The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 570: The moon and the mirror

The palace of Nevareth did not sleep so much as it held its breath, a vast stone beast suspended in the deep, freezing gut of the night. It had been two days since the world had fractured, two days since the man who was her anchor had vanished into a crack in the sky.Eris moved through the corridors like a wraith. In the daylight, she wore her authority like armor, her spine a column of unbreakable marble, but the dark stripped the lacquer away.

Two days of silence looked different on her when no one was watching. Her appetite, once ravenous as she fueled the four lives including hers currently inhabiting her skin, had simply evaporated.

The trays of rich meats and spiced broths went back to the kitchens untouched, cold and stagnant.

It wasn’t merely tiredness.

It was a profound, systemic depletion.

She felt as though a tap had been opened at the base of her throat, and her very essence was draining away faster than her body could replenish it.

She was a well running dry in a season of drought.

Sleep was a joke she no longer found funny. Rising from the edge of the bed, she reached for a heavy woolen blanket, a concession to the unpredictable shivers that had begun to rack her frame.

She, the queen of Fire, who had once walked through Solmire’s summers without breaking a sweat, now felt the bite of the air.

She didn’t wake the maids. She didn’t summon the guards. She had spent months mapping the patrol rotations, memorizing the rhythm of boots on stone until she knew exactly which stairwells remained hollow at three in the morning.

Just me, she thought, the words a rhythmic pulse in her mind. For a little while. Just me.

The path to the garden was a memory etched in her feet. It was the place Soren had shown her months ago, back when Nevareth was a foreign land of ice and sharp edges, and he was a man she had married out of her own personal necessity.

Now, the garden was different. At night, the moonlight was a heavy, silver liquid that transformed the frost flowers into something alien.

They caught the full moon’s glow, each crystalline petal acting as a tiny, jagged mirror. It was the kind of beauty that didn’t soothe; it cut.

Beautiful things always hurt more when you were already hollowed out by grief, because they reminded you of the vibrancy you no longer possessed.

Eris stood among the blooms, the blanket clutched tight around her shoulders. Without a conscious decision, her hand drifted to her abdomen. Beneath the silk of her nightgown and the layer of wool, she felt them.

Movement.

It wasn’t the soft fluttering of the early weeks. It was the restless, demanding stir of three things that were not yet in the world but were already fighting for their place in it.

Her expression, shielded by the shadows, softened into a look of raw, unshielded vulnerability she would never have allowed the council or anyone else to see... Anyone else except him.

The cold arrived then, seeping up from her core and chilling the blood in her veins despite the blanket. It was the familiar, tectonic wrongness that pulled her back to the memory of Aldwin’s words.

It had been one day, or perhaps two, time had become a soup, since the old mage had sat across from her. He had looked at her with the expression of a man holding a scalpel, delivering a truth he knew would leave a scar.

"Normally," Aldwin had begun, his voice carefully metered, "a child does not awaken their magical affinity until after birth. The spark remains dormant until they draw their first breath of the world’s ether." He had paused, his eyes tracing the exhaustion in her face. "But these children are not ordinary. Their father is not an ordinary mage. Whatever Soren is, whatever primal, ancient ice runs in his bloodit runs in theirs too."

The consequence hit her again, a phantom weight.

"Their magic has already awakened," Aldwin had said. "Inside you."

In the memory, Eris had gone very still, her breath hitching.

"You are fire," he had continued, his hands gesturing vaguely to the air between them. "Your body runs hot. It has always run hot, and now it runs hotter because of the strain of the pregnancy. And the children feel that. They are like ice dragons in a furnace. Naturally that would be considered a threat."

"What do they do?" she had whispered even though she already knew the answer.

"They protect themselves," Aldwin replied.

"From their own mother..." Eris cut in.

"It isn’t malice, Eris. It isn’t even awareness. It is a reflex, the most fundamental instinct of a living thing to protect its own temperature from an environment it perceives as lethal. They make it cold. They are instinctively trying to freeze the furnace so they can survive the heat. It’s not their fault."

The result was a biological war. Her fire responded to their ice; their ice pushed back against her fire. Two primordial elements that required a massive act of will to coexist were now operating within her without any will at all. They were two storms colliding in a single room, and the room was her body.

And underneath it all was Pyronox. The Great Fire. The dragon of her soul was sharing a confined space with three infant ice dragons who had no idea he was there, who only knew that the world was too hot and they needed to survive.

"The strain this creates," Aldwin had concluded, his eyes heavy with a pity he tried to hide, "on your body, on your core, and on the seal itself... is considerable."

Considerable. A scholar’s word for deadly.

Back in the moonlight, the cold flared again.

Eris looked down at her wrists and saw the faint, intricate patterns of frost blooming beneath her skin before they vanished, melted away by her own internal heat. They were brief, like the ghost of a touch, but they were appearing more often. On her wrists, her collarbone, the hollow of her throat.

She let out a long, shuddering exhale into the night air.

Will I make it? She asked the moon. To the end of this? To the day they arrive? Will I make it that far?

She didn’t know. And the terrifying part, the part that made her knees weak, was that this was the first time in her life she had asked a question about her own survival and hadn’t heard an immediate, defiant yes echoing back.

Her thoughts drifted to Soren. They arrived uninvited, crashing through the barriers she had built. Where was he? Was he even alive? She didn’t let herself finish that thought.

She couldn’t afford to mourn him yet, because if she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and if she stopped, the children would freeze her from the inside out.

I have so many things I needed to tell you, she thought, her eyes stinging. There is so much you do not know yet.

The helplessness was a physical weight, a suffocating shroud. For the first time in her entire life, in both her lives, she couldn’t find the next move.

She couldn’t see the step after this one. She was a grandmaster at a chessboard where the pieces had all turned to water. She couldn’t strategize her way through her own blood.

I wish Orrian would appear, she thought with a sudden, sharp bitterness. I wish he would just, for once, show up when I actually need him, rather than when the story requires a witness.

It come from the garden. It didn’t come from behind the stone pillars or the rustling hedges. It didn’t have a direction at all; it seemed to resonate from the very air she was breathing, or perhaps from the space just behind her eyes.

The quality of it was familiar in the way a dream is familiar, one you’ve had a dozen times but can never quite recall the details of once you wake. It was a voice that belonged to the beginning of things, to the ink on the page before the words were even formed.

They were three words. A greeting from someone who had been watching the tragedy unfold for a very long time and had decided that this, finally, was the moment the protagonist could no longer stand alone.

"Well hello there," the voice said. "I’ve missed you too."

Eris froze. The cold in her veins didn’t vanish, but it stilled. She didn’t turn around immediately. She couldn’t. Because in that single word, she recognized the architect of her misery and the only person in the universe who might know how to end it.

Orrian was no longer a name in a book or a memory of a past life. He was here, standing in the garden of the world he had helped break.