MHHC Chapter 156

Blooming

Her heart thudded against her ribs. Adelheid clasped her damp hands tightly together.

She had no need to ask him to repeat himself. No need to feign confusion or demand explanation.

She had known instinctively. What he was saying. What he meant, in the particular way he meant it, when he said he could not go with her.

And yet denial was a habit she could not seem to break.

Adelheid curved her lips upward in an awkward smile—as though, if she could only manage that, she might reduce all of this to nothing more than a terrible joke.

"What do you mean by... I don't quite... understand what you're saying right now."

The smile she was laboring to hold crumpled into despair.

"...I don't understand. Why are you suddenly... why are you doing this..."

"Adelheid."

Valentin spoke her name like a soothing, coaxing her back from some ledge. The sound that parted from his lips spread through the air and seeped into her ear.

Rich, and deep. The voice she loved.

All this time, she had privately felt a relief she had never acknowledged aloud—each time Valentin communicated with her through a human voice rather than through divine will alone.

Divine will had no sound. And that silence was proof, in itself, that he was something other than human.

And Valentin had promised her—had promised willingly—that he would live the life of a man rather than a god, for her sake.

That he would not leave her alone. That he would always remain beside her. That he would try to blend into the rhythms of human life...

"Do you remember? I once promised to give you every choice in the world."

Adelheid nodded quickly. Even now, cornered as she was, she found something like comfort in the fact that he was still giving her his voice.

Yes. It couldn't end here. He couldn't be this cruel to her.

How many futures had they mapped out together? How many promises had they made?

"I remember. So I don't want to hear you say things like that—not even as a joke. You have to keep your promise to me. You said you'd always be with me."

"I did."

He let the words trail off and rested his gaze for a moment on the gold of her hair, which had fallen softly over her shoulder.

Adelheid knew immediately which memory had surfaced behind those eyes.

Those past evenings when he had braided her hair with his own hands, pressing his lips to the strands and finding something like peace in them. Those quiet nights...

"But as you are now, you exceed what it means to be human, yet fall short of what it means to be transcendent. All that is needed is a little more time."

Valentin had been watching her hair with that unfocused expression. Then he smiled—abruptly, lightly—and lowered both hands.

"So go back with Donovan. Leave this to me."

"I can't do that."

Adelheid reached for him with trembling hands, but was repelled before she could touch him.

A transparent barrier had materialized between them without her noticing. The sheer indignity of it flooded through her at once.

"I never wanted this!"

She drove her clenched fist into the barrier with everything she had. It produced nothing more than a faint, rippling tremor.

Valentin stretched out his hand as though to pull her back. But he could not pass through the barrier either. His broad palm searched the empty air, unable to reach her.

"Please, Adele. The longer this goes on, the more dangerous it becomes for both of us. I'll find a way back somehow—"

She recognized it immediately: he was trying to placate her. Like a man desperate to conceal something, and doing so hastily, without care for how it looked.

If Valentin had been himself—the Valentin she knew—he would never have let slip anything that might arouse her suspicion in the first place.

Which meant this was proof that he had been driven to his limit. So completely cornered that he could no longer manage even such a small calculation.

And so she needed to know. What limit, exactly, had brought him here?

They were both physically unharmed. The exit was right in front of them. At least, to outward appearances.

Her hand moved to her chest, searching. She drew out the dagger.

She remembered what Valentin had said when he gave it to her. That if sufficient magical force was channeled through the blade, it could cut even a god. If that was true, it could shatter a god's deception as well.

"Adele."

Valentin's composure broke apart then. He looked genuinely startled, pressing his hand flat against the barrier.

Adelheid ignored him and slid the blade free from its sheath. The edge in her hand looked profoundly, almost pitifully, unstable.

"Please don't. You'll hurt yourself."

"It doesn't matter."

"Everything you experience here will affect you directly. A human body won't be able to withstand it."

"Then you could break it yourself, Your Grace."

They stared at each other for a long moment—nearly glaring. A taut standoff in which neither gave ground.

Adelheid's patience ran out. She lifted the dagger and prepared to tear through the barrier—

"...Wait."

Valentin rubbed his gaunt face with a dry hand. It looked like a man summoning resolve. Or barely holding on.

And then, slowly, he dissolved the illusion he had wrapped around himself.

"Oh..."

The sight was more harrowing than she had imagined. A low sound escaped her.

The black hands—or serpents—or things—that had crept from his shadow clung to Valentin's body, layered and dense across every surface of him. The back of his neck and his shoulders, his cheeks and brow, his forearms and thighs...

The power he had always commanded like extensions of his own will was now visibly devouring him from within.

It was a sight that inspired a visceral, bone-deep revulsion—like watching a beast gnaw off its own leg to survive, so grotesque, so fundamentally wrong. Adelheid shuddered, clenching her trembling hands into stillness.

He spoke in an expressionless face, reciting his justification in a low murmur.

"Someone intervened in the rate at which the corruption was spreading. If it had continued at that pace, the world would not have held long enough to give you the time you needed..."

Only then did she understand completely what Valentin had done.

He intended to become the breakwater himself. To weave a dense net from his own soul and bear all of it—to hold all of it back, absorb it entirely, so that the corruption could not spread further.

Everything made sense now. Why his divine power had failed to recover for so long.

Why, even when he had drawn from her freely and taken his fill, it was sometimes exhausted again within days. Why he had seemed so impossibly depleted at times.

He had been squandering his precious life on this...

"Stop it. Right now."

Adelheid brought her hand up against the palm he had pressed to the barrier from the other side.

The transparent membrane lay between their touch; she could feel none of his warmth. But their trembling passed between them whole and undiminished.

The gaze he fixed on her had never once wavered. It held perfectly, terribly still.

A sobbing breath tore free from her. She could feel acutely where his attention rested—her brow, her eyes, the line of her cheek and the bridge of her nose, the faint scatter of freckles across her shoulders...

As though he were committing every part of her to memory.

Adelheid shook with barely-contained weeping. The breath she could not reach through the barrier felt suffocating.

"I can't allow this. I never consented to this."

Even as she said it, she held no expectation that it would change anything. It was like screaming into a wall.

If a few words were enough to make him stop, he never would have carried things this far to begin with.

His body might be trapped in that distant sanctuary, but his soul had been free all this time.

Even if he lost this borrowed flesh, it would only take some small additional effort to find another vessel.

But if his soul were consumed wholly by the corruption—claimed without remainder—he would be able to exist neither as a god nor as a man. And all of this to delay the inevitable by a few years.

"I'll find a way. I'll shorten the time—I'll find some way to speed things along. I can manifest divine will now; I managed it. You said you'd give me anything I wanted, whenever I asked."

"..."

"Please. Even now, right this instant—"

Already too late. That was what his helpless smile said. What the slow shake of his head confirmed.

In that same moment, the hands that had been circling with a serpent's patient hunger struck: they plunged through Valentin's abdomen from behind.

Not blood, but a golden liquid—drip, drip—scattered downward in a sudden rush to the ground below.

She could not even make a sound. The shock had emptied her entirely of breath.

Valentin's brow contorted in agony, his breathing going ragged and raw, as the black things dragged him downward.

She lost herself completely. Her fist crashed against the barrier again and again.

[No! Stop!]

In that instant, something explosive erupted from her small frame. And simultaneously—the movement of the things gripping Valentin lurched to a halt.

Adelheid was so overwhelmed with relief that they had stopped that she did not yet realize what she had done.

She was barely half in her right mind—too far gone to understand that she had, for one single moment, commanded both divine will and authority freely.

The things shuddered once. Then, as though in defiance of their momentary recoiling, more hands burst forth and launched themselves at him.

[Stop!]

She screamed and drove her fist against the barrier once more with everything she had.

But this time, nothing changed.

Her frantic gaze fell on the dagger still in her hand.

Adelheid seized the grip and drove the blade against the barrier with all the force in her body.

Her palm screamed with pain, as though it were being torn open. Perhaps it already was. Blood dripped from her white-knuckled fist—drip, drip—striking the floor below.

The barrier shook. Trembled.

The vibration traveled through the blade and directly into her hand. Like something screaming without a voice.

Adelheid poured every scrap of magical force she possessed into the blade.

At some point, the sensation came—as though the edge had slipped through something. She dragged the dagger downward in a long, hard slash and tore the barrier open.

And in that moment—a tremendous wave of force exploded outward. Adelheid was thrown from her feet and tumbled hard across the ground.

She scrambled upright the instant she could think again, swallowing a cry of pain, and rushed desperately to Valentin's side.

[Valentin!]

The things coiled around his collapsed form moved with sudden, frenzied urgency.