Chapter 131. You Deserve to Live More Than Any of Us Ever Did
The creature unleashed another roar, a sound that wasn’t just noise but a physical assault that rattled the stones beneath their feet. It moved a sickening, wet sound of shifting chitin and grinding bone as it repositioned itself for a killing strike.
Behind them, the clearing erupted into chaos.
"Hold the line!" Kaela’s voice tore through the air, sharp and desperate. "Everyone, defensive formation!"
"Do not let it break through!" The shouts of the other students rose in a panicked chorus as they drew their weapons, their eyes fixed on the towering horror. "Instructor Wade! Vice Headmaster! Get your asses back here!"
William’s muscles coiled, his instinct screaming at him to intervene, to throw himself between Catherine and that approaching nightmare. But he looked at her, really looked at her, and saw something he hadn’t seen in years.
The hollow terror was still there, but beneath it, something else was stirring. He made the agonizing choice to trust Kaela and the others, to trust his students to buy the precious seconds Catherine needed.
He stood like a sentinel at her back, his hand on the hilt of his sword, eyes locked on the monster, ready to die to protect this moment.
Catherine, however, seemed to have slipped into a pocket of time where the world had ceased to exist. The roars, the shouts, the approaching footsteps of a monster it all faded into a distant hum.
Her entire universe had shrunk to the dimensions of that small, worn leather book. Her fingers traced the embossed leather edge once, twice, her touch almost reverent, as if she feared the book might dissolve into ash if she pressed too hard.
Then, with a breath that shook as violently as her limbs, she pried it open.
The pages were brittle, smelling of old parchment and something faintly metallic—the ghost of dried blood and gunpowder. She began to flip, her eyes devouring the fragments of a life stolen mid-sentence.
’Tuesday: Drills were hell today.’
’Catherine’s already clocked thirty laps ahead of everyone.’
’I swear, she doesn’t have lungs; she has bellows.’
’Someone tell her to relax before she burns herself out.’
’I’ll buy her something sweet after.’
’Weather’s turning cold.’
’Mira’s complaining about the damp again, but her blade work has never been sharper.’
’The twins got into another argument over who ate the last of the rations.’
’I should intervene, but honestly?’
’Watching them squabble is the only thing keeping me sane in this godforsaken camp.’
;Notes on the Northern Pass: The terrain is treacherous, but if we maintain the formation Catherine suggested, we should be fine.’
’She’s the best tactician I’ve ever seen... Even when she’s being impossible about the details, she’s right. She’s always right.’
Each line was a dagger. Each half-finished joke about her own perfectionism and each private observation about the squad’s quirks tore through her defenses.
She saw Mira’s dry wit captured in ink; she saw the twins’ childish bickering immortalized with Aldric’s fond exasperation.
These weren’t just notes; they were the heartbeats of her friends, preserved in amber. Her chest ached with a physical pressure so intense she thought her ribs might crack.
Then, she reached the end. The final pages.
The ink here was different darker, rushed, the handwriting jagged as if written by candlelight in a shaking hand. The date was the morning of the expedition.
’If we die down there, the entry read, the letters bleeding slightly into the paper, don’t you dare stop fighting because of it.’
’You were always the one meant to carry this further than the rest of us ever could.’
’Don’t waste that on guilt...’
’You deserve to live more than any of us ever did.’
’Live for us, Catherine... Please.’
Catherine read it once. Her vision blurred as tears finally spilled over.
She read it a second time, her thumb catching on the word ’live’’live.’ Her breathing began to change.
The frantic, panicked gasping slowed, not because the fear had vanished, but because something far more powerful had risen to meet it. A cold, terrifying clarity settled into her bones, hollowed out the centuries of guilt she had carried, and replaced it with something sharp and undeniable.
She read it a third time, tracing each letter as though she could feel the heat of Aldric’s hand still moving across the page. She remembered the screaming.
She remembered the darkness. But she also remembered Aldric’s smile.
Something inside her finally, irrevocably broke, not with the wet sound of despair, but with the clean, resonant snap of a chain breaking. The grief was still there, but it was no longer a weight dragging her down; it was a fuel.
She had never betrayed them by surviving. For eight years, she had been betraying the very thing they had died to protect: her own life.
She had been wearing her survival like a shroud, refusing to breathe, refusing to fight, refusing to be the woman they believed she was.
The monster roared again, closer now, its shadow stretching over her like a death sentence. But Catherine didn’t flinch.
She closed the journal with a decisive thud, her grip tightening until her knuckles turned white. Her eyes, previously clouded with trauma, cleared into something terrifyingly bright.
The White Sword was back.
The tremor in Catherine’s hands didn’t vanish; it transformed. The erratic, nauseating shaking of a victim was replaced by something far more dangerous: the controlled vibration of a predator coiled to spring.
Something solid had fused to her bones, a foundation forged in the ink of a dead friend’s promises that no amount of horror could dislodge. She closed Aldric’s journal with a deliberate click, tucking it into her belt where it rested warm against her hip, a heartbeat made of leather and parchment.
Then, she reached down for her blades.
When she lifted them this time, there was no scraping sound of steel against stone. There was only the clean, deadly whisper of metal finding its purpose.
Her grip was absolute.
Albert watched her, his keen eyes tracking the subtle shift in her shoulders, the way her center of gravity dropped, the way her breathing became a weapon rather than a liability. He allowed himself one single, sharp exhale of relief before turning away.
"Reinforcements to the eastern perimeter!" he barked, his voice cutting through the screams of the students. "Form a crescent moon formation!"
"Do not engage the core contain the spillover!"
"Protect the students at all costs!" He knew when to step back; he knew that the woman standing in that clearing was no longer a girl needing rescue but a force of nature reclaiming its name.
"Catherine," William said, his voice low, rough with a fierce, protective wonder. "You don’t have to carry this alone... Not tonight."
She turned her head slightly. The woman who had been cowering minutes ago was gone. In her place was someone whose eyes held the cold light of a winter moon.
"I know I don’t." Her voice was quiet, but it carried over the distant sounds of clashing steel and inhuman shrieks. "But I want to."
"Not because I have some debt to pay or some honor to reclaim, but because... for eight years, I was fighting to survive." Catherine smiled. "Tonight... tonight, I’m fighting to live!"
"Then I’ll be right beside you," William promised, stepping up to her flank, his own blade he borrowed from the patrol singing as it left its sheath. "Same as always."
"Thank you, William..." Catherine kissed his cheek.
A ghost of a smile, sharp, fierce, and devastatingly beautiful, touched her lips. "Eight years, William..."
"Eight years I let myself believe that surviving that day meant I owed the world some kind of quiet, pathetic penance."
"That I had to apologize for every breath I took because Aldric couldn’t take his." Her grip tightened on the hilts until her knuckles creaked. "But he didn’t die so I could become a ghost."
"He died so I could be whole... So I could fight without flinching."
"Then fight," William commanded, his eyes blazing. "Live completely... Starting right now as your first step as becoming your usual self!"
Catherine turned her gaze toward the center of the clearing. The creature the thing that had once been Corwin was no longer merely growling. It was convulsing.
Its corrupted flesh rippled like boiling tar, chitinous plates grinding against one another with the sound of breaking tombstones. It let out a roar that wasn’t just sound; it was a shockwave that tore chunks of earth from the ground and sent a spray of black, foul-smelling ichor across the clearing.
She felt none of the paralyzing terror. The grief hadn’t left her it had simply been transmuted.
It was no longer a weight; it was a blade.
She rolled her shoulders, the joints popping in the sudden silence of her own mind, and dropped into Wind’s dual-wield stance. Her feet found purchase in the blood-soaked dirt, planting themselves with the certainty of roots in stone.
The creature shifted, its massive, twisted limbs tensing for a charge that would shatter anything in its path. Behind her, the sounds of battle intensified the wet crunch of bone as reinforcements met the creature’s smaller spawn, the desperate shouts of students, and the authoritative commands of Albert.
But Catherine heard none of it.
She didn’t wait for the monster to make its move. She didn’t wait for the inevitable collision.
She became the collision.
With an explosive burst of Aetherion’s power, she launched herself forward. Her footwork was a blur of lethal precision, Wind’s blades carving silver arcs through the blood-misted air.
She moved faster than any human should, a streak of white fury aimed directly at the heart of the nightmare. The last thing William saw before the world dissolved into a maelstrom of steel, gore, and screaming darkness was her face: stripped of doubt, shorn of fear, and utterly, terrifyingly alive.
"HRAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!"