Chương 90: Chapter 23: Complex Decisions

A week later, when a fragile and tense normalcy began to reinstate itself in the university corridors, Selena felt the paralysis of fear crack. Fern's death had not been a hollow warning; it had been a prophecy fulfilled for one of them. And if her destiny was to die sooner or later, devoured by the same power that now cursed her, it would not be from a place of ignorance. She would not close her eyes to the truth; however terrible it might be.

With a cold determination, renewed not by hope but by a sort of furious resignation, she headed to the library. She descended straight to the eighteenth floor, to the crypt of ebony and silence. There, in the same dark corner among forgotten genealogies, lay the book. She took it, feeling the weight of the tanned hide and the centuries in her hands. She opened it, resolved. She was no longer trembling. The internalization of her own mortality, so vividly illustrated by Fern, had granted her a macabre serenity.

If magic was going to claim her life, at least she would understand its origin, its nature. Her gaze locked onto the first page, where the handwriting, though ancient, was surprisingly clear, as if the author's will transcend time.

"After decades, I believe everything must have a clear beginning," it commenced, and Selena felt the air around her grow thin, transporting her to another time.

"It is for that reason that I shall begin by saying that I, Eliud, was an excellent apprentice from the age of five under my mother, the midwife of the Volhan tribe." The prose was direct, personal. It was not the chronicle of a king, but the confession of a man. Selena could almost see him: a boy in a primitive village, learning the secrets of healing and herbs from his mother, a woman who dedicated her life to alleviating pain and naming the unnamable.

"She died when I was barely a boy of fourteen years," the narrative continued, and an echo of loss resonated in Selena's heart, reminding her of Kaela, of Nyssa, of the absences that marked a life.

"But the chief of the tribe, since I had no father, forced me to learn to be a hunter and warrior, as every man was meant to be." The tale took a brutal turn. From healing to hunting, from compassion to death. Selena read how the young Eliud was forced to kill, to give thanks to Aelthra, the flow of the earth, for every life taken. And he admitted something that surprised her:"I admit that when I came to know it, it filled my soul with an immense tranquility."

It was the acceptance of a primitive pact with nature, a simple faith in the cycle of life and death. The years passed within a single paragraph.

"When I reached twenty years of age, being already married to my young wife and with a child on the way, the chief of the tribe arrived riddled with obsidian arrows. It was the beginning of what would soon be known as the war of the tribes." Peace was shattered. Violence erupted, alien to the natural cycles of the hunt. It was a war for territory, for the sacred zone of the armorudus. And then, horror arrived at his doorstep.

"When the battle reached where my family was, some soldiers attacked them to the death, and my wife was left gravely wounded." The desperation of a man watching his world crumble.

"I tried to heal her in every way my mother had taught me so many years ago, but none seemed to work." Selena held her breath. She was on the verge of the crucial moment, of the abyss.

"Until one day, sitting before her for hours and in silence… I felt it." The words seemed to vibrate on the page.

"An ancient power that chilled everything it touched. The echo that whispered forbidden power. Before I realized it, a soundless word came out of my mouth and her body began to regenerate at an accelerated pace, her wounds healing in the blink of an eye…" It was the same astonishment, the same terrifying miracle she had witnessed with Maya. But what followed was the cost, engraved with the rawness of one who lived it for the first time.

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"… but I felt as if my life were tearing away from me." These were no metaphors. It was the naked truth. The first spell, the first transgression, paid for with his very life essence. The end of the passage revealed the origin of a name, of a legend:"The rumors of my wife's healing spread like fire and the days passed, until the chief of the tribe named me general of a battalion in honor of my feat, and gave me the title of Volgthar, which means 'he who builds and plans with the sword and with life'."

Selena kept reading, determined not to skip a single word, to drink in every syllable of this ancestral confession. Eliud's prose grew denser, stained by the mud and blood of the battlefields.

"The war was not ordinary," the account continued,"our chief, driven more by vengeance than justice, charged against the enemy tribe. This time, I went at the front, commanding titanopod riders." Selena could almost hear the thundering of the beasts' six legs striking the earth, the crunching of their carapaces.

"We charged with our spears against hundreds of people. The taste of their blood splashing into my mouth gave me a feeling of profound disgust." There was no glory here, only the visceral revulsion of a healer turned murderer. Each life reaped was an echo of the one he had saved, a reminder of the spiraling price his power demanded. The tale took another brutal turn.

"The chief, who had no children or successor of any kind, was poisoned. And therefore, the highest-ranking general would take over the future of the tribe." The midwife's apprentice, the reluctant hunter, the terrified resonant, now found himself elevated to leader not by ambition, but by the vacuum left by death.

"My son, little Corven, was born three weeks after I took command of the tribe." Life and death, the beginning and the end, intertwining around his destiny. And then, the strategist emerged, the founder.

"With our strength, which was superior to that of the other tribes, I made a treaty with the losing side: they would unify with our tribe, absorbing them, in exchange for our new tribe, stronger and more powerful, striving to improve the quality of life for everyone." He was not just a conqueror; he was a unifier. He forged a nation out of the ashes of war, using force not just to destroy, but to build. Then came the detail that turned Selena's blood to ice.

"That year, a visitor from the Trusoth tribe approached me and, as a token of good faith, gifted me a parchment book. One that was completely empty." An empty book. The description resonated almost like a powerful metaphor.

"He declared that the empty book would be a promise from his tribe to build a harmonious relationship from scratch. I accepted without hesitation." The irony was so heavy it could almost be touched. The vessel for all his secrets, for the chronicle of the echo itself, had been given to him as a symbol of peace and a new beginning.

"And it is that book," Eliud concluded the chapter, with a bitterness that transcended the centuries,"where I write my chronicle today. The chronicle of secrets. The chronicle of the imagined echo. The chronicle of a cursed wretch, driven to his own misfortune to save his wife, his tribe, and to create a nation for the common good." The final words left Selena's throat dry. It was not the story of a god-king, nor of a stainless hero.

It was the tragedy of a good man, or at least a man who tried to be, caught in a web of impossible choices, whose deepest act of love had condemned him and everyone who would come after. The first Volgthar did not see himself as a glorious founder, but as a "cursed wretch." The weight of that inheritance, of that primordial guilt, fell upon her shoulders with an almost physical force. She closed the book slowly, feeling the tanned hide as if it held the residual warmth of its author's anguish.

She could not leave it where it was. With extreme care, she hid it in another corner, beneath a pile of dusty volumes narrating the fall of tribes that time and the kingdom of Erabergh had erased from memory. Let his secret rest among other dead secrets. Upon leaving the library, the night was deep and clear, a velvet mantle studded with countless cold stars. The immensity of the sky, indifferent to human dramas and arcane curses, offered her a moment of perspective.

Beneath that infinite vault, the tribes, the wars, the kingdoms, and the resonants seemed as ephemeral as sighs in the wind. Without a word, escorted by the silent shadows of Fjora and Samira, she headed to her quarters in the Forest Cloister. The exhaustion, more mental than physical, overcame her completely. She collapsed onto the bed, and this time, sleep did not carry her to dreamscapes or dungeon nightmares.

She fell into a well of deep, restorative darkness, a brief interlude of peace in the turbulent ocean of her destiny, while the stars, mute witnesses to the chronicle of the first cursed one, continued their slow and eternal turn over Kaelburg.