205- The Stench of the End
POV Elowen Grimwald:
He left me in the library, where I became a slave to my own destructive thoughts. I leaned my body over the soundboard of the piano, the only instrument I knew how to play.
I did not move a single inch from that spot afterward. I couldn’t. I tried not to imagine what awaited me, because even a fleeting glimpse of expectation made my stomach churn.
The moment Nerin came looking for me, I saw on her face the war she fought upon realizing my distress. Deep down, I felt that she would have embraced me if she could. Comforted me like a daughter, if she could.
But she couldn’t; and I understood.
In silence, we climbed the stairs of my former prison toward the carnage. I halted my steps and turned to her when we reached the door that would take me back to hell.
“Go in, Elowen.” She kept her expression serious.
“I ask you…” I closed my eyes and clenched my fists for a moment, controlling my anger, “at least one piece of clothing.”
“I am not authorized to provide you with any kind of assistance. I’m sorry.” She was still kind enough to apologize for following her alpha’s orders.
I would have to face that horror dressed only in torn cotton panties and a bra.
“I understand…” I replied, drawing air into my lungs in an attempt to calm myself.
Nothing silenced the frantic pounding inside my chest.
“Everything you need is on the other side of the door, Elowen.
Call me when you’re finished.”
I nodded to Nerin, who, before leaving, directed an empathetic look at me.
Aldren Valmorin was a demon disguised as an alpha. I doubted that in that organ of his, called a heart, there could exist any trace of humanity.
I closed my eyes as I turned the doorknob and entered the room, without the courage to open them.
The pungent odor of iron and death permeated the air, and that alone was enough to make my stomach churn. The nauseating stench clung to my throat with the threat of suffocating me.
I would never, ever forget what the putrid exhalation of the end was like.
Using my last thread of courage, I covered my mouth and held back the vomit the instant the macabre scene took shape not only in my sense of smell, but also in my sight.
Teneris’s body, disemboweled, was separated from her head, partially severed by Aldren’s claws. The appearance of her face, fallen to the side, with pierced eyes turned toward me, made terror clamp down along my entire spine.
No, no…
The already coagulated blood painted the floor inside and outside the cage in scarlet. Shreds of her skin were interwoven with bone fragments and organs spilling outward.
I shouldn’t have felt pity for someone who mistreated me, but I was overtaken by such a deep sense of desolation that I found myself unable to breathe.
My thoughts warned me that this could be my end as well, or Lunara’s, and for that reason holding back tears became an impossible mission.
Before the macabre tableau painted by Aldren’s unrestrained fury, I fell to my knees on the floor, sobbing, pulling at my own hair, wishing it were nothing more than a nightmare.
I was going mad, and the culprit now had a first and last name.
In front of me were two large wooden chests, some cleaning supplies, a mop, and a large shovel.
It was real, as real as my survival. And there was nowhere to run.
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand before I smeared them all over that blood, and stood up, moving closer to the cage. I locked my breath as I stopped at the entrance.
Up close, it was even worse.
The nausea coiled in my entrails, like an icy serpent twisting inside me, slowly climbing my throat. I tried to swallow and keep control, but it was useless.
I vomited, convulsing all the liquid from my stomach painfully over Teneris’s mortal remains. Each gag and lack of air reminded me that I would never be able to sweep that filth under the rug.
I caught my breath, but when I looked again at the mangled corpse, it was as if the ferruginous smell reached my lips. Death, beyond exuding putrefaction, had a taste.
The more time I wasted being a sensitive, weeping female, the greater the risk that I would never manage to finish that cruel task. I clung to the thought that if it were Teneris in my place, she would feel no pity at all.
I know she wouldn’t.
Taken by revolt and abandoned by my caged she-wolf, who only appeared to offer herself to Aldren, I dragged the first chest, about two meters long, right up against the cage, to throw whatever I could inside it.
I ground my teeth and began to gather the fallen entrails around her torso, which, with their sticky texture, slipped from my hands because of the mucus.
Among them, I found half of one of her lungs. When I held it and felt the spongy texture, I quickly hurled it into the chest, anguished.
My desperation, at seeing myself still surrounded by all those remnants of death, pushed my body into automatic mode. I grabbed the exposed, fibrous flesh of her blood-soaked torso, which had been separated from the skull, and threw it into the chest, causing a grotesque crash as it struck the old wood.
I used the shovel and the mop, and at a certain point, even my own hands, to remove the excess coagulated blood mixed with scraps of skin and even some of her teeth. Around the cage, part of the splatter was already drying.
Countless minutes later, the last solid part I still needed to collect stared back at me, even though it could no longer see anything. Beneath her eyes, a kind of white slime ran toward the deep perforation of her eyeballs.