Chapter 124: A Gift Written in blood

The Imperial Palace had shed its veneer of clinical regality, transforming into a feverish tableau of disarray. Its corridors, once the silent witnesses to centuries of poise, now shuddered under a fury so palpable it seemed to thicken the very air. Amidst this storm stood the Emperor, a colossus of scorched nerves, looming over his guards like a predator over broken prey.

“Gone?” he hissed, the word cutting through the tension like a razor. His voice didn’t merely carry; it vibrated with a lethal, serrated edge that promised ruin. “In a heartbeat? Have you all succumbed to collective madness? This is the sanctum of an empire, not a roadside bazaar! How does an Empress dissolve into nothingness from the marrow of this fortress while a thousand eyes remain blind?”

He pivoted with the sudden, violent grace of a guillotine blade, his gaze pinning the head maid where she stood. “And you,” he spat, “at what post did you linger while your mistress was being plucked from the sanctity of her own chambers?”

The woman collapsed as if her bones had turned to ash, her forehead meeting the polished stone with a sickening thud. She remained prostrated, a broken figure against the cold marble.

“I… I withdrew only when Your Majesty was within,” she stammered, her voice a fragile thing, muffled by the floor. “I was absent but a few fleeting moments. When I returned, there was only the carnage of shattered glass and… and that thing.”

A violent tremor racked her frame, a cold sweat slicking her skin. “A foulness lingered, My Lord—a suffocating miasma like the exhalation of an open grave. It gorged itself on the room. It was as if the very light had been caught in a strangler’s grip and snuffed out.”

The Emperor’s chief aide leaned in, his voice a low, jagged murmur that barely grazed the sovereign’s ear. “Sire, I implore you—do not let panic cloud your judgment. We may yet trace Her Majesty through the resonance of the enchanted gems she wears. But… we must tread with extreme prejudice. This scent, this lingering residue… it bears the blackened mark of a practitioner of the Forbidden Arts.”

The Emperor rounded on him, eyes bloodshot—a volatile cocktail of primal terror and incandescent rage. “I have no use for your warnings, nor the luxury of your caution!” he thundered, his fist bunching the silk of the man’s collar as he hauled him close. “I care not if you must dismantle this Empire stone by agonizing stone. Find my Empress. Now!”

In that dismal, stifling vault, the word “friend” acted like a sudden frost, freezing the very marrow in Alisha’s bones. For one fleeting heartbeat, the agonizing fire devouring her scorched flesh seemed to recede, eclipsed by a hollow, predatory silence that felt far more dangerous than the pain.

“How…” she managed to wheeze, her voice a fragile, trembling thread. “What… what madness is this?”

“Are we truly to endure this tiresome game of riddles?” the figure countered, his tone dripping with a mocking, cultured weariness. “By all means, Your Majesty, play the ingenue. But you know precisely the weight of my words.”

Alisha remained paralyzed, the air trapped in her lungs as he pinned her with a gaze so sharp it felt like a scalpel peeling the very skin from her bones.

He leaned in, his presence a suffocating shroud that blocked out the world. “Why the deception, Alisha? Why lie to your husband? Why tell him his sister flourished in health? Though, I suppose even a lie of that magnitude holds a grain of truth. She is indeed ’well’—far better than she ever was—provided she remains a world away from Roland. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Alisha’s throat convulsed as she spat out a jagged, hysterical sliver of a laugh. “Is this your grand gambit? Your pathetic threat?” she hissed, the sound scraping against the silence. “Who in their right mind would believe a raving lunatic like you? You’re fucking delusional. She is dead—rotting, gone—and no amount of theatrics changes that. Now release me, you godforsaken bastard!”

He remained unmoved, his arms crossing over his chest with a glacial, terrifying composure. “The dead do not rest, Your Majesty,” he countered, his voice a low vibration of pure malice. “Not when their so-called ’friends’ preen in crowns forged from the splintered wreckage of their ribcages.”

With a slow, predatory deliberation, he reached out. His fingers didn’t just touch her; they pressed firmly into her charred, weeping palm, grinding her back into the raw agony of her own scorched flesh.

“Tell me, oh Great Queen… when you collapse onto your blood-stained silk sheets, does the phantom echo of her weeping still find you? Can you still hear her? That desperate, pathetic begging—imploring you to tell Lucius not to feed her to that monster?” He leaned in, his breath cold against her skin. “Or did the clatter of stolen gold finally muffle the screaming?”

A violent, rhythmic tremor seized Alisha’s frame, her muscles jumping beneath her skin like trapped animals. “Who the hell are you? Show me your face! I fucking command you!”

The man let out a low, dry rasp of a chuckle—a sound devoid of mirth. “Careful what you wish for, Alisha. Some faces were sculpted to be seen only once… a final, hideous vision before the soul departs the meat.”

He dipped his head lower, his lips hovering a mere heartbeat from her ear, his voice descending into a lethal, intimate caress. “Isn’t the curiosity clawing at your insides? Don’t you want to bid a proper hello to your ’dear friend’? I think she would be… absolutely ravished to see what you’ve become.”

Alisha’s throat convulsed, her windpipe tightening into a knot of raw, suffocating terror. From the periphery of her vision, she watched it—a shadow peeling itself away from the deepest, most stagnant corner of the vault. It did not walk; it moved in a series of rhythmic, disjointed spasms, a sickening mockery of human silver. As the form drifted into the flickering, jaundiced light, Alisha’s heart missed a jagged beat, then hammered against her ribs like a dying bird.

It was Serene. And yet, it was a blasphemy of her.

The silhouette held the familiar height, the hauntingly precise curve of her shoulders, but the flesh was a waxen, necrotic grey. Every movement was the twitch of a marionette dancing on tangled, broken strings.

“You’re lying!” Alisha shrieked, her voice splintering into a jagged, ugly hysteria. “This is a trick! A foul hallucination! She’s dead.!”

The man let out a dark, guttural chuckle, his eyes gleaming with the frantic light of a visionary or a madman. “True, even I cannot breathe life back into a maggot-ridden corpse,” he whispered, leaning so close she could smell the iron and graveyard dust on his breath. “But as long as her soul remains tethered to that wretched, godless place where you left her, it is more than enough to summon her essence. She just wants to play for a while, Your Majesty… isn’t that what ’friends’ do?”

With a fluid, predatory grace that felt fundamentally wrong, Serene scaled the cold stone slab. She straddled Alisha, her weight settling like leaden soil. Her eyes were no longer eyes—they were swirling, bottomless abysses of absolute black, voids that promised only an endless scream. Without a word, those cold, dead fingers—stiff as rigor mortis—locked around Alisha’s throat.

Alisha thrashed in a blind, primal frenzy. The metallic rattle of her chains erupted in a frantic, rhythmic clangor against the stone as she clawed at the air, her lungs burning for a breath that the dead refused to grant her.

Above her, the man remained a statue of cold, voyeuristic cruelty—a silent predator savoring the exquisite sight of an Empress reduced to a thrashing, suffocating animal.

Suddenly, a nearby orb ignited, pulsing with a rhythmic, jagged light that cut through the gloom like a warning flare. The silent alarm bled crimson across the damp stone.

The man let out a sharp, mocking scoff. “Ha… it seems your pathetic lapdog of an Emperor has finally caught the scent.”

With a sudden, violent wrench that bordered on the feral, Mathias seized Serene’s necrotic form and hauled her off Alisha’s trembling body. The sheer force of the movement sent his hood snapping back; his mask, loosened by the exertion, slipped and clattered against the stone floor with a hollow, metallic ring that echoed like a death knell.

Alisha collapsed against the slab, her lungs hitching in a series of agonizing, raw gasps. Her vision was a blurred, stinging mess of salt and terror. As she frantically wiped at her eyes and forced herself to look up, her heart didn’t just stutter—it hit a wall of absolute ice.

Even stripped of the familiar, mocking emerald glint in his eyes, those features were etched into her very nightmares. There was no mistaking the lethal, predatory sharpness of that jaw, the freezing aristocratic disdain, or that unmistakable, suffocating aura of power that felt like a physical weight upon her chest.

“Mathias… Lucron…” she wheezed, the name a mere ghost of a whisper, a frantic prayer to a god that wasn’t listening. “You…”

Mathias didn’t flinch. He cradled Serene’s limp, grey form in his arms with a disturbing, tender possessiveness, as if she were a precious porcelain doll with severed strings. He stared down at Alisha with twin pits of obsidian—eyes that had swallowed the light—and his lips curled into a jagged line of pure, unadulterated malice.

“I warned you,” he murmured, his voice a low, resonant thrum of dark, vibratory power that seemed to ripple through the very stones of the vault. “Once you looked upon this face, you would invite your own end. I shall return for you soon… mother-in-law. But for now…”

He clamped one hand over her eyes, his palm a cold, suffocating weight, while his other arm held the dead girl’s slack form against his chest.

“What are you doing?!” Alisha shrieked, her voice cracking under the weight of a burgeoning, instinctual terror.

The question was answered not with words, but with a jagged, primal scream of agony that ripped through the chamber, shredding the silence.

“AAAAAAAH!”

The sound was raw, a visceral tearing of the soul. When he finally wrenched his hand away, a terrifying, absolute void swept over her world. Alisha’s mind screamed that the room was still bathed in the flickering, amber glow of the torches, yet she saw nothing. The universe had collapsed into a thick, impenetrable shroud of oily black.

“What… what have you done to me?!” she sobbed, her hands clawing uselessly at the air, her eyes wide and staring into a vacuum that refused to break.

He offered no mercy, no explanation.

Mathias leaned in one final time, his presence a towering shadow that engulfed her broken, trembling form. “Do not harbor the delusion that this is over, Alisha,” he whispered, his breath a cold draft against her skin. “Once I have unearthed every foul thing you’ve done to Olivia—once I have tasted every drop of your treachery—only then will I deign to decide your final fate.”

Then, with a ghost of a step, he pivoted and dissolved into the encroaching shadows, abandoning her to rot within the tomb of her own private, sightless darkness.

Standing a short distance away, cloaked in a gloom so thick it felt like a physical shroud, Mathias watched the frantic flickering of torches as the Emperor’s hounds began to storm the perimeter. He looked down at his upturned palm. Resting there, pulsing with a rhythmic, ghostly radiance, were two glowing white orbs—the pure, stolen essences of a queen’s sight.

“I hope Olivia finds this gift to her liking,” he whispered, the words barely a breath against the damp air.

Then, his gaze drifted downward to Serene’s cooling, waxen corpse, and a chilling, predatory smile stretched across his lips. It wasn’t a smile of triumph, but of a dark, burgeoning anticipation.

“I truly want to witness the moment the light leaves that wretched Roland’s eyes,” he murmured to the silence. “The moment he realizes his precious prize is gone—not just dead, but mine. This… this is going to be exquisite.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep