Chapter 547. Knocking on Catherine’s Door at Dawn Is Not Romantic, Just Bloody

Chapter 547: 547. Knocking on Catherine’s Door at Dawn Is Not Romantic, Just Bloody

Clara did not answer. She couldn’t.

The words seemed to have calcified in her throat, trapped behind a wall of grief that no amount of courage could breach.

Instead, she simply bowed her head, pressing her forehead against the back of Ellie’s pale, cold hand.

Her shoulders shook with silent, violent tremors, the kind of weeping that doesn’t make noise because there is no air left in the lungs to support it.

William watched her from the shadows, his own body aching with exhaustion, but his mind remained sharp, cutting through the emotional fog.

He had been circling a truth for days, a suspicion that had been gnawing at his gut like a parasite, and now, seeing Clara broken on the floor, the picture finally crystallized.

’This isn’t just regret,’ he thought, his jaw tightening until it hurt. ’This isn’t the guilt of a guardian who kept a secret to protect a child.’

’This is the guilt of an accomplice.’

He watched the way her fingers curled around Ellie’s as if she were afraid the girl would dissolve into ash. It wasn’t the guilt of someone who knew a dangerous truth; it was the guilt of someone who had helped orchestrate the inevitable.

He didn’t know what her role had been, whether she had administered the catalyst, studied the progression, or simply stood by and watched the clock tick down, and in some dark part of himself, he didn’t want to guess.

But he knew with a sudden, bone-deep certainty that the answer would not be simple. It wouldn’t be a story of betrayal, but something far more complex and terrifying.

Clara hadn’t just been carrying a secret; she had been carrying the weight of a prophecy she had helped execute.

The fragile silence of the room was shattered by the sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor—quick, uneven, and urgent.

William’s hand instinctively moved toward the hilt of the dagger at his belt before he realized they weren’t threats. He had been so consumed by the horror in this room that he had become deaf to the world outside.

Three figures appeared at the threshold of the broken doorway, their faces pale in the dim lamplight.

Olivia was in the lead, her small frame tense, gripping her metal tea flask like it was a mace. Behind her stood Lia, her stance already coiled into a combat-ready posture, her hand resting white-knuckled on the hilt of her sword.

And Kaela brought up the rear, her enchanted gauntlets half fastened, her mouth hanging open in genuine shock as her eyes darted between William’s blood-soaked shirt and the broken woman on the bed.

"We heard a noise," Olivia said, her voice uncharacteristically small. "A... a very big noise."

"Like something breaking."

"Is she all right?" Lia asked, her eyes narrowing as she took in the scene: the blood, the bandages, and the way Clara was huddled on the floor.

Her hand didn’t leave her sword; she was scanning the room for whatever monster could have caused this much damage.

William straightened his spine, forcing his voice to remain steady despite the exhaustion threatening to pull him under.

"She is alive, and she is stable," he said, his tone leaving no room for debate. "But she needs rest... More than that, she needs silence."

He stepped forward slightly, his shadow stretching across the floor toward them. "She needs people who will keep their mouths shut about what they saw tonight."

"No questions. No rumors. No whispers in the academy... Can I ask that of you?"

The request hung between them like a challenge.

None of them argued. Kaela was the first to respond; she gave a single, sharp nod, her usual bubbly demeanor completely extinguished by the gravity of the room.

For Kaela, that silence was more binding than any oath; it was the silence of someone who understood that some truths were too heavy to share.

Lia gave a short, solemn nod, her jaw set in the same grim expression as William’s. Even Olivia, who typically possessed a thousand questions for every situation and a curiosity that could unearth buried bones, simply bit her lip and nodded, her eyes fixed on Ellie’s sleeping form.

"Good," William said, the word feeling like a release of pressure. "Thank you."

William turned his back on the group, his gaze lingering one last time on Ellie. She had finally drifted into the shallow, treacherous sleep of the traumatized, her breathing still uneven, her fingers still locked around Clara’s hand as if even in unconsciousness she feared being abandoned.

He looked at the two of them the broken girl and the broken guardian, and felt a profound sense of vertigo. He was standing at a crossroads where every path was lined with thorns.

He had to make a decision, and the options laid out before him were all poisoned. But one path stood out not because it was safe, but because it was the only one that promised answers instead of endless, soul-crushing questions.

"Clara will stay with her tonight," William said quietly to the others, his voice carrying the finality of a death sentence. "She won’t leave her side."

"As for me... I need to go see someone."

The journey through the village felt like walking through a dream. The world was muted, the silence of the early morning hours pressing against his eardrums like deep water.

It was nearly dawn when William finally reached Catherine’s home. He knocked on the heavy wooden door, the sound echoing unnaturally loud in the pre-dawn stillness.

Outside, the sky had bled from black to the sickly, dull grey of cooling ash, and the morning air was sharp enough to sting his lungs.

He had stopped at the courtyard pump to scrub the dried blood from his face, but the effort had been futile; his shirt remained a grim testament to the violence of the night, looking as though he had crawled out from under a butcher’s block.

When the door creaked open, Catherine stood there in a simple robe, her hair loose and tangled from sleep.

But the moment her eyes landed on him, on the dried blood beneath his fingernails, and the hollow exhaustion in his eyes and the haunted set of his jaw, her drowsiness evaporated. She didn’t ask what happened.

She didn’t need to.

William spoke in short, clipped sentences, the words tumbling out like stones dropped into a well.

He told her about the unnatural glow, the translucent glass erupting from Ellie’s spine, the terrifying surge of mana that had felt less like magic and more like an invasion, and the way he had been forced to physically restrain the energy with his bare hands, feeling his own bones creak under the metaphysical pressure.

Catherine listened with a terrifying stillness. She didn’t interrupt.

She didn’t ask if Ellie was alive, because William’s voice had already answered that. She didn’t ask what he needed, because she could read the desperate hunger for truth written in every line of his body.

As he spoke, her expression shifted from concern to something far more ancient and grim. The softness in her face hardened into something resembling granite.

Without breaking eye contact, she turned and grabbed a heavy wool coat from the hook beside the door.

"I heard something once," she said, her voice low and carrying the weight of old ghosts. "Years ago, when I was still a young instructor at the academy."

"There was a rumor whispered in corridors where students shouldn’t have been that a certain kind of race wasn’t really a race at all."

"That they were something... manufactured."

"Something placed here." She paused, wrapping the coat tight around herself. "I dismissed it as a ghost story."

"A campfire tale designed to frighten green recruits."

Her jaw tightened. "But there is an archive... An old, sealed vault beneath the restricted section of the library."

"It has been untouched since before I drew my first breath... Albert holds the key."

"Will he open it?" William asked, his voice urgent.

"If you’re convincing enough," Catherine replied, stepping out into the cold. "And if you’re prepared to endure a lecture about the sanctity of restricted records and the consequences of unauthorized entry."

A small, weary smile touched her lips, a ghost of her usual self. "It should take him about an hour to prepare the descent."

William’s eyes burned with a cold fire. "I’d pay any price for that hour."

Catherine looked at him, seeing the raw desperation beneath his exhaustion, and nodded once. "I know you would."