Chapter 776: [The Rewritten Lost Past] [16]

It had occurred several decades ago...

The Falkrona Estate sat on its island like a sovereign thing, ancient stonework wrapped in salt air and the low ripples of the sea.

Within it, the quarters of Belle Falkrona were the warmest corner of all. Soft lamplight, the faint scent of something floral, shelves lined with books that had been read and loved rather than merely displayed.

Belle herself was absent that evening.

But her son was there.

Seven years old right now.

He sat in the center of the large bed, the same bed he had slept in since infancy, curled against his mother’s side in her arms, with a book open across his knees.

He wasn’t a fearful boy, not exactly. But the nights were unkind to him in ways that had nothing to do with the dark. Pain came to him in his sleep, not the ordinary aches of childhood but something deeper, something that clawed at the inside of his skull and dragged him from rest gasping and trembling. The healers had no name for it. Only Belle’s presence could soften it, her hand at the back of his head, her voice until his breathing slowed and the pain behind his eyes dimmed.

But tonight she hadn’t returned yet, and so Amael read.

The door opened.

He didn’t look up immediately. His eyes finished the sentence on the page first.

It wasn’t Belle. The figure in the doorway was a young man.

Brown haired and green-eyed.

Charles Dolphis. He had arrived at the Estate recently alongside a delegation of Sancta Vedelia nobles, his house among the most prominent of those welcomed through the gates. He was the Crown Prince of House Dolphis. He had no reason whatsoever to be standing in the private quarters of Belle Falkrona at this hour.

And yet he didn’t look lost. His eyes moved, and when they found the small boy sitting alone on the large bed, something in his posture shifted before he stepped fully inside and pulled the door closed behind him.

"Are you here to kill me?" Amael asked.

Charles went still.

He turned toward the boy slowly.

"Why would you think that?"

Amael turned a page. "You came here at night," he said. "Perhaps to try something against my mother but you wouldn’t be able to touch her regardless, so that seems unlikely. She isn’t here, and yet you came in anyway, upon seeing me alone." He glanced up for just a moment. "So I assumed you came for me."

"I may have come to speak with you," Charles replied.

Amael scanned him for a beat, then closed the book with a soft sound. "Then speak."

Charles’s gaze drifted around the room before settling back on the child. "Do you always sleep here?"

"Always," Amael said. "I spend most of my time in this room."

"Why?"

"I’m not like the others." He said it plainly, without self-pity. "I don’t get on well with my mother’s brothers and sisters and their children."

"Why not?"

Amael considered the question briefly "My mother’s father is a God," he said at last. "They see us as different. Mother says they resent it, resent us. Maybe they’re envious. I don’t fully understand it yet, but I know enough."

Charles moved closer. "Do you know what you are?"

"The Vessel of Samael Eveningstar," Amael replied without hesitation.

"Do you understand what that means?"

Amael looked up at him fully for the first time, thinking for a moment. "Are you here to kill me because of what I am?"

"Killing a Vessel hardly stops the cycle," Charles replied. "Once dead, they are reborn again and again until they fulfill their purpose. You know this."

"But I’m not an ordinary Vessel," Amael said. "My father is Nihil. The Guardian God. That makes me something a little more complicated than the ones who came before, doesn’t it?"

"Your lineage is... problematic," Charles nodded quietly. He had reached the bedside now and stood before the boy, looking down at him with an expression that was difficult to read.

"What’s your name?" Amael asked, tilting his head back to meet his eyes.

The man was quiet for just a moment. "Most call me Anox," he said. "Others call me Sirius."

Amael’s brow furrowed slightly. "Anox, like the Guardian Goddess?"

Sirius gave a single nod.

"She betrayed Eden," Amael said, watching him carefully. "She is called an Evil Goddess." He paused. "Then you’re with her. That would explain why you’re here. Have you come to kill me or to take me?"

Sirius looked at him before looking away.

"I don’t even know what I’m doing here," he said at last. "I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore."

"Do you feel lost?" Amael asked.

There was no mockery in it, no edge.

He was just asking.

Sirius exhaled slowly. "That," he said, "is a very good word for it." He was quiet for a moment. "I thought perhaps the Vessel of Samael Eveningstar might help me understand certain things. Help clarify what comes next, for us, for our plans."

"When you say plans," Amael said, "you mean Lucifer’s plans. He wants to take Eden’s realm, and all of you are helping him do it."

"Eden has caused immeasurable suffering in this world," Sirius replied.

"So this is revenge." Amael tilted his head. "Revenge by doing what exactly?" He paused, then shifted. "And how do you move between bodies the way you do?"

Sirius glanced away, something distant moving behind his eyes. "It isn’t difficult, mortal lives are fragile things, easy to slip into and easy to leave. I have been passing from one to another for five hundred years, body to body across Sancta Vedelia, watching each one flicker out after a few short decades." His voice held a kind of hollow contempt. "Weak. Brittle. I’ve often wondered whether Eden truly intends to use them as soldiers, or whether they are simply... decoration. Props in someone else’s design."

"And yet," Amael said quietly, "you stayed within that place for centuries. Under A-Nox’s orders." He looked up at Sirius without blinking. "Which means those lives meant something, didn’t they? The very ones you just called weak."

Sirius looked down at him.

"I should have anticipated this," he said, almost to himself, "but you aren’t an ordinary child, are you."

Amael didn’t answer that. "You’re doubting her," he said instead. "A-Nox. Even now, standing here in front of the Vessel of Samael Eveningstar, an opportunity that others would have seized without a second thought you’re hesitating.." His silver eyes didn’t leave Sirius’s face. "Five hundred years living among those brittle mortal lives has done something to you. Changed the way you think. Enough to make you question what your mother truly wants from all of this and what you become at the end of it, if you succeed."

Sirius’s gaze sharpened. "What do you think would happen if I took you right now?"

The boy was too perceptive.

Far too perceptive for seven years of age.

"My mother would kill you," Amael replied simply.

"You believe she could stop me?"

"Your current body isn’t strong enough to face my mommy," Amael said. "And if you tried anything beyond that, my grandfather would finish what she started. And if somehow which won’t happen you managed to get past both of them, my father won’t forgive you."

Sirius stared at him for a long moment. Then, against what seemed like his own will, a short laugh escaped him. "What a troublesome family." He shook his head slightly, and there was something in his voice that had softened without his permission. "I find myself a little envious, if I’m honest."

"Why have you spent all these years in Sancta Vedelia?" Amael asked. "All those centuries. What was the real purpose?"

"To infiltrate it. Manipulate its foundations slowly, from within. Conquer it eventually, the land, the Tree for Lucifer. A blow struck against Eden’s designs from the inside." He said it plainly, without pride.

"You feel empty," Amael said.

Sirius blinked.

The words had landed somewhere unexpected.

Amael climbed down from the bed. He moved a few steps across the floor, not toward Sirius, just into the quiet open space of the room, and pressed his small hand against his chest. "Living without purpose, I know what that feels like. I felt it too. In my past life, I lost everyone. Everything. And that hollow place it left behind, I still feel it sometimes. Right here."

Sirius watched him carefully, a faint crease forming between his brows. He found himself wondering, without quite meaning to, whether the boy was speaking of Samael’s life when he said past life.

"But then I found Ephera," Amael continued, his hand falling back to his side. "And that emptiness, it didn’t disappear entirely, but it became bearable. She filled it. And my friends helped too, in their own ways." He turned and looked at Sirius directly. "You just need something worth fighting for. Something worth being alive for. Once you find that, everything else becomes easier to carry."

"Where is this Ephera now?" Sirius asked.

Amael’s expression turned dark. "Dead," he said. "But not forever. My father made me a promise. I will see her again. I need to see her again."

"Love," Sirius said, scoffing lightly. "Love is the very reason Samael declared war against Eden in the first place. It is the seed of every war, every ruin. I would rather not court it."

"You already have," Amael said, and the look he gave Sirius was calm and stern. "It’s love for your mother that drove you to spend centuries alone in that place, wasn’t it? Isolated. Cut off from everything else. You did all of it for her."

Sirius smiled hearing that.

"You may be right," he said.

"But love is better when it’s returned," Amael added, a faint smirk tugging at his mouth. "And your mother will never love you the way my mommy loves me."

Sirius turned a dry look on him. "I’m seriously reconsidering killing you."

"I’m just saying," Amael shrugged, entirely unbothered, "that A-Nox isn’t worth what you’ve given her. Not even close."

"You know," Sirius said after a moment, his eyes narrowing slightly, "you’ve been doing this purposefully. Keeping me talking." The faintest trace of something almost like admiration crossed his face. "You’ve bought yourself quite a lot of time until your mother returns. Cleverly done."

"I was doing that at first," Amael admitted without a hint of embarrassment. "But then I actually became curious about you." He tilted his head. "What if you conquered Sancta Vedelia for yourself? Not for Lucifer. Not for your mother’s agenda. For you."

Sirius blinked. "For myself? What does that give me?"

"Your mother’s recognition, perhaps," Amael offered.

Sirius stared at him. "Didn’t you just tell me I was wasting my time trying to earn something from her?"

"You can want her recognition," Amael said simply, "and still do things for yourself. The two aren’t mutually exclusive."

Sirius went quiet at that. Something in the logic caught him somewhere he hadn’t expected.

"There’s nothing in Sancta Vedelia worth conquering," he said after a moment, though his voice had lost some of its certainty. "Nothing there for me."

"Nothing at all?" Amael raised a brow. "Nothing interesting?"

Sirius paused. His gaze drifted slightly, unfocusing, and for a moment he wasn’t in the room anymore.

He was thinking of her.

The Vampire Witch, the one who kept being reborn only to suffer and die alone, body after borrowed body, each life collapsing inward like a structure built on sand. He had watched her for a long time. Longer than he had watched most things. She was different from the others in Sancta Vedelia, different even from himself.

Did Merithra send her there with a purpose? Had there ever been a design to it, or had she simply been cast into that place and forgotten?

He couldn’t answer that. He had never been able to.

But the original witch, the soul beneath all those fractured vessels, was still holding on. Still breathing, still burning, still waiting for something or someone that may never have come. And in the absence of that something, she turned her waiting into rage and her rage into destruction, laying waste to everything around her because without revenge she had nothing, no anchor, no north, just the hollow promise of an uncertain future.

Sirius admired her, in his way. Her resilience was almost incomprehensible.

She had something to hold onto.

What did he have?

The thought had never struck him quite so plainly before. He had never even considered speaking to the Vampire Witch, had watched her from a distance the way one watches a storm through a window.

Yet now, standing in a child’s lamplit room in a body that wasn’t his, something stirred in him. A pull he hadn’t felt in centuries, simple, uncomplicated curiosity. He wanted to understand her. Wanted to know what she was truly waiting for.

The thought was still forming when the temperature in the room changed.

"What are you doing in my room?"

The voice was sweet.

Completely, terrifyingly sweet.

Sirius felt the cold run down the length of his spine before he even registered the sound of movement and he barely had time to turn before his face met the floor.

-BAM!

Belle’s knee drove into his back, pinning him with a weight that had nothing to do with her size, and silver eyes looked down at him from above.

"Did you touch my son?"

"What...?" Sirius clenched his hands, reaching instinctively for his mana and felt it drain away at a rate that made his whole body turn numb.

"I asked you a question," Belle said, and pressed her knee further into his spine.

-Crack!

The sound was small. The pain was not. A short, involuntary cry tore from his throat as something in his back gave way.

"Mommy—" Amael appeared at the edge of his vision, expression caught somewhere between concern and a grimace. "I think you might be hurting him."

"Are you alright, my sweetie?" Belle’s entire demeanor shifted in an instant, her voice flooded with warmth, her eyes finding her son tearfully. "I am sorry for the late, I had been caught with that little pest Aniha. One day I will definitely get rid of her, I promise you."

"I’m fine," Amael said. "But he didn’t, he didn’t hurt me. I think."

"He’s dangerous, love. I’ll be done quickly, I promise." She smiled at him, soft and radiant, and deeply unhinged. "Go back to bed and count to ten for me, yes?"

Amael glanced down at Sirius one more time, pressed flat against the floor, then quietly turned away. He climbed back onto the bed and pulled the blanket across himself.

"One... two... three..."

"I didn’t come here to hurt him!" Sirius snapped from the floor, straining uselessly against her grip.

"You came," Belle replied, her voice returning to ice. "That is enough."

"That’s not—"

"I heard everything." She tilted her chin toward the headboard of the bed, where a small silver falcon sat perfectly still on the carved wood, watching with bright, patient eyes. "I always leave one of my birds to watch over him. Always."

Sirius stared at the tiny bird and found he had nothing to say.

"You walked into my son’s room alone," Belle continued, her grip tightening around the back of his skull, her fingers pressing into it the way one grips something they are considering breaking. "Does that little wretch A-Nox have a death wish? Does she want me to come for her?"

"Nothing happened—ughh!!"

The groan cut his own sentence short as her fingers squeezed harder, the pressure only getting worse.

"That’s supposed to comfort me? You stood with my son and told him your sad, pathetic little story. Now he’ll carry it. He’ll remember it. He’ll think about you." Her eyes narrowed in disgust. "You’ve taken up space in my boy’s mind that didn’t belong to you. Are you pleased with yourself?"

"You’re completely insane—"

-Crack!

-Spurt!

She crushed his skull before he could finish the word.

The neck followed a half-second later with a quiet, definitive snap.

"...Ten."

Amael’s count settled into the silence. Belle straightened up, brushing nothing from her hands, and turned toward the bed with a smile that belonged entirely to a different woman than the one who had just been kneeling on a man’s spine.

"All done, sweetie!" She crossed the room in a few quick steps and scooped him up, pressing a kiss to each cheek. "Were you frightened?"

"No," Amael said honestly. He looked past her shoulder at the crumpled shape on the floor. "...is he dead?"

"Mm. For now." Belle balanced him on her hip, unbothered. "That particular little parasite will find himself a new body soon enough. If he has the poor judgment to come back, I’ll take that one too, as many times as he likes. Or," she added thoughtfully, tapping her chin with one finger, "I could let him keep the next vessel and simply keep him alive long enough to convince him to give up. That might be more effective, actually."

"I think he’s pitiful," Amael said quietly, his arms looping around her neck.

Belle’s expression softened, just slightly, at the edges. "He’ll be far more pitiful once I’m finished with him, my sweet boy."

Amael pulled back just enough to look at her face.

He knew that smile. He had seen it before, not often, but enough. It was the smile she wore when she had already made up her mind and was simply letting the rest of the world catch up to her decision.

She was going to Sancta Vedelia.

She was going to find him.

"Mother," Amael said carefully. "Could you leave him alone?"

Belle blinked. "...sweetie?"

He held her gaze. "Please."

For a moment, something cracked open behind her eyes, something overwhelmed and completely helpless against him. Her arms tightened around him, pulling him close, and she buried her face briefly against the side of his head.

"You are so perfect," she whispered, crying. "My sweet, perfect boy. Asking me to spare the man who walked into your room at night." She pulled back just enough to look at his face, eyes shining. "As expected of my son. Truly."

Amael let her hold him, saying nothing more, resting his chin on her shoulder with a smile.

A beautiful mother and son interactions, an heartwarming scenery, if not for the dead body with a crushed head on the ground...