Free Web NovelChapter 6: Alexia Von Almont
My father would be proud of me.
That was the thought that kept me company through the empty corridors of the palace, a little jar of ointment in one hand, a bottle of sweet wine in the other. Proud, and relieved. House von Almont didn’t survive on its name alone: it survived on its alliances. And there wasn’t, in all the kingdom, a more precious alliance than that of a hero fallen from the sky.
I’d understood it from the very first day, in that library, when they’d put him in my charge. While the other nobles squabbled over scraps of court, I’d been handed direct access to the most coveted weapon on the continent. You’d have to be a fool not to make the most of it.
So I’d grown closer. Carefully. One lesson after another, one laugh after another. And tonight, walking toward his wing, I was making the decisive move.
Because Kuro didn’t know our customs. He came from another world; he didn’t know what it meant, here, for a young woman of my rank to go alone, at night, to a man’s chamber. He didn’t know that in the eyes of the nobility, such a gesture was as good as a promise. That by tomorrow there would be witnesses, rumors, and that not one of those rumors would ever let him leave free.
I felt a little guilty, it’s true. It was almost unfair, trapping someone who didn’t know the rules of the game.
But still. I gripped the bottle a little tighter and allowed myself a smile in the dark. He wasn’t unpleasant, deep down. Far from it. We got along, really — that part wasn’t an act. And he was rather to my taste, besides. There were worse fates than one day bearing the children of a hero who made you laugh.
I’d tell him, someday. That it hadn’t all been calculation. He’d understand. He liked me, I could feel it.
I was so absorbed in my plans that I almost didn’t see her.
She stood at the crossing of the corridors, where mine met the one leading to Kuro’s wing. Still a long way from his door. Motionless, in her white Saint’s gown, pale hair falling over her shoulders.
Alice.
I stopped and at once arranged my warmest smile.
"Alice! You startled me. I was just—"
I fell silent.
Because she wasn’t smiling.
Not the way she usually did. Not at all, in fact. The soft, luminous mask I’d always known on her had simply vanished. All that remained was a perfectly smooth face, and two red eyes resting on me without the slightest warmth. Without anything, really. The way you look at a piece of furniture you’re about to move.
"You won’t go," she said.
Her voice was calm. Gentle, even. And that was what chilled me before anything else.
"Excuse me?"
"To his chamber. You won’t go." She tilted her head slightly. "I know, you see. What you’ve come to do. Your little customs, your little trap. You’re not the first to see Kuro as a thing to be taken."
Something knotted in my throat. But I lifted my chin. I wasn’t the type to be cowed by a girl, even a Saint.
"And so?" I answered, more sharply than I meant to. "It’s none of your business. It’s not for you to decide, not for him and not for me. I owe you nothing, Alice."
"No," she conceded. "You owe me nothing."
That was when I noticed the smell. Green. Damp. A smell of earth and flowers, where there should have been nothing but cold stone.
I looked down.
Between the flagstones, beneath my feet, stems were piercing through. Slowly. Buds opened along the walls, white flowers spreading their petals in the gloom of the corridor. I’d never seen anything like it. But I’d heard of it. The whole palace had been whispering about it for days: the new Saint’s domain, a garden that sprang from nothing and closed wounds. They called it miraculous.
No one had ever said it could bloom in an empty corridor, in the dead of night, with no one to heal.
"What are you doing," I breathed.
"I’m listening," she said gently. "Truly. You were saying you owe me nothing. Go on." freewebnoveℓ.com
My fear turned to anger. It was easier to carry.
"Fine. You want the truth? I’m going to see him. Tonight, and every night if I have to. And in the morning, I’ll tell him everything. Everything you’re doing, right here, in this corridor. We’ll see which of the two of us he believes." ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
Alice looked at me for a long moment. Then something went out deep in her red eyes.
"Then you leave me no choice," she said.
And she smiled. But it was no longer the Saint’s smile. It was wider. Deeper. Something that resembled nothing human.
"Inverted Paradise."
And the world died.
The white flowers blackened in a second, then turned red. A blood red, thick, engorged. The grass withered and twisted into brambles. The soft light drifting in the air went out, giving way to a scarlet glow, sick, rising from the ground like an open wound. There was nothing divine left. Nothing holy. Nothing but a hell of red flowers breathing around me.
"Right to the end, I gave you a chance, Alexia," Alice said, and her voice stayed gentle in the heart of the nightmare. "If you’d turned back, you’d still be alive tomorrow."
She took a step toward me.
"But understand one thing, first. My faith isn’t turned toward your gods. Not toward your heaven, not toward your light. This world, your crowns, your wars, your lives — all of it is perfectly indifferent to me. You are perfectly indifferent to me. There’s only one thing that has ever mattered to me, in any world. And you were about to reach out for it."
I tried to back away. My legs wouldn’t answer. Something had already coiled around my ankles — brambles risen from the flagstones, biting into the skin until it bled.
Terror crashed down on me all at once, total, animal, a horror that no longer resembled anything human. The jar slipped from my hands and shattered on the stone. I fell to my knees in the red flowers, and they closed over me like a maw.
"Wait—" I gasped, and all my pride had melted away in an instant, leaving nothing but a terrified girl begging. "Wait, Alice, please. I won’t say anything. To anyone, ever, I swear it. I’ll leave, I’ll disappear, you’ll never hear of me again, I—"
The brambles climbed up my throat and forced their way between my lips.
My sentence died there.
I couldn’t speak anymore. I couldn’t scream. The thorns filled my mouth, crushing the howl tearing through my chest, and the panic tipped over into pure madness. I thrashed, I clawed at the earth. And that was when I felt it for real.
They were drinking me.
Not my blood. Worse. Everything. The warmth fled my limbs, the water left my skin, and I felt my own body wither around me, emptying like a fruit being squeezed. My skin drew tight over my bones. My lips cracked. My hands shriveled before my bulging eyes, the flesh hollowing out between the tendons, and each second seemed to tear ten years off me at once. I was locked alive inside a body drying out, and I screamed, I screamed without a single sound passing my lips.
Alice had knelt before me, in her garden of blood, and she brushed aside a strand stuck to my forehead, tenderly, the way a friend would.
"You know, I really would have liked to let you live," she said, and there was almost a softness in her voice. "But you’d already done too much. And above all, you’d seen far too much."
Her fingers lingered in my drying hair, slow, tender, while her brambles emptied me out.
"And yet, in spite of everything, I’m so happy. If only you knew. For the first time since I was brought into this world, I can finally say it out loud to someone. You have no idea what a weight it is, carrying a secret like this all alone. This system, this thing that summoned us here, it lies for me. To everyone, it presents me as a Saint. It hides what I really am, my true class, False Saint, and a few of my skills along with it. So I smile, I play my part, day after day, and I’ve never, never been able to speak of it to anyone."
She closed her eyes for a second, as if relieved of an immense burden, and a shiver ran through her whole body.
"But you, just now — I’ve shown you everything. Told you everything. And it’s as though you’ve just lifted that weight off my shoulders. So thank you, Alexia. From the bottom of my heart. Thanks to you, I finally feel light."
The red was climbing up my chest. I could no longer feel my legs.
And that was when her face changed.
"And then... there’s the best part," she murmured.
Her eyes began to shine. Not with tears. With ecstasy. Her breath quickened, her cheeks flushed, and a smile of unbearable sweetness rose to her lips, as if she were gazing at something wonderful, far behind me.
"Thanks to your death, I’ll be able to grow closer to him still. He’s going to grieve for you, Alexia. He’s going to be in so much, so much pain." She shivered, eyelids half-closed, lost in the image. "And I’ll be there. Pressed right against him. I’ll hold him in my arms while he weeps, I’ll dry every one of his tears one by one, and I’ll be the only one, the only one in the world who can console him. He’ll have no one but me. You’re giving me that, do you understand? You’re giving me that moment."
She opened her eyes again, and her gaze was brimming with a terrifying gratitude.
"You can’t even imagine the gift you’re giving me."
She leaned toward my ear, and her whisper was almost a sigh of bliss.
"Thank you for everything, Alexia."
And in that final instant, as the red swallowed me whole, what terrified me was neither the thorns, nor the dryness devouring me from within, nor even dying.
It was her ecstasy. That sincere, luminous happiness, resting on me as she watched me go out. Because deep in her red eyes, there wasn’t the slightest hatred. Not the slightest anger. Nothing addressed to me at all.
I had never been a person, in her eyes. Just the ear to confide her secret to, and the price to pay to press a little closer to him.
I had never existed.
At the very end, when the dark finally took me, I thought of neither her nor Kuro.
I thought of my father.
I was supposed to make you proud, Dad.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry...
