Episode-887
Chapter : 1773
She squeezed his shirt, trying to transfer some of her own fading warmth into him, but it was useless. The valley was greedy. The black stones that surrounded them were drinking everything. She could feel the energy being sucked out of her pores. It felt like standing naked in a blizzard. The stones wanted her magic. They wanted her life. They wanted to leave nothing behind but two empty husks in the mud.
Tears blurred her vision. They were hot and salty, stinging her cheeks.
"I’m so sorry," she sobbed, her body shaking with the force of her grief. "I’m so sorry, Lloyd."
The echo of his last words still rang in her ears, louder than the thunder. I hate you.
He had died believing the lie. He had died thinking she was a monster who had sold him out for power. He thought she was the villain of his story. That thought hurt more than the spear in her chest. It felt like a poison spreading through her veins, turning her blood to ice.
She remembered the years they had spent together. She remembered how she had built walls around herself. She had worn the mask of the "Ice Queen" because she thought it would keep her safe. She thought if she was cold, if she was distant, she couldn't be hurt. She thought she was protecting him by being strong and emotionless.
But she had been wrong. So terribly wrong.
"I built a fortress," she thought bitterly. "But I locked myself out. And I locked you out with the wolves."
She wanted to shake him awake. She wanted to scream the truth into his face. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she had always loved him, that every cold look and harsh word was just a shield she was too scared to put down. But you cannot explain things to the dead. The dead do not listen. They only remember the last thing they heard.
Rosa closed her eyes, fighting the wave of dizziness that threatened to pull her into the darkness. She couldn't die yet. Not yet.
Her fingers were already clamped tight around the small stone she had been hiding, pressing it hard into the center of his chest. This was the Aethel-Core, a tiny crystal sphere that was now pulsing with a faint, stubborn white light against her palm. It hummed with a low vibration, sounding like a heartbeat that didn't belong to either of them, and it was the only source of warmth left in the entire valley.
This little stone was everything. It was the reason she had sold her jewelry. It was the reason she had emptied the family vaults. She had spent years hunting for it, fighting for it, bargaining with shady merchants in back alleys. She had bought it to save her mother, hoping it would be a cure.
But it wasn't a cure. It was a ticket.
The Core is a ferry, the old scrolls had said. It carries the passenger across the great dark ocean to a new shore.
It was useless for the living. It couldn't heal a wound or fix a broken heart. It could only take a soul that had already let go and send it somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
Rosa placed the glowing sphere on Lloyd’s chest. The light from the crystal reflected in his dead eyes, making it look like a spark of life had returned for just a second.
"You can't stay here," Rosa whispered to him. She brushed a wet lock of hair away from his forehead. "If you stay here, your soul will just wander in the dark. Mammon will find you. He will eat your memories. He will make you relive this pain forever."
She looked up at the sky. The clouds were thick and suffocating. There was no sunlight here. There was no hope in this world for a man like Lloyd Ferrum. He was too brilliant. He was too soft. This world of swords and magic and betrayal had chewed him up and spit him out.
"You need to go," she said, her voice trembling. "You need to go to a place that makes sense."
She didn't know where that place was. She didn't know if it even existed. But she imagined a world without magic. A world where things were built with hands and math, not blood and pacts. A world where a man could be an engineer without having to be a killer. A world where logic was king, and feelings were simple.
Chapter : 1774
"I will send you there," Rosa promised. "I will push you so hard you’ll fly right out of this universe."
She felt the darkness creeping into the edges of her vision. Her heart was stuttering. The cold was moving up her arms, numbing her fingers. She knew she didn't have much time. The ritual to activate the Aethel-Core usually required three high-ranking mages and a week of preparation.
She had neither. She only had herself.
To make the stone work, she would have to become the fuel. She would have to burn her own Spirit Core—the source of her magic and her life—until there was nothing left but ash. It was a suicide mission. But she was dying anyway.
"Better to burn out," she thought, a sad smile touching her pale lips, "than to fade away in the cold."
She adjusted the stone on his chest, making sure it was touching his skin. She took a deep breath, or at least as deep as she could with a spear in her lungs. She focused her mind. She pushed away the pain. She pushed away the fear. She focused entirely on the small, white light in her hand.
"Okay," Rosa whispered. "Let’s make a miracle."
________________________________________
Igniting a soul is not like lighting a candle. It is like opening a door to a blast furnace.
Rosa closed her eyes and looked inward. Deep inside her chest, beneath the pain and the broken ribs, sat her Spirit Core. For her whole life, it had been a ball of beautiful, blue ice. It was the source of her power, the thing that made her the genius of the Siddik family. It was cool, calm, and controlled.
Now, she needed it to explode.
"Burn," she commanded silently.
She didn't gently draw mana from it like she would for a spell. She smashed it. She mentally grabbed the core of her being and crushed it.
The reaction was instant and violent.
A roar of energy exploded inside her body. It wasn't the cold magic she was used to. It was white-hot fire. It rushed through her veins, burning away the numbness. It felt like she had swallowed the sun. Her skin began to glow. Small cracks of blue light appeared on her arms and neck as her physical body struggled to contain the massive release of energy.
The Null-Stone valley reacted immediately. The ground beneath her began to shake. The black rocks sensed the feast and tried to suck the power away. They pulled at her, dragging at the energy like hungry wolves tearing at meat.
"No!" Rosa screamed through gritted teeth. "It’s not for you!"
She forced the energy down her arms. She pushed it out of her hands and into the Aethel-Core sitting on Lloyd’s chest.
The crystal sphere lit up.
It started as a hum, a low vibration that rattled Lloyd’s ribcage. Then, the light intensified. It turned from a soft glow to a blinding brilliance. Beams of pure white light shot out from between Rosa’s fingers, cutting through the gloom of the valley. The rain that hit the light evaporated instantly, turning into hissing steam.
But it wasn't enough. The stone needed more. It needed a life to pay for a life.
Rosa dug deeper. She didn't just give her magic; she gave herself. She began to feed her memories into the fire.
She remembered her mother’s smile before the illness took her. Burn it. The memory turned into fuel.
She remembered the pride she felt when she mastered her first spell. Burn it. The pride became power.
She remembered the first time she saw Lloyd, looking awkward and shy at the academy. Burn it. The love became a roaring flame.
She gave up her past. She gave up her future. She gave up the name "Siddik." She gave up the title of "Regent." She poured every scrap of who she was into the stone until she was nothing but a conduit for the light.
The beam of light erupted.
A massive pillar of white energy shot straight up from Lloyd’s chest. It punched a hole through the grey clouds, revealing the dark void of space beyond. The anti-magic field of the valley shattered. The silence was broken by the sound of a thousand wind chimes ringing at once.
In the center of that blinding pillar, Rosa saw it.