The Anomaly's Path

"Why?"

The word came out of me before I could stop it, raw and broken, stripped of all the anger I had been carrying for weeks.

I had imagined this moment so many times in the past month, pictured myself screaming at her, demanding answers and justice, making her suffer for every life she had stolen.

However...

Now that she was here, kneeling in the mud with my blade at her throat, I could not find the rage. There was only exhaustion. Only the hollow emptiness of someone who had already lost everything and was tired of pretending otherwise.

Marta looked up at me.

The rain ran down her face in thin streams, dripping from her chin and mixing with the blood that seeped from the small cut on her neck where Tempest rested. For a long moment, she did not speak.

She just looked at me with those tired, hollow eyes that had once seemed so kind, so full of warmth and grandmotherly affection.

"...Because I was dying," she said finally. Her voice was soft, barely louder than the rain hitting the muddy ground around us. "I have always been dying, Leo. From the day I was born, I was dying."

"You were dying for ninety years?"

The words came out sharper than I intended, but I did not apologize.

I had spent the last month digging through old records and forgotten graves, tracing the path of a monster who had been killing for longer than I had been alive. Every piece of evidence I found led back to her, and every part of me wished it had not.

Her eyes widened, just a fraction. It was the only tell I needed.

"When I found out someone leaked the information about Mia, I thought it had to be someone from the village. Someone who held a grudge against her or against Roran or against the orphanage. But there was no one. At least from Wayford. The village was small and the people were simple. They did not have secrets. They did not have reasons to betray their own."

I paused.

"That was when it clicked. Other than me, only one person in that village knew about Mia’s ability. Only one person knew what she could do and that person had the knowledge and the opportunity to sell her to the demons."

I looked down at her.

"...You."

She did not move.

"But I saw you die. I watched that demon pull her hand out of your chest. I watched you fall. A dead person cannot be a traitor. That is what I told myself. That is what I wanted to believe."

I shook my head. "Then I remembered your power. Gardener’s Touch. You said it let you borrow time from the soil. From the trees and flowers. You said it made things grow faster, healthier and stronger."

I leaned closer.

"But that never made sense to me. It was always strange to me even if I know some powers were strange. Borrowing time from a tree does not make a flower bloom in winter. That is not how time works. That is not how anything works."

"..."

"So I started thinking. What if your power was not just limited to borrowing time from things? What if it was about taking something else? Something that trees and flowers and soil do not have?"

I let the question hang in the air. "...Life. You were taking life. Not time, but life."

The rain fell harder.

"I did not want to believe it. It sounded absurd. Even for this world. A woman who could drain the life out of living things and use it to keep herself alive. It sounded like a nightmare. Like something from a story told to scare children."

I paused.

"But then when me and the knights were making the graves, we never found your body. The knights said it was because there were too many bodies to identify. Too much damage and blood. I wanted to believe that too. But something did not sit right. I kept thinking about it. Kept turning it over in my head."

"..."

"So I started searching. I looked into the history of Wayford and the areas around it. I thought maybe there was something I missed. Some record, clue, connection. Anything I am missing."

I took a breath.

"I found the Hestia records," I said, and my voice was steadier now, colder. "The northern territories. A noble family with a sickly daughter who was supposed to die before she turned twenty. But she did not die, did she? She lived. And her family died in a fire that left no burn marks on their bodies."

Marta’s hands trembled in her lap, her pale fingers curling into fists against her thighs.

"Their bodies were found shriveled, drained, like someone had sucked the life out of them." I pressed the blade a little closer, watching a thin bead of blood run down her neck. "...That was you, was it not?"

She did not deny it. The mask of the kind grandmother did not just slip; it dissolved, leaving behind a creature of primal, desperate survival.

"I found the children, the victims of your harvest, I should say," I continued, and now my voice was dropping, growing heavier with every word. "The ones who left the orphanage. The ones who were sent to other villages, other families, other lives. None of them arrived anywhere. None of them left a trace. It was as if the world simply swallowed them whole the moment they walked out of Wayford."

I thought about Roran’s friend, who had left Wayford when he was younger and never been seen again.

"...You killed them," I said. "One breath at a time. So slowly that the village thought it was just the luck of the poor."

Marta’s lips trembled. For a moment, I thought she was going to cry. But no tears came. I did not think she had any left.

"I... I wanted to live, Leo." Her voice cracked, and suddenly she was not the cold, hollow woman who had sold us to the demons. She was just an old woman, afraid, desperate and broken.

"Is that so wrong? To want to see the sun one more day? To not feel the cold in my bones? Voss promised me a body. A new start. I would have been beautiful again. I would have been young again. I would have been free."

"You killed children for a beauty that was never yours to keep," I spat.

"They were orphans!" she shrieked, a flash of her true, ugly self breaking through. "Discarded things! No one wanted them! I was just... borrowing time from those who had no use for it."

"Time is not a debt you get to collect from the innocent." My mana surged, the black lightning on the blade hissing as it touched the rainwater. "That is not borrowing. That is theft. That is the rot at the heart of the world."

She flinched as if I had struck her, her shoulders sagging. "I know...," she whispered. "I have always known what... I am."

She looked up at me, and there was something in her eyes that I had not expected. I saw a terrifying acceptance in her gaze. She was not fighting anymore. She was waiting.

"I have been running for ninety years," she said. "Hiding, lying and pretending to be someone I am not. I have killed so many people that I stopped counting. I have stolen so many lives that I stopped remembering their faces."

She paused, a strange, twisted tenderness flickering in her eyes. "But I never forgot Roran. He was the only one who ever looked at me like I was human. He trusted me. He believed in me. He was too strong, too bright, too... good. I could not touch him. I could not bring myself to dim that light."

Her eyes locked onto mine.

"I did not want to betray him. I did not want to sell Mia. But the borrowed life was slipping. My body was turning to ash. Voss promised me her vessel. I sold you all for the chance to see one more sunrise without the taste of death in my mouth."

"So you sold us."

"I sold all of you." Tears finally came, mixing with the rain on her cheeks. "For a chance to live. For a chance to see the sun rise one more time without feeling my bones ache. To be free of this curse."

She reached up, her trembling hand closing around the naked edge of Tempest. Blood spilled over her palm, but she did not let go. She pulled the sword closer to her own throat.

"So go ahead," she said. "Kill me and end it. I deserve it."

I stared at her.

"But do not pretend you are better than me, Leo." Her voice sharpened. "You are also killing me to survive. You are also taking a life to protect the ones you love. The only difference between us is that I kill the weak, and you kill the guilty."

The words hit me like a physical blow. The old man’s voice echoed in my head.

"One day, this path will also take you to ruin. There will be a time when you will have to make a choice, and I am sure that time you will realize what I am feeling right now."

Seraphina’s voice followed.

"The difference is choice. Every day, every moment, every breath—you choose. To be better or to be worse."

Why now...? I thought. Why am I remembering this now?

I looked at the woman who had helped me and raised the people I knew, and I looked at the monster she had become. The rain felt like a shroud, blurring the lines between justice and vengeance.

"...I am not you," I said, though my voice felt hollow.

Marta gave a small, broken smile, a ghost of the woman I used to believe in.

"Not yet...," she whispered.

I did not give her another second to plant those seeds of doubt. I did not give the world another moment to let her breathe. "Not ever."

I raised Tempest. "Any last words?"

Marta closed her eyes. The rain fell on her face. "Tell Mia I always loved her as my daughter..."

"..."

I did not say anything and brought the blade down.

There was no grand explosion of power, no final scream. There was only the soft, wet slide of steel and the heavy thud of a body meeting the mud. The rain rushed in to claim her, washing the dark blood into the gutter in a pale, fading pink.

Marta’s body crumpled to the ground, and the rain washed over her, turning the blood pink as it ran toward the drain. Her eyes were still open, still staring at nothing, and her lips were slightly parted, frozen in the middle of a word I would never hear.

She looked so small. Frail. Just a bundle of grey rags and old bones that had finally run out of time.

I stood there for a moment, Tempest heavy in my hand. The rainwater ran down the blade, but it could not wash away the stain. It could not clean the feeling of my own soul.

I looked down at Marta’s body.

I did not feel like a hero. I did not feel like a survivor. I just felt empty, a vessel of my own, scooped out by the very justice I had sought.

This is what it feels like, I thought. This is what it feels like to kill someone who was once like a grandmother to me.

I looked up into the weeping sky. The storm did not care. The world did not tilt. I had killed the woman who was like family, and the rain simply continued to fall, indifferent to the fact that I was now truly, utterly alone.

This was the price of the path.

This was the weight of the sword.

To kill the past so the future could breathe, even if it meant walking that future as a ghost.