hotmtlnovel Chapter 119 Ashes & Spark [Part 2] [Witch]
Chapter 119 Ashes & Spark [Part 2] [Witch]
Chapter 119 Ashes & Spark [Part 2] [Witch]“You pulled,” Light observed flatly. “And she lives.”
I stared at the little girl propped by Paleman. She looked like Alice: the same black hair, the same startled eyes. Relief hit me in a hot animal way, until she warped. The child’s skin rippled; age fell on her like a tide. One breath, a child; the next, an adult, pronounced with wrinkles that had not existed a second before. Then collapse. I screamed Alice’s name, but the sound simply bled into the keep’s humming corridors.
Alice, my daughter, convulsed between lifetimes… newborn to elder, toddler to woman, looping at impossible speed. Sparks crawled over her until the skin smoked and shriveled. Each collapse birthed a new cry, a new flicker of mind: infant shrieks, toddler confusion, adult sobs, old-woman rasp. Time had become a cruelty, and she the instrument.
I lunged to Light. “What is the meaning of this? What did you do to her?” I demanded, throat raw.
He smiled the way calm people smile before a storm. “Your little Alice pulled,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I’m trying to alter the nature of my birth, to increase my power. The prophet said it could be done if I could engineer a pull like this. I didn’t expect success on my first try, but this looks promising. Also,” he added, with an odd, clinical chuckle, “this should allow me to remove the weak link in my lineage.”
“Remove? Remove how?” I asked, hearing my voice as if from a distance.
“I intend to use her as a template,” he said plainly. “With the right procedure and the right grafts, I can shift my origin. It won’t be gentle, and she may die in the process. But hey, I’m gonna be eternal…”
“Let me fix it,” I said.
“And why would I trust you?”
“You can’t let her die! She’s going to be your mother, right!?”
“I am not interested in her as my mother… I only want her for her womb… If anything, the only thing of value to her was that she brought me back to life. She’s nothing to me. Once she gives birth to me, I am going to take over that baby, and then I’ll be perfect. Get out of my way. Paleman, call Dr. Sequence here, and we can probably accelerate this thing.”
“B-But she’ll die,” I cried to him, and tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “And if she dies, you won’t be able to try again… C-Can you travel back in time the same way you did the first time? Can you do it again?”
“Fine,” said Light. “Do what you can.”
I reached for Alice, my trembling hands cupped her face, her skin hot with the energy still flickering beneath it. Her eyes fluttered open for a second, and in that brief moment, I felt her.hat made silence sound alive.
He didn’t sleep easily, and neither did I.
So I reached out with my mind and spun a thread of telepathy between us. It wasn’t just a dream I pulled him into, but a memory, raw and unfiltered, the story of what made me who I was. I let him see everything… Beacon, Ning, Alice, the birth of the Ten, and the long spiral of horror that followed. My shame. My crimes. My reasons.
The dream rippled like glass as he realized what was happening. He stood from the bed, climbing to the upper bunk, the light from the ceiling bending around his silhouette. I felt his anger ripple through the tether, sharp and searing.
He knew.
He knew this wasn’t just some telepathic trick. He knew this was my confession.
“You think I don’t see it?” he muttered, his voice distorted in the dream’s air. “You think I don’t feel you trying to make me understand you?”
I didn’t respond. There was no defense worth giving. People like him, like us, weren’t swayed by words. They needed something real. Something painful to truly move them. If I had to expose and bare my sins to give him purpose, to make him stronger, then so be it.
“I just wanted you to see where I came from,” I whispered. “Why I did what I did.”
He didn’t answer. But through the link, I felt his fury twist into something colder, not forgiveness, not yet, but comprehension. And that was enough.
The dream began to dissolve, edges unraveling into static. As it did, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Alice, older now, distant, standing at the edge of my mindscape. She smiled faintly, her image fading with the dream.
And then it was over.