MHHC Chapter 155

The End of the Road

[Oblivion. And regret.]

Adelheid's eyes went wide.

She had understood it intellectually—the sudden thickening of the fog was unnatural, her mind had registered that much—but the full weight of it had not yet settled into her body.

Only after hearing Valentin's words did the chill arrive, belated and sharp. How much of that fog had she breathed in?

[We should hurry.]

"Understood."

She quickened her steps to match his pace.

The more she turned it over in her mind, the more their meeting here began to feel like extraordinary fortune—the kind that arrives once, without warning, and does not come again.

The deeper they pressed into the passage, the worse the stench became.

Putrid air stung her eyes until they watered, and what carpeted the floor and ceiling could only be described as fragments—grotesquely severed flesh, masses that resembled abscesses—all of it, seemingly, the remains of something that had once been alive...

'Wait. What is that?'

Something was moving near Valentin's feet.

At first she thought it was a trick of the light, that she had misread a reflection. But they were hands. Countless, slender hands crawling up from the shadows on the floor, straining toward his ankles with a kind of desperate, deliberate purpose.

The sight was so grotesque that Adelheid lurched backward, a full-bodied shudder ripping through her.

[Be careful.]

She nearly went down—her foot hit something slick—and Valentin moved quickly, closing the distance between them and catching her before she could fall.

Adelheid gripped his arm and stared uneasily down toward his feet.

"Those things..."

In the brief moment she'd looked away, the number of things attaching themselves to him had multiplied.

What struck her most was his manner. He appeared vaguely inconvenienced—like a man troubled by a persistent draft he had long since given up sealing—but he made no move to drive them off entirely. Or perhaps, she thought, he could not.

Adelheid swallowed the saliva pooling in her mouth, breathless.

[What things?]

"Things like hands, that keep attaching to you. They look slightly different from what I've seen before..."

He turned to look at her, eyes marginally wider, wearing an expression of faint bewilderment.

It was a strange reaction. It had the quality of a man who had only just registered that she was standing beside him—or perhaps, she thought, of one who had assumed she would not be able to see any of this at all. Valentin lifted a hand slowly to smooth the corner of his mouth before answering.

[In simple terms—they were the minimum bulwark holding back the spread of corruption.]

A bulwark? Then he had constructed them himself? Things as horrible as those? She blinked, disoriented, and then she looked again at Valentin—wreathed now in that pale, bluish luminescence—and barely managed to make sense of it.

In this strange, liminal space, Valentin seemed closer to god than she had ever seen him.

And then again—it was hardly possible to judge the territory that gods walked through by the standards of mortal sight.

Horrible as those things appeared to her, they might not appear horrible to him at all.

"The way you say it, it sounds as though that was only ever true in the past."

[Precisely—it no longer functions as it should.]

Valentin confirmed she was steady and released his hold on her.

But Adelheid was faster—she caught his hand before he could withdraw entirely. Was it the horrible things she'd seen? The need to feel him solid and real was suddenly overwhelming.

"My legs went weak," she said, offering it like an excuse, and laced the tips of her fingers through his—

Valentin's expression darkened slightly. He squeezed her hand once, hard, then slowly let it go.

[We need to move faster.]

Adelheid bit down on her trembling lip.

She had told herself, at first, that it was only her imagination—had forced herself into believing it. But there was no denying it now. He was gently, persistently pressing her outside the boundary of wherever he permitted himself to be.

She watched the back of the man walking ahead of her.

For one disorienting instant, the thought surged up unbidden: what if this wasn't him at all? What if something else had taken his shape?

'Ridiculous, of course.'

The faint resonance of divine power she could feel emanating from Valentin was unmistakably the one that had once originated from him—and, through him, from her.

"...How much farther do we have to go?"

The words were already out before she realized how they must have sounded—like a complaint, like a child worn out and dragging their feet. She hurried to clarify.

"I didn't mean it as weakness. But everything I can see is horrifying, and I'm so uneasy, and I... I simply can't make myself go further in that direction."

Adelheid forced her gaze away from the writhing things on the floor and let her sentence trail away. Valentin glanced back at her face.

[What do you see?]

"Tumors. Knotted, uneven ones. And from them—something thin, like veins, spreading along the floor like a circulatory system. I can't even see where they end..."

"..."

"You can't see them?"

The floor was thick with the things—like blood vessels, like pale worms—and overhead, dangling from the ceiling in clusters like grotesque stalactites, were masses of what could only be abscesses. The stench alone was unbearable. She had been on the verge of demanding how he could possibly fail to see any of this—

Valentin, who had been maintaining a careful distance, moved to stand directly before her.

[Close your eyes.]

Adelheid studied him with an uncertain expression, then let her eyelids fall in obedience.

There was something in Valentin's voice—a quality she could not quite resist.

The warmth of his hand against her palm, the pulse she felt through his skin, settled over her like a strange, unhurried calm.

[Think about something simple. The underground prayer room in Ansgar castle, perhaps.]

"Did you ever visit the prayer room yourself, when you were at Ansgar castle?"

[I did observe you there once—offering your prayers to Morig with considerable dedication.]

She couldn't begin to guess when that had been... She had completely forgotten the room existed after he had 'returned' from death; everything else had crowded it out entirely.

There was much she wanted to ask. But as he had said—this was not the moment for satisfying curiosity.

Danger could be lurking anywhere in this place. Rejoining the main force as quickly as possible was, above all else, what mattered.

When Adelheid moved to step forward too hastily, Valentin's grip tightened around her hand. She stood caught fast against him, doing nothing but catching her breath.

[Take a deep breath first. Then slowly—think of Hazel.]

"...Hazel?"

An unexpected request. But Valentin seemed entirely serious. Adelheid breathed slowly and let herself listen.

[Do you remember the first time you rode and galloped—how quickly the scenery changed around you?]

"Of course... I remember."

[Focus on that moment. The more precisely you can picture it, the better.]

"Precisely—what do you mean?"

[Start with the wind against your cheek. I remember your long hair streaming back behind you in the sudden gust. The sound of it rushing past your ears. You were far more capable than anyone would have expected, for someone riding the first time.]

"..."

[You were startled by the horse's muscle shifting beneath your thighs. And as the speed built, your breathing grew fuller and more urgent with it.]

"..."

[The flush in your cheeks deepened with the thrill of it, and joy filled your lips. When the tall grass brushed past and released that clean, green scent into the air, you laughed.]

"..."

[And then you whispered to Hazel's ear without a trace of hesitation. A little faster. A little further.]

Somewhere along the way—without her knowing quite when it happened—every scene he described began to form with perfect vividness behind her closed eyes.

Because these were her own memories. She had lived them. And yet not every detail aligned with what she remembered.

When had she ever been that capable... Her memory of first riding Hazel was nothing but frozen panic and lurching missteps.

[Even after you lost the reins—you still bolted straight toward where you wanted to go. Do you remember that?]

Adelheid swallowed and nodded. This memory, too, differed between them.

The truth was that terror had driven her to throw her arms around Hazel's neck entirely, and the clever mare had simply understood on her own and charged for the target hill—nothing more than that. Was that why? Hearing herself through Valentin's account had a dislocating quality she couldn't shake.

She could not quite believe that she might appear—to someone else's eyes—as something so vivid. So beloved.

And yet, at the same time, she was beginning to understand.

How Valentin had been looking at her, all this time. The depth of it, the temperature of it—she could feel the shape of it now, however faintly...

[Think slowly. After we climbed that hill—where did we go? How did we walk?]

Her hand had been flailing in the air without her realizing it, searching for something to hold. Valentin took it firmly in both of his.

She leaned against him entirely and let herself move forward, one step, then another.

Was it her imagination? With each step, the foul smell that had saturated everything seemed to thin and recede.

She was seized by the powerful illusion that she was walking through the middle of a forest.

All the horrible things were gone. In their place—birdsong, the sound of a stream, the scent of towering firs rising straight as arrows into a sky she couldn't see but could somehow feel... Adelheid drew a slow, trembling breath.

[Yes. Just like that.]

His will held something that felt like a smile.

At last, Valentin lifted the hand he had placed over her eyes. Adelheid let her eyelids open slowly.

And in that same moment, she realized the world around them had changed entirely.

They were standing in an unfamiliar cave. She turned, wide-eyed, looking in every direction.

No foul smell. No sign—not even a trace—of everything that had seemed so horrifying. All of it had vanished without leaving a mark.

At the far end of the long cave, bright light poured inward along with birdsong. Fresh forest wind drifted in through the opening.

"Good Lord."

She blinked, dazed.

"How did you do that?"

[To be precise—you did it. A human's imagination is faster than almost anything, and it reaches as far as it chooses to go.]

"I did?"

Valentin gave a calm, unhurried nod.

[So I hope you won't set limits for yourself, in whatever you do from here. Don't give up on a single thing you want.]

A gentle charge. And yet something in it rang strangely in her ears.

Adelheid nodded and said she understood—but she couldn't quite make sense of why he was offering this counsel, or what he meant by it. As though, in the future he was envisioning, he would not be there...

She pressed down the unease rising through her chest and managed, barely, to smile.

"That looks like the exit. We can get out through there."

She took Valentin's hand and drew him gently forward.

She had assumed, as she always had, that he would let himself be led. But he stood rooted to the spot—immovable—as though his feet had been nailed to the earth beneath him.

[No, Adele.]

He released her hand as he spoke.

[This is as far as I can go with you.]