Chapter 85 Cyprian 2
The proximity snapped the tension in her spine. Elara scrambled around on her knees, her hands flying up to shield her face as she skidded backward on the stone. "Don't kill me! Please! I don't even know where I am! I’m nobody—I’m just—don't kill me!"
The man stood over her, his silhouette cutting a jagged line against the crimson glow of the hall. He didn't move toward her. He simply watched, his eyes glowing a steady, rhythmic red.
He chuckled, "Kill you? After I spent a century waiting for a single drop of my blood to sing again?"
He stepped into the light. He was impossibly pale, his features so sharp they looked sculpted from ice. As he inched closer, Elara saw the faint, elegant curve of fangs pressing against his lower lip.
"I have no interest in killing my only living legacy," he said, reaching down.
Elara flinched, her eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not a legacy! I'm an orphan! I don't belong here!"
"You belong exactly where your blood brought you," he countered. His hand closed around her arm. It wasn't a strike; it was a firm, steady lift. He pulled her to her feet as if she weighed no more than a feather. "Stop trembling, child. It’s unseemly for a daughter of the Spire."
Elara blinked, her breath hitching in her chest as she looked up at him. He was taller than Ronan and radiated a cold power that made her knees feel like water. "Who... who are you? And why do you keep calling me that?"
"I am Cyprian," he said, his eyes locking onto hers with a gravity that made it impossible to look away. "And I call you that because I am the source of the fire in your veins. I am your great-great-grandfather."
The world tilted. Elara’s grip on his arm tightened instinctively. "That’s... that’s not possible. I don't have a family. My foster father, Hector... he’s gone. He died because of me."
"Hector?" Cyprian tilted his head, his eyes flashing with a sudden, sharp clarity. "The werewolf who raised you? He isn't dead, Elara."
"He is!" Elara sobbed, the guilt she'd carried for years bubbling over. "Draven told me... he said he died trying to protect me. That's why Draven hates me so much. I'm the reason his father is dead!"
Cyprian let out a low, cold hum. He reached into the air, and a shimmering crystal—a Life Stone—appeared in his palm. It was pulsing with a faint, steady amber light. "I do not know where he is, nor do I know the games this 'Draven' plays. But this stone is bound to the man who swore an oath to your parents. If he were ash, this stone would be dark. Hector is alive, little princess. He is merely... silent."
Elara’s breath hitched. Alive? If Hector was alive, then everything Draven had used to break her was a lie. Then, whose grave had she gone to visit?
"You want the truth?" Cyprian asked, his voice dropping as he placed a hand on her forehead. "Then look. Look at the night the world tried to erase you."
The Flashback: The Fall of the Triple-Blood
The crimson hall dissolved. Suddenly, Elara was standing in a small cottage on the outskirts of the Neutral Lands. It was night, and the sky was screaming.
"They’re through the first gate!" her mother, Valeriana, shouted. She was beautiful, her silver hair matted with blood, her hands glowing with a frantic violet light as she reinforced the door.
A man—Elara’s father, Julian—was snarling, his half-shifted claws digging into the floorboards. "Balthazar sent them. My own father sent the Council to kill his son."
In the corner, a young, muscular werewolf stood with a crying baby Elara. It was Hector. He looked younger, his face etched with a grim, agonizing loyalty.
"Hector, take her," Julian commanded, grabbing the werewolf’s shoulder. "The secret paths through the witch-woods. Don't stop until you reach the human borders."
"I won't leave you both to face them alone!" Hector roared.
"You aren't leaving us," Valeriana whispered, pressing a final, frantic kiss to the baby's forehead. "You are saving the only thing that matters. Go!"
The door exploded.
Elara watched in a trance as silver-armored Lycans and dark-robed Vampires flooded the room—a coalition of hate. Her parents fought like demons. Her mother wove spells that turned the air to glass, while her father tore through armor with the strength of two races.
She saw Hector dive through a back window, shielding her tiny body with his own as arrows hissed past them. He ran until his lungs burned, his eyes fixed forward, never looking back at the house as it went up in flames behind him.
The vision snapped back to the Obsidian Spire.
Cyprian was watching her, his expression unreadable. "Hector stayed. He hid you. He raised you under the nose of the very people who wanted you dead. If he is 'dead' now, it is because it serves a purpose for someone else. But the blood does not lie."
Elara stood shaking, her breath hitching in her throat as the weight of the truth threatened to collapse her lungs. "Draven lied to me," she whispered, the realization cutting deeper than any silver blade. "All those years of guilt... all the times he called me a curse for 'killing' his father..."
A cold, lethal fury began to simmer beneath her skin, mingling with the violet static of the Shadow King.
"He lied," she repeated, her voice gaining a sharp, jagged edge. "But if he’s alive... where is he? Draven burned the old house. He took over Northwood. I even visited his grave, Cyprian."
Cyprian leaned in, his red eyes glowing like dying embers in the fading mist of the Spire. "A King does not keep his greatest prize in a common cellar, little princess. He keeps it where the world is too afraid to look."
The edges of the crimson hall began to dissolve into a swirl of red and black smoke. Elara reached out, trying to grab Cyprian’s robes, desperate for a name, a location, anything. "Where? Tell me where he is!"
Cyprian didn't answer with words. He leaned forward, pressing a cold, marble-like finger to her forehead. "The blood knows its maker, Elara. Follow the pull. But remember..."
His image began to flicker, his voice echoing as if from the bottom of a deep well.
"A princess of the Spire doesn't cry for a father lost in the dark. She becomes the light that burns the world down to find him."
The Spire vanished. The smell of roses and old blood was replaced by the sharp, clinical scent of antiseptic and the rhythmic, frantic ticking of a heart monitor.