Chapter 112: The damsel called Leornars part 5
The sky over the ancient province of Oakhaven had once been blue—not the cold, electric blue of mana-saturated air, but a soft, dusty sapphire. Five hundred years ago, before the Dragon's Teeth mountains were jagged obsidian, they were green.
Malcolm Calvin remembered the green. He remembered the way the sunlight filtered through the elm trees, dappling the floor of his small apothecary shop. He remembered the smell of dried lavender and the rhythmic thump-thump of his mortar and pestle.
But mostly, he remembered the sound of the cough.
"Papa?"
The voice was thin, like parchment being torn. Malcolm dropped the bundle of herbs he was holding and knelt by the small cot in the corner. His daughter, Elara—just seven years old—was a ghost of a girl. Her skin was the color of curdled milk, and her golden hair was matted with sweat.
"I'm here, Elaine. Drink this," Malcolm whispered, lifting a cup of bitter root tea to her lips.
She took a sip and immediately convulsed. A spray of dark, flecked blood hit Malcolm's linen shirt. The Ash-Cough. It was a death sentence. It turned the lungs into cinders until the patient drowned in their own dry breath.
"It hurts to breathe," she sobbed, her small fingers clutching his calloused hand. "Make it stop, Papa. Please."
Malcolm didn't pray. The gods of that era were distant, deaf things. Instead, he gathered his daughter in a thick wool blanket and began to walk. He walked past the village limits, past the screaming warnings of the elders, and deep into the forbidden rift—the Labyrinth of Zunirack .
The air inside the Labyrinth didn't move. It was thick and tasted of ancient copper. Malcolm walked until his boots were shredded, his feet bleeding onto the cold, geometric stone.
In the deepest sanctum, where the walls were carved with unblinking eyes, a voice echoed. It didn't come from a mouth; it came from the stone itself.
"WHAT DO YOU SEEK, MORTAL? KNOWLEDGE? GOLD? ETERNITY?"
"My daughter's breath," Malcolm roared, his voice cracking. He held the dying child toward the darkness. "Take my eyes! Take my hands! Just let her live!"
The darkness pulsed. "A LIFE FOR A LIFE IS TOO CHEAP. I WANT YOUR SOUL. I WANT YOUR TIME. YOU SHALL HAVE TWO OF EVERY DAY—ONE TO WATCH, AND ONE TO ACT. UNTIL THE DEBT IS PAID IN SORROW."
"Done!" Malcolm screamed. "Anything!My soul! Life! Take anything!Just save her!"
A white, porcelain mask drifted out of the shadows, cold and weeping. It pressed itself onto Malcolm's face. He didn't scream when the bone fused to his skull. He only wept when he felt the girl in his arms take a deep, clear, effortless breath.
For thirty years, Malcolm Calvin lived a miracle.
He watched Elara grow. He watched her golden hair turn to the color of wheat in the sun. He watched her marry a local farmer and give birth to a son with Malcolm's own eyes.
Every day, Malcolm lived twice. He would wake up, live the day as a shadow, watching the world move in slow motion, seeing every mistake, every falling leaf. Then, he would wake up again and live the "real" day, guiding his family away from accidents, predicting the weather, ensuring their prosperity.
He was a ghost-king of his own small world. He was happy. He thought he had cheated the Labyrinth.
"You look tired, Father," Elaine said one evening, sitting on the porch as the sun set. She was thirty-seven now, a beautiful woman with laugh lines around her eyes. "You look like you're carrying the weight of two lifetimes."
Malcolm smiled behind the mask he told everyone was a "vow of silence" for a religious sect. "I would carry a thousand lifetimes for you, Elaine."
Then came the thirty-first year.
The demi-human border raid wasn't an army. It was a handful of hungry beast-kin, desperate and territorial.
Malcolm had seen it in his "shadow day." He had seen the smoke. He had seen the spears. He woke up for his "real" day and ran. He ran until his heart nearly burst, his magical mask humming with a frantic, rhythmic pulse.
He was too late. The "iron loop" of the Labyrinth had shifted. The day he had seen in the shadow was not the day he lived in the light.
He found Elaine in the garden. The wheat was stained crimson. A beast-kin spear—crude, jagged, and tipped with rusted iron—was buried in her chest. Her golden hair was matted in the mud.
Her eyes were open, looking at the blue sky she had loved so much.
"Papa..." she whispered. It was the same thin voice from thirty years ago.
Malcolm knelt in the mud. He tried to use the magic of the mask to heal her, but the porcelain only grew colder.
"You promised!" Malcolm screamed at the sky. "You said she would live!"
The mask vibrated, the dual-voice of the Labyrinth mocking him in his own mind: "SHE LIVED. SHE BREATHED. THE DEBT OF HER LIFE IS PAID. NOW BEGINS THE DEBT OF YOUR SORROW."
Malcolm sat in the mud with his daughter's cooling body until the sun went down. Then he lived the day again. And again. He watched her die seven hundred times in his mind before the week was over.
His grief didn't break him; it vitrified him. It turned him into a thing of jagged edges and frozen hate.
"If a beast-kin took her breath," Malcolm whispered to the empty house, "then I will take the breath of every beast-kin. I will chain them. I will sell them. I will turn their lives into the same currency I traded for hers."
Four hundred years passed. The apothecary named Malcolm Calvin vanished, swallowed by the shadow of the Harbinger.
He moved to the Rigs, a place where he could control the flow of life and death. He lived every day twice, perfecting the art of cruelty. He knew when a slave would try to escape before they even thought of it. He knew the exact moment a buyer would arrive.
He sat in his chamber, staring at a small, dried larkspur flower—the last thing Elaine had picked.
"Five hundred years, Elaine," he whispered, his voice now two-toned and hollow. "The world is so loud. I just want the silence of the Labyrinth again."
He stood up and walked to the balcony, looking out over the Serpent's Maw. He felt the ripple in space. He felt the arrival of something cold, something white, something that didn't belong in his loop.
He adjusted his bone mask, feeling the porcelain tears wet against his nonexistent skin.
"The White plague is here," Malcolm murmured. "I've seen him kill me seven hundred times today. I suppose it's time to see if the eight-hundredth is any different."
He turned away from the memory of the green mountains and stepped into the dark of the Rigs, the smell of "Midnight Narcissus" already beginning to drift through the salt air of his final afternoon
The ocean roared below, a hungry beast of grey foam and jagged rock, but the platform of the Rigs was silent. The air between Leornars and the man who had been Malcolm Calvin was no longer just atmosphere; it was a pressurized pocket of conflicting wills.
Malcolm stood with his head tilted, his bone mask reflecting the cold moonlight. He looked less like a warrior and more like a weary traveler who had finally reached a bridge he couldn't cross.
"You're looking at the water," Malcolm rasped, his dual-voice grating like rusted gears. "You're thinking about the displacement of the tide. You're calculating how deep you have to dive to find the family of the fox-girl."
Leornars didn't blink. He held his razor-edged fan at a slight angle, the indigo silk of his stolen kimono snapping in the wind. "You've said that already. You've seen this moment seven hundred times, remember?"
"Seven hundred and eight," Malcolm corrected. "And in every one of them, you choose the girl. You choose the 'heroic' path. You dive, and I collapse the Rigs on top of you. It's a beautiful tragedy, King of Avangard. A boy who wanted to be a saint, buried under the weight of the very people he tried to save."
Leornars let out a short, dry chuckle. It wasn't the sound of a hero. It was the sound of a predator who had found a flaw in a perfect trap.
"That's your mistake, Malcolm. You've lived five hundred years, but you're still thinking like a human. You think because I'm wearing a crown, I'm bound by your 'choices'."
Leornars took a step forward. The wood didn't creak; it turned to vapor under his boots.
"Althelia," Leornars whispered.
[Confirmed,] the voice echoed, not just in his head, but bleeding out into the physical world as a hum of pure information. [Analyzing temporal loop. Identifying anchor points. Disrupting the 'Twice-Lived' frequency.]
The Harbinger's mask twitched. For the first time in five centuries, the man felt a sensation he had forgotten: Uncertainty.
"What... what are you doing?" Malcolm stepped back, his shadow-blade flickering. "The loop is absolute! I lived this! I saw you jump!"
"I don't jump for anyone," Leornars said.
"I DON'T FEEL ANYTHING!" Malcolm shouted
He didn't move toward the edge. He moved toward Malcolm.
In a blur of speed that defied the laws of momentum, Leornars closed the gap. He didn't use the fan. He reached out and grabbed Malcolm by the throat, his fingers sinking into the shadow-essence of the man's neck.
"You've lived this day twice, Malcolm. But you've lived it through the lens of your own grief. You're so busy watching the past that you didn't notice the horizon changing."
Leornars hoisted the Harbinger into the air.
"You want to know what happens in the seven hundred and ninth version?"
Leornars's eyes ignited with a violent, void-blue light.
"In this one, I don't dive. In this one, I simply take the ocean away."
Leornars extended his free hand toward the Serpent's Maw. He didn't cast a spell. He issued a Command.
"PART."
The word hit the sea like a meteor.
For miles in every direction, the churning grey water didn't just move—it was violently shoved aside by an invisible, divine hand. A massive trench opened in the ocean floor, revealing the jagged limestone bed and the pressurized glass sphere where Lyra's family lay huddled in terror.
The water stood as two colossal walls of liquid marble, hundreds of feet high, held back by the sheer spiritual pressure of the Crimson Crown.
Malcolm Calvin stared at the impossible sight, his bone mask cracking under the strain of his fading reality. "No... the tide... the pressure... you can't... the loop says..."
"The loop is a lie you told yourself so you wouldn't have to admit you failed your daughter," Leornars hissed, his face inches from the mask. "You sold your soul for a memory, and you turned that memory into a cage for everyone else. But I am the King of the White Plague. I don't trade souls. I break them."
Leornars's grip tightened.
"You've lived long enough, Malcolm. Go to the green mountains. Go find your daughter in the dirt. But you're leaving this world to me."
"Wait—" Malcolm gasped, the dual-tone of his voice finally merging into a single, human sob. "I... I remember the green... I just wanted..."
"I know," Leornars said, his voice almost gentle. "But you chose the wrong King to play with."
Leornars clenched his fist.
"Begone from this world and have peace, semi gate keeper, body erasure"!. The porcelain mask shattered into a thousand white shards that dissolved into sea-foam. The shadow-cloak vanished, leaving nothing but a faint scent of dried lavender that was quickly swallowed by the ozone.
The Harbinger was gone. The five-hundred-year loop was broken.
Leornars stood on the edge of the now-dry cliff, looking down into the trench at the glass sphere. He felt a sharp pain in his chest—the cost of holding back the entire ocean—but his expression remained a mask of permafrost.
"Stacian," he called out, his voice carrying over the roar of the suspended water walls.
Stacian, who was currently standing over the paralyzed, needle-filled body of Krog, looked over the edge and nearly fainted. "Lord Leornars... you... you're holding the ocean? You're actually holding the entire Serpent's Maw?"
"I can't hold it forever," Leornars said, a trickle of blood escaping his nose. "Get the family. Now. Before I let the rig come crashing back down."
Stacian didn't hesitate. She leapt from the platform, her lavender kimono fluttering like a butterfly as she plummeted toward the seafloor.
Leornars watched her go, his knuckles white as he maintained the Command. He looked at the shattered pieces of the bone mask at his feet.
"Rest in the mud, Malcolm Calvin," he whispered. "The sun is coming up, and for the first time in five centuries, it's a new day."
"Be at peace Malcolm "
"Ah, this is different. Different indeed. " Malcolm's voice echoed
The roar of the Serpent's Maw was gone. The smell of salt, the sting of the iron chains, and the suffocating weight of the porcelain mask had vanished as if they were nothing more than a fever dream.
Malcolm Calvin opened his eyes.
He wasn't in the Rigs. He wasn't in the Labyrinth. He was lying in a world of absolute, shimmering whiteness. There was no sun, yet there was light. There was no wind, yet the air felt cool and sweet, like the first breath of spring after a long, choked winter.
Slowly, the blankness began to bleed color at the edges. It was a soft, hesitant reconstruction—the way a memory forms when you're half-asleep. First came the smell: dried lavender and fresh earth. Then came the sound: the distant, rhythmic thump-thump of a mortar and pestle.
"Papa?"
The voice didn't sound like parchment anymore. It was clear. It was vibrant. It was the sound of a heart beating without debt.
Malcolm pushed himself up from the ground. His hands were no longer gloved; they were the calloused, stained hands of an apothecary. He looked down at his chest and saw a clean linen shirt, free of the blood flecks of the Ash-Cough.
"Elaine?" he whispered. His voice was singular now—no longer the dual-toned rasp of a monster, but the quiet baritone of a father.
He turned, his boots clicking on a path that was slowly turning into green grass. In the distance, a single tree began to take shape against the white horizon. It was a massive, ancient Elm, its leaves a brilliant sapphire green, shimmering as if they were made of light.
Standing beneath the tree was a woman. She wore a simple dress of woven wheat-gold, and her hair caught the glow of the world like a halo. She wasn't the thirty-seven-year-old woman in the mud, nor the seven-year-old in the cot. She was simply Elara—timeless and whole.
She smiled, and the last of the white shards of the Harbinger's mask fell away from Malcolm's soul, dissolving into the grass.
"You took a long time, Papa," she said, her voice a melody of forgiveness. "The road must have been very long."
Malcolm reached her, his breath hitching in his throat. He reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched her shoulder. She was warm. She was real. The five hundred years of loops, the chains, the screams, and the blood—they were all being washed away by the quiet peace of the Elm.
"I got lost," Malcolm choked out, tears finally carving paths down his face. "I thought... I thought I had to pay the world back for losing you."
Elaine reached out and took his hand. Her grip was firm, a tether to a reality that no longer required magic or sacrifice.
"The debt is gone, Papa. The King broke the cage."
She turned toward the horizon, where the white light was softening into a gentle, golden dawn. There was no "next day" here. There was no loop. There was only the "now."
"Come on," she whispered. "Let's go home. Mama is waiting."
Malcolm Calvin didn't look back at the world he had left behind. He didn't look back at the Rigs or the man in the indigo kimono who had ended his nightmare. He simply tightened his grip on his daughter's hand.
Together, they walked toward the golden horizon, two silhouettes moving hand-in-hand through the green grass, until the light swallowed them whole, leaving nothing behind but the scent of lavender and the silence of a soul at rest.