CHAPTER 13 — “Persephone” #2
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗║ SKILL CHECK: \[Emotional Regulation\] ║║ ║║ Result: CRITICAL FAILURE ║║ ║║ You don't have this skill.
You never ║║ learned it. Probably should have ║║ invested some points there instead ║║ of memorizing seventeen variations ║║ of Fireball, but hey, hindsight.
║║ ║║ Current coping mechanism: Sitting in ║║ the dark reliving trauma.
║║ ║║ Effectiveness: 0/10 ║║ Would not recommend.
║╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
The System’s still not wrong. Still extremely rude about it.
The night before the final battle with the Demon Lord, she came to my tent.
We’d been camped at the edge of his territory for three days, running reconnaissance, finalizing strategy, trying not to think too hard about the fact that half of us probably wouldn’t survive what was coming.
Morale was somewhere between “grim determination” and “nervous breakdown,” and I hadn’t slept more than two hours at a stretch in a week.
She appeared in my doorway with her armor half-undone and her hair loose around her shoulders, and for a moment I forgot all of it. The war, the planning, the fear. Just her.
Always just her.
“Vel,” she whispered.
That’s what she called me. Vel. Like I was something soft. Something she could hold in her hands and keep safe. Nobody else called me that. To everyone else I was the Archmage, the prodigy, the weapon. To her I was just Vel.
“Hey.” I set down my spellbook—forty-seven contingency plans for tomorrow, three backup strategies, two emergency protocols, and a strongly worded letter to the Demon Lord in case diplomacy suddenly became an option—and opened my arms. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“I had to see you.” She crossed the tent in three steps, climbed into my lap like she used to back at the Academy, buried her face against my neck. She was shaking. “Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“Nervous?”
“Terrified.” Her fingers traced my jaw, my cheekbone, the shell of my ear. Memorizing. I should have recognized that—the way you touch something you know you’re about to lose. “But not of the Demon Lord.”
“What, then?”
Pause.
Long pause.
I should have heard it. The weight of it. The calculation underneath the emotion. But I was tired and scared and holding the woman I loved, and all I wanted was one moment of peace before the storm.
“Losing you,” she said finally.
I held her tighter. “Never.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. I’ll always come back to you, Seph. Always.”
She kissed me then. Deep and desperate and real—or what I thought was real, what I would have sworn on my magic and my soul was real. How do you fake something like that? How do you kiss someone like they’re the only thing keeping you breathing when you’re planning to watch them die?
I still don’t know. Maybe I never will.
“I love you, Velthar,” she said against my lips.
“I love you too.”
She left before dawn. Said she needed to prepare her healing circles, double-check her mana reserves, make sure she was ready for whatever the battle brought.
I watched her go—silhouette against the gray pre-morning light—and thought: After tomorrow, we can rest. After tomorrow, we can go home. After tomorrow, we’re finally free.
Twelve hours later, she held my hand while Dario put a sword through my chest.
She was crying then, too.
“It’s better this way,” she said, like she was returning a sweater to a shop and not watching me bleed out on the Demon Lord’s throne. “You have to understand, Vel. We couldn’t have done this without you—”
“Could’ve… fooled me…” Blood in my mouth. Blood everywhere. Dario’s sword still in my chest because apparently he wasn’t even going to do me the courtesy of a quick twist.
“We needed your power. Just your power. And this way, you don’t have to see what comes next. You don’t have to be complicit in—”
“In what? In WHAT?”
But I never got an answer. The Mary Harvest started—sigils carved into my living flesh, my mana ripped out strand by strand, distributed among all five of them—and by the time they finished, there wasn’t enough left of me to hear explanations.
Not that I would have listened anyway.
I wake up screaming her name.
Not a metaphor. Actually screaming. Loud enough that Johnson startles off the bed and takes a defensive posture like someone’s attacking, which would be more reassuring if I wasn’t the threat here.
My throat’s raw. My face is wet. And Mariella’s standing in the doorway of my room, silhouetted by lamplight, looking at me like I’m a puzzle she’s not sure she wants to solve.
“You were—” She stops. Starts again. “I heard you from the farmhouse.”
“Bad dream.”
“You screamed a name. Several times.”
My heart’s still racing. I can still taste the memory—copper and cherry blossoms and betrayal, all mixed together into something that coats the back of my tongue and refuses to wash away.
“My wife,” I say.
Don’t know why I say it. The words just come out, like they’ve been waiting two hundred years for an audience and finally found one.
Mariella’s probably the last person I should be confessing to—I barely know her, she barely knows me, we’re both hiding enough secrets to fill a library—but there’s something about three in the morning that makes you stupid. Vulnerable. Human.
She goes still in the doorway. Not scared-still. Thinking-still.
“Your wife,” she repeats.
“Former. Very former.”
“What happened?”
I laugh. It sounds wrong even to me—jagged edges and broken glass. “She helped kill me.”
Most people would flinch at that. Most people would ask clarifying questions, try to figure out if I’m speaking metaphorically, back slowly toward the door while making soothing noises.
Mariella just nods.
“Then she never deserved you.”
Simple. Declarative. Like she’s stating a fact no more complicated than water is wet or the sky is blue or your wife was a piece of shit and you’re better off without her.
I don’t know what to do with that. My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out. I’m the Archmage—former Archmage—the man who once delivered a forty-minute monologue to the Demon Lord about the nature of good and evil while simultaneously maintaining six separate defensive barriers.
I have a vocabulary that spans three dead languages and two constructed ones.
I’ve talked gods into bargains they regretted.
This woman with her simple declarative sentences keeps leaving me speechless.
“You should sleep,” she says. Already turning to leave.
“Mariella.”
She stops. Waits.
“Thank you. For—” I gesture vaguely at the space between us, which is probably not a great way to communicate but it’s all I’ve got. “Whatever this is.”
“It’s called giving a shit about someone,” she says. Small smile, barely there, gone almost before I register it. “I know that’s confusing for you.”
She’s gone before I can respond.
Johnson hops back onto the bed, which is really more of a lands at his current size. Takes up most of the mattress. Puts his enormous head on my chest like I’m a pillow and he’s earned this.
“You’re heavy,” I inform him.
He closes his eyes.
“And you drool in your sleep. Did you know that? Because I know that. Intimately.”
Ear flick. Dismissive.