Dv-s The Skaafin Prize <HIGH-QUALITY ⚡>

Vethis tilted his head, genuinely curious. “Then what do you claim?”

Venn walked through the door without looking back. Behind him, the Obsidian Galleries collapsed into silence, and Vethis sat alone in the dark, wondering if he had just lost or won something himself.

Vethis crouched beside him. For a moment, the Proctor’s brass eyes held something almost like pity. “No one ever can. That is why the Skaafin Prize has been claimed only three times in a thousand years. Most choose to stop. They leave with nothing but the weight of remembering.” DV-s The Skaafin Prize

He stood at the edge of the Obsidian Galleries, a cavern of polished volcanic glass that reflected his own scarred face back at him a thousand times. Somewhere in these echoing halls waited the Prize—and the one creature who could grant it.

The glass walls rippled. Suddenly Venn was no longer in the galleries. He was back in the salt-flat village of his childhood, the day the fever took his younger sister. He watched his twelve-year-old self hold her hand as she slipped away, helpless. Vethis tilted his head, genuinely curious

“Stop,” he whispered.

On the salt flats, Venn knelt and pressed his palm to the ground. For the first time in years, he said their names aloud: the sister, the rebels, the lover. All of them. None of them. Vethis crouched beside him

“The Prize,” Vethis purred, stepping through the memory like a ghost, “is the return of one thing you have lost. A person. A moment. A piece of your soul. But to claim it, you must choose which loss you value most. And then you must relive the others.”

And then he understood.