บททั้งหมดของ The Blood Bound Legacy: บทที่ 191 - บทที่ 200

Silence.And then, the double stepped forward again—but slower this time. Gentle. Her tone shifted. “I’m not here to destroy you, Sariah. I’m what you lost when you gave up needing to be understood. I’m the part of you that still wants to be loved.”That word.That cursed, fragile word.Sariah’s knees buckled. She didn’t fall, but she staggered, one hand bracing against the invisible wall behind her.“I don’t know how to be both,” she whispered. “Strong and… and human.”Her double knelt beside her. “No one does. But pretending that you have to be one or the other? That’s what will kill you.”Sariah looked up, tears in her eyes. “So what happens now?”The reflection reached out—not to strike, not to accuse, but to merge.“You don’t bury me anymore,” she said. “You listen. You remember. And you let yourself feel, even when it hurts.”Sariah hesitated. Then nodded. And the world exploded into light.Not the searing kind that burns away darkness. This was something different—warm, encompa

Another murmur rolled through the room.Elias finally sat down. “Then we wait.”“No,” Isolde said firmly. “We prepare.”“For what?”She looked each of them in the eye.“For her return.”And though no one said it, though no bell rang, or tower fell, or prophecy cracked open like a fruit beneath the sun, everyone in that room knew the same thing at once.Sariah wasn’t finished.And the Vein hadn’t chosen her just to hold the past.It had chosen her to change the future.The words seemed to echo long after Isolde said them, reverberating through the tall stone chamber as though the Vein itself had listened in and was now holding its breath.Councilor Durn, the gaunt man from the Southern Reach, shifted in his chair. “You speak as if this were ordained. Like she was meant to be some kind of messiah.”Isolde turned toward him slowly, her voice deliberate. “I speak as someone who’s watched her sacrifice again and again, only to be dismissed because she didn’t fit into your mold of what a le

Dain stood at the edge of the tunnel, the cold of his cabin forgotten. The air inside the passage radiated an unnatural warmth—not the comforting kind you huddled near on a bitter night, but something older, heavier. Like the earth itself had started to breathe.The glow from the veins in the walls pulsed gently. Red, then darker. Almost black. Then red again. The rhythm was slow, but deliberate, like a living thing conserving its strength, biding its time.He should have shut the hatch. Should’ve grabbed his blade and run for the village, roused the hunters, called the elders. He should have done anything but what he did next.He stepped forward.His boots found the first stone rung of what wasn’t a ladder, but an old, spiraling slope. He descended with cautious steps, eyes locked ahead. The tunnel walls narrowed just enough to make him feel like he was slipping into the throat of something ancient.He counted the paces in his head. Twelve. Twenty. Forty.At forty-seven, the humming

That thought followed him as he climbed out of the tunnel, up through the spiral of stone that seemed to recognize his steps now—smoother underfoot, subtly warm, and faintly thrumming with life. Each step upward felt heavier than the one before, as if gravity itself had changed since he’d descended. Or perhaps it was simply the knowledge of what he carried now, etched in the center of his chest, humming just beneath his skin.When he emerged into the cabin, it was still night—or something pretending to be night. The moon hung in the sky like a dull coin, washed in rust-colored haze. The trees outside the window weren’t moving, but they no longer looked still. They seemed to breathe, their branches swaying without wind, their roots whispering against the frozen ground.Dain closed the hatch behind him and sat on the edge of the hearth. His blade, untouched, still rested on the table where he had left it. He stared at it for a long time, as if the iron might offer answers where magic ha

Dain didn’t sleep that night. He tried.He stoked the fire. He boiled water. He lay down on the cot and stared at the ceiling beams he’d carved with his father’s blade twenty-three years ago. But even with his body exhausted and his mind fraying at the edges, sleep would not come. The warmth under his ribs, that pulse of gold, kept humming. Not loud. Not painful. Just present, like the world was holding its breath through him.Outside, the frost grew thicker. A thin layer crept along the windowsill, shimmering silver in the low light. The trees didn’t move. The wind didn’t call. The whole mountain felt suspended, as if waiting for him to move first.And then there was her voice, Sariah’s, or whatever she had become.Not loud. Not constant. But there, nestled just beyond thought.He didn’t know how to name what they’d shared. It wasn't a memory. It wasn't a prophecy. It was closer to knowing someone the way the earth knows its roots: not by choice, but because they have always been the