Semua Bab CROWNED BY BLOOD: Bab 111 - Bab 120

Kai Jr. led me through the silent passages with the confidence of someone who had studied these tunnels extensively, who knew their secrets even when I, their former queen, did not. We passed rows of sealed doors, each one marked with ancient runes that glowed faintly in the torchlight. Some doors were bound with chains that had rusted into the stone itself. Others were merely closed, but the magic that held them shut was palpable, pressing against my skin like invisible hands warning us away.The temperature dropped as we descended, Kai Jr. glanced back at me over his shoulder, and in the torchlight his face was half-shadow, half-flame. His expression was unreadable neither angry nor gentle. Just determined, with the quiet certainty of someone who had wrestled with a difficult decision and finally committed to a course of action. "It's time you saw what was kept from you, Mother. Time you understood the full truth of what was done."We stopped before a massive door at the end of the

The trees breathed again in that imperceptible way living things do, their leaves rustling with contentment. The air smelled of moss and rain, of growing things and earth rich with life. Seraphina and Alexander walked ahead of me on the narrow path, their steps light upon soil that had once been scarred and barren but now teemed with life. Kai Jr. stayed at my side, his presence was steady and grounding as always. His gaze was distant but tender, his spirit-sight allowed him perspectives denied to purely mortal vision, and I had learned to trust the things he sensed even when I could not perceive them myself."There's something you need to see," he murmured.My feet knew where to step even when my eyes couldn't see the path clearly. My body recognized this place on a level deeper than conscious thought, responding to landmarks that existed more in spirit than in physical space.When the clearing finally opened before us suddenly, as though a veil had lifted I stopped breathing altog

One moment the sky was clear, painted in the soft pastels of twilight, the next, it split open like a wound, bleeding crimson light across the heavens.They called it the Red Veil, and whispers spread through the gathered realms faster than fire through dry grass. Some said it was divine judgment that finally came to collect what I owed, others claimed it was the curse returning, that my corruption had merely been sleeping and was now awakening to finish what it had started. A few suggested it was the end of all things, apocalypse written in blood across the sky.I stood at the edge of the sanctuary garden. The wind lashed through my hair like claws every howl of the storm. The same storm that once lived inside me, that had raged through my soul and poisoned everything it touched, was now painting the world in its color. Crimson. Blood-red. The color of guilt made manifest.And they came, as I had known they would. As they had to.The emissaries of old grudges arrived through portal

The summons had come three nights ago through dreams. Visions of constellation-beings speaking in voices that resonated in my bones, telling me I was needed for something I couldn't yet comprehend. My children had received the same dreams, confirming this was not madness or wishful thinking but genuine contact from powers that existed beyond ordinary reality.We arrived at the Astral Court through a veil of starlight that manifested at the edge of the Sanctuary grounds when the moon reached its zenith. The passage was unlike any portal I had traveled before, a gradual dissolution of the physical into the celestial. Each step took us further from the solid ground, our feet walking on what felt like crystallized light until only constellations remained beneath and above us.Even after everything we had been through, the curse, the wars, the years of estrangement and painful reconciliation they looked at me not as a monster but as Luna, complicated, flawed but somehow still worthy of the

They said someone had torn it open in the night, that the villagers had dragged the stones away and scattered the dirt as if trying to erase his name from the world itself.Marcus. The betrayer. The trusted advisor whose counsel I had followed into darkness. The man whose choices had chained me to the curse, whose manipulation had almost damage the life of my children, whose conspiracy with Aldric had almost ended everything I loved and left the world in ruins.Part of me thought he deserved the silence and erasure. Thought that a man who had orchestrated such suffering should have no memorial, no marker to show he had walked this earth. Let him be forgotten as completely as he had tried to make me forget my own humanity.But another part still capable of mercy knew that silence was just another kind of lie. That refusing to acknowledge the dead, even the ones who had done terrible things, was a way of refusing to fully reckon with truth.So I went alone to find what remained of his