"Amora!"
His voice was a whip-crack in the heavy silence, shattering the suffocating aftermath of her grief. The door flew open before the echo had faded, and Amora rushed in, her sharp eyes taking in the scene in an instant: Gaius standing rigid, and the crumpled, weeping girl on the floor.
"Take her to her chamber," he ordered, his tone flat and final. He didn't look at Aurelia again, turning his back to her devastation as if it were merely a mess to be cleaned up.
"No..." The protest was a hoarse, broken whisper. Then, as Amora's strong hands closed around her arms, it became a raw, desperate scream. "No! No! Don't touch me!"
Aurelia thrashed, a wild animal caught in a trap. It wasn't just resistance; it was the last, futile rebellion of a shattered soul. In her panic, a deep, forgotten part of her surged. A force she couldn't name—her power, latent and untrained—ERUPTED.
A silent, concussive wave of raw emotion blasted from her core.
Amora was thrown back—not with violence, but by a startling, powerful shove that sent her stumbling into the wall. The impact shuddered through the room; dust rained from the rafters.
For a second, there was only the sound of Aurelia's ragged gasps. She stared at her own hands, trembling in the aftermath.
But the burst had been a single, useless spark. She tried to summon her power again, to grasp it—but the crushing weight of the truth smothered it instantly. Gaius… Mother… Killed. She was too weak. Perhaps too broken. The effort left her drained, hollow, her body a leaden weight she could not lift. She collapsed onto the floor, the fight gone. Only the tremors of defeat remained.
Gaius didn't turn. He simply listened to the brief struggle die. "Now," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Take her."
Amora hauled her up, dragging her down a corridor to a new room. It was beautiful. And it was a horror.
Everything was pink. Frills and flowers adorned every surface. The bed was vast, draped in white curtains. In the dim light, the colors were sickly-sweet, a parody of comfort.
Amora shoved her inside. Aurelia heard the key turn in the lock behind her—a precise, unforgiving clunk of finality.
"Open this door!" Aurelia's scream was raw, scraping her throat.
She slammed her palms against the unyielding wood, the impacts jarring up her arms—once, twice, a frantic, third thunderous beat.
Then, it struck. Not just a pain, but a deep, twisting wrongness in the core of her belly.
My baby…
It was a sickening lurch, a wave of dizzying heat that rushed from her belly to her skull. The world didn't spin so much as it liquefied.
Her final slam against the door became a weak, sliding push as her body buckled, her back scraping down the polished wood until she landed in a heap on the floor.
She sat there, trembling, one hand splayed over the ache in her abdomen, the other braced on the floor to keep the room from tilting her over.
What have I gotten myself into?
Her breath came in thin, ragged sips—deep ones threatened to pull her back into the dizzying spiral.
The pain was a cruel, intelligent anchor. It pulled her from the edge of her panic and chained her to the vulnerable reality of her body.
Calm, it demanded. Be still, or you will break what is left.
Slowly, the worst vertigo subsided, leaving a profound, draining weakness in its wake. The fight was over. Not surrendered, but forcibly extinguished.
Her movements as she rose were those of an old woman, of something shattered and hastily reassembled.
She did not stand so much as unfold. Her hand, pressed to the wall for balance, guided her shaky ascent. Her legs trembled with the effort of simple weight.
She turned to face the room, her vision still slightly smeared at the edges. It was a beautiful, grotesque parody of a sanctuary. The pink was nauseating now. The vast bed yawned before her, a plush, expectant trap.
She drifted toward it, pulled by a gravity of exhaustion. Her knees met the mattress, and she let herself tilt sideways in a slow, controlled fall, too weak for grace.
Her body slowly meeting the suffocating softness with a final sigh. She was careful, even in collapse, arranging herself onto her side, curling instinctively around the precious, painful weight within her.
Then, the silent breach.
Tears did not fall—they seeped. They welled from a depth of utter defeat and overflowed without sound, two hot, constant trails from the outer corners of her eyes. They traced the hollows of her temples, disappeared into the roots of her white hair, and soaked into the silk pillowcase, a dark and steady bloom of despair.
Her hair fanned out like spilled moonlight. Her hands lay empty before her face.
Then, her fingers crept forward, trembling, to slowly gather a fistful of the duvet. It was not a grip of anger, but of a child seeking a scrap of comfort in an abyss.
"No,"She held on, her knuckles pressed to her lips, stifling the need to whimper.
All she had wanted was the open sky, the sharp taste of freedom.
Not this pastel dizziness.
The silence of the room pressed in, a thick, perfumed weight. A gilded tomb where even her grief had to be swallowed to keep the last flicker inside her safe.
Velmara.
The name was a fresh wound.The vital truth she was to carry to the border was now trapped with her, useless. Her failure was a second prison, built inside the first.
"This is too much," she whispered to the empty, pink air. A hot tear tracked into her hair. "I never imagined this… not from him." Her hand pressed over her belly. "I should have known. That devil… how could he?"
The memory hit her, swift and brutal.
She was six. Gaius was eleven. They were jumping in rain puddles, laughing, covered in mud. He'd given her a dandelion crown. She'd worn it until it wilted.
For years, that was the face she prayed to. The brother she begged the heavens to bring him back home.
And they had. They'd brought home a man who looked at her with those same eyes and told her he'd killed their mother.
For a reason she knew nothing about.
Why?...
A sound escaped her, raw and broken. She curled tighter around the life inside her, the only truth left that hadn't turned to poison.
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To be continued...