CHAPTER 234: THE VILLAGE WAS ALREADY LIKE THIS, I SWEAR

Judge winced as his foot caught on a gnarled root.

Pain shot up through his leg, but he swallowed it, again.

By now, the pain felt as natural as breath. The ether working through his body didn’t heal cleanly.

Ether was putting him back together, slowly, but with a kind of perfect care no human hands could match.

A human body was complicated, full of tiny parts and delicate pieces. Normally, it would take the best healers in the land to fix something this broken. No, not even they can fix this since ether was sucked away from all his dry wounds.1

But the ether was doing it on its own, without thought or feeling, like the world itself fixing the imperfections in nature.

It closed wounds without care for how they looked, joined bones and joints without thinking about movement or pain.

In some places, his skin came back smooth as silk. In others, more quickly, it was rough, like uncut stone.

Every time he blinked, the crack down his face pulled at old breaks and new nerves just starting to grow. This wasn’t gentle healing, it was ether forcing him back into shape, slow and steady, whether he was ready or not.

He didn’t stop anyway.

Ahead, the field of blood-red flowers swayed gently, each stalk brushing against his boots like whispers. He stepped through them, careful not to crush any more than he had to. They felt wrong. Beautiful, but wrong. There was no breeze, yet they moved. No bees, yet they bloomed.

The ruins loomed closer.

A village, or what used to be one. Half-collapsed walls, burned beams, scorched markings on stone, and melted remains of stones.

All of it — the unmistakable signature of his mother’s power. Her spellwork was precise, elegant, and unapologetically overwhelming. Just remembering it sent chills down his spine, even though there won’t be much of a spine left if he didn’t heal quickly.

Judge crouched beside a blackened column, gripping his knee as he went down. He scanned the stone.

Golden residue. Half-erased runes, and some residue of strangely manipulated ether.

Yeah. That was Eleyn. And based on the slash marks carved clean through a stack of felled trees—

"Seraphis was here too," he muttered. "well obviously."

He pressed his palm to the stone. It felt cold.

Still.

The air smelled faintly of lightning and crushed petals. Ether hung low in the atmosphere, dormant but watchful. Not enough to hurt him through overabsorption. Just enough to alert him.

This place wasn’t fresh. It had been days.

The village’s heart had been torn open. Craters in the soil, some circular, some jagged. He recognized the signature of at least three unnatural energy types. All of them violent. All of them... strange.

He stood, slowly, bracing his back. A dull throb pulsed behind his freshly healed sternum, the Heart of Nothing working overtime. It pushed ether into torn ligaments. Rebuilt shattered veins. Knit broken bones in glacial rhythms.

But it didn’t care about pain, only survival.

He limped through the ruins, following the trail of destruction.

And then he found it.

The battlefield proper.

It was a grave, at least it felt like one. Judge wasn’t new to a battlefield, he had plenty of experience in his previous life. But the sight of the dead lying like this always sickened him, although he knew he was also a person who personally caused many such scenes.

Five impact zones. Deep cuts in the earth where bodies had been flung, ether drained, burned, or crushed.

He could see it, imagine it, the chaos, the rhythm. His mother’s spells weaving patterns in the air. Seraphis breaking bones with her fists while never once drawing that blade. But that strange feeling was always there, the ether did not feel right.

Coupled with the feeling of a gaze being fixated upon him, it made him cautious and ready for an unexpected encounter.

He knelt again, slower this time. His hand shook as he picked up a shard of black porcelain. A mask. Cracked diagonally. Probably a fox. Dried blood on the inside. Ether burns along the edge.

The material was at least visually similar to the deer mask he saw before.

These hadn’t been ordinary foes, that was for sure.

Judge turned the shard in his hand.

’WHAT?!’

There were runes along the inside, burnt in, not carved. But runes were only known to dragons.

’Ok, calm down,’ He took a deep breath, ’There might be people who knew this, or there might be rebellious dragons.’

Whatever it was, he didn’t have enough clues to pinpoint the reason, but maybe he could try to. He proceeded to read the runes.

An unknown rune similar to ’die’ with unknown modifiers, the Transfer rune, the Regeneration rune, and the Control rune. He couldn’t make out the complicated modifiers.

"Dead men don’t regenerate," he said softly, pocketing the shard and standing back up.

Behind him, the wind rustled the red flowers. They whispered secrets he couldn’t quite hear.

But the silence was more eerie than anything, it had weight to it.

Judge moved past the cratered center of the village, each step a direct question to his life choices that led him to endure this pain, instead of maybe using a painkiller. Was it because painkillers hadn’t been invented yet? He did not know.

The runes left by his mother were faint now, but still discernible if you knew how to read them. And he did. And he understood that he was never meant to study runes.

He couldn’t even begin to comprehend what was written here.

He finally found the source of the strange ether, the source was these runes by his mother, they we strange and more importantly... powerful.

And yet, whoever she’d fought had broken through more than one of these strangely immense runes.

He paused near a half-melted tree. The bark had been seared black, but its branches were still standing, almost defiantly. Behind it, a deep furrow cut through the earth, like a slash from a weapon swung too casually. Too clean, wide, and really lethal.

He crouched and ran his fingers along the edge. It still buzzed faintly.

That crimson ether. It was Seraphis.

She had fought here. Hard.

But most probably, she still hadn’t drawn her blade.

He imagined the masked ones trying to swarm her, again and again, their limbs rebuilding, their bones stitching themselves back together while she struck them down with nothing but fists and force.

He could feel her frustration. She had been forced to kill something that refused to stay dead.

Judge exhaled, and the cracked side of his face whined with tension. The sound it made wasn’t breath, it was wind across fractured stone.

He looked up.

To the right of the battlefield, a section of trees had turned to glass.

Smooth, obsidian-black, reflecting the warped sky like the surface of dead water. Golden strands still shimmered faintly beneath the surface.

It hadn’t been fire that did this.

It was ether ignition on a scale that should have vaporized the caster’s organs. And yet, Eleyn was a different breed. She was his mother after all.

Of course, she had no problem with her own spells, unlike some masked idiot called "Judge".

He reached out and placed his hand flat against the glass. It was warm.

Still feeding on the remnants of power.

"Why?" he asked the reflection. "Why go this far? Why burn this much?"

No answer. Just his own reflection staring back, a man wearing a broken boy’s body. Half of his face was smooth. The other half was fractured like a ruined statue. A crack ran from the corner of his jaw through his cheekbone and up past the edge of his brow.

The Heart of Nothing pulsed once.

And then again.

And again.

He looked down.

At the center of the scorched clearing, surrounded by ruin and ash, sat a single smooth stone. The soil around it was untouched.

There were no bloodstains. No ether marks. No footprints.

Only a mark—burned into the center.

A sigil. His mother’s crest. Etched in gold, faint but unmistakable.

A message.

Judge walked toward it, despite his legs’ protests. His spine had begun to lock again. The ether in his back was trying to rebind tendons with too much density, making his movements stiff, like a poorly built puppet.

He dropped to one knee beside the stone and traced the crest.

Eleyn didn’t leave things behind unless she wanted someone to find them. That someone was him.

A flicker of motion caught his eye.

To the left, among the weeds, something small glimmered in the light.

He reached for it.

A torn scrap of fabric. Pale. Part of a cloak. Embedded with fine golden embroidery.

It was Seraphis’s.

Not bloodied.

Just left.

He turned it over and found a single hair tucked into the fold.

Deliberate.

"They knew I’d come," he whispered.

He clenched the fabric in his fist, and his cracked hand trembled, ether squirming beneath the skin like smoke under glass.

He didn’t know why, but suddenly, he felt a presence. Not malicious. Not ghostly.

Just... distant.

Like being watched through a closed door.

It was gone a moment later.

But the meaning stayed.

They’d survived. They’d moved on.

And they’d left behind the kind of destruction only people like his mother and Seraphis could make.

Judge looked around one last time. Took it in.

He turned toward the path leading east.

They were ahead of him.

Good.

He was almost caught up.

I wanted to use "cracks," but that would raise some eyebrows.