Chapter 345

Chapter 345

Without stopping to question why, I turn around and head deeper into the cave.

Scarlette notices the change in direction but doesn’t ask a single question. She simply falls into step behind me, trusting me just as readily as I trust the unseen voice leading us onward.

The passage narrows before opening again, and as we continue, I begin noticing carvings etched into the stone walls. At first they’re simple sketches of a man. Some show him working, others capture him sitting beneath trees or simply smiling. None are particularly refined, yet every line carries an unmistakable devotion.

The further we walk, the more numerous they become.

Entire sections of the cave are covered with them. It’s less like decoration and more like memories carved into stone.

Despite their crude style, I know people would travel across continents just to study them. Historians, archaeologists, artists… anyone with an appreciation for ancient civilisations would lose their minds over this place.

Then the drawings begin to change.

The admiration remains, but something darker slowly seeps into it. The expressions grow more intimate. The poses more suggestive. Before long, the walls are filled with increasingly unrestrained fantasies, each carving exposing the artist’s desperate longing for the man at their centre. It tells a story without a single written word—a slow descent from affection into fixation, then from fixation into outright obsession.

“Wow…”

Scarlette’s quiet voice makes me stop.

She’s staring at one particular carving.

I follow her gaze.

A shiver crawls over my skin.

It isn’t the most disturbing image we’ve passed, but it’s unsettling enough. A woman lies face down while an enormous wolf mounts her from behind. The wolf itself looks… wrong somehow. Familiar, yet impossible to place.

I tear my eyes away almost immediately.

“I’ve seen enough of that.” Scarlette snorts softly before following after me.

The tunnel widens into a large chamber that appears to have once been someone’s bedroom. Time has reduced most of it to ruins. An ancient bed leans crookedly against one wall, its frame barely intact. A broken bookshelf has collapsed beneath layers of dust, while a heavy stone table still stands stubbornly in the centre of the room.

The glowing stones bathes everything in soft amber light.

The carvings here are different.

Very different.

The man’s face is gone.

Instead, every wall depicts the same woman with her face violently scratched out. In one carving she falls from a cliff. In another she’s pierced by dozens of blades. Elsewhere she burns, drowns, or lies lifeless beneath a pool of blood.

I slowly turn in a circle, taking them all in.

“…That’s odd.”

“Sapphire, look.”

Scarlette lifts a weathered journal from the remains of the bookshelf, brushing centuries of dust from its cracked leather cover. I cross the room and peer over her shoulder as she carefully opens it.

The pages are in a miserable state.

The moment she turns one, the brittle edge crumbles into ash and drifts onto the floor. Several more have rotted away completely, leaving only jagged stubs clinging to the spine. Others are stained, scorched or faded until the ink is little more than ghostly smudges.

Then she finds a page she can still read.

“I hate her… I hate her so much,” Scarlette begins.

The language is foreign to me, but she translates as she goes, her voice rising with the writer’s fury.

“Why does she get all the good things? Why is she always the lucky one? What about me? It’s not fair. It’s not fair! We’re supposed to be equals—or better yet, I should be better than her. So why? Why am I always the one left behind?”

She delivers every word with such dramatic venom that I can’t help laughing.

“You don’t have to perform it.”

She flicks me a look.

“Shh. I’m enjoying myself.” Her expression quickly sobers as she studies the faded ink. “The rest is damaged, but I’ll read whatever I can make out. You keep looking around. Maybe you’ll find something.”

I nod and leave her to it.

The broken bookshelf contains far more books than I expect. Most fall apart the moment I touch them, but enough survive for me to skim through their contents. Herbology. Potion brewing. Spellcraft. Dark magic. A surprising number of embarrassingly steamy novels.

“…Well, someone had varied interests.”

Tucked behind one of the shelves, I discover a tarnished picture frame.

I wipe away the dust with my sleeve.

A man stands at the centre of the faded photograph.

The same man from the carvings.

Beside him stands a woman, but someone has deliberately cut away part of the image. Time has done the rest, leaving her face almost completely erased.

A strange chill runs through me.

Even in the carvings covering the cave walls, she’d never given herself a face. Almost as though she refused to remember it.

“Sapphire.”

Scarlette’s voice loses all trace of humour.

“You need to hear this.”

I turn at once.

She isn’t smiling anymore.

“The woman who wrote this diary keeps referring to someone simply as Witch,” Scarlette says, lowering her eyes to the brittle page again. She takes a moment to decipher the faded writing before continuing. “According to this, Witch fell in love with a man named Sirius, and they were deeply in love. But the woman writing this… she became consumed by jealousy. She wanted Sirius for herself. She envied her friend so much that she eventually grew to hate her.”

Scarlette’s voice trails off, her expression hardening as she stares at the next few lines. The silence that follows is heavy enough to make my stomach knot.

“And that’s not even the worst part.”

My fingers instinctively twist the hem of my shirt. “What could possibly be worse than that?” I ask, my voice quieter than I intend.

Scarlette slowly raises her head. The gravity in her blue eyes makes my mouth go dry before she even speaks.

“The woman who wrote this diary…” She pauses, as though giving me one last chance to prepare myself. “…was Selene’s granddaughter.”

The picture frame slips from my fingers and strikes the stone floor with a sharp crack that echoes through the chamber.

“Fuck…”

My pulse lurches.

“A granddaughter of a goddess. Is that why the curse is so impossibly powerful?”

Scarlette gives a grim nod before lowering her gaze to the diary once more.

“They were demi-gods,” Scarlette says, carefully turning another brittle page before it crumbles beneath her fingertips. “According to the diary, Sirius fell gravely ill. Witch begged Selene to save him, but whatever was killing him was beyond even the goddess’s power to heal. In the end, they came up with another solution.”

She pauses to decipher the faded words before continuing.

“Selene allowed Sirius’s soul to be reborn as a werewolf, while Witch willingly placed herself into an enchanted sleep so her essence could one day be released and reborn beside him. That way, they would find each other again in their next lives. Witch entrusted Sirius’s soul to Selene before surrendering herself to the spell, believing she would wake in another lifetime and be reunited with the man she loved.”

I breathe in deeply, suddenly feeling choked.

“Sirius was reborn as a werewolf exactly as planned,” Scarlette continues quietly. “The diary says he remembered nothing of his previous life.”

The pieces begin slotting together in my head, making me gulp dryly.

“And the woman who lived here cursed them out of spite?”

Scarlette slowly shakes her head, her expression hardening. “It’s much worse than that.”

The bitterness in her voice makes my stomach tighten.

“She didn’t just curse them. She stole Witch’s future.”

Another page flakes apart beneath her fingers as she lowers her eyes to the diary again.

“She trapped Witch’s soul, leaving her as a powerless spirit with no body, then took her place and reincarnated as Sirius’s fated mate instead. This entire section is just her gloating. She writes about how perfectly everything went, how she intends to leave the following day, and how no one—not even her own mother—will be able to stop her because she’s Selene’s beloved granddaughter.”

Silence settles over the cave.

The only sounds are our breathing and the fast pounding of my heart.

Scarlette closes the diary with great care, as though even after everything it contains, it is still a piece of history worthy of respect.

“The woman who wrote this diary…” she says at last, lifting her eyes to mine, “…is Liviana.”

The name strikes me like a blow.

My pulse pounds in my ears.

“And Sirius?”

Scarlette doesn’t answer straight away. She doesn’t have to.

“If my guess is right,” she says quietly, “then Sirius was reborn as—”

“Alpha Hiems,” I whisper.

Scarlette gives a single grim nod. “Bingo.”