CHAPTER 178: [178] HOME

Xavier’s silver mask shattered against the polished floor, the crystalline fragments scattering like fallen stars across the volcanic stone.

"Anointing?" His voice rolled across the vast space like thunder preceding lightning, each syllable carving itself into the volcanic stone walls with the permanence of divine law. "Or a desecration masquerading as ceremony?"

The assembled nobles turned toward him as one entity, their elaborate masks creating a glittering sea of anonymous faces. Hundreds of eyes focused on the young man who dared interrupt their most sacred ritual. But Xavier’s attention swept past individual faces to encompass the crowd itself—these were the people who held Hearthome’s true power in their manicured hands, the ones whose support Haverford required to legitimize whatever abomination he planned to unleash upon their world.

"Look around you!" Xavier’s arm swept wide in a gesture that encompassed not just the ballroom but the very foundations of their society. "This man seeks to bind a divine being—a gift of the Eternal Flame itself—transforming sacred miracle into personal weapon! He would risk the very foundation stones of your city, gamble with the lives of everyone you hold dear, all for the intoxicating taste of power!"

Lord Blackwater stepped forward from the crowd, his bronze mask askew from their earlier conversation, confusion radiating from his scarred frame. "What divine being? That’s Lady Selene—Lord Torval’s niece, born and raised in this very city."

"Is she?" Xavier’s voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried to every corner of the vast room, intimate as a lover’s confession yet sharp as an executioner’s blade. "Have any of you wondered why the winters grow harsher with each passing year? Why the Eternal Flame—which has burned bright for three centuries—now flickers like a dying candle in the wind? Because what stands before you isn’t merely a noble daughter playing dress-up for your entertainment. That is a goddess, trapped in stolen flesh, her divine essence slowly bleeding away into Haverford’s enchantments like wine from a cracked chalice!"

The golden threads woven through Calypso’s gown pulsed with sudden, violent light at his words. The suppression magic responded to truth like a wound exposed to winter air, its carefully crafted bindings straining against the weight of revelation. Several nobles gasped in unison, stepping backward as if the very air around her had transformed into something dangerous and wild.

Haverford’s jaw clenched beneath his sun mask, the metal creaking under the pressure of his fury. But before he could marshal his words into a counter-attack, another voice exploded across the ballroom with the force of a volcanic eruption.

"You know nothing!"

Lord Torval’s roar shattered the crystalline tension like a hammer blow against glass, sending invisible shockwaves through the assembled crowd. The High Burner’s obsidian mask reflected the room’s chaos in its polished surface as he stepped forward, his entire frame shaking with barely contained emotion. His hands—usually steady enough to perform the most delicate flame rituals, to guide the Eternal Flame through its sacred dances—now trembled with the force of his anguish like leaves in a hurricane.

"Nothing of what I’ve sacrificed!" Torval’s voice cracked like ice under unbearable pressure, decades of suppressed grief finally breaking free from its carefully constructed prison. "Nothing of what I’ve lost! Nothing of the choices that tear a man’s soul apart in the dark hours before dawn!"

The words struck the assembled nobles like physical blows, each syllable carrying the weight of a father’s desperation. Lady Morwyn’s jade mask couldn’t hide her sharp intake of breath. Lord Ironhold’s bronze features twisted into an expression of dawning horror. These people had known Torval for decades—had watched him raise Selene after her parents’ death in the Winter Court raids, had witnessed his devotion to the girl who represented his bloodline’s last flickering hope.

"Save her?" Xavier’s voice carried a note of genuine pain now, his tactical approach shifting as he recognized the depths of Torval’s self-deception. This wasn’t mere political maneuvering—this was a man drowning in his own good intentions. "You didn’t save her, Lord Torval. You condemned her to an eternity of falling between worlds while another soul wears her face like a mask!"

"She was dying!" Torval’s mask fell away as he spoke, clattering to the floor beside Xavier’s shattered silver. The face revealed beneath was carved hollow by years of guilt and sleepless nights, marked by the kind of suffering that ages a man beyond his years. His eyes—once sharp and commanding enough to cow Winter Court emissaries—now held the haunted quality of someone who’d stared too long into the abyss and watched it stare back. "The Winter Court had marked her, claimed her for their fallen queen! I felt their touch on her soul—cold and hungry and patient as the grave itself. They would have taken her, used her, twisted her into something monstrous! At least this way, she lives!"

The ballroom erupted into a symphony of whispered conversations as the nobles processed this revelation. The Winter Court—Frostfall’s ancient enemy, the frost-touched demons who haunted their nightmares—had targeted a child. The implications sent ripples of fear through the crowd like stones thrown into still water, parents unconsciously moving closer to their own children as if proximity could protect against fate itself.

But Xavier pressed forward like a blade finding its mark, his voice cutting through the chaos with surgical precision. "Lives? Or exists in eternal torment while you tell yourself comfortable lies to sleep at night?"

Before Torval could respond, before anyone could draw breath to speak, another voice joined the conversation—soft as falling snow, haunting as winter wind, devastatingly familiar yet somehow wrong.

"Uncle."

Every head in the ballroom turned toward Calypso like iron filings drawn to a magnet, but the woman who spoke wasn’t the regal goddess they’d witnessed before. Her posture had shifted with subtle but profound changes, shoulders curving inward in a way that made her seem younger, more fragile, like a child trying to make herself small in a world too large and cruel. Her purple eyes—still Calypso’s divine orbs that held the light of distant stars—now carried a sorrow so deep it seemed to echo from another world entirely, from places between life and death where lost souls wander.

When she spoke again, her voice carried the cadence of a lost child calling through an endless void, each word dropping into the silence like stones into a bottomless well.

"The girl in my dreams... the one who is still falling... she doesn’t want another soul to take her place." Each syllable fell like winter rain against glass, creating ripples of horror through the assembled crowd.

"She wants to come home."