Chương 151: Interlude: Before She Looks Back

[Time]: Year 1939 [Location]: Multiple — An Alternate High-Magic Plane · The Palace of Rex Mundi, Grand Audience Chamber Three years. When spoken aloud, it sounded like an epoch. But standing at the precipice of the era and looking backward, Tasia understood that three years was nothing more than the sharp, truncated intake of breath before a scream. The shadow of global war had been advancing across the continent like a creeping frost.

Yet the true turning point did not arrive from the massing armies of Holheim, nor from any geopolitical masterstroke. It arrived from an inconceivable, catastrophic act of internal self-destruction. Mary Noeffler had murdered her own sister. It touched the unforgivable taboo of Witch civilization. The remaining Grand Witches convened. The verdict was unanimous. An execution squad was formed. Tasia stood at the periphery and watched. Nominally, the succession fell under the jurisdiction of nine Grand Witches.

Practically, the mathematics required only one variable: Ovelia. The other eight were present because an event of this magnitude, the forcible succession of the First Seat, demanded unanimous, witnessed consensus from every member of the High Council. The nine arrayed themselves along the highest ridges of the continent, silent and watchful, waiting for the inevitable dust to settle. It was the ancient, unbreakable logic of the wolf pack: when the crown of the alpha is contested, the duel must be singular.

The new First Seat had to possess a violence that unequivocally eclipsed all others. The only way to prove total superiority was to execute the former First Seat alone. To overwhelm her with numbers would be the work of vultures, a cowardice beneath the dignity of the ten. And despite everything, it was the last honor afforded to Mary Noeffler: she had been an undeniable titan of her age. The chosen execution ground was a high-magic alternate plane, deliberately selected for its immense structural density.

It was a thriving, vibrant realm: a world of swords and sorcery, of sprawling epics and grand mythologies, where native gods literally walked the earth. The Inner Sea had commandeered it as a battlefield for a simple, brutal reason: any lesser world would have shattered under the first exchange. The air already hummed with a lethal, world-ending barometric pressure as the Grand Witches encircled her. Famia Schüder stepped forward.

The Black Emperor of the Abyss recited the litany of crimes, her voice carrying the grinding finality of a closing vault. She paused, offering the condemned the customary window for a final defense. Mary Noeffler looked around the perimeter of assembled Grand Witches, her eyes sharp and completely unrepentant. Her lips curved into a cold, razor-edged smirk.

"My only regret," Mary said, her voice cutting cleanly through the wind, "is that I did not clean up the evidence thoroughly enough." She turned her gaze away from Famia. She looked directly at Ovelia. She drew her staff.

"If you want this seat," Mary challenged, the magical pressure around her erupting into a storm of localized cataclysm, "come and take it yourself." Tasia watched through the heavy [Abjuration] wards her mothers had erected as the sky tore open. The collateral damage was absolute. Ancient kingdoms, heroic epics, and walking deities were erased in the crossfire. Oceans of magma were inverted. Mountain ranges were pulverized into atmospheric dust.

The entire dimension shrieked as its foundational code was overwritten by the collision of two uncrossable ceilings of power. When the tempest finally broke, the world they had stood on no longer existed. It had been reduced to a shattered asteroid field, a graveyard of floating bedrock drifting through the cold vacuum of the void. Ovelia floated amidst the debris. Mary Noeffler was broken, her life force bleeding out into the cold of the void. Ovelia drifted closer.

She paused, looking down at the dying revolutionary. She asked if Mary had any last words. Mary Noeffler stared up into Ovelia's eyes. And then, she smiled. She did not answer. She smiled, and let the silence claim her. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. From her vantage point behind the reinforced spell-glass, Tasia observed that smile and quietly archived it. There was no terror in the curve of those lips.

There was something else: something she could sense but not name, something that had no business existing on the face of a woman who was dying. The execution was complete. Ovelia hovered alone in the center of the ruined cosmos. The dust of a shattered world swirled around her. She raised her hand. Her mana bled outward into the chaotic void. The cosmic dust parted, violent and absolute, carving a pristine, silent channel through the heart of the starry dark.

Along the jagged fragments of floating rock, the eight remaining Grand Witches lowered their heads in unison. The weeks that followed were, paradoxically, the most jubilant period the Milan'thirskaya family had experienced in a decade. The board had never looked cleaner. Their greatest ideological enemy had self-destructed. Their most dangerous internal threat had been executed by Ovelia, their closest ally, the undisputed First Seat.

Tasia sat in the drawing rooms of the Palace of Rex Mundi and listened to her mothers plot the architecture of the new world. To say they hadn't considered the possibility of Ovelia seizing the throne for herself would be a lie. But Francesca was a peerless judge of character. She looked at Ovelia and saw a complete absence of the hunger for power. The antithesis of Mary Noeffler. The certainty that followed was immediate. She doesn't want the throne. Why shouldn't we simply share it with her?

The blueprint formulated itself over afternoon tea: They would mobilize the Grand Witches crush Holheim, unify the globe under the banner of the White City, and then arrange a dynastic marriage between Ovelia and Ash. Francesca and Angie would abdicate. Between Ovelia and Ash, it hardly mattered which one held the ultimate title. Did they love each other? Tasia wondered, listening from the corner. Has anyone actually asked Ovelia if she wishes to marry my sister? Ash was undeniably willing.

But Ovelia's heart was an unmapped abyss. Yet the matriarchs' logic was ironclad: Witch marriages were rarely built on epic romance; they were alliances of power and legacy. Ovelia was closer to Ash than anyone else alive. By marrying Ash, she effectively became the sovereign of the globe. No one refuses the entire world as a dowry. The day of Ovelia's first formal debriefing as the First Seat arrived. The entire Milan'thirskaya royal family assembled in the Grand Audience Chamber of the Palace of Rex Mundi.

The architecture of the room was designed to impose total psychological subservience. On the raised dais sat exactly three thrones: two immense, parallel seats for the ruling monarchs, and one slightly smaller throne for the Crown Princess. Three occupants. Three chairs. A throne ceases to be a throne if you put too many of them in a room. Tasia and Alucard stood in precise attention to the left and right of their mothers' thrones. Liandra stood still beside Ash. The heavy mahogany doors opened. Ovelia walked in.

Protocol dictated that a Witch entering the presence of the monarchs must relinquish her staff and surrender all visible weapons before crossing the threshold. Ovelia did not disarm. She walked down the central aisle. A hardbound grimoire in black drifted lazily at her shoulder, its cover pressed with nine cat paw prints. A slender, unadorned sword hung at her hip. Francesca's brow tightened by a fraction of an inch. The transgression was absorbed in silence. Ovelia stopped at the base of the dais.

Her gaze moved across the vast marble floor in a single, unhurried sweep. The three thrones. Nothing else. Naturally, there would be none. Even Mary Noeffler had been forced to stand here. Mary used to stand in this exact spot, Tasia remembered, and the desire to upend those chairs was written into every line of her. Ovelia drew the sword at her hip. The blade rose, steady and exact, its tip directed at the large ceremonial banner hanging from the pillar flanking the aisle.

A pulse of raw [Transmutation] rippled outward, bypassing the palace's localized anti-magic wards as if they were made of wet paper. The heavy silk violently warped, twisting, folding, hardening, the thick fabric and its iron pole letting out a sharp, metallic shriek as the matter rearranged itself into the clean shape of a high-backed wooden chair. The newly minted chair hovered off the marble floor. It floated smoothly across the room and settled directly behind Ovelia at the base of the dais, facing the thrones.

Ovelia sat down. She crossed one leg over the other, resting her hands in her lap. Francesca and Angie's expressions went to stone. Neither uttered a syllable. Ash leaned forward, her eyes finding Ovelia's. Ovelia caught the gaze and offered a faint, exquisitely mocking glance. Ash's eyes dropped to the floor. Tasia stared at Ovelia and refused to look away. Ovelia's gaze swept across the room and treated her with the same weight it afforded the marble columns: none.

Beside Francesca's throne, Alucard's hands balled into tight, white-knuckled fists. Her aura flared for a single microsecond before she suppressed it. But it was Liandra who hadn't moved at all. The youngest daughter stood frozen beside Ash, every trace of color drained from her face. She stared at Ovelia, the woman who had held her as an infant, the woman who was supposed to one day be family, with the wide, shattered eyes of a child who had not expected this. Ovelia did not look at Liandra.

She settled comfortably into the transmuted chair, looking up at the three thrones.

"You are going to lose this war," Ovelia said. Her voice was the simple, unembellished delivery of a weather forecast. Having delivered her report, Ovelia stood up. The shadows beneath her boots dilated, pooling outward into an ink-black void. She stepped backward, her silhouette dissolving into the dark without a trace. The monarchs rose in silence. For a long moment, no one moved. Liandra turned. She found Ash's eyes. Ash placed her hand on Liandra's shoulder without a word. Liandra leaned into her side.

They walked out together. Alucard followed, her footsteps hollow against the stone. From that day onward, the chair remained at the base of the dais. Tasia was the last to leave. She stood at the threshold of the heavy doors, looking back into the empty chamber. The chair sat at the base of the dais, an uninvited artifact positioned directly in front of the supreme authority of the world, and nobody had ordered it removed. She stood there for a long time. She closed her eyes.

She tried, with everything her mind possessed, to render her mothers victorious over Holheim, the three thrones secure, the dynasty surviving into another era. Every iteration collapsed. Whenever she reached for an image of victory, the logic engine failed her. The only image her mind would render was the memory of the dead dimension: Ovelia, floating above the cosmic dust of a pulverized world, her mana expanding outward, a brilliant, consuming starfield black that had dyed even the fabric of the cosmos itself.