Chapter 124 Agonizing Shrieks
Leela cried out, tears immediately spilling over her lashes and tracking down her pale cheeks. The crimson flowers burned like physical branding irons against her skin, leaving faint wisps of acrid smoke in the air, but she refused to let go. The pain was excruciating, but her determination was absolute. She dug her fingers into the jagged edges of the raw crystal, anchoring herself to the desk to see it through.
The raw stone pulsed, shooting a blinding beam of light directly into the antique chandelier crystal Jax had placed in front of it.
The prism caught the agonizing memories and violently refracted them. The study was instantly plunged into a spectral, three-dimensional darkness, lit only by the eerie, swirling green-and-white projections of the dying earth.
The walls of the study vanished. Suddenly, Vane, his guards, and the Elders were standing in the middle of a spectral wasteland.
Translucent, ghostly images flickered into existence all around them. The first projection showed the truth of the Whisper Wind territory. It sat directly atop a massive, pulsing ancient magic line. Ghostly images showed Vane, decades younger, driving massive, dark warding stones into the earth along the borders. For years, the High Councilor had been secretly, slowly bleeding the territory dry, siphoning the ley line to feed his dying magic.
Then, the scene shifted, and the truth of Leela's awakening was laid bare.
The projections violently accelerated. When Vane had first felt the distant, terrifying tremor of a new, unimaginably strong Elemental, he had panicked. He needed to know exactly how powerful she was. The soldiers watched in horrified silence as ghostly figures drove dozens of new, jagged black drain stones deep into the soil. Vane had intentionally escalated the destruction, rapidly slaughtering the land to create a massive localized void—a brutal trap designed specifically to suck Fennigan in and force him to draw on Leela’s magic across their bond, just so Vane could measure her strength.
The cost of his test was absolute devastation. Lush, green crops withered into black ash in a matter of days. Season after season, the soil cracked, turning to gray dust.
Then came the people.
Ghostly projections of the Whisper Wind pack flickered around the glowing cage holding the High Councilor. They were emaciated, their eyes sunken and hollow. They looked like living skeletons, desperately clawing at the dead dirt, trying to use the old ways and the elemental lessons they had been taught to save their crops. But the magic was gone, swallowed by Vane's stones. The lessons failed them because the earth itself had been murdered.
Elder Horne stepped forward into the spectral light. He ignored the trembling guards and walked right up to the edge of the salt cage. He looked down at the emaciated ghosts of the people, then pointed a shaking, furious finger directly at Vane.
"Look at them!" Horne demanded, his voice cracking with decades of buried grief and boiling rage, echoing over Leela's quiet, painful sobs. "Tell your soldiers, Vane! Tell them what you did to test her! Tell them the truth about the Whisper Wind!"
High Councilor Vane opened his mouth, his jaw working frantically as he scrambled to formulate a lie, a justification that could save his reputation in front of his own vanguard.
But before a single word could leave his throat, the Whisper Wind shifted again, overriding his voice with undeniable truth.
The ghostly image of the emaciated pack faded, replaced by a dark, clandestine meeting. The projection showed Vane, cloaked in shadow, handing heavy sacks of coin to a pack of snarling, scarred rogues. He was ordering them to bury a new perimeter of deeply cursed ruin stones around the Whisper Wind borders.
The crystal magnified Vane's spectral voice, cold and calculating. These weren't just drain stones; they were a lethal, targeted snare. If the Elemental had set foot on that soil herself, the stones were designed to violently suck her dry on impact, killing her instantly.
Instead, Fennigan had walked into the trap. The soldiers watched in dawning horror as the projection revealed how the ruin stones had adapted, using the Alpha's mate bond as a violent conduit to rip the magic from Leela from hundreds of miles away. It was a brutal, parasitic drain that had nearly killed her and the twins, Caspian and Briar, right in her womb.
Before the guards could even process the sheer cruelty of the trap, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony shattered the room.
Leela threw her head back, a blood-curdling, piercing scream ripping from her lungs. The raw beacon stone on the desk didn't just glow—it violently pulsed, bridging a catastrophic, invisible arc of raw magic directly into the center of the cage. The pure elemental energy of the stone embedded over Leela’s heart violently collided with the dense, rotting magic of the iron ring on Vane’s finger.
The collision of life and death was explosive.
The spectral wasteland of the Whisper Wind territory was instantly wiped away. The antique chandelier crystal flared blindingly bright, and the projections violently shifted, plunging into the darkest, most depraved depths of Vane’s soul.
The room was suddenly filled with cages, cold iron bars slick with fresh blood. Horrifyingly precise anatomical charts plastered themselves over the bookshelves, mapping out exactly how to extract magic from young, developing veins.
And then came the horrifying truth behind his power.
Flash after flash of young, terrified faces illuminated the room in rapid, strobe-like succession. The study was instantly filled with a cacophony of overlapping, terrifying screams—the echoes of stolen Elementals blending seamlessly with Leela's agonizing shrieks.
The projections showed Vane stealing these gifted children from their families under the disguise of the "greater good," claiming they needed specialized training at the citadel. But the blinding light of the crystal exposed the sickening reality: there was no training. It was only for his greater good. To do nothing but feed his ego, to hide him from the earth and the moon.
The children in the visions were screaming because of what he was taking from them. The rings and cufflinks Vane wore weren't just set with dark iron; the pale, clouded accents were bone.
The vanguards watched in absolute, paralyzed revulsion as the projections showed exactly how he acquired them. The spectral children shrieked in excruciating pain as Vane harvested their magic and their bones while they were still alive. Then, a giant, translucent image of the High Councilor materialized right over his head. It showed Vane sitting at his opulent desk, a calm, satisfied smile on his face as he meticulously waxed and polished the freshly harvested, tiny bones to a sickening shine, completely deaf to the slaughter he had just committed.
"Fenn!" Leela wailed, her knees buckling. The crimson vines on her neck were burning so hot they looked like magma beneath her skin, the death magic from the ring surging back up the tether directly into her chest.
In the center of the trap, bathed in the sickly light of his own atrocities, Vane's face grew horrifyingly pale. His skin seemed to shrink against his skull, his eyes sinking into black, hollow pits. He looked exactly like what he was: an ancient, starving monster wearing a human suit.