Chapter 202 - 201: The War Of Zhipher!

Caelestis’s jaw tightened, torn between the desperate need to reach Eleanore and the horror of Stella’s fate ticking down somewhere in the darkness. Beside him, Hael looked frozen, caught in an impossible choice that no man should ever have to make.

"Go," Caelestis said suddenly, voice hard and certain, not once looking away from Mavros. "Hael. Go save Stella. Now."

"I can’t just leave you here to—"

"I said go," Caelestis snapped, sharper this time. "I will handle this. I will get Eleanore and our child out of this safely, I swear it to you. But Stella doesn’t even have two hours to wait for us to argue about it. Go, Hael. Now, while there’s still time to reach her."

Hael hesitated only a fraction of a second longer, torn between loyalty to his closest friend and desperate love for his own wife, before finally, with a look of anguished apology toward Eleanore still bound helplessly on the platform, he turned and sprinted back through the chaos of the battlefield, disappearing toward the western hills at a dead run.

Caelestis turned back to face Mavros alone, sword raised, every trace of his earlier composure burned away entirely by cold, unrelenting fury.

"Now," he said, voice low and deadly, "it’s just us."

Mavros smiled thinly, the dark magic surrounding the platform pulsing hungrily in response. "So it is, Duke Sinclair. So it is."

Across the battlefield, near the collapsed eastern wall of the palace, Princess Penelope, fought her way through the chaos with single-minded desperation, ignoring the soldiers clashing around her in favor of the one figure she’d been searching for since the fighting began.

"Kieran!" she called out, finally spotting her brother standing eerily still amid the carnage, his eyes the same hollow black that had once consumed Adena entirely. "Kieran, please, you have to fight this. I know you’re still in there."

Her brother turned toward her slowly, his expression carrying none of the warmth she remembered, his voice layered with that same wrong, doubled quality she’d heard described in reports for weeks now. "Penelope," he said, almost fondly, though the coldness beneath it made her skin crawl. "Still trying to save me. How touching."

"This isn’t you. You would never try and destroy Zhipher, your own kingdom and stand against your own family—"

"I wouldn’t?" Something like amusement flickered across his hollow features. "Perhaps you never knew me as well as you thought, sister."

"That’s the magic talking, not you. Please, Kieran—" She stepped closer, staff raised defensively but her voice pleading. "Fight it. I know you’re strong enough. You’ve always been stronger than anyone gave you credit for."

For one fragile moment, something flickered behind his black eyes—a flash of the brother she remembered, buried somewhere beneath the void that had claimed him. Then it vanished, swallowed whole by whatever controlled him now.

"Touching," he said again, voice flattening back into that cold, doubled register. "But irrelevant."

He raised a hand almost lazily, and dark magic surged outward, catching Penelope full in the chest and hurling her backward through the air. She hit the ground hard several feet away, staff skittering uselessly from her grip, pain blooming sharp and immediate across her back and shoulders.

Kieran then turns to where Eleanore had been standing, tied over the cross Mavros had built. His hand stretched out toward her, as he rose in the sky. The impact of that could be seen immediately, as a dark line of laser passes from over the several soldiers and Caelestis, hitting her chest.

Eleanore’s scream tore through the chaos as Kieran’s magic began pulling something deep and vital directly out of her chest, not physical pain exactly, but something worse, a hollowing sensation like being unraveled from the inside out.

"What’s happening to her?" Caelestis roared, cutting furiously through the dark tendrils separating him from the platform, each one reforming as quickly as he destroyed it.

"The fragment," Mavros said, watching with detached fascination as threads of dark, shimmering energy began lifting visibly from Eleanore’s chest, coiling upward like smoke given shape and purpose. "It’s finally going home."

Eleanore’s vision blurred, her whole body trembling violently as the extraction continued, and beneath the terror and pain, a far more devastating fear took hold. The baby. She could feel it, some deep, instinctive maternal certainty that whatever was being torn from her was tangled inextricably with the fragile life growing inside her, that losing one risked losing both.

"Please," she gasped, straining uselessly against the ropes binding her wrists, "please, stop, my child—"

"An unfortunate casualty," Mavros said, though something in his tone suggested even he found little satisfaction in that particular cost. "But not one I have any power to prevent now. The extraction has already begun. It cannot simply be stopped partway."

"Then I’ll stop you," Caelestis snarled, finally breaking through the last barrier of dark tendrils and closing the remaining distance in several furious strides, sword swinging in a brutal arc toward Mavros’s exposed side.

Mavros barely dodged in time, stumbling backward with a hiss of pain as the blade caught his shoulder, dark blood welling immediately through torn fabric. "Impressive," he ground out, clutching the wound. "But it changes nothing. The extraction continues regardless of whether I’m standing here to witness it."

Caelestis didn’t waste breath responding. He turned immediately toward the platform, slicing through the ropes binding Eleanore’s wrists with frantic, desperate speed, catching her as she collapsed forward the moment the bindings gave way.

"Eleanore—Eleanore, look at me, stay with me—"

"It hurts," she gasped, tears streaming freely down her face, her hand instinctively pressed to her stomach as though she could physically shield the child inside from whatever was being torn from her body. "Caelestis, the baby, I can feel it, something’s wrong—"

"I’ve got you," he said fiercely, gathering her fully into his arms even as the threads of dark energy continued spiraling upward from her chest, unbothered by his presence, unbothered by anything except the pull of whatever force was calling it home. "I’ve got you, I’m not letting go, just hold on—"

Across the battlefield, Penelope forced herself back up onto trembling legs, blood trickling from a cut above her eyebrow, staff retrieved and gripped tightly once more despite the pain radiating through her back.

She looked toward her brother’s hollow, unrecognizable form, then toward the distant platform where Eleanore’s scream had gone suddenly, terrifyingly quiet, and understood, with sick clarity, that whatever was happening on that platform and whatever controlled her brother were two threads of the very same danger,one that neither she nor anyone else on this battlefield was anywhere close to containing.