The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 596: What a villainess is for

The world is fracturing, she thought. The beasts are moving wrong. The ruins are waking. Something old and terrible is breaking through the skin of reality. And at the center of it is me.

It wasn’t a thought born of arrogance. It was the opposite. It was the specific, soul-deep exhaustion of someone who had been the "problem" for as long as she could remember.

A god inside a mortal body that was never meant to hold one. A fire sealed in ice, and the world cracking around the pressure of it.

My fault, she thought, even though she knew it wasn’t rational. She thought it anyway.

She passed a large window and stopped. Below, in the courtyard, two children of the palace staff were running through the light snow. Their breath was visible in the cold, their laughter muffled by the thick glass. They looked so simple. So easy.

Eris placed her hand against the cold glass. I want that, she thought. I just want to see my three run like that. In a courtyard. In the cold. Laughing like they have all the time in the world.

But wanting something had never been enough to make it possible. Her mind went back to the fabric in her lap, the small, careful things.

When she had started them, they had felt like hope. They had felt like a future. Now, she couldn’t name the feeling. The closest word was vigil.

The dresses are real, she thought. The needle and thread are real. But the hands that will fill them... those are not certain.

She was certain the children would live. She felt their strength every time they moved. What she wasn’t certain of was whether she would be there to see it.

She walked further until the corridor ended at a small alcove with a bench overlooking the inner gardens. She sat, her hands empty now, resting in her lap. Without the sewing, they looked small. Useless.

I have lived this story before, she thought. I know how stories like mine end.

She knew what she had been. She was written as the villainess, the obstacle, the fire that had to burn so the hero could rise from her ashes.

She had been trying to believe she had rewritten it. She had been trying to believe that this life was different, that Soren was different, and that the dresses weren’t just wishful thinking.

But the old stories were stubborn.

Villainesses do not get to keep things, a voice in her head whispered. They get to want them, and then they get to lose them, because that is what they are for. They are the cost of the happy ending.

Soren is traveling to the ruins of the world for me, she thought. And it is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever done for me. And it might not matter.

She didn’t doubt him. She doubted herself. She doubted the body that was already cracking under the weight of a god. She doubted the flesh that three children were already asking more of than it knew how to give.

What if I cannot hold on long enough for him to find the answer?

The thought tasted like something she had swallowed before, in a different life, at the end of it. It was the recognition of an ending she had already felt before.

Eris folded her hands in her lap. She didn’t cry. Instead, she sat with it. She sat with the grief of a woman who had decided she would not fight the inevitable in front of anyone.

If it is inevitable, she thought, then let it be quiet. Let it not frighten the children. Let it not break Soren more than necessary. Let it just... be.

She knew everything about that thought was wrong. She knew Soren would hate her for it. She thought it anyway. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com

Below the window, the flowers he had planted three weeks after her arrival were blooming. They were white and blue, fragile things that thrived only in the cold.

Soren planted those because he wanted something that was mine, she remembered. They are still growing. Whether I am here or not, they will keep growing.

She couldn’t decide if that was comforting or cruel.

The light was fading now, the afternoon deepening into a bruised evening purple. Eris sat in the shadows, her hands in her lap, her stomach rounding with the lives that did not yet know what they were asking of her.

Her final thought, before she rose to go back to the chamber and the half-finished dresses, was a simple one.

I hope the dresses fit them. I hope someone tells them that their mother made them by hand, in the quiet of a palace in the north, while she was still here.

She rose and walked back through the corridor, leaving the frost flowers to grow in the dark. The dresses were waiting in the chair by the window. Half-finished. Beautiful. And silent.

...

The border was not a physical thing. There were no iron gates here, no stone walls rising to meet the sky, no soldiers in heavy plate demanding credentials. It was simply a line in the dirt where the land decided to be something else.

Soren crossed it at first light.

Behind him lay Nevareth, an empire of grey stone, white pine, and a cold so permanent it felt like the foundation of the world. It was a landscape that didn’t try to be anything other than what it was: frozen and unyielding.

The moment he crossed, the air changed.

It wasn’t warm, Solmire’s winter was still a biting, sharp thing, but the cold lost its ancient permanence. It shifted from being the soul of the place to being a guest, something that was here now but might not be here tomorrow.

The ground beneath his horse’s hooves changed too. The stone turned darker, shedding the crystalline ice of the interior.

The earth was rich, a deep, loamy brown that felt as if it remembered being warm, even under the dusting of frost.

As he rode, the trees began their gradual metamorphosis. The white pines thinned, replaced by broader, sturdier specimens with bark the color of dried blood.

Their branches didn’t reach upward in the desperate, narrow search for light common in the north; they reached outward, spanning the path like the ribs of a great, slumbering beast.

Even the light was different. The pale, blue-white clarity of a Nevarethian morning gave way to a sky infused with amber.

Solmire’s light carried a quality of warmth in its color, even if the temperature remained low. The sky felt wider here, the dramatic, jagged geography of the Vetharn range falling away to reveal a horizon that seemed miles further than it should be.

His horse felt it too. The animal moved differently, its ears swiveling, its gait more alert, sensing the shift in the world beneath its feet.

Soren did not stop at the border checkpoints. He didn’t head for the Solmire garrisons to announce his presence or seek a diplomatic escort. He rode directly toward the coordinates marked on his map.

No announcements, he thought, his eyes fixed on the path ahead. No formalities. No one to ask what the Emperor of Nevareth is doing in the ruins of a fire kingdom, alone.

As he rode deeper into the territory between the border and the ancient ruins, the forest began to close around him. The red-brown trees grew thicker, their interlocked canopy dimming the amber light.

At first, the sounds were normal. The wind sighed through the broad leaves; branches creaked under the weight of the frost; the distant, shrill call of a bird echoed through the canopy.

Then, gradually, the world went quiet.

It wasn’t a sudden silence, but a staggered one. One by one, the sounds died. The wind dropped first, leaving the leaves unnaturally still. The creaking branches fell silent. The bird’s call was cut off mid-note, as if a hand had been clamped over its beak.

What remained was a silence that wasn’t peaceful or empty. It was the specific, heavy stillness of a forest where everything living has stopped moving at the same time.

Soren slowed his horse to a walk. He knew this silence. He had felt it on a hundred battlefields and in a dozen hunts.

Predator, he thought. Something large enough that the rest of the world stops breathing when it moves.

He did not stop. He continued his forward progress, his hand moving instinctively to the hilt of the blade at his side. He didn’t draw it, but he was ready.

He could feel eyes on him, not one pair, but several. They were watching him from the shadows of the broad-trunked trees, moving parallel to him with a terrifying, liquid grace.

He could feel their heat. Even from twenty yards away, the specific warmth of fire magic contained in living flesh radiated through the cold air. They were following him, pacing him, their presence a low hum of energy in the back of his mind.

They didn’t approach. They simply watched.

They know I am here, Soren realized. They have known since I crossed the line. They feel the ice in my marrow the way I feel the fire in theirs.

He rode on, refusing to give them the satisfaction of a pause.

Through the dense screen of trees, a gap finally appeared. It showed a stretch of open ground, and beyond it, the ruins.