The Death-Chosen Daughter Chapter 12
Faced with Caelum’s breakdown, his tears, and the gruesome sight of him tearing open his robes with bloody hands to carve out his own heart, I felt absolutely nothing.
Inside the hall, there was pin-drop silence.
All the nobles, councilors, and commoners held their breath, watching this High Elf prince, once proud for two centuries, now groveling at the bottom of the stairs like a stray dog.
I looked at him as one would a disgusting, soiled rag tossed into a puddle of blood.
“My heart… Look, it only beats for you,” Caelum muttered, a madman’s gleam in his eyes.
Caelum slashed open the flesh of his own chest. Blood gushed out, splashing onto his pristine white robes.
The elders in the hall gasped in terror, trying to intervene, but the Underworld’hecrotic energy pinned them to the ground, rendering them immobile.
The high priest stumbled forward, crawling on his hands and knees. “Your Highness, think twice! If you carve out your core, you will never be the heir to the elven royal family again!”
Caelum ignored him.
Guided by his magic, the heart that had beaten for two hundred years-the elven core representing the highest lineage of the High Elves-slowly emerged from his chest.
The core was entirely jade-green, radiating the purest silver light of the World Tree.
It was the most precious possession of the elven race.
To lose it meant an elf would forfeit their entire lifespan and life essence, forever losing their immortality.
“You said there was no longer an eternity between us…” Caelum cupped the bloodstained core, his golden eyes filled with red veins, clinging to it like a drowning man clutching his last piece of driftwood.
“I will give you all my lifespan! I will split it in half, and we can forge a new soul-bond! Elowen, I am paying you back with my life. Please, come back to me…”
Trembling, he traced a soul-binding array in the air with his blood, offering the core-representing half his life-up to me.
“Let us start over. Can we?”
The hall was dead silent.
Even Lady Seraphine, who had been writhing in the blood with her collarbones pierced by cold iron, stopped moaning and stared at me blankly.
I walked toward him step by step. My gown, woven of starlight and night, dragged across the bloodstained white jade tiles. With every step, a blue spectral flower bloomed in the blood.
The light in Caelum’s eyes grew brighter by the inch.
It was a frantic, almost deranged hope-the kind that comes when reaching the absolute limits of despair and finally grasping the final straw.
I stopped before the slowly rotating silver array.
I lowered my eyes, looking at the beating half of the elven core in the center of the array, radiating his two hundred years of essential light.
Then, I raised my foot and stomped down upon the focal point of his blood-drawn array.
Silver light exploded across the floor, scattering into thousands of fireflies before slowly fading away.
The soul-binding array constructed from Caelum’s blood collapsed from the center and completely extinguished with a loud boom.
The half of the elven core hovering in the air, severely struck by the laws of the Underworld, instantly lost its light and snapped back into Caelum’s chest.
Caelum was struck as if by lightning. He spat out a mouthful of blood and slumped to the ground..
“Did you think carving out your core would move me?”
“Not long ago, Your Highness confidently swore to my face that your soul would only bear her name.”
I leaned forward slightly, looking at his paper-white face, and curled my lips into a mocking sneer. “Didn’t you vow that after she died, you would observe mourning for her for a hundred years with the rites of a royal consort?”
“What? The woman you professed to love has not yet drawn her last breath, and Your Highness is already breaking his vow? Is the devotion of a High Elf so worthless?”
Every word was a barbed blade, stripping away the last shreds of his dignity and self-deception.
“No… No!” Caelum broke down, wailing in agony. Having lost his last sliver of sanity, he reached for me desperately.
“I only love you! From the very beginning, it has always been you, Elowen!”
But while his hand was still hanging in the air, a phantom formed from pure black nether-mist slowly materialized behind me.
His figure was nearly as tall as the canopy of the grand hall itself. His black robes were like the eternal night, and though his face remained unseen, his eyes were deeper than the Styx and heavier than the abyss.
The Lord of the Underworld, Thanatos. Just the presence of this phantom alone made the entire World Tree tremble.
He leaned down, wrapping an arm around my waist.
The gesture was possessive and familiar, a clear declaration: This is my queen.
Caelum knelt in the blood, looking up, staring fixedly at the hand on my waist, not daring to utter a sound.
An invisible, terrifying pressure carrying endless necrotic energy smashed directly into Caelum’s chest, like the absolute will of a primordial beast. He was sent flying backward.
He opened his mouth, and mouthful after mouthful of blood spilled out, trailing down his chin and dripping onto the floor.
He could not move a single finger.
Thanatos lowered his head, his silver hair brushing against my ear, his cold gaze locking onto Caelum in the blood.
“A mere short-lived, pointy-eared insect.”
Thanatos’s voice was not loud, yet it detonated like thunder in the soul of every elf present.
“And you dare lay a hand on my queen?”
