Chapter 255: A Mother’s Sorrow

Nyx, however, completely refused to accept this conclusion.

She gritted her teeth, her voice rising with frustration.

“No. No, that’s impossible. Julius is definitely involved somehow. I refuse to believe otherwise!”

Her hands clenched into fists.

“I don’t know how he did it, but he’s definitely orchestrating all of this. He has to be!”

She looked around desperately.

“Every time I look at him, I can see it in his eyes—he’s looking down on everyone here, like he has us all under his control. I can’t just accept that he’s innocent!”

She turned to Leona with almost fierce desperation.

“There has to be something, Leona! Some detail you noticed that was off about him. Something that proves he’s involved!”

But Leona just shook her head sadly.

“I’m sorry, Nyx. I’ve tried everything I could think of to prove he was responsible. I wanted to believe it too, it would have been easier than accepting the alternative.”

“But everything I found pointed in the other direction.”

She took a deep breath and added gravely,

“And if what I’ve already said isn’t enough, there’s one more thing that completely cemented in my mind that Julius wasn’t truly the one in control.”

Her eyes darkened with anger and pain.

“After all, only something truly evil…” Her voice shook with barely controlled fury “…only a spirit filled with malice and resentment could do something as horrible as what happened next.”

Everyone leaned forward, sensing that something significant was coming.

“What happened?” Someone whispered. “What did he do?”

Leona’s entire body began to shake. Despite having been relatively calm and composed while recounting everything else, she now looked like she was on the verge of breaking down completely.

Luna and Lulu both leaned forward anxiously, worried about their mother’s distress.

But to their utter surprise, Leona looked directly at them—straight into their eyes with profound sadness.

“It…” She stammered, struggling to get the words out. “It has to do with Luna and Lulu.”

The crowd stilled. Leona’s voice softened, her eyes growing distant—not with pain, but with memory.

A beautiful memory by the looks of as she looked at them with a tender gaze and said,

“It was two years after my marriage to Julius. Two years after everything went wrong. I was already isolated. Everyone hated me. I was living a life of despair and desolation, with nowhere to go, no one to turn to.”

She then smiled—a genuine, radiant smile.

“But then, two years later…both of you were born.”

Luna and Lulu’s hearts raced.

“It was like a ray of sunshine breaking into my dark world.” Leona’s eyes glistened. “When I learned I was pregnant, I was so excited. It kept me going. It gave me hope.”

She looked at her daughters with infinite tenderness.

“And when you were both born—when I held you in my arms and saw your two beautiful faces sleeping next to me—I couldn’t hold back my tears.”

“For the first time in years, I cried tears of happiness.”

“All the darkness, all the despair—it washed away. You two made me feel like the happiest woman alive.”

“…That day was truly the happiest day of my life.”

Both Luna and Lulu were openly sobbing now, tears streaming down their faces.

“Mother…Mother…” They whispered, their voices choked with emotion.

They had always believed their mother had been cold and distant with them their entire lives.

Luna had spent her whole childhood trying to prove her worth, desperate to earn her mother’s approval.

Lulu had been terrified of her own mother, always walking on eggshells around her.

But now, hearing their mother speak such loving words—seeing the sincere, tender way she looked at them—hearing her say that their birth was the happiest moment of her life…

They felt truly loved.

But just as Leona was gazing at her daughters with pure love shining in her eyes, her expression suddenly twisted with anguish.

She looked away from them abruptly, her lips quivering.

“But sadly…”

She whispered, her voice breaking.

“…that happiness in my life lasted only for a single day.”

She turned back to face the crowd, tears streaming freely down her face now.

“The very next day—when my two daughters were less than one day old, couldn’t even lift their heads properly, could barely even cry because they were so tiny and fragile—”

Her voice cracked completely.

“They also suffered from the same illness.”

The entire square fell into shocked, horrified silence.

“My precious daughters—just a day old were screaming in agony. Their tiny bodies convulsing with pain.”

“A-And there was nothing I could do. Nothing except watch them suffer because I—their own mother—had dared to love them.”

The crowd was utterly silent, frozen in collective horror and heartbreak.

The younger elves who had been born around the same time as Luna and Lulu were hearing this for the first time.

Their faces were pale, their eyes wide with horror.

They had grown up hearing whispers about the illness that sometimes afflicted the village, but no one had ever told them that it had once struck newborns. Babies barely a day old.

The older elves looked even worse because they had been there. They remembered.

Before that terrible day, the illness had only targeted adults.

Occasionally an older child, but never the very young.

And then suddenly, inexplicably, it had struck the Matriarch’s twins—tiny, fragile beings who had barely taken their first breaths.

The entire village had gathered around, desperate to help, but nothing worked.

The babies screamed and screamed, their tiny faces contorted with pain, and no one could do anything.

They remembered the Grand Matriarch holding her grandchildren, crying as she watched them suffer.

They remembered Nyx, frustrated beyond words, hacking at a tree with an axe because she couldn’t fix this, couldn’t save her nieces, couldn’t do anything at all.

Even though the villagers had already begun to distance themselves from Leona by then, they had still felt her pain. They were mothers too. They knew what it meant to watch your child suffer.

It was a tragedy that had scarred the entire village.

Leona wiped her tears, looking at her daughters with eyes full of heartbreak.

“It was then that I realized the curse didn’t just affect adults. It didn’t spare the elderly or the young…”

Her lips trembled.

“It struck…my children…”

Her voice cracked.

“My newborn babies…”

A hollow, broken laugh escaped her lips.

“And just because I…held them…just because I loved them…even for a moment…”

She looked up at the crowd, her expression twisting into something almost manic.

“They suffered for it.”

A ripple of horror went through the villagers.

Leona laughed again—but there was no joy in it.

“Isn’t that funny?” She said, her voice unstable. “My children…suffered…because I dared to love them.”

Her fingers shook.

“And you know what the worst part was?”

No one answered. No one could.

“After I realized that…”

She continued, her voice dropping into something hollow.

“I understood that I couldn’t love them anymore.”

Silence. Heavy. Crushing.

“Even though they were crying…screaming…in pain…”

Her breathing became uneven.

“The only way to protect them…was to stay away.”

Several elves turned their faces away, unable to bear it.

“I had to leave.” She said softly. “Even though they were just born…even though I had just held them…I had to act like I didn’t care.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“So I left.”

A tear rolled down her cheek.

“I walked out of my own home…and didn’t come back.”

The realization hit the villagers like a blow.

They remembered how Leona had abandoned her newborns, how she had handed them to Nyx and their mother and walked away without a backward glance.

They had been horrified. They had thought she was a monster, a woman so cold that she didn’t even care about her own children.

Now they understood.

She wasn’t cold. She was trying to protect them.

And every step she took away from their cribs had probably felt like ripping out her own heart.

Unable to hold back their sorrow, the villagers broke down. Even the most hardened among them wept openly.

“Y-You suffered so much, Leona!”

“Oh, spirits, why did you make her suffer like this?!”

“What did she ever do to deserve this!?”

“Poor child. Poor, poor child! How did you possibly bear it?!”

They looked at her as if she were the most pitiful person in the world. And perhaps she was.

A new mother unable to hold her own children, unable to comfort them, unable to show them any love without causing them harm—it was the most heartbreaking thing any of them had ever heard.

Nyx couldn’t hold back her tears any longer. She bit her lip so hard that blood welled up, her whole body shaking with the effort of containing her sobs.

Her sister had suffered so much. So much. And she had never known.

Luna and Lulu broke free from the crowd and ran to their mother.

“Mother! Mother!”

They threw themselves into her arms, crying uncontrollably.

Lulu sobbed against her chest.

“I-I thought you hated us! I thought you didn’t want anything to do with us. But you were protecting us all along. You gave up everything for us!”

Luna nodded, tears streaming down her face.

“We love you, Mother! W-We’ve always loved you. Even when we thought you didn’t love us back¡”

Leona was surprised by their outburst, but she didn’t push them away. She wrapped her arms around them, holding them close, and smiled through her own tears.

“I love you too.” She whispered. “I’ve always loved you. I never stopped.”

Even Luca, who had remained calm throughout the entire confession, closed his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them again, there was a hint of sadness in his gaze.

He had heard many tragic stories in his long life, but this one…this one shook him.

But while Luna remained wrapped in her mother’s warm embrace, tears still streaming down her cheeks, another question gnawed at the edges of her heart, refusing to be silenced.

How had she and Lulu even come to exist?

She had been born two full years after her mother’s marriage to her father, yet the curse had already taken root in that very first week.

From then on, the bond between her parents had shattered like fragile glass.

Her father had grown distant and cruel, his words as cold as winter frost, treating her mother with a harshness that left no room for tenderness.

Her mother too, had been kept apart from everyone, isolated in a house filled with silence and resentment.

In such a loveless, broken atmosphere, how could her mother have conceived them at all?

There was simply no way she would have willingly shared any intimacy with a man she no longer cared for, especially not in the midst of such emotional ruin.

For one terrible moment, a darker possibility surfaced—that her father had forced himself upon her mother, that she and Lulu were nothing more than accidents born of violence and regret.

The idea made her stomach churn with nausea.

Were they bastards of a union that should never have produced life?

Had her mother endured such suffering because of them?

Luna squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head fiercely, pushing the horrifying images away.

No. She refused to believe it. Not now, not when her mother’s arms were holding her so gently.

Those questions could wait. This moment was far too precious, too fragile, to be poisoned by shadows from the past.

She would ask later, when her heart felt steadier.

For now, she simply let herself cry, clinging tighter to the one person who had always been her light.

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