Chapter 92: Child of vengeance.

Chapter 92

Lucian’s eyes snapped open, his throat raw from a scream that had echoed through centuries.

He expected to feel the cold stone of the cellar floor against his back, but instead, the rough, damp bark of an ancient oak pressed against his spine.

He was leaning on a tree in a clearing, this was the very place where the foundation of the old cabin had been built on. Where the east wing is located.The memory had gone deeper.

The air here was dense, smelling of damp earth and the metallic tang of a life cut short. A heavy sound broke the silence: the trudging footsteps of a man carrying a weight far greater than a body.

Lucian turned his head, his breath hitching in his chest. He saw himself. The younger Lucian was a shell of a man.

His armor was discarded, left somewhere along the desperate path from the gallows, and his tunic was stiff, dark with the dried blood of the men he had cut down to get here.

In his arms, he cradled Bella. Her white hair was matted with red, and her skin was the color of winter floor.

Lucian watched, a ghost paralyzed by his own grief, as his younger self reached the center of the clearing and sank to his knees beside a freshly dug grave.

The younger Prince didn’t weep; he was past tears. His eyes were vacant and dark, fixed on the face of the only person who had ever seen the man behind the crown.

“I will burn them all, Bella,” the younger Lucian whispered. The sound was a shard of glass in the quiet woods.

“I will storm your father’s kingdom and level my own. I will not rest until the soil is soaked in the blood of everyone who touched you. I’ll give you your revenge, even if I have to become a monster to do it.”

A sudden, soft rustle of leaves made both Lucians stiffen—the man in the memory and the man watching it. A sharp, unnatural chill swept through the clearing, killing the scent of the damp earth and replacing it with the suffocating stench of rot and ancient dust.

From the thickest shadows between two oaks, something began to emerge. It wasn’t a ghost, and it certainly wasn’t a man.

The creature staggered out into the moonlight, its movements jerky like a puppet on snapped strings.

It was stark naked, but there was nothing human left to identify. Its skin was the color of parched ash, pulled so tight over its skeletal frame that it looked like cracked parchment.

It had no hair, no ears—only a jagged slit for a mouth and eyes that burned with a concentrated, starving red light.

Young Lucian surged to his feet, his hand flying to his sword. He stepped over Bella’s body, placing himself between the corpse and the approaching nightmare.

“Stay back!” he roared, his voice cracking with the strain of his grief. “Whatever hell you crawled out of, stay back or I’ll send you back in pieces!”

The older Lucian, leaning against the phantom tree, felt a cold sweat break across his brow. He remembered this.

He remembered the weight of the sword in his hand and the inexplicable, primal terror that had seized his heart.

This was the moment the “Prince of Death” truly died, and the king of the unholy was born. The creature didn’t stop.

It let out a sound that wasn’t a growl, but a wet, clicking hiss. With a speed that defied its skeletal frame, it blurred.

Young Lucian swung with a desperate, practiced lethalness. The steel whistled through the air, shearing through the creature’s neck.

Its head lolled back, nearly severed, but as the Prince stepped back to watch it fall, the flesh knit itself together in a sickening display of silver veins and black blood.

It healed instantly. “What are you?” Young Lucian gasped, backing away until his heel hit Bella’s hand.

The monster didn’t give him time to breathe. It lunged again. Young Lucian drove his blade straight through the creature’s chest, the tip bursting out of its spine.

But the thing didn’t flinch. It ignored the iron in its heart and slammed into the Prince, its talons digging into his shoulders.

The older Lucian watched, his own neck beginning to throb with heat. The creature buried its teeth into the side of Young Lucian’s neck.

A strangled cry died in the Prince’s throat. Both of them crashed to the dirt, the creature’s weight pinning Lucian down right next to Bella’s cold face.

The struggle lasted only seconds. As the creature drained the life from the Prince, it began to crumble.

Its ashen skin turned to literal soot, dissolving into the wind until nothing remained but a pile of grey dust on Lucian’s chest.

“Avenge your love.” The words echoed as young Lucian lay still, his eyes wide and staring at the stars.

The red tint was already beginning to bleed into his amber irises. His heart gave one final, violent thud against his ribs—and then it stopped.

The silence that followed was absolute. The older Lucian pushed off from the tree, his hands trembling.

He reached out to his younger self but a light so blinding surged through the forest. “Who’s there?” Older Lucian roared.

This wasn’t part of his memories. He watched as a figure stepped from the light—a woman whose form seemed woven from starlight and mist.

“Prince Lucain.” Lucain remembers the voice but not the memory of it. “I have watched your thread tangle with hers,” the entity continued, her voice filled with a profound, ageless sorrow.

“It is a tragedy that a love so pure was met with such cruelty. The heavens weep for what was stolen from you this day.”

The younger Lucian was defenceless and moving, his eyes changing color. “If you are a goddess, then show mercy. Can you bring her back? Can you fix this?”

“I can,” the entity whispered, “but you both can never be together again.” The words hit the older Lucian with the force of a physical blow, more agonizing than the monster’s teeth.

“No,” he whispered, his ghostly form flickering in the memory. “That isn’t how it happened. We were supposed to…”

But the Entity didn’t look at the ghost of the future. She looked down at the younger Lucian, who was gasping on the forest floor, his skin turning a deathly, translucent pale.

“Why?” Young Lucian wheezed, his fingers clawing at the dirt, trying to reach Bella’s hand. “If you have the power to save her, why must we be apart?”

The Goddess of Love stepped closer, her radiance illuminating the pile of ash that had once been the creature.

She looked at the grey dust with a flicker of ancient, sisterly disdain. “Because you are no longer a child of the sun, Prince Lucian,” the Entity murmured, her voice like a funeral bell.

“It is a shame my sister’s pet got to you before I did. That creature… it was a stray from the my sister’s void. Its venom has rewritten your soul. You are now a vessel for the very shadows I am sworn to hunt, A child of vengeance.”

She reached out, her starlight fingers hovering inches above Bella’s cold forehead, but she pointedly avoided touching Lucian.

“I am a Goddess of Light and Life. Bella’s soul is pure, but yours is now stained with a hunger that can never be sated. To bring her back into your arms would be to place a lamb in the den of a wolf. I can heal her thread by making her entire lineage my children. I can ensure she walks the earth again in another time, another life, where the trauma of this night is forgotten.”

She paused, the light around her turning a sorrowful shade of violet. “But for your love? It is a closed door. You are a creature of the night now. You cannot worship at her altar without scorching her. You’re a child of vengeance now. The balance will not allow it.”

“I don’t care about the balance!” Young Lucian roared, his voice cracking into a terrifying, dual-toned snarl as the vampire within him took root.

His fingernails dug into the earth, leaving gouges in the dirt as his body contorted, fighting the transformation and the Goddess’s decree all at once.

“Bring her back!” he wheezed, his eyes now fully flooded with that predatory crimson. “If I have to be the monster in her nightmares just so she can have a dream again, then let it be so! But do not tell me I cannot love her!”

The Entity’s expression remained unchanged—pitying, distant, and cold. “You speak with the tongue of a dying man and the heart of a rising beast. You do not understand the weight of the dark you now carry. To touch her would be to poison her. To love her would be to consume her.”

She raised her hand, and the starlight intensified. “I will grant your wish, Prince of Death. She will return. Her bloodline will be blessed, her soul shielded by my light. But the price is eternal. You will walk the shadows of her world, a guardian she can never truly know. You will be the Child of Vengeance, and she will be the Child of Life. And between those two points, there is a gulf that even time cannot bridge.”

“No!” the older Lucian screamed from the shadows of the memory. He lunged forward, trying to grab the Goddess’s shimmering robes, but his hands passed through her like smoke.

Lucian’s eyes snapped open and he was back at the east Wing floor.

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