MHHC Chapter 158

The Last Truth

"Thank God. You've come back to us!"

Donovan let out a deep, shuddering breath and crossed himself. The faithful knight's face had gone pale enough that he looked liable to faint on her behalf.

"Do you have any idea how frightened I was? You were moving perfectly fine one moment, and then you simply— you collapsed—"

Adelheid blinked slowly and took in her surroundings. They were beneath an enormous stone pillar—the precise point where they had reached the fork in the passage, where the fog had begun pouring in to fill every direction.

"Are you in pain? Can you walk?"

She rose with Donovan's assistance. As the seconds accumulated, the situation sharpened in her mind, settling into hard clarity.

'It was a dream, after all.'

She had sensed it vaguely from somewhere in the middle—the way certain truths announce themselves before we're ready to receive them.

If it had not been a dream, Valentin could never have appeared so suddenly, not with such ease. And beyond that...

She moved to wipe her face and found her palm soaked through with blood.

Donovan followed her gaze to the ragged wound and added carefully, "It appears you cut yourself on something when you fell. The bone doesn't seem damaged, at least..."

"..."

No. This was not a wound from the fall.

At the very least, Valentin had been right about one thing.

That what happened within that dream reached across into the waking world. Which meant his soul, by now...

Adelheid clenched the torn palm shut. The pain drove into her, sharp and clarifying, and her thoughts came clean. She raised her head.

"Let's go."

"...No. I really cannot allow it. We cannot press on with you injured. We should find shelter for tonight."

"That isn't necessary."

"Absolutely out of the—"

"I meant there is no longer any need to search." She said it evenly. "The Grand Duke has already passed."

"P— passed? What— what do you mean by—"

Adelheid walked past him toward the cave entrance.

She could feel his bewilderment pressing at her back, but she had no time to explain it. There was someone she needed to see, and she needed to see them now.

When she emerged into open air, she called, and the horses answered.

Ignoring Donovan's stricken expression, she seized Hazel's reins, mounted, and rode hard back the way they had come.

The road bore only the scattered wreckage of battle. No monsters. No army. Nothing alive but the wind moving through the ruined landscape.

She reached the main camp's gate before long.

When the sentries demanded identification, she tore the Nassau ring from her neck and threw it at them without slowing. They stood staring at the ancient relic in their hands, bewildered, and waved her through.

She cut through the camp with a dazed Donovan and a trail of confused soldiers stumbling in her wake, and she did not hesitate, did not pause to check her bearings, did not slow—she moved through the military encampment as though she had walked it in another life.

Donovan, following at her heels with an increasingly skeptical expression, stopped short when she halted before a tent bearing the Grand Cathedral's standard.

"How did you— Your Grace, when did you even note where this was—"

The priest standing guard at the entrance bowed with quiet deference. "Welcome. He awaits you inside."

He. The priest's eyes were glassy—distant in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. She recognized the quality of that absence now with complete comprehension.

Adelheid exhaled, slow and deliberate, released the tent flap, and entered.

Inside, the darkness was complete and cold. Not a thread of warmth, not a splinter of light.

For ordinary human eyes, it would have been impenetrable. For her, every detail resolved itself with perfect clarity.

And someone who appeared to have anticipated her arrival well in advance—with sufficient leisure to prepare a steaming teapot and two cups—looked up as she entered and offered her a benevolent smile.

She let the canvas fall from her fingers.

"Come in, my dear."

Father Padre. It was him.

"Woman born as a doll," he said, "who will be written into history as a god."

"Yes."

Padre set his teacup back on its saucer. Adelheid, who had been staring at the table with a blank face, looked up at the sound. Their eyes met. He smiled.

"I remember telling you that the day would come when you would need me," he said. "And you told me that day would never arrive."

"..."

Adelheid let out a breath threaded with cold laughter.

"Your manner of speaking has changed."

"Because there is no longer any need to pretend."

"Then who are you?"

He smiled at her.

"The first Morig."

"That would mean..."

"Yes. I am the god who created both the dragon and the serpent. To be precise, I was a god. Now I have only enough remaining power to borrow another's consciousness for a little while."

The wordplay had been stripped away—the riddles about echoes and the being she most desperately desired—and what lay beneath them was a truth too large to hold without shaking. Adelheid laughed, the sound hollow in the cold tent.

"...Earlier, you called yourself the being I most desperately desired."

"At that moment, what you desperately wanted was for 'me' not to be Valentin."

"Have you also been deceiving me? From the very beginning—knowing everything, pretending to know nothing?"

The old man shook his head.

"Padre is a devout man. Once I have gone, he will not even remember this conversation."

"I came here because I wanted the truth."

He drank a few more sips in silence. Then he set the long-cooled cup back on its saucer and began to speak.

"Yes. There is not much time. Where should I begin..."

He rubbed his forehead, choosing his words slowly.

"I knew that I was not perfect. Jealousy. Envy. Hatred. The desire to unmake. Terrible, sinful emotions—they writhed inside me..." He paused. "Have you been told this much?"

"That you decided to create a successor. Yes. I've heard that."

"The reason I chose to relinquish divinity was very simple—but sometimes a single reason becomes the whole of everything. What I wanted was someone who would come after me and possess a completeness that would not repeat my failures."

"..."

"And for a time, I believed I had succeeded."

A long silence.

"What I had failed to account for was that all living things possess desire. And desire begets change. Whether toward goodness or away from it."

"That means..."

"The corruption was foreseen. From the moment I understood this, I knew there would need to be something that could turn him back."

"..."

"If there were only something that would remind him of compassion toward the world..." He let that sentence dissolve. "And so I gathered the last remnants of my power and fashioned a single doll."

He raised a withered finger and pointed it at her—not gently, but with a deliberate, prodding precision.

"Yes. You. A tool made to serve only humans, blindly and without exception."

"The way you say it... it sounds as though I was... created for some particular purpose..."

He smiled. It was the most coldly cynical smile she had ever seen wearing a kind face.

"Can something fashioned for a single purpose be called human? You are nothing more than a doll shaped to be my son's beloved."

The trembling in her hands was something she could not suppress. She clenched them closed. She did not want to believe it. She could not, by any part of herself, believe it.

But she was now, whether she wished it or not, something that had crossed into the divine.

Which meant she now possessed the capacity to read the presence of deception or falsehood in another's words.

And he was telling the truth. At the very least, he believed it absolutely himself.

"..."

The values she had held as righteous until this moment. The way she had understood the world. Her entire past—clinging, over and over again, to human connection even after every betrayal, even after every wound inflicted upon her.

She had always believed it was simply her nature. Something she had been born with. And yet—it had been engineered from the very beginning. Designed toward a purpose.

"It was like this from the very first moment you were made. And so no matter how diligently you tried to imitate ordinary humanity, it was always slightly wrong. You could manage a reasonable performance—blend in, pass for whole—but those with sensitivity would feel the difference more acutely."

"..."

"And those who noticed would find themselves experiencing, as a general rule, one of two things when they looked at you. Revulsion. And guilt."

"..."

"My sons were no different. One learned of your existence and devoted himself to revulsion. And the other was seized by such enormous guilt that he placed only you—only you—at the center of his entire world."

It was clear enough who his sons were meant to be.

One was Valentin. The other was the current bearer of the name Morig. Even in the middle of these staggering revelations, still tumbling down on her one after another, Adelheid found herself caught on a single incongruity—that he would refer to Morig as his son as well.

"Morig is also your child?"

He blinked at her, his eyes going round, as if he had not expected that to be the question she chose.

Then he threw back his head and laughed—a deep, full laugh that showed the back of his throat.

"It is a little strange hearing that name spoken in quite that way. If things had gone according to my original intentions, my name should have passed to the eldest."

"..."

"But to give you an answer—yes. I feel that serpent is my child too."

"..."

"I should have withheld my affection from the beginning. I did not understand that my halfhearted consideration would bequeath him a greater despair than indifference ever could have."

"...Even gods have things they don't know."

Adelheid's voice was cold. He smiled in response—a gentle, unhurried thing.

"I can sense only the broad currents of how things move. If a god could read all of the future in its particulars, I would not have crafted an attached doll merely to prevent a corruption I might have simply... prevented."

"..."

"And I could have foreseen that the doll—rather than checking the corruption—would become the very catalyst that brought it to its fullest flowering."