Episode-851
Chapter : 1701
She looked down at her hands. They were trembling uncontrollably, vibrating with the aftershocks of her magical outburst. She could still feel the phantom sensation of his neck under her fingers. She could feel the fragility of his life. She could feel the ease with which she had snuffed it out.
She had trained her whole life to be a weapon. She had sharpened herself to protect her House. But a weapon has no loyalty when it breaks. It just cuts whatever is closest.
And she had cut the heart out of her own life.
Far below, Serrum Town was a portrait of ruin.
The wind had died down, but the silence that remained was heavy and suffocating. The town square looked like it had been hit by a meteor made of glass. Buildings were sheared in half, their interiors exposed to the elements like open wounds. Furniture hung precariously from ruined floors. The cobblestones were pulverized into fine dust.
A layer of black frost coated everything. It wasn't melting, even as the sun tried to break through the clouds. It clung to the wood and the stone, a lingering curse that sucked the heat out of the air.
Slowly, tentatively, the civilians began to emerge.
A cellar door creaked open. A shutter was pushed back. Faces, pale and terrified, peered out into the gloom. They looked around with wide eyes, expecting to see the monster still hovering above them.
They saw the destruction. They saw the craters. They saw the impossible spikes of black ice that pierced the earth.
But the sky was empty. The white contrail of Rosa’s flight was slowly dissipating, a fading line that pointed north.
She was gone. The threat was gone.
But the fear remained.
"Is it over?" a woman whispered, holding her child tight to her chest.
"I think so," a man replied, his voice shaking. "The witch has left."
They stepped out into the streets, crunching over the frozen debris. They didn't look for their Lord. The devastation was so absolute in the center of the square that they assumed the worst. They assumed that whatever had happened between the Lord and the Queen had ended in tragedy.
The town of Serrum had been built on industry, on the loud, confident noise of progress. Now, it was silent. It was a graveyard of ambition. The people moved like ghosts, too afraid to speak, too afraid to touch anything, lest the black ice wake up and finish what it started.
They looked north, watching the sky. They didn't know the details. They didn't know about the affair or the baby. They only knew that the Winter Queen had come, she had screamed, and she had left a scar on their world that would never fully heal.
Rosa crossed the invisible border that separated the Kingdom from the Dead Zones.
The air here changed. It wasn't just colder; it was thinner. It lacked the rich, vibrant mana of the south. This was the domain of the wild, untamed magic of the glaciers.
Below her, the green forests and brown fields gave way to endless white. The trees disappeared, replaced by jagged rocks and vast plains of snow that had not melted in a thousand years. The wind here was ferocious. It didn't blow; it bit. It carried tiny particles of ice that scoured everything they touched.
Usually, this landscape would have required Rosa to raise a shield. It would have been a hostile environment. But today, she didn't feel the hostility.
She felt welcomed.
The cold outside matched the cold inside. The desolation of the landscape was a perfect mirror of her soul.
She began to descend. She didn't aim for a cave or a valley. She aimed for the highest, most desolate peak on the horizon. It was a jagged spire of black rock and blue ice that pierced the clouds like a broken spear, standing alone against the sky.
She slowed her flight, the ice platform beneath her feet dissolving into mist as she touched down.
Her boots crunched on the snow. The wind howled around the peak, tearing at her dress, whipping her hair across her face. It was a physical assault, a gale that would have flayed the skin of a normal human in minutes.
Rosa stood still. She let the wind hit her. She let the cold seep into her bones. She wanted it to hurt. She wanted the elements to punish her.
She walked to the edge of the precipice and looked south.
Chapter : 1702
From this height, the world was just a map. She could see the clouds covering the lands she used to rule. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, was the capital. Somewhere was her family estate. Somewhere was the grave where they would bury Lloyd.
She imagined the funeral.
It would be a state affair. The King would be there. The Guild Masters would be there. They would bury him next to Jasmin. Two victims of the war.
But Lloyd wasn't killed by a Devil. He wasn't killed by a monster. He was killed by his wife.
The thought made her knees buckle. She sank into the snow, burying her hands in the white powder. The cold bit at her fingers, but she didn't pull them out.
"I loved you," she whispered into the gale. The wind snatched the words away before she could even hear them. "I loved you more than I knew how to say. I loved you enough to break the world."
She closed her eyes.
She reached into her core. She could feel the immense reservoir of her Sovereign power. It was still there, buzzing and potent, swirling with the endless energy of the winter.
It sickened her.
This power had killed him. This power, which she had sought so desperately, which she had tortured herself to obtain, was the weapon that had ended his life. It felt dirty. It felt like holding a blood-soaked knife.
She considered ending it.
It would be easy. So terribly easy.
She could pull all that mana into her heart. She could compress it, denser and denser, until it reached critical mass. She could detonate her own Spirit Core. It would be a flash of light, a moment of heat, and then... nothing.
No more pain. No more guilt. No more memories of his empty eyes.
She could join him. Maybe, in the afterlife, he would forgive her. Maybe they could start over.
She gathered the mana. She felt the hum of potential suicide building in her chest. It was a seductive feeling. It was the promise of sleep after a long, nightmare-filled day.
But then, a cruel voice in her head stopped her.
That is too easy.
It was the voice of her training. It was the voice of the spy she used to be.
Suicide is an escape. You don't get to escape. You broke it; you bought it. You killed the hero; you don't get to die like a martyr.
If she died, she would leave Mina alone to deal with the mess. If she died, the north would be left unguarded. The monsters that lived in these glaciers—the wendigos, the ice drakes, the ancient horrors—would eventually wander south. They would attack the kingdom Lloyd had built.
"I have to live," she realized, the thought tasting like ash in her mouth. "I have to live with this."
She had to live as a monument to her sin. She would stay here, in this frozen wasteland. She would guard the north. She would be the ghost in the snow, the unseen shield that kept the monsters at bay.
She would protect his kingdom, even if she could never set foot in it again.
It was a penance. A purgatory of her own making. She would sentence herself to a lifetime of solitude, serving a world that would hate her memory.
She stood up. The snow fell from her dress. She wiped her face, her expression hardening into something brittle and cold. The weeping woman was gone. The monster was gone. All that was left was the husk of a Queen.
She raised her hands.
The ice around the peak responded to her call. It didn't crack or explode this time. It moved with a slow, mournful elegance.
Walls of crystalline ice rose from the bedrock. They were thick, transparent, and harder than steel. They rose up around her, blocking out the wind, blocking out the noise.
She wasn't building a castle. She wasn't building a fortress.
She was building a tomb.
A roof of glacial glass formed overhead, sealing her in. The space was small—just a single room, bare and empty. There was no furniture. No bed. No fire. Just the rock floor and the ice walls.
The wind outside battered against her new home, but inside, it was silent. Dead silent.
Rosa walked to the center of the room and sat down on the hard stone. She arranged her dress around her. She placed her hands in her lap.
She looked through the transparent wall, gazing south one last time. The clouds were thickening, hiding the world of the living from her view.
"Goodbye, Lloyd," she whispered.