Chương 66: Chapter 65: The Price of a Name

When he spoke, his voice cut through the air like the edge of a dagger firm, clear, and charged with an authority that admitted no reply, tolerated no delay, and imposed itself over the collective fear like a mantle of iron. —Isabella Elizabeth Selena of Solendra. Each name fell like a block of granite upon Selena, crushing any vestige of her borrowed identity, any lie woven during those days of survival in Terracanto.

The words resonated in the courtyard like funeral knells, marking the end of something she didn't even know had begun. The man continued, relentless, his voice modulated with the precision of one reciting a litany of power: —Hereditary Duchess of Solendra, Lady of Lumenburg, Protector of the Eastern Straits. Selena felt the world vanish around her. The words made no sense, but their weight was unbearable, a slab sinking her into an abyss from which she could not escape. Solendra. Duchess. Heiress.

The terms clashed against her understanding, eroding the reality she had built. The black soldier shook his head with a slow gesture, almost one of disappointment, as if the spectacle before him were unworthy of the titles he had just pronounced. —Your uncle, Grand Duke Valerius —he continued, and the name sounded like a sentence, a final judgment, a door closing forever— will not be happy at all. A tsunami of fear swept through the courtyard.

Upon hearing the titles, upon comprehending the magnitude of what was being revealed, all the women of the hostel, as if driven by an ancestral spring of survival, dropped to one knee. They bowed their heads until their foreheads almost touched the earth, a gesture of absolute submission, of instinctive vassalage before a power that transcended everything they knew. The collective trembling was palpable, a dull murmur of bodies shaking by panic.

The smell of urine suddenly mixed with the dust, an acrid and humiliating stench that spoke of primal fears, of the body's fragility before the threat of a noble. A muffled cry, a sob someone tried to strangle their own hands, rose from the prostrate crowd. But one did not move like the others. Nyssa. The one who always whispered prices and numbers, the one with the clouded mind, the one who repeated her litany of merchandise like a mantra to calm an internal confusion no one understood.

She remained standing, her thin body tense as a string about to snap, defying the authority of the soldiers, defying the natural order that dictated the poor kneel before the powerful. Her voice, normally a monotonous thread lost in a world of figures and transactions, emerged then charged with a hatred so pure and poisonous that it cut through the fear-laden air like a red-hot knife: —The Crimson Duchess.

She spat the nickname, and the name echoed like a curse, like a challenge, like the final word of a condemned woman before facing her fate. Selena had no time to process it. There was no second warning, no instant to close her eyes, no opportunity to scream. With a movement so fluid and rapid it was barely a silver flash, the black soldier unsheathed his sword. It was a precise cut, almost surgical, the execution of a sentence that had already been written before being pronounced. The sound was a brief, wet snap.

Nyssa's head separated from her shoulders and rolled across the earth, her glassy eyes still open, frozen in an expression of eternal hatred she could no longer express. It spun twice upon the dust before stopping, staring toward nowhere, toward nothingness. Blood erupted in a violent scarlet fountain, a flow of life escaping in spurts from the severed neck. It splashed the legs of the women closest to her, staining the courtyard dust an obscene red, hot and steaming in the cold night air.

The silence that followed was more eloquent than any scream. The women crouched even lower, until their foreheads struck the cold earth with force, hitting themselves in a desperate attempt to disappear, to become invisible, to not be next. Some moaned softly, a contained lament escaping through clenched teeth. Others held their breaths, as if the air itself might betray them. Anya, on her knees, had a face as pale as wax, her hands clutching the folds of her nightgown with a force that whitened her knuckles.

Her eyes, always so full of warmth, were empty, staring without seeing at the body still twitching on the ground. Lyra, the marked one, touched her scar with trembling fingers, an automatic gesture, as if she needed to confirm she was still alive, that she still had a face, that misfortune had not come for her as well. The smell of urine intensified an acidic and humiliating note in the symphony of horror.

Kaela, beside Selena, remained clutching her bracelet of common stones, her fingers hooked into the thread as if her life depended on it. But her gaze was fixed on the pool of blood slowly expanding toward her, a scarlet river advancing unstoppably over the earth. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

When the hot, thick liquid touched her fingers, when Nyssa's blood stained her skin, a sob so deep and heartbreaking escaped her throat that it seemed to tear the veil of incredulity enveloping Selena. It was an animal sound, primal, the cry of someone who has seen too much, who has lost too much. That sound, the rawness of that pain and the betrayal in Kaela's gesture, pulled Selena from her stupor momentarily. Reality imposed itself with terrifying clarity: Nyssa's blood was on the ground.

Nyssa, the woman whose only crime was a mind clouded by the slow poisoning of heavy metals, who only repeated prices and numbers as a mantra to calm an internal confusion no one understood. Nyssa, whom Anya defended by saying that "the Flow has another destiny for her." That woman lay decapitated because of a title that was not hers, because of an identity Selena had never asked for.

Her former life revealed itself with a force no one could have anticipated, a tsunami of lineage and power sweeping away everything in its path. And the price of her flight, of her imposture, of her ignorance, had just been paid before her eyes with the life of an innocent woman. The bond of mud and survival that united her to Kaela, to Anya, to all of them, shattered in an instant, drowned in a scarlet pool under the cold gaze of a black suit of armor. Now she was, once again, a stranger.

Now she was alone, alone in this world that only attracted tragedies, that only offered her loss and violence. But her mental world, far from plunging into the storm that should have destroyed her, shattered in a more sinister and silent way. In place of chaos came emptiness. A pure, anesthetic white flooded her consciousness, drowning the scream that could not leave her throat, paralyzing the tears that did not reach her eyes.

Her vision narrowed to a single tunnel, a narrow passage focusing with cruel precision on the scene her psyche refused to accept as real. There, in the center of that tunnel, was Nyssa. Not the one who screamed with hatred or the threat the soldier had seen, but the innocent woman, the one with the broken mind, the one who only wanted to survive one more day in this hostile world.

That woman, whose greatest crime was a hatred born of madness, was the one who now lay decapitated, her vital blood spilling and staining the earth at her feet, splashing Selena's own sandals. Selena, the involuntary cause of it all, the one burdened with a name that was not hers, could show no emotion. It was as if a disconnection button had been pressed in the deepest part of her being, a defense mechanism as old as humanity itself. Then, her perspective shifted and floated.

She saw herself from above, as if she were an external narrator, an impassive camera recording every detail of the nightmare without getting involved in it. She saw the collective trembling of the women, a mute choir of kneeling terror. She distinguished the pure and silent hatred in Lyra's eyes as her fingers caressed the scar on her cheek. She observed how Kaela clung to the stone bracelet —that symbol of their alliance— with desperate strength, as if it could protect her from the crumbling reality.

And there was the man in the black armor, cleaning the blade of his sword on a dark cloak with a professional calm that was more terrifying than any show of rage. Before anyone could utter another word, before Kaela could cast her a look of betrayal or Anya one of pain, the black soldier's gloved hand closed around Selena's arm with the force of a vise. There was no resistance in her body. She was a rag doll, an inert weight, an empty shell.

He dragged her without ceremony, pulling her away from the courtyard, from the pool of blood, from the terrified and broken gazes following her without fully understanding what had just occurred. He hoisted her into a carriage waiting outside, an imposing structure pulled by two enormous insects with shiny carapaces and jointed legs that moved with a mechanical, alien rhythm. But the insects, the carriage, the outside world… none of it mattered anymore.

The man from Earth who inhabited that body, that consciousness which had struggled to understand, to survive, to find its place, was now only a specter, an observer floating in limbo. He saw his own body being pushed into the luxurious interior of the vehicle, but he did not feel the contact of silk against his skin. He saw the black soldier sit across from her, moving his mouth, pronouncing words that must have been orders or threats, but not a single sound reached his ears.

It was a silent film in which she was the protagonist and the spectator at once, separated by an unfathomable glass. The carriage moved forward, jolting over terrain she no longer felt, its wheels crossing roads she did not see, traversing landscapes she did not register. Time lost meaning. When it stopped and they shoved her out, she found herself in a place of a scale and opulence that defied imagination. Immense, meticulously tended gardens stretched as far as the eye could see.

Fountains that sang with crystalline water, their jets dancing in the morning sun; a mansion that was more a palace of white stone and elegant arches. But beauty provoked nothing in her. She only registered it, like a catalog of emotionless images, like an inventory of luxuries that did not belong to her. She was dragged through wide, carpeted corridors, her bare feet sinking into the softness of the fabrics without feeling anything.

Corridors that seemed endless, flanked by paintings of ancestors with severe gazes who judged her in silence. Until they threw her into a room that was larger than the entire communal dormitory of the hostel. Furniture carved in dark, rich woods. A four-poster bed that looked like a cloud, with silk sheets and down pillows. The door slammed shut, and the sound of the bolt falling rang out, for the first time, sharp and final in her ears. Then her body —Selena's body— collapsed.

She fell to her knees on the soft rug and then slumped over, crawling toward the bed in an unconscious, animal movement of one seeking refuge even knowing there is none. From her floating perspective, he saw it all: he saw the young woman with chestnut hair huddle in a fetal position upon the silk. He saw how her shoulders began to shake with a mute and desperate weeping that did not emanate from his own consciousness.

He saw the physical anguish, the visceral pain of another person manifesting in the flesh he inhabited. But he felt nothing. Until, finally, the girl's gut-wrenching cry in the bed became so sharp and deep in its observed silence that the last string holding his spectating consciousness snapped. The black veil of fainting —this time genuine and profound— fell over the young duchess on the bed. Her body relaxed into unconsciousness, her shoulders stopped shaking, her breathing became slow and shallow.

The consciousness of the man from Earth who watched her from the nothingness vanished with her, plunging into a darkness that, at last, showed nothing. No images, no memories, no questions. Only the absolute void, the rest and the peace of unconsciousness. End of the first volume.