Chương 219: Chapter 76: The Letter Stained with Tears

Selena picked up the envelope and the jewelry box; although she disguised it as best she could as she lifted them from the floor, her hands trembled with the anxiety that only silence can understand. The envelope was heavy, the parchment of superior quality, sealed with wax the color of dried blood, bearing the seal of Solendra, a golden falcon armed with a spear over waves. The jewelry box was small, cold to the touch, but what stood out the most were the thousands of small intricate drawings upon it.

There was no time to examine them there. With Fjora at her side, they mounted the titanopod they had hidden and set off at a fast pace, trying to appear as calm as possible despite the urgency; they headed toward a nearby river that Fjora had located during her previous reconnaissance. There, on the bank hidden by the dusaut, they performed the transformation. They burned the jet-black cloth disguises, which smelled of sweat, blood rust, and smoke.

The flames consumed the evidence of the intrusion, leaving only ashes that the wind carried downriver. They dressed in simple peasant clothes, coarse linen skirts, faded vests, headkerchiefs, everything acquired in the village. Selena hid the letter and the jewelry box in a double bottom of her saddlebag. Then, following the course of the river, they headed back to the settlement. Though the route was discreet, it was impossible not to encounter the multitude of washerwomen working nearby.

They entered the inn with the discretion of tired travelers, paid for a room with copper crowns under the names of Maud and Edith, and climbed the wooden stairs that creaked beneath their feet. Finally, safe within four rough walls that smelled of road dust, old zintel wood, and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, Selena sat on the edge of the hard bed, whose rough wool promised more discomfort than rest.

Fjora, turned into a living statue of vigilance, posted herself against the solid titarde door, her ear attentive to any sound from the corridor. The only window, small and high, had been sealed with a thick blanket, smothering the grayish light of day and plunging the room into an intimate gloom, broken only by the faint flame of a tallow lamp. Selena's hands, which had remained steady while torturing, while threatening, while riding, now trembled.

It was not fear that shook them, but the pure, visceral anticipation of confronting the deepest and most distorted mirror: the mind of the woman who had inhabited this body before her. With a deliberate movement, she broke the wax seal of the envelope and extracted the letter. The dark wooden jewelry box with mother-of-pearl inlays could wait. First, it had to be the words.

The truth, or the perversion of it, was about to speak to her from the past, from the pen of the original Isabella, the crimson duchess, whose shadow had been behind everything. She unfolded the parchment. The handwriting that greeted her was not the neat and elegant calligraphy one would expect from a noblewoman educated in the halls of Solendra. It was messy, impulsive, with strokes that sometimes widened with fury and at others tightened in an almost feverish tension.

The capital letters were dramatic, the lines slanted as if the hand tracing them had been trembling with emotion. She read:"I hope it is you reading this letter. If you are not, it does not matter; after all, the only certain thing is that I carried out what I needed to. Yes, it is I, Isabella Elizabeth Selena of Solendra. I carried out the task that was necessary, with love and devotion. How could I not? After all, I am a pillar of the "Clarity" or, as the ignorant call it, the Omnipresent Shadow.

I gave everything to my primordial god. It is what a priestess must do. I stained my soul with blood and pain, so that you may know, creature. I gave birth to you, and everything went as I expected. You read this and you must know that —mom greets you and loves you with fanatical love— you are the greatest act of love of my life. I gave everything so that you would exist, and you are a truth: our primordial god of magic exists. Your existence is the greatest proof.

I offered you everything, and I gave everything; but I leave you a gift. A particular jewel. Whatever you do, know that we have already won. With affection, Mom, or as you surely know me, The Crimson Duchess." Selena trembled. It was not a superficial shudder, but a deep, seismic tremor that ran down her spine and froze the blood in her veins. The truth, raw and monstrous, rushed upon her with the weight of a millstone. I knew it, she thought, a part of her mind crying out in a silent scream.

In two years of intensive study at the university, in the pages of Eliud, in the lessons of Isolde and Valerian, the evidence was clear, incontrovertible: there was no "god" of magic. The dimension of the Echo, the Void, was impersonal, a force or a plane of existence that responded to prices, to exchanges, to will and life, not to worship or sacrifices. It was a mechanism, not a deity; but the letter did not speak of mechanisms. It spoke of faith. Of a fanatical, bloody, and effective faith.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. A cold rage, sharp as the blade of a dagger, succeeded the tremor. Ever since the first day in this body, she had been walking a path that the original Isabella had meticulously designed. She had not been a victim; she was not the young noblewoman murdered in a dark plot. She had been the architect. A calculating and bloody monster, but whose blood was not decorative; it was currency, a ritual offering.

A possibility that Saúl, in his darkest ruminations, had contemplated and set aside quickly because of how horrendous it was: that the transmigration had not been a cosmic accident, but a ritual. A real one, that had worked. The organization did not call itself the "Omnipresent Shadow"; that was the nickname given to it by its enemies or those snooping at the edges of secrecy. They called themselves the Clarity. The original Isabella was not a pawn; she was a pillar. More than a pillar: a priestess.

Of a god, or of what she perceived as a god, that had answered her sacrifice. A sacrifice that had included her own life, her soul, and who knew how much more blood. The letter did not explain the mechanisms of how. It explained the why. The motivation: a fanatical love, a religious devotion to a power she believed to be real, and the conviction that the existence of Saúl-Selena was the ultimate proof of her faith. She even called them "creature," "child."

That word, "child," was what made the tremor return, becoming an uncontrollable shudder. She brought her hands to her hair, digging her fingers into the brown mass, and noticed that the letter was growing damp on the table. It was not the ink running; it was her own tears, hot and silent, falling onto the parchment, blurring the dramatic signatures and widening the stains of a past that now burned her hands.

Her body wept, betrayed by an emotion her mind could barely process: a mixture of horror, of rage, and of a desolation so deep it emptied her chest. For a long minute, there was only the sound of her ragged breathing and the crackle of the flame. Fjora, from the door, did not move, but her gaze rested on Selena's stooped back with an intensity that was almost a silent embrace. The marchioness, however, remained so plunged in her thoughts that nothing around her existed for her.

Finally, with a sudden movement, as if waking from a trance, Selena pushed away the soaked letter and took the jewelry box, trying to control her hands. The object was cold and heavy for its size. She opened it carefully, the hinges producing a soft click. Inside, upon worn black velvet, rested a single jewel. It was not ostentatious, nor even particularly beautiful at first glance. It was a ring.

Its material was wood, but not just any wood: it was coral tree wood, the same red, dense, almost sanguine wood of the giants surrounding the estate. It was a simple band of polished red wood, so austere that it was unsettling. Selena picked it up between her thumb and index finger. Upon contact, an immediate, overwhelming electrical sensation ran through her from head to toe. It was… euphoria.

A wild, primal euphoria that made her blood seem to sing in her veins, her heart beating with a renewed and reckless force. It was as if the most basic essence of her being, from blood to life, recognized the object and leaped for joy. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog of that intrusive sensation. Then, gathering all her discipline, she applied the perception of the Void that she had trained so hard.

Her sight gave her the first flash, but she did not just look; she felt it with that additional sense, that ear for the echoes of power. She understood it instantly; it was a resonant artifact. Her perception told her forcefully that it had not been born from the serene death of a resonant attempting to protect, like the black stone ring of Ashkharum. This was the legacy of something different: of a resonant whose dominant essence, whose core of power upon dying, had been imbued with euphoria for blood and pain.

It was not gratuitous sadism; it was something more ritualistic, more transcendent for its creator. A sacrificial ecstasy. The function of the ring revealed itself to her with crystalline clarity: it could mold, control, transform all blood within its reach. Not only its own, but any spilled blood nearby. It could turn it into… whatever the bearer desired. A weapon? A cure? A tool? The possibilities, limited only by the available blood and the bearer's will, were terrifying.

She tried to find the drawback, the flaw inherent in every artifact that Valerian had taught her to detect. But she did not find it; it was too well hidden or… this artifact was different. Perhaps its drawback was not a cost to the user, but something more sinister: that it attuned the soul of whoever used it toward the same bloody ecstasy of its creator. That every use brought you closer to becoming a devotee of that primordial god of blood and pain in which the Crimson Duchess believed.

What was certain was that it was a perfect ring for her. For the other her. A farewell or welcome gift, from a monstrous mother to her "child" creature.

"Whatever you do, know that we have already won," the letter said. Won what? Her existence here? The chaos she could unleash? Or simply the satisfaction of having proven, to her own fanatical eyes, that her god was real? Selena closed the jewelry box with a sharp click, imprisoning the red wood ring in its darkness. She stored it in her pouch, far from her skin. The letter, stained with tears, she folded with hands that no longer trembled. Now there was only a cold determination, a resolution carved in ice.

She knew the truth. It was worse than she had imagined. She was not a victim of circumstances; she was the deliberate product of a fanatical madness. Now, with that knowledge and with the cursed artifact she had been bequeathed, she had to decide what to do. The path of the Crimson Duchess ended here, in this poor room, with these dried tears. The path of Selena, the Void, the Emerald, the transmigrated, was only beginning.

She would have to forge it with her own decisions, not with the bloody designs of a ghost who called her "child." Then, she bore it all. Her rage, a cold fire burning her entrails. Her displacement, that feeling of being a perpetual castaway between two worlds, neither truly hers. Her tears, already dry but whose salts burned on her cheekbones. And above all, the helplessness, the bitter taste of having been a pawn on a board arranged by a fanatic who bore her name and her face.