Chapter 107: Evendur Redwyn (3)

During these months, Evendur painstakingly made sure his wife never found out anything in relation to the ring and the eerie effects it had on those he invited to the safe it was placed in.

Thankfully, his impenetrable expression made it relatively easy to hide the truth. Considering most of her attention was focused on their children—Aden, Kaelen, and the young Daren—there was little room for doubt.

But even he knew the illusion of peace wouldn’t last. The effects had become so noticeable that even the maids, butlers, and warriors who worked closely with him had begun to whisper. Naturally, they had all been disposed of silently, but there was only so much he could do to keep the unnatural string of disappearances from his wife.

“Evendur,” she had called out one day with her head placed against his. “What have you been up to these past months?”

Evendur remembered how the temperature in the room fell incredibly low. Despite her eyes appearing a normal shade of black, at such close range, he felt it—the same sense of attraction and crushing compression he felt when staring at the ring resonated through the very depths of his soul.

“W—what do you mean—”

Evendur’s words halted.

For the first time in his life, Evendur had stammered.

She pulled back, a calm, steady movement, with a smile that wasn’t a smile plastered on her lips.

“Daren has been crying a lot lately, and whenever I come to look for you, your aides always keep me by your door with the excuse that you’re engaged with important things.”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “More important than the two daughters and two boys you have left? Did you think how heartbroken I felt when I had to watch my children go through brutal amounts of training and get sent to the middle of the Demon continent and into the depths of the Abyssal Plains as reward for their efforts?! I am free but even that freedom feels like a cage!”

Evendur remained silent. The cries of his two daughters sounded in the opposite room, and the low thumps of the attending maids followed soon after, but none of those external reactions were able to pull his eyes away from his wife’s rage-filled eyes.

“It’s not my fault any of this happened,” he finally responded.

“Then tell me why I always catch you staring blankly at the wall,” she replied quietly, her gaze dropping to the red bedsheets beneath her knees.

Evendur’s breath hitched. Suddenly, the air of impenetrablity he’d always boasted felt insufficient. What could he possibly tell his wife? That the energy she wielded had become something that would come to consume any living being that came close to it? That his supposed source of pride— being his children, had never ran to his arms in joy after coming to the Academy like other children? And the fact that there was no one else he could blame but himself?

There was nothing he could say. And so he kept quiet.

A dry laugh escaped her lips as she wiped her eyes with the edges of her emerald hair. “It’s the power, isn’t it? It’s affecting you… and everyone else who touches it.”

His arms unconsciously clenched the bedsheets, but after three heavy breaths, he nodded slowly.

A sad smile formed on her lips. “I knew they wouldn’t let me off that easily,” she got to her feet, her light weight making contact with the furry rug below. “I want you to promise me one thing, Eve. No matter what happens, do not let that darkness encroach into our family.”

Evendur’s eyes narrowed and his expression grew grim. The steadiness in her voice didn’t sit well within him. “What are you planning on doing, Isolde?”

Isolde smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve called my name in fourty years. I’m glad.”

Evendur’s heart shook violently as his mind ran at light speed to find the memories buried under the rapidly growing mountains of doubt, fear and insecurity. There was no memory. The last time he called her name was when he had saved her from the hands of some high-ranking demons during the ending stages of the war, which in itself proved to be awfully convenient.

The realization hit Evendur like a physical blow, colder than the Atonic winds of the Abyssal Plains.

In forty years, he had referred to her as “my wife,” “my love,” or “the mother of my children.” He had used every title of possession and affection in the human lexicon, but he had buried her name. To speak it was to acknowledge her as an individual, a being with a history that existed before him and an agency that existed outside of him. By forgetting her name, he had inadvertently helped the Void Unwrite her long before the Ring ever touched his finger.

Evendur tried to stand, but his legs felt like they were made of the same heavy lead that he used in lining the vault. The impenetrability he had cultivated wasn’t a shield for her; it was a wall that had kept him from seeing the woman standing right in front of him.

“Isolde…” he whispered again, the name tasting like copper and ash on his tongue.

She didn’t move toward him. Instead, she walked toward the window, the emerald of her hair catching the fading light in a way that made her look like a ghost of the forest she once was.

“You spent so much time hiding the darkness in the basement, Eve,” she said, her back to him. “You never noticed that the shadows were already in the nursery. Daren doesn’t cry because he’s hungry. He cries because he can hear the Ring screaming for him. He is the only one in this house who recognizes the voice of his ’grandmother.’”

The temperature in the room didn’t just drop, the molecular vibration of the air seemed to cease. Evendur watched in horror as the furry rug beneath Isolde’s feet began to lose its color, turning a brittle, translucent white.

“The Freedom I felt wasn’t a gift from the Ring,” Isolde said, turning to face him. Her eyes weren’t black anymore. They were two infinite wells of that Dark Purity. “It was a grace period. A chance to see if you would choose the family or the power. You chose the Ring, Evendur. You chose to ’protect’ us by feeding the very thing that wants to erase us.”

She stepped toward the bed, her hand reaching out not to touch his cheek, but to hover over the space where his heart—and the fragment she had planted there—beat in frantic rhythm.

“I cannot take the power back,” she whispered. “But I can redirect the signal. I will tie the Ring’s hunger to my own fading essence. It will buy the children time—a few years, perhaps a decade—before the Infiltration resumes.”

“Isolde, no!” Evendur finally found his voice, lunging forward to grab her.

But his hands passed right through her. She was already becoming Static.

The price for a broken contract is always the same, Eve,” she smiled, and for the first time, the smile reached her eyes, even as they began to dissolve into emerald sparks. “One life for the silence. I am going back to the Void, so that our children can stay in the light.”

In a flash of blinding, silent green light, the pressure in the room vanished. The crying in the nursery stopped instantly. The heavy, suffocating weight of the Ring in the vault below fell silent, entering a deep hibernation that would last until the day Daren—now Aden—reached his third stage of Resonance.

Evendur fell to his knees on the rug, which snapped like glass under his weight. The room was empty. No emerald hair, no velvety voice, no cold arms. Only the faint scent of forest rain and the absolute, crushing silence of a man who had won the world and lost his soul.

The guards barged in with panic and apprehension written in their expressions as they began to search for the source of the massive explosion. Multiple magic circles stacked themselves around him to protect his kneeling form.

Multiple voices from his brothers and sisters tried reaching him, but they were all drowned out by the constant ringing in his ears.

“Isolde… Why?” He muttered with a voice that barely registered as a sound. He blinked once. Then twice, but nothing changed apart from his surroundings as the mages teleported him out of his room, oblivious to what had happened.

His daughters, and two sons were gently guided out of the manor with the help of the maids and brought to where Evendur was seated. When Evendur focused his eyes on Daren’s familiarly blue eyes, a surge of something so painful, so full of cold rage and indeterminable blame flowed through him.

He opened his lips to say the words, ’how are you,’ but what followed were the words:

“Is this your fault?”

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