Chapter 231
My
heart slammed into my ribs. I gasped.
Vaela must’ve seen the shift in my eyes because she froze. “What? What did you hear?! WHO SPOKE TO YOU?!”
I spat blood onto her pristine white dress and grinned maniacally. “Raelith,” I croaked. “She says fuck you.”
Lucien screamed in frustration and brought the blade down again. And again. I stopped counting the slices after that. But I didn’t stop fighting. Not in my body. Not in my mind. Lyssira kept healing my body. Slowly, but surely. I would endure.
I curled around the Moon Goddess’s words, wrapped them around me like a shield. I held onto Lyssira’s rage, her comfort, and her promise that we would survive.
They could carve me into a thousand pieces.
But I’d still be alive to watch their world fucking burn.
Vaela POV
She was gone. No whispers in the dark. No visions in the blood.
No warmth in the runes. I had scoured every pool of crimson I’d bled from the hybrid’s flesh and found… silence. Divine silence was the worst sound in the fucking world.
Lucien paced like a beast on a broken leash, muttering prayers into his bloodied hands, his eyes flicking to the altar every few seconds as if it might rise and forgive him. Forgive us. He looked like a man who still expected absolution in the echo of his own footsteps.
Me? I sat in the ruin of it. I bathed in the shame of her absence. I carved devotion into my own thigh just to feel something. And still she did not come. The mongrel strapped to the table watched me with swollen, cataracted eyes, and I hated her for breathing. For still bearing the goddess’s mark on her skin. For daring to carry the scent of moonlight when we reeked of rot and sacrifice.
“You’re smiling,” I hissed, sliding toward her like a lover in mourning. “Why are you smiling? She’s gone. She’s abandoned us. Because of
you.”
She didn’t answer. She only watched, blank, defiant, or blissfully stupid. I raised the blade again, the steel cold and dead–bright in my palm, preparing to scar her pretty face, and the room froze.
The candles guttered black. The puddles of blood around the altar rippled though there was no wind. The air coiled along my spine, cold as a grave and thick with shadow. Lucien stumbled back into the stone, wide eyed and panting, as the temperature dropped and the runes along the walls began to burn backwards.
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19:41 Fri, Dec 12
Chapter 231
Then the mirror cracked.
G47
The sound was teeth grinding on bone, a terrible, ancient fracture that split the silence like a scream. From that black fissure something crawled, smoke with claws, a thing not meant to be and yet commanded into being. It colled, it writhed, it took the shape of a woman, ragged and torn, with a voice like brittle iron wrapped in ruin.
“You failed me.”
I dropped to my knees, my forehead kissing the cold floor, and my blood smearing the stone in a lover’s kiss. My voice broke into the word that had to come first. “My queen, my blood, my goddess….”
“Silence.”
The shadow circled, a predator scenting wounded prey. “I have been struck down by cursed moonlight and sun. Humbled by divine hands. My reach and my power, is severed. Their worship struck me down. Their light wounded me.”
My stomach knotted the way it did when bad things became worse. No…no…no. They had found her. The other gods had intervened. A hot, animal gasp tore out of me. “How dare they,” I spat.
Lucien was sobbing now, a sound like some dying animal. “Tell us how to fix it. Tell us what to do, please, Raelith, please….”
The shadow leaned in, the tendrils brushing the crown of my head like ash weaving itself into a coronet.
“You will build me anew. A temple of blood. Three hundred sacrifices. Willing. Bound by faith. Given freely. I will rise again. I will eat the fucking moon.”
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