Chương 102: Chapter 35: When Reality Gives Way

Selena nodded to herself and finally lowered her gaze to the book. She turned the pages carefully, until she found the place where the methodic and mournful prose of the bandaged mage continued its exploration of dream laws.

"The second of the laws," she read with an avid curiosity,"is born from my tireless and often heartbreaking documentation of resonant deaths, from the analysis of prophetic dreams and future designs, both the positive and the negative ones. A resonant, by inhabiting the limbo between two dimensions, possesses within the Halom a window toward the future, but it is a fogged, cryptic window. However, we are, first and foremost, a bunch of wretched souls incapable of touching the true essence of the power we waste.

I term it as 'the power to have everything, but not the means to achieve it.' Transformed into a law, after verifying it in sixty-three documented cases, it would be the following:'The Halom will never reveal your death.' A lesson that this servant carved under the sacrifice of countless friends and colleagues who used the touch. A mage is never capable of feeling, foreseeing, or dreaming of their own death through the halom. It is an absolute blind spot in our vision.

In turn, and as it happens to me now while I write these lines with a trembling hand, once this gift stops, when the prophetic dreams cease completely, when the well of the future dries up, it is a clear, unequivocal, and terrible sign that death looms over our head. It is its last warning, or perhaps, its final mockery." Selena closed the book gently, without the sharp slam of horror, but with the slowness of someone who has just understood a bitter and elegant truth. A sigh, long and laden, escaped from her lips.

Even the so-called advantages that Isolde had mentioned to them, the possibility of glimpsing the future, were actually a poisoned apple. The thought was clear, crystalline in its perverse logic: any gift inherent to the resonant, anything that could placate the pain of not having chosen that life, was, in its very essence, a mechanism of the curse. A death warning or the illusion of control over a destiny that was already written.

She left the book on the desk, far from the bed, as if she could push away the weight of the revelation with it. She turned off the tallow lamp, plunging the room into a bluish twilight illuminated only by the full moon that was beginning to peer through her window. She settled between the blankets, seeking stillness. She tried to sleep, to empty her mind. But sleep resisted.

She lay awake, flat on her back, listening to the melodious and constant sound of the nocturnal insects in the forest outside, a chorus of life indifferent to everything. It was useless. Her mind, though blank, was in tension, like a string tuned to a note of dull anxiety.

Only when the moon reached its highest point, bathing her room with a silver and ghostly light that turned the furniture into ice sculptures, did the physical exhaustion accumulated over days of study, terror, and forced laughter completely overcome her. Her eyelids grew heavy as stone slabs, and finally, inevitably, she sank into the depths of sleep. The dream shaped itself immediately, but not with the distressing sharpness of other times.

It was like a sketch made in pencil on gray paper, the contours blurry, the shadows barely suggested. She looked at herself. She was wearing a military uniform of an intense and severe red, with golden epaulets that weighed on her shoulders. Looking ahead, she recognized the landscape: a forest of dense trees of colossal height, the same one she had caught a glimpse of in a previous dream, tinged then with a golden light. Now, the light was cold, grayish.

Her gaze focused on the frenetic activity taking place among the trees. Soldiers in green uniforms worked with mechanical efficiency. They were not preparing cannons or catapults, but something more disturbing: enormous beetles with armored shells, at least two meters long. To some, they adjusted reinforced metal plates over their elytra, turning them into living tanks.

Others, even larger and with heavy movements, were hoisted by pulleys and nets onto what appeared to be descomunal wagons, whose wheels were reinforced to withstand the weight. The deep hum of the insects was a continuous bass in the air, mixed with sharp orders and the clattering of tools. A soldier approached her, gave a perfect military salute and, without looking her in the eyes, reported in a monotonous voice: —Ma'am, the Hammerer Project is underway. We plan to reach the border with Khelganor in two months.

The advance will be underground and silent. They won't notice it until it's too late. Then, words emerged from the mouth of the Selena in the dream, but they were not hers. They were cold, flat, imbued with a ironclad conviction: —So, it shall be done. For the crown. For the homeland. For the future. The image blurred, dissolving into a smear of red and gray.

Immediately, there were no more scenes, only brutal, primal physical sensations: dull blows that reverberated in her body, as if she were being beaten; the suffocation of tight bandages or perhaps a thick cloth wrapping her head; an immense, throbbing pain that cleaved her skull; and, in a vivid and repulsive manner, the warm and sticky sensation of a thick liquid, it was blood, without a doubt, running between her fingers.

Everything vanished at once, swept away by the clear and insistent song of a bird on her window sill. Selena opened her eyes, gasping slightly, while the first and vigorous rays of the morning sun slipped through the window, bathing the room with a light that felt unreal after the dream darkness. She sighed; she knew that despite how disconcerting and terrifying the halom was, she could do nothing more until she deciphered enough. That morning, routine was a bulwark.

She dressed quickly, this time without excessive haste, but with the determination of one who flees from their own thoughts; when she finished, she ran toward the medicine lecture. The topic of the day was"Basic Diagnostics." Selena sat down, opened her notebook, but when the professor began to break down the methods, all of them anchored firmly in the theory of the four humors reviewed the previous semester, a wave of weariness and frustration washed over her.

It was not just that it was wrong; it was wasting time. When the master began to describe how to diagnose melancholy due to an excess of black bile by observing the color of the urine and the patient's inclination toward mournful poetry, Selena silently gathered her things and slipped out the back door. She could not afford the luxury of pseudoscience, not even as a cover. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Once outside, breathing the fresh air that smelled of damp earth and freshly baked bread from the kitchens, her mind, still vibrating with the echo of the military dream and the sensation of blood between her fingers, led her to a place of brutal certainty. She headed straight to the library. She went down the endless spiral of stairs, passing the familiar floors, until she reached the eighteenth. There, in her hiding place among chronicles of forgotten tribes, was the book of the first king.

She took it with hands that did not tremble. No matter how terrible its content was, no matter how many horrors it described, it had a redeeming quality, terrifying yet essential: it was real. It was not superstition; it was not empty dogma. It was the chronicle of a verifiable curse, of a power with concrete rules and prices. Facing the falsehood of the humors, Eliud's bloody truth was a beacon in the fog.

She found a secluded reading corner, where the light of a bluish gas lamp fell upon a small desk of polished rock. She opened the heavy book, turning pages until she found a passage she had not read in depth, and began anew. Eliud's voice, increasingly torn and yet increasingly lucid, emerged from the pages:"The bitter taste of guilt did not last long. As I little by little unraveled the mysteries of the spoken echo and the written touch, as the poem of the tablets said, my brain… transfigured.

I noticed it gradually at first. Small threads of light when someone used an artifact near me. When a written spell was activated, I no longer just saw the blood disappear into the air or the effect; I could still see the letters of blood or power floating in the air, ghostly, before slowly fading away. Those were the mildest changes, the first cracks. If only… I admit it, I have been a reckless, arrogant king.

But can a youth, a terrified warrior, be reproached for fighting for what he believes to be the greater good, even if the price is his soul? The battles against the triple alliance of tribes were slowly decimating them, and with each death, with each use of the power, my perception grew. It was no longer just feeling the void or intuiting the spell. It was seeing it. It was hearing the whispers not as a distant rumor, but as a chorus around me. It was tasting the metallic taste of power in the air when it unfolded.

'Aelthra, have mercy on the unwary,' I sometimes prayed, in a corner of my mind that still remembered the midwife who was my mother, 'and may its flow return to the bosom of your safeguard.' But my prayers no longer found the goddess, only the Void." Selena turned the page, the parchment rustling softly. The tale took a leap toward transforming horror.

"One day, in a particularly fierce battle, I wanted to use a heat spell to create a wall of fire that would cut off the enemy's retreat. I only thought it. I did not draw with my blood; I did not utter a word. The wall… emerged. It was as if reality were a damp parchment, and my mind, the pen. Before I could comprehend the enormity of what I had done, the transfiguration, the third level that the poem named, it was the creature of the void, my cursed guardian, who set into motion.

They were invisible to the others, but I… I began to see it. Not fully, never complete, but blood began to flow through the air, outlining impossible contours, structures that borrowed parts of reality and twisted them. The creature attacked legs and arms, separating them from the torso with surgical and grotesque precision. Blood, guts, screams. The men, twenty brave souls, fought. They struck the air; they threw spears into the nothingness. None could do it any harm.

When barely two remained, both threw themselves into the mud, begging for their lives between tears that furrowed the mud and the blood of their comrades. By then, the pain of others was a habit for me, a spent coin. I killed them with compassion, quickly, with a thought that stole the air from their surroundings. But the creature protested. Its voice, a multiple and ancient whisper, echoed inside my skull: 'Their blood rejoices me. Their pain relieves me. And their despair… gives me hope.'

A chill that had nothing to do with the weather ran down my spine, freezing my marrow. The worst part was not that day. It was the subsequent ones. Sometimes, when it attacked to defend me, far from seeing only the result which was the blood, the dismembered bodies, I began to distinguish its claws. Not as solid shapes, but as patterns of absence, like cracks in the air that sucked in light and life, outlines that confounded my mind to the point of causing me nausea.

I heard sounds in the nights, in my campaign tent. Some were just laments of the dead. But other times, the voices, their voices, those of the things of the Void, asked me for favors, to do errands on their behalf... Not power, not victories. Blood. Suffering. Despair. Once, in a battle where I faced an enemy general who carried a resonant artifact, upon his using it against me, I saw… I saw through the veil.

I saw an immense creature, a colossus of impossible geometries that bent over themselves, approaching him slowly from a place that was not a place, drooling a dark and vibrant substance over the battlefield. It was the true owner of the artifact, the final parasite. The imaginary echo… the imaginary echo… Eliud's words seemed to be written with anguish is the final condemnation of the cursed one. The culmination of power.

But it is also the door to a reality that no one in their right mind would want to accept or know. A reality that, little by little, made me more powerful than any person, but that also turned me into a terrible man. I do not know how history will know me, whether as a heroic founder or as a monster. I only hope, with the little faith I have left, that my kingdom… that the kingdom I built upon rivers of blood and baneful pacts… can make its inhabitants happy. Happy… yes. As the void never allowed me to be."

Selena closed the book slowly, not out of horror, but out of an immense weight of comprehension. Eliud did not just describe power; he described its evolution, its psychological and perceptual cost. The imagined echo was not just a phrase: it was a state of mind, a reconfiguration of the senses that allowed you to see the bloody machinery behind the curtain of reality. And the price was your humanity, your peace, your possibility of happiness.

She let her forehead rest upon the cured leather cover, feeling the coldness of the parchment and the residual heat of the desperation of a king who, having achieved everything, only yearned for the simple, unachievable happiness that he himself had sacrificed on the altar of power. That afternoon, she dragged her feet with the weight of awareness like lead ballasts.

Every step through the silent corridors of the library resonated with the echo of Eliud's words, of that founding king who had seen the horror behind the veil and had paid with his soul for the privilege of power. She did not look toward the dark corners where Valerian used to lurk; she did not even care if he were there or not. Her mind was a battlefield already silent, covered by the dense fog of exhaustion. She headed straight to her room in the Cloister of the Forest.

Once inside, she dropped onto the bed without undressing, as if the simple act of breathing were already a monumental effort. Sleep took her immediately, a heavy and dreamless sleep, a black well of restorative unconsciousness. There were no nightmares of dungeons, nor visions of battles, nor whispers from the Void. Only nothingness itself, welcoming and mute.