Chương 136: Chapter 69: The Cuirass of Grief

When the agonizing glow died out, leaving only a golden ember in her retinal memory, Selena stood up. She did not look back. There was nothing left to look at. She fumbled, with the blurry vision of her newly formed eye, searching for the exit. She found the spiral staircase, the very one they had descended an eternity ago. Climbing was a different kind of torment. There was no tumultuous weeping, no oppression in her chest, no insatiable whispers.

Only the echo of her own footsteps, each one heavier than the last, and the emptiness she carried inside, vaster than any dungeon. On the upper levels, the horrors were still there. Decapitated soldiers dragging their feet through puddles of latent blood, repeating their ancient anxieties. Severed arms emerging from the gloom, reaching out to grasp, to harm. But Selena was no longer thinking. Magnor's final act had robbed her of the capacity to reflect, to feel fear or disgust.

Only one impulse remained: to get out. When a pale arm lunged toward her ankle, she opened her mouth. A mute word, cold as the ice of her despair. The blood on the floor, thick and obedient to a will superior to her own, responded. It rose in thick crimson tentacles that pierced the creatures, pinning them with brutal force against the stone ceiling of the dungeon. A second word, a frozen whisper in her mind, froze them there, turning them into grotesque chandeliers of flesh and ice.

She passed beneath them without looking. She climbed another staircase. This level was strangely empty, inhabited only by whispering shadows, trying to slip into her mind, to find some crack in her armor of pain. Selena turned the bronze ring on her finger. Not with will, but with the inertia of habit. Pure light burst forth, flooding the corridor. The shadows vanished with hisses of frustration, like mist before the morning sun. She kept walking, an automaton bathed in divine light.

Finally, after an eternity of ascent through layers of nightmare, she reached the last staircase. The one that ended at the warped steel bars, the entrance. The air changed. It stopped smelling of blood, rust, and metaphysical rot. Now it smelled of sand, of a cold night, of bitter freedom. She avoided the poisonous vines with golden tips. —Nobody touch them— Magnor had said. She passed by the empty, rusted armors. Seeing them, a sharp, precise pain, like the edge of a knife, pierced the numbness of her soul.

Magnor. Astrid. Alistair. The names, and the images that accompanied them, returned agency to her heart with exquisite cruelty. Tears welled up then, silent and burning, washing away the dust and dried blood from her face. Trembling from head to toe, her new leg protesting with every step, she kept walking. She stepped out of the tower's archway, into the starry desert night. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She walked, like a sleepwalker, toward where she remembered the base camp to be. Upon arrival, she noticed it was larger. There were more tents, more torches, more movement. They had reinforced the outpost during their long descent into hell. Some soldiers, seeing her phantasmal figure, bathed in dried blood and with a lost gaze, recognized her, or perhaps recognized the absolute despair in her eyes. Without a word, they led her directly to the main tent, larger and better lit than the rest.

Inside, sitting on a stool, reviewing scrolls by the light of an oil lamp, was Cassian. He looked up. His clear eyes, impassive as always, scrutinized her from head to toe, registering every wound, every stain, the emptiness in her gaze. He showed no surprise, no relief, no concern. —Perhaps you do not know, Countess —said his voice, smooth and precise as a scalpel —But two months have passed. The silence he let fall was more eloquent than any reproach. Two months of horror, of loss. Selena could barely process it.

Time, in the dungeon, had folded in on itself, turning weeks into hours and agonies into eternities. Cassian spoke again, his tone flat, stating a fact. —I see you failed. Something snapped inside Selena. It was not pain, nor sadness. It was the cold, clinical indifference of that sentence. Failed. As if Magnor, Astrid, and Alistair were mere spent resources, lost pieces on a board. All the pain, the horror, the contained fury, and the desperate emptiness she carried found a flashpoint.

It was not a scream, nor a curse. It was something deeper, more visceral. She opened her lips. A word came out of her mouth, a word of the spoken echo, a silent verb that consumed her future. Lacking sound, it was a harsh whisper laden with an emotion pure and green as the emerald of her eyes. From that whisper, fire was born. A green fire, of the same vibrant and supernatural hue she had used in the cannibal library, but now infinitely hotter, more concentrated, more personal.

It erupted like a lash and did not strike at Cassian. Instead, it enveloped the fabric of the tent, consuming it from top to bottom with a dull roar in a matter of seconds, reducing it to ashes that fell like black snow. Then, the flame condensed, spinning upon itself, and slammed into an empty corner, a space where there was only shadow and sand. There, in that seemingly unoccupied corner, something writhed.

The air distorted, like heat over sand in full sun, and a smell of ozone, along with something ancient and vigilant, filled the night. Cassian, for the first time since Selena had known him, grimaced. Not from fear, but from a deep, visceral displeasure. A shudder ran through his body, from the tips of his pale fingers to the roots of his hair. —I don't like it —said Selena, and her voice reflected what she felt, it was an edge of true emotion: total, absolute disgust —looking at me.

Her green eyes now glowing with a reflection of the fire she had summoned, she did not look away from the corner where her green flame still licked the air, revealing the presence of something that had always been there, watching, waiting. Cassian looked at her, and a deeper tremor, one that went to the soul, shook him. His words, when they came out, were no longer those of an impassive master, but of a man confronted with a mystery that surpassed him. —You… —he stammered, the blood leaving his face— see it?

End of Volume Two.