.

"I'm sorry for not arriving sooner, but I was hunting down the one who killed Lark. If I dropped everything to come here, it would only have made Mirim's death pointless." He said.

"Did you find them?" She looked at him with a crazed frenzy in her eyes.

"Not yet. But I will." Lith said with a stone-cold voice that held promises of infinite pain.

"Soon?"

"Soon." He nodded.

"When it happens, I want to be there to watch." Brinja hid her face in his chest while clawing at his back as if to squeeze the life out of the object of her hate.

"You have my word." Lith said.

***

Lith and Solus investigated the crime scene to the best of their abilities, but to no avail. The culprit had once again left no trace of their passage aside from the defiled corpse of their victim and the damage to the Household.

Even the members of the Knight's Guard with their amazing forensic devices failed to find a single strand of hair or a drop of blood. Solus turned into her Eyes form, but aside from a massive headache, she gained nothing from it.

The raw amount of information from the Distar Household and the Guard forced her back into her ring form after barely a few seconds.

'By my Mom, now I understand how Scarlett felt when Baba Yaga unlocked the advanced mode. I wish I had some kind of filter as well that gave me access to more information than mana sense but not so many either.' She sighed.

'Maybe, once you go back being a tower, you can check if that interface you discovered after Silverwing broke in now has some other functions related to the Eyes. I doubt that Menadion ever planned on the tower having a portable form.

'According to Baba Yaga's words, fusing your dying body with the tower must have been a last-ditch effort.' Lith replied.

'I hope you are right, otherwise until my power core stabilizes, this form will be utterly useless.' She said.

Once they were done, Lith took the Gate from the local branch of the Mage Association and stepped through the Gate in the barn of the Verhen household.

The sun was about to rise, but its light gave him no joy.

Ever since Lark's death, Mogar had become a darker place to him.

Mirim's murder made sunlight even duller and the thought that by the end of that day Kamila might break up with him made Lith feel as if Mogar had split open under his feet, ready to swallow him whole.

After losing the last semblance of his humanity, Lith's world was filled with so much darkness that losing the light that her unconditional affection bestowed upon him was too much to bear.

Less than 24 hours had passed since the death of Marchioness Distar, yet Lith found all the members of his family assembled together in the living room, waiting for his return.

Aran and Leria tried to run to his legs, but their respective magical beast stopped them. Onyx and Abominus growled at Lith, baring their fangs as the mana from their best spells filled the air.

"Stand down. It's really me." Lith's tone held no threat nor outrage. It was flat as if he was reciting the alphabet.

"Bad Onyx! Bad! How can you be so mean with my big brother?" Aran struggled, but the Shyf held his clothes between her teeth without letting him go.

"Abominus, how can you not recognize uncle Lith?" Leria asked.

"It's not their fault, it's mine." He said while looking at his relatives in the eyes one at a time. "Many things happened during my short absence. One of them made me reach the violet core."

Lith shapeshifted into his Tiamat form, with his seven eyes now fully opened and each one shining with the light of its corresponding element. He used his tail to drag a chair while folding his wings around his shoulders and hips.

"Cool!" The kids said in unison, admiring his glistening scales that now had become thicker and bigger.

"Why is that a bad thing?" Elina threw a worried look at her son.

There was something different with Lith and it wasn't just grief. She had seen him after Protector had faked his death and after Lark's murder.