All Chapters of CROWNED BY BLOOD: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Alexander's blade clashed against my claws, steel ringing against bone. The sound echoed through the ruined courtyard like a funeral bell. His strength startled me not the boy I had once carried on my shoulders through the palace gardens, but a warrior grown, shaped by choices I had forced upon him.The blade he wielded was not his father's ceremonial sword, but something new forged specifically for this moment, blessed by priests whose prayers had been aimed at my destruction. I could smell the holy oils on the steel, could feel them burning against my cursed flesh where they made contact. He had prepared for this confrontation with the thoroughness I had taught him, understanding that sentiment would be a luxury neither of us could afford.For an instant, his strike cut through the curse's haze and I saw him not as an enemy, but as my son. The boy who had practiced for hours in the training yards while I watched from the balcony, pride swelling in my chest. His form was perfect, foot

The throne room was filled with whispers that carried more venom than truth. Each word floated through the air like poison, settling into the hearts of those who had once called me their sovereign. I could feel their hatred even from this realm of shadow and despair, their voices reaching me through the thin boundaries between worlds."She's no longer our queen." "She's a monster curse-ridden, beyond saving." "If we wait, she'll finish what she started. We have to kill her."Their words sliced through the air like blades, each one finding its mark in my children's hearts. Even here, chained in the Forsaken Realm with shadow-bindings that cut deeper than any earthly metal, I could sense their pain. The connection between mother and child transcended the boundaries of life and death, of curse and redemption. Through that bond, I felt Alexander's rigid stance, fists clenched so tight his nails drew blood from his palms. I felt Seraphina's eyes brimming with tears as she refused to let fal

The chains bite deeper every time I move. They are something crueler woven from my own pain. The metal tastes of copper and shame, and I wonder if this is what drowning feels like when the water is made of your own failures.I've lost count of how long my consciousness has been suspended here in this twisted mockery of sanctuary. The walls around me pulse with a sickly luminescence, like veins carrying poisoned light through dead flesh. Every surface reflects my face back at me, distorted and hollow, showing me what I've become what I chose to become when I made that first, fatal bargain.The chains shift with each shallow breath, tightening around my wrists until I can feel my pulse hammering against the ethereal bond. They know my shame better than I do, these cursed shackles. They whisper my sins back to me in voices. I recognize my grandmother's disappointed sigh, the countless innocents who trusted me before I learned to weaponize that trust.But it's Alexander's voice I fear hear

The mountains weren't silent. They were ancient things and they carried their age in voices of wind and stone. The wind screamed, a constant keening that spoke of centuries of storms weathered and seasons endured. The wolves that prowled these peaks howled their hunger to the night.And inside me, the beast that had consumed my flesh growled with endless fury, a bass note of rage that vibrated through my bones and into the very bedrock beneath my claws. It was a sound without beginning or end, the eternal snarl of something that had forgotten how to be anything but angry. Day and night, waking and sleeping if such distinctions even applied to creatures like me.Yet tonight, beneath all these chaos, something else stirred in the spaces between heartbeats, in the pauses between the wind's screaming something achingly familiar that made my spectral consciousness lift its head like a hound catching a distant scent.A sweet melody.At first, I thought it was only memory clawing its way up f

I feel myself splitting. Not just my skin, not just my bones. The very essence of what I am, what I was, what I might still become, tearing apart like fabric under impossible strain. It's as if someone has taken my soul and stretched it across two different worlds, pulling in opposite directions until something has to give. The sensation is beyond pain, beyond madness it's the feeling of existing in spaces that were never meant to contain the same consciousness simultaneously.In the mountains, my beast-body thrashes against the snow with mindless violence. My claws carve deep gorges into the ancient stone, leaving marks that will outlast kingdoms, wounds in the earth that mirror the wounds in my spirit. The granite screams as it splits, a sound like the world itself crying out in protest at what I have become.My jaws snap at ghosts that are only echoes of my own madness, phantom enemies conjured by a mind that can no longer distinguish between memory and reality. Sometimes I see the