Chapter 203 - 202: The Sins Of Mavros!

Mavros’s men closed in the moment Caelestis turned his attention back to Eleanore, and he was forced to release her gently onto the platform floor, spinning just in time to parry a blade aimed at his back.

Steel rang against steel, three of them converging on him at once, but grief and fury had sharpened something in him that made him faster, more brutal than any of them anticipated. He cut through the first with a single decisive stroke, ducked beneath the second’s wild swing and drove his blade up through an opening left too careless to defend, and turned to face the third with blood already slicking his grip.

His breath came ragged, his arms burned, but none of it mattered. Nothing mattered except finishing this and getting back to her.

"You should have stayed away," the last soldier said, though his voice wavered with the first real fear he’d shown all night.

"You should have chosen a better employer," Caelestis said, and ended it quickly.

He didn’t wait to watch the man fall. He was already turning, already searching the chaos of the platform for Eleanore’s crumpled form, when Mavros’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears.

Mavros had used the distraction to retreat toward the platform’s edge, one hand still pressed to his bleeding shoulder, but there was nowhere left to run. Caelestis turned on him with the cold, focused violence of a man who had nothing left to lose and everything left to protect. His boots struck the stone in measured, unhurried steps, each one somehow more terrifying than a charge would have been.

"This ends now," Caelestis said.

"It ends when the extraction finishes," Mavros spat back, though there was nothing left of his earlier composure. His back met the low railing at the platform’s edge, and beyond him the drop yawned dark and empty. "Killing me changes nothing. The magic doesn’t need me anymore, it only needed her—"

Caelestis didn’t let him finish. The blade came down swift and final, and Mavros collapsed without another word, spurting out a large amount of blood.

He laughs, even as he falls to his knees, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "He will revive me once he gets all the black magic in the Grand Duchess." The words come out wet, almost gleeful, like a man who has already accepted his own death and finds it funny.

The thread of his life slips, and he falls unconscious on his back, one hand still twitching against the stone.

Caelestis didn’t linger over the body. He was already moving, already forgetting the man existed at all, because Eleanore’s screaming hadn’t stopped. If anything, it had grown worse, her body arching against the platform floor as the dark, coiling energy above her pulsed brighter, faster, tightening toward some final, terrible culmination. Every sound she made felt like a blade sliding between his ribs.

Across the battlefield, Penelope watched the growing black fog above the platform with dawning understanding, and turned back toward her brother with sudden, desperate resolve. Her hands were shaking. Blood ran freely from a gash along her temple, but she barely seemed to notice it anymore.

"Kieran," she said, voice steadier now despite the pain still radiating through her body. "I’m sorry. I don’t know another way to save you."

She drove her staff into the ground with every ounce of strength she had left, teeth gritted, a single tear cutting through the dirt and blood on her cheek.

Blue light erupted outward in a violent wave, spreading rapidly across the battlefield, washing over Kieran’s hollow form with visible force. He convulsed, black eyes flickering wildly, that same doubled voice screaming out in something between pain and fury as the light forced its way through him, severing whatever tether connected him to the dark power controlling his body.

He was thrown backward violently, collapsing motionless several feet away, and the black void in his eyes finally, slowly, began to recede, replaced by the dull, exhausted brown Penelope remembered from childhood.

She didn’t have time to celebrate. The same wave of blue light rolled across the distant platform moments later, colliding with the dark energy still spiraling out of Eleanore’s chest.

The reaction was instantaneous and violent. Eleanore’s scream tore raw and agonized through the night air as the two forces collided inside her, her body convulsing hard enough that Caelestis had to physically hold her down to keep her from harming herself.

He could feel the two energies warring beneath her skin, feel her heartbeat stuttering wildly against his palm, and for the first time all night, real terror, not battle-terror, not the sharp clean fear of combat, but something slower and colder settled into his chest.

"Eleanore—Eleanore, stay with me, please—" His voice cracked entirely, all the composure of the battlefield abandoned now, nothing left but raw, desperate terror as he cradled her against his chest, feeling her whole body shudder violently beneath his hands. "Please, don’t do this, don’t leave me, not now, not like this—"

"It hurts," she sobbed, voice barely recognizable, thin and cracked and nothing like the woman who had faced down Mavros’s men without flinching hours earlier. "Caelestis, it hurts so much, I can’t—"

"I know, I know, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere—" Tears streamed freely down his face now, unashamed, his hands trembling as he brushed her hair back from her sweat-soaked face. "Just hold on. Please, just hold on a little longer, whatever this is, it has to end soon, it has to—"

The dark energy above them pulsed one final time, violent and blinding, and then, all at once, shattered into nothing, dissolving into faint, drifting embers that scattered harmlessly into the night sky, leaving Eleanore gasping and limp in Caelestis’s arms.

The battlefield around them fell into sudden, disorienting quiet, the fighting itself seeming to falter in the wake of whatever had just occurred, as if even the soldiers still standing understood something irreversible had happened.

"Eleanore." Caelestis pressed his forehead to hers, hands still shaking uncontrollably, terror still gripping his chest even as her breathing began, slowly, to even out beneath him. "Eleanore, please, say something, anything—"

Her eyes fluttered open weakly, unfocused at first, before finally finding his face above her. "Caelestis," she whispered, voice hoarse and broken but achingly alive. "The baby. Is the baby—"

"I don’t know," he admitted, voice breaking entirely as he pulled her closer against his chest, cradling her like something infinitely precious and fragile. "I don’t know, but you’re alive, you’re here, and that’s all I need. Just stay with me. Please, just stay with me."