Chapter 140 – Twist of Fate

It was not planned.

The destruction of an entire zone in the outer district of Vorn City was not something either Morenna or Hel Hood had intended when they began their operation.

Yet it had happened.

When they arrived, they had indeed found a base of the Crimson Daggers, exactly as their sacrifice had directed them. But what they found was nothing but a collection of low-level agents, members with no significance in the broader scheme of things.

Hel Hood was enraged. Unable to locate the Linked Artifact of her son, she destroyed the entire zone in a fit of blind, wrathful fury.

Morenna, for her part, was not particularly surprised. The Crimson Daggers were no fools. If they had dared to attack the Hood, it only meant they had prepared ways to escape the inevitable retaliation.

She understood then why their Sacrifice had pointed so easily to that location.

The Crimson Daggers had deliberately weakened their anti-divination barriers around that base while strengthening the barriers around their others, ensuring the Hood would find only the one they were meant to find.

They had been led by the nose like lost sheep.

At that realisation, Morenna Hood couldn’t help but smile.

It had been a very long time since the Hood had engaged in any kind of battle — open or subtle — with another power in the Kingdom worthy of the effort.

For a long time, her main entertainment had been Hel herself, while Hel kept busy manipulating the Church of Death and making Morenna’s life difficult whenever the opportunity arose.

Their relationship had been exactly that since the day Morenna married Mort.

But now, with an external enemy deliberately targeting them, Morenna and Hel Hood had decided — for the first time in decades — to set their unending quarrels aside and deal with the Crimson Daggers first.

The Crimson Daggers had succeeded against them twice.

There would be no third time.

Beside that, however, there was one interesting thing they had come across in that ravaged district.

The corpses of two members belonging to the Stormblessed Family.

One had been killed with a dagger across the throat. The other was collateral damage from Hel’s wrath inside her manifested Zone.

Questions immediately arose: what were Stormblessed agents doing in that place at that precise moment?

Suspicions were naturally born at once, and Hel Hood nearly acted on that unclear, unreliable feeling, wishing to march directly to Storm City and demand an explanation.

Morenna, knowing better, stopped her grandmother-in-law just in time.

They nearly came to blows over it.

But at the end, Hel relented.

No one attacked a Tier One family without extensive preparation. And if the Stormblessed did have a hand in recent events, they needed even more time to plan, to understand how and when to strike.

And so the Hood began a silent, almost invisible war against the Stormblessed...with the latter completely unaware of it.

Ulrich, indeed, was preoccupied with something else entirely.

...

"I think I am getting old." Ulrich said, standing in front of his mirror inside his room. "My hearing seems to be dangerously failing me. Can you repeat that?"

He was on the phone, his features arranged in a cold, unfeeling mask. And even without seeing him, the person on the other end was trembling.

"We... we have lost her, sir."

"Theophane?"

"Yes, sir."

"How did it happen?" Ulrich asked, his voice a low growl rising from the very depths of his throat. "How did she escape that building when I placed two guards stronger than her inside, and more outside?"

"We don’t know, sir... we have very little information. When we arrived, we found that the two interior guards had gone missing. And outside, one of the guards had killed the others before dying from his wounds, we believe." The man paused. There was more to say, but his chest tightened like a fist every time he tried to say it.

Ulrich’s patience was hanging on a thin, fragile thread, thinner than it had been in longer than he could remember.

"You have three seconds, you useless piece of shit." He hissed, gripping the phone so hard it began to crack. "Three seconds, or I will come for you personally. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, sir!" The man almost screamed in fright, then spoke in rapid haste. "Inside the pocket of the guard who killed the others, we found a piece of torn white cloth. The cloth belonged to Theophane, my Lord. And on it, written in her blood, was... how she...how she..."

"How she what?" Ulrich snapped.

"...how she loved him, couldn’t stop thinking about him, and wished to escape with him. Sir... I think—!"

"Enough." Ulrich hissed, his teeth grinding. "Do we have any information about that guard?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the two guards who were supposed to keep watch inside?"

"They haven’t been seen, sir. Being proficient hunters, they were able to conceal their traces. But given their prolonged absence, we can only assume they are dead, having killed themselves rather than face the consequences of their failure."

"Kill them all."

"...Pardon, sir?"

"Their families. Their friends. Their neighbours. It doesn’t matter. I want all of them dead. All three of them. The guard especially, I want his soul. Find a rogue Soulmancer and have it done."

The man on the other end breathed nervously. "Right now?"

"Right now."

"But sir, with the current tensions concerning the Hood, wouldn’t it be wiser to—!"

"Shuaib." His voice cut through like a blade. "I do not care about the Hood or whatever they are going through at this moment. I only care about one thing: their deaths, and the soul I asked for. So let me ask you again..."

Shuaib swallowed.

"...will you do it? Or do I have to do it myself, and add your family to the list while I’m at it?"

"I-I will do it, sir." Shuaib answered tightly.

"I want confirmation of their deaths by tomorrow morning." Ulrich said, then hung up immediately without waiting for a reply.

He threw the phone onto the bed behind him in intense irritation, then leaned forward, pressing both palms flat against the shelf holding the mirror, and stared into his own reflection.

But he was not truly looking at it.

His eyes were open. But his mind was elsewhere, travelling back through time, stopping on that fateful day.

The day he had finally seen Theophane after eighteen years.

And seeing her had felt like breathing for the first time. Like feeling the sun for the first time. Like standing beneath a stunning, moon-blessed sky thick with stars and finally understanding what it meant to look up.

It was on that day that an indescribable feeling struck Ulrich so hard and so mercilessly that he had frozen in place, unable to believe what was happening inside him.

Ulrich had never known he had a heart until that day. And he had never known, until that day, how it felt to have your heart want one thing and your mind want another.

And so it was in that confusion that he had walked toward Theophane, who had not run, despite knowing exactly who he was, which only deepened his feelings further.

He had sat across from her, taken in her face and the air around her, and noticed how the people around them — men and women alike — stared with a mixture of fear and awe.

Fear of something too otherworldly to name. Awe of the same thing.

Ulrich needed only one minute of conversation to grasp the full nature of Theophane.

He, more than anyone, knew that women were not to be trusted. That they were faithless and ungrateful, quick to fold under pressure and the right proposal.

Greedy little creatures who believed themselves valuable simply because they were born women.

But Theophane was different.

Cold, but different.

She was beautiful. And she knew it.

And there was nothing more dangerous than a woman who was fully aware of her beauty and what it could bring her. Especially a woman who held no particular value or respect for herself and thought of herself as a thing before even someone gave her that very distinction.

Yet in a twist even he couldn’t explain, Ulrich had wanted to trust her despite her being everything he despised in a woman.

He had wanted it so desperately that he spent days without a single hour of sleep, trying to reconcile his heart and his mind.

Yes. Ulrich Stormblessed was in love. At least, he believed he was. Because nothing else could explain what he felt.

So he had told himself plainly: he loved Theophane, the sister of his wretched that was his wife. But he knew he could not trust her. And he refused to love someone he could not trust.

Theophane had watched his internal war with a smile that revealed absolutely nothing of what she wanted from him.

Ulrich lost all composure.

He had captured her and imprisoned her inside a building he owned himself, known to no one. Not even the Elders.

He was prepared to give Theophane everything, as long as she stayed in that building and remained the thing she had always said she was.

But only for him.

"And yet you were ungrateful." Ulrich whispered, his eyes growing colder and colder. "And right now, my Theophane, you are probably on your knees for another man. Trading yourself for whatever benefit. For another night. Just as you did with me."

His face twisted into something inhuman, and red and blue lightning began to sizzle furiously around him, crackling in and out of his face.

"As you wish, then." He breathed, arcs of lightning escaping his mouth. "I will not abandon you. You have no choice but to come back to me if you want your sister returned, Theophane, my Theophane."

Yet even as he said it, a fist of doubt drove itself into his stomach.

Was Theophane’s goal truly to save her sister?

Ulrich didn’t know.

And that inability to know — something that hadn’t happened to him in a very long time — caused his strange new obsession with Theophane to deepen one step further.

"Theophane, my Theophane..."

CRACKLE—!

"Theophane, my Theophane..."

—End of Chapter 140—