Chapter 127: Calm Morning
The morning sun pierced the mist—not like a triumphant conqueror, but more like a timid visitor. A pale light, golden and cold, that did not yet warm the ravaged earth but outlined the ruins and the bodies. The fog, more subtle than usual, drifted in translucent tatters, like the last sighs of the night.
Dylan rose.
It wasn’t a sudden motion, but a slow emergence, like a drowning man finding footing on an unfamiliar shore. His body was a landscape of dull pain—bruised muscles, rusted joints, the ghost-memory of every fracture inflicted by Élisa and healed by... the other. He no longer had that monstrous regeneration, only the heaviness of an exhausted and sullied flesh.
He blinked, chasing away the last streaks of a darkness no longer fully within him, but whose imprint remained—viscous. The clearing was a silent battlefield. Patches of scorched grass, steles snapped like twigs, the ground scarred by dark, sticky impacts where the corruption of the Lady of Midnight had spread.
Then his gaze fell on them.
A little further, leaning against a half-broken and charred rock—Maggie. Her face was ash-pale, her eyes half-closed, glassy. The side of her shirt was soaked in dark crimson, nearly black in the newborn light, a red that still seeped, slowly, inexorably. Her breathing was short, wheezing, each inhalation a visible struggle.
And Élisa.
Élisa was kneeling beside her, her back to Dylan. Her hands—those same hands that had shattered his bones with implacable will—trembled slightly. They pressed a torn piece of fabric—likely a scrap of her own jacket—against Maggie’s gaping wound. Dylan saw her shoulders rise in stuttering jerks, not from effort, but from a contained sob. A strange glow, faint, golden like the morning light but warmer, emanated from her hands, mixing with the blood on the cloth. Not a miraculous healing, no. More like a cauterization, a desperate dam against the red tide threatening to carry Maggie away.
The weight that fell upon Dylan’s mind was heavier than Élisa’s invisible hand had ever been. It wasn’t him. Not really. Not consciously. But it had been his hands that held the knife, his arms that struck, his legs that chased Maggie through the night, driven by that foreign, vicious will. He saw again the twisted grin on his own face reflected in a shattered window, heard the echo of the harsh, cruel laugh that had come from his throat. His fingers, ending in long claws, had plunged into her side like a blade.