The Death-Chosen Daughter Chapter 08
The staircase to the Abyssal Shrine seemed to have no end.
Caelum rushed down the corridor of withered vines, his white soul-binding robes tonto shreds by the barbed thorns.
Before the two guards stationed outside the Abyssal Shrine could even bow, he blasted them aside with a single strike.
“Your Highness! This area is forbidden…”
“Get out.”
He hurled the words like stones, his voice so hoarse it sounded as if his throat had been slashed.
The heavy, black wooden door stood right before him.
Caelum’s hand hovered over the wood, but he did not dare push it open.
He smelled it.
That cold, moonlight-like scent. The scent he had known for two hundred years and could recognize with his eyes closed. It was now mixed with a thick, sweet stench of blood, seeping through the cracks of the door.
“Elowen…” He kicked the door open.
But in the center of the Abyssal Shrine, beneath the massive black root, he found nothing of what he had hoped for.
There was only a massive pool of gleaming, pitch-black blood, still radiating heat.
The blood crawled across the stone floor, winding its way down along the ancient roots. In the deepest depths, it had birthed a field of spectral blue flowers he had never seen before.
They were flowers of the Underworld. Absolute proof that Death had descended.
Caelum’s knees crashed heavily onto the stone slabs.
He reached out to touch the pool of blood, but the moment his fingertips grazed it, two objects scattered in the puddle clattered against the stone.
He knew these items intimately. They were cold iron shackles, meant to pierce collarbones, and they were still coated with fresh flesh and blood.
The Vaelens had followed him down. Elowen’s mother, Seraphine, stepped into the black blood and shrieked as she scrambled backward. Elowen’s father turned deathly pale.
“These shackles…” her father trembled. “Why are these shackles here?”
“My lady is dead! Driven to her death by you monsters!”
Faye, the elven maid who had only ever dared to hide behind Elowen and cry, stumbled out. She was shaking violently, clutching a silk handkerchief stained black by Elowen’s necrotic aura.
“Are you satisfied now?! While all of you were up there celebrating, she was kneeling here alone, vomiting mouthfuls of black blood while being torn apart alive by necrotic energy!”
“For eighteen years, you bled her magic like a vessel! You forced my lady to hand over that ring yesterday as she was dying. You have no hearts!
Lady Vaelen’s face was as white as a sheet. She glanced frantically at the swirling aura of death around them, her voice a brittle attempt at bravery. “Shut up! What does a lowly maid like you know? Nyssa is the one in the prophecy…”
Faye ignored her completely. Her voice was so piercing it nearly split the shrine in two.
–
“Your Highness, do you know of the old wounds in my lady’s collarbones, pierced again and again?”
“Do you know that the madam drained her blodd twice a month, bleeding her until she was unconscious, just so Lady Nyssa could remain healthy?”
“Do you know that when you gave her that ring, her back was still bleeding from the wounds Lady Vaelen inflicted with a cold iron whip? She bled the entire night, yet she smiled and finished that dance with you!”
Caelum knelt in the pool of blood, completely unmoving
Faye’s tears crashed down onto the handkerchief, splattering onto the black stains.
Caelum could not produce a single word.
His mind buzzed. The fragments he had always ignored were now piecing themselves together, like a thousand dull blades scraping his bones, over and over.
Elowen’s collars, always buttoned so high. That fleeting scent of cold iron he thought was an illusion when he held her the night she took a poisoned arrow for him.
That scent, it turned out, had been seeping from the wounds in her collarbones all along.
At some point, Nyssa had also reached the outside of the Abyssal Shrine, stumbling inside while crying for help.
Everyone’s attention snapped toward her. Instantly, even the seasoned guards gasped in absolute horror.
Without the suppression and life support of Elowen’s shadow magic, the true condition hidden within Nyssa’s body had completely erupted.
On Nyssa’s face, a face once praised as “the purest lily of the elven continent,” dark, rotting bruises were surfacing at a visible speed.
The spots started on her chin, then moved to her cheeks, and down her neck.
Her skin began to curl up like waterlogged, rotting petals, revealing the pink, pus-seeping flesh underneath.
“My face! Mother, my face hurts so much! Save me!” Nyssa lunged toward her parents, screaming and tearing at her own hair.
Seraphine instinctively reached out to catch her, but the moment she touched Nyssa’s skin, an entire piece of her cheek sloughed right off.
Seraphine shrieked and yanked her hands back, while Nyssa curled into a ball on the ground.
“Necrotic affliction…”
Her father, who had been silent, spoke in a crumbling voice. “It’s the necrotic affliction…”
“Nyssa… She has had the necrotic affliction since birth. We only managed to suppress it by relying on Elowen’s shadow magic.”
Faye snapped her head up. “You knew?!”
“You knew from the moment she was born?!”
“You knew Nyssa was the cursed one, you knew my lady was the true chosen one, and you still did this?!”
The father’s lips trembled, but no words came out.
Seraphine collapsed in the pool of blood, her face paler than a corpse.
Faye slowly turned her bloodshot eyes toward Caelum.
“Your Highness.”
“Do you understand now?”
Caelum did not answer.
Kneeling in the center of the blood pool, his hands shaking violently, he pulled a tiny, faintly glowing silver crystal from his
robes.
It was the highest-tier tracking crystal of the elven royal family. As long as the soul-bond remained, whether the other person was at the ends of the earth, alive or dead, this crystal could track down their very last shred of a soul.
He pressed the crystal into his palm.
He poured every ounce of his remaining elven power into calling out the name etched into his soul for two hundred years.
He just wanted her back.
The crystal flared for a second. But then, the priceless artifact shattered into fine powder right in his hand.
Caelum froze. The spiritual bond inside him felt as though it had been violently severed from the other end. He spat out a mouthful of fresh blood, splattering it directly onto the ghostly blue nether flowers.
He pitched forward.
The backlash from the severed soul-bond ravaged his elven core. He knelt in the black blood Elowen had left behind, his fingers clawing at the ground so hard that his fingernails cracked and flipped backward one by one.
But the physical agony was nothing compared to the despair in his heart.
Elowen had not left him a single thread.
She had not even left him the chance to chase after her and beg for forgiveness.
His vision fell on the edge of the blood pool. Resting quietly there was a half-burned wooden amulet.
It was the one he had personally placed around her neck five years ago, after she took a highly toxic cold iron arrow to save him. She had kept it close to her heart, right up until her final moments.
“One soul shall ascend to the canopy, one soul shall fall to the rotting roots.”
Caelum knelt in the blood, gripping the ruined amulet.
The truth, eighteen years late, had cleaved his mind open in the most brutal way imaginable.
She never lied.
It had always been her, carrying the weight of death for them all. And he had personally driven poison into her very bones.
