The Death-Chosen Daughter Chapter 10
As my voice fell, the council hall descended into a deathly silence.
Caelum knelt at the bottom of the stairs, clutching his right hand with a hole burned straight through it. His tears smashed against the bone steps.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Lord Emissary.”
The high priest scrambled forward, kowtowing heavily. His voice trembled so much he could barely form a sentence. “Lord Emissary, please forgive him! His Highness… He just lost his composure for a moment…”
“Lost his composure?”
I looked down at this old fool who had once knelt at the altar and declared Nyssa the “child of prophecy.”
“Years ago, you personally attributed the faith of the Underworld to Nyssa Vaelen’s name.”
“You declared her the child chosen by Death.”
“You said the entire elven continent needed to pray for her.”
The blood drained from the high priest’s face.
“I… I…”
“You didn’t mistake the god,” I said calmly. “You simply chose the family you wanted to curry favor with.”
The high priest collapsed onto the ground in a heap.
I raised my hand.
A scroll formed from pure black nether-mist, radiating a faint blue glow, hovered silently in my palm.
It unfurled, rolling all the way to the far end of the hall. Countless names and accounts, written in the ancient script of the Underworld, materialized upon it.
“Behold, the Ledger of the Underworld. It calculates every life, every death, and every debt to the last fraction. Nothing is
omitted.”
My voice echoed through the entire hall.
“The first iron law of the Underworld:”
“Those who steal the emissary’s name and usurp the emissary’s faith shall suffer a death of a thousand cuts, and every blessing they have enjoyed shall be returned in full to its rightful owner.”
Gasps rang out across the hall.
Several elders turned deathly pale. In the past three years, all of them had sent lavish gifts to Nyssa, begging for “the emissary blessing.”
And those blessings were the ones I had scraped together bit by bit using my healing magic in the Lower District.
“Bring them in.”
The moment I spoke, the side doors of the hall were pushed open by spectral entities from the Underworld.
Pouring in from outside was a crowd of ragged commoners from the Lower District.
They had been escorted all the way up by the spirits of the Underworld. They bore unhealed wounds and the bloodstains of the recent riots.
Leading them was an old el with a broken leg.
With a trembling hand, he pointed at me. “Three years ago, you knelt by my grandson’s sickbed and with your own hands, you pulled him back from the brink of the abyss!”
“They told me the one who saved my grandson was named Nyssa Vaelen!”
“But it was clearly you!”
Commoner after commoner knelt.
“You cured my Black Death, yet they told me my savior was Lady Nyssa.”
“Our entire family’s… our entire family’s faith was swindled away…”
As the old man wept, the Underworld’s Ledger in mid-air erupted with a blinding red light.
I turned my palm upward, and with a sharp rustle, the ledger flipped to a brand-new page.
“Nyssa Vaelen,” I read. “One thousand eight hundred and seventy-three instances of stolen faith.”
The power of faith that Caelum had forcefully credited to Nyssa, which truly belonged to me, transformed into streams of golden light. They were violently ripped from Nyssa’s rotting body, flowing endlessly into my divine core.
“No… No! Give it back!” Nyssa crawled desperately on the ground, trying to catch the floating light.
But this was only the first step of the reckoning.
“The faith is returned. Next, the thief’s reckoning.”
Nyssa rolled frantically on the floor. “Save me! Save me!!”
I did not stop. I snapped my fingers.
Blood began to seep from Nyssa’s collarbones, as if two invisible spikes of cold iron were piercing her flesh at a brutally slow pace, driving straight into her bone.
This was the exact agony I had endured every new moon. Now, I was returning it to her, piece by piece.
“Sister…” she cried out. “Sister, I beg you…”
“I have been frail since I was a child. Father and Mother forced me to do this. You can’t blame me alone.”
I looked at her. For eighteen years, she had probably never truly considered me her sister.
When she needed me to lay down my life to carry her burdens, she had not even deigned to acknowledge me as her blood kin.
“Nyssa, you too shall know the feeling of cold iron piercing your collarbones.”
As the nails drove through, Nyssa’s entire body arched violently on the floor. The fingernails on her beautiful hands cracked and peeled back one by one, blood spraying across the pristine white marble tiles.
“Ah! Please stop! Mother, save me! Caelum, save me! It hurts!” Nyssa thrashed wildly on the ground, her eyes practically bulging from the pain.
Watching this, the Vaelens completely broke down.
Mother crawled to the bottom of the stairs, her tear-streaked face turned up to me as she resorted to her familiar emotional blackmail.s
“Elowen, she is your biological sister!”
“You are twins who shared the same womb! Will you only be satisfied when you’ torture her to death? I am begging you as your mother, spare her for the sake of your bloodline!
“You have already won! You are the emissary, high and mighty! What more could you want?”
“For the sake of our bloodline?”
I chuckled softly, the sound exceptionally jarring in the grand hall.
I looked at this “loving” mother. “I remember when you drained my magic, you told me the exact same thing: ‘Endure it, just consider it a favor to your mother.””
I raised my hand and tapped lightly at the empty air.
“Since your heart aches for her so much, then as a parent, you should be willing to share in the pain she now endures, should you not?”
The moment my words fell, two bloody holes exploded at Mother’s collarbones.
“Ah!” Seraphine’s exquisite face, arrogant for most of her life, twisted entirely in that instant.
Like a fish sliced open by the belly, she fell stiffly onto Nyssa, letting out a shriek even more miserable than her daughter’s, a sound that nearly tore through the canopy.
I tilted my head slightly. “Mother, don’t scream.”
“These are the very spikes you personally drove into me.”
“I carried them for ten years.”
“How can you not handle a single strike?”
The council hall was dead silent.
Aside from the overlapping screams of the mother and daughter, no one dared make a sound.
My father, Lord Vaelen, knelt less than three paces away from them, shaking like a dead leaf in the wind. A drop of sweat rolled
down his chin and hit the floor.
He did not dare save them, and he did not dare move. He did not even dare look up at me.
As for Caelum, he stared at me across the blood-soaked floor and the overlapping wails of the women.
His lips trembled so violently he could barely form a sentence.
“Elowen…” he called my name, word by hoarse word.
“That’s enough… alright?”
“Punish whomever you will… I will take it for them. I will bear it all for you.”
“Don’t become like this…”
“You… you were never like this.”
I smiled and asked him, “Then tell me, what was I like before?”
“Was it when you held me down, and I did not cry out as Nyssa poured the potion into my wounds?”
“Or was I the one who didn’t dare say a word when you stole my identity, claiming the people I saved were saved by her?”
“Your Highness, the version of me you long for was built upon my bones.”
Caelum’s pupils contracted sharply. He had nothing left to say. Clutching his burned hand, his knuckles dug so hard into the bone stairs that his fingers began to warp.
