Chapter 124. A Nightmare Stitched Together From Memories of Safety
The air between William and the dying man had become a pressurized chamber of hatred and inevitability. William stood poised like an executioner, Aetherion raised high, the steel gleaming with a hungry, silver light that promised to sever the last thread of the stranger’s existence.
The muscles in William’s forearm were coiled tight as steel cables, his entire being focused on the singular point where the blade would meet flesh and bone.
Then, it broke through.
Not a scream, not a clash of steel, but something far more fragile: a soft, wet sound from behind him.
It was barely audible over the distant, rhythmic thwip thwip of his students’ blades as they methodically carved through the remaining stragglers of the monster swarm, but to William’s hyper attuned senses, it sounded like thunder.
Catherine was stirring.
"Instructor Wade!" A young patrol officer’s voice cracked through the clearing, desperate and strained with relief. "She’s waking up! The vice headmaster... she’s coming around!"
The timing was agonizing. William’s instincts screamed at him; the primal part of his brain that had survived two lifetimes of slaughter demanded he finish the job.
’Kill him now...’
’End the threat before she opens her eyes...’
’Before he speaks another word of that twisted prophecy...’ His grip on Aetherion tightened until his knuckles turned bone white.
The masked man beneath him saw the hesitation; he saw the flicker of conflict in William’s eyes and his bloody grin widened.
"What’s the matter... Instructor?" the man wheezed, blood frothing at the corners of his mouth. "The great... unpredictable... warrior... hesitates?"
William’s inner voice was a storm of conflicting commands. ’Finish it...!’
’Don’t let him have another last word!’
’Don’t let him die with that smug satisfaction.’ But another voice, one he had buried beneath layers of cynicism and scar tissue, pulled at his sternum.
A voice that remembered what it meant to protect something precious.
In the space of a single heartbeat, William made his choice.
"Catherine!" His voice erupted across the clearing, raw and commanding.
It wasn’t the voice of a killer; it was the voice of a lifeline, the same guttural, anchoring tone he had used to drag soldiers back from the brink of death on battlefields both ancient and modern. "Catherine, listen to my voice!"
"Come back to me...! I need you here! Stay with me!"
Behind him, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone surfacing from a deep, dark ocean. A sharp, disoriented intake of breath.
A small gasp that sounded painfully human against the backdrop of carnage.
The relief that flooded William’s chest was more painful than any wound he had taken during the fight. His shoulders dropped fractionally, the lethal tension bleeding out of his stance.
He looked down at the masked man. The stranger was struggling weakly to push himself up, his movements jerky and pathetic.
The ruined fragments of the porcelain mask hung from his face like peeling scales, revealing the raw, bleeding damage beneath. The man’s eyes searched William’s, disappointed, almost mocking in their emptiness.
"You chose... the girl..." the man whispered, his voice fading. "How... predictably... human."
William didn’t answer. He didn’t give the man the satisfaction of a retort.
With a deliberate, controlled motion that felt like tearing off a piece of his own soul, he lowered Aetherion. The tip of the sword scraped against the blood-soaked stone with a harsh, grinding sound.
"William...?"
The voice was thin, fragile as spun glass, and laced with profound confusion. It carried across the clearing from where Catherine was slowly forcing herself upright, her movements unsteady as the patrol officer’s hands braced her shoulders.
William turned, the tip of Aetherion still dripping fresh, arterial blood onto the cracked earth. His eyes locked onto hers, scanning her face with the desperate, clinical intensity of a man checking for fatal wounds.
He saw the glassy haze of concussion fading, replaced by the raw, painful clarity of someone returning to themselves. She was pale, her breathing ragged, but she was there.
The relief that washed over him was violent, a physical wave that threatened to buckle his knees.
"I can beat him," William called out, his voice carrying across the clearing with the authority of a commander, though his heart was hammering against his ribs like a caged animal.
He jerked his chin toward the masked man, who was still a pathetic heap of broken porcelain and bleeding flesh behind him. "But if I finish this, Catherine, you don’t get your closure..."
"You lose yourself all over again... Not to him, but to the guilt of watching someone else take what belongs to you."
He moved then, crossing the distance in strides that were too fast, too urgent. He didn’t care about the tactical positioning or the lingering threat of the enemy behind him.
His entire world had narrowed down to the girl swaying unsteadily in the patrol officer’s grip.
Before he could stop himself, before his training could reassert its cold control, William reached her. He didn’t just check her pulse; he pulled her into a fierce, crushing embrace.
His armored chest pressed against her, his arms wrapping around her with a strength that spoke of terror and profound, unguarded gratitude. For a moment, the battlefield vanished; the blood, the screams, and the dying man were there, only the heartbeat beneath her ribs confirming she was alive.
Catherine gasped, her face flushing crimson despite her pallor.
"W-W-W-W-W-William...!" she hissed into his shoulder, her voice muffled but indignant. "What... W-W-What... what are you doing?!"
"C-Control yourself...! People are w-w-watching!"
The words acted like ice water thrown on a forge. William stiffened, the reality of his actions crashing down on him.
He pulled back instantly, clearing his throat and straightening his posture with obvious discomfort, though his eyes remained uncharacteristically soft.
"Right... Sorry," he muttered, though he didn’t retreat.
Instead, he reached out and pressed the hilt of Aetherion into her shaking hands. The weight of the blade was substantial, a cold reminder of the reality they inhabited.
"Where was I...? Oh right..." William cleared his throat. "You need to finish this yourself..."
"You’ve already survived the worst of tonight, but this... is just the final ritual."
Catherine’s fingers curled around the leather grip. Something shifted behind her eyes.
"I don’t think I can do it, but... I’ll try..." Catherine smiled at William. "I am ready to come back... to the old me... the White Knight of Astoria... Catherine."
"Good..." William nodded.
The exhaustion didn’t vanish, but it crystallized into something harder: a grim, focused resolve. She didn’t look at William; she looked past him. Her gaze fixed on the figure struggling to rise from the dirt.
The masked man, sensing the shift in the air, let out a wet, rattling chuckle. With a slow, deliberate motion that seemed almost theatrical, he reached up and clawed away the remaining fragments of the shattered porcelain.
The shards fell to the ground with hollow clicks, revealing the full visage beneath.
Catherine froze mid-stride. Her boots seemed to root to the blood-soaked earth.
’W-What...?’
The face beneath was a map of violence deeply lined, weathered by decades of sun and wind, and crisscrossed with scars that spoke of battles she had only read about in history books. But it wasn’t the scars that stopped her heart.
It was the eyes. Pale, sharp, and carrying an ancient, penetrating intelligence that pierced through her soul.
Those eyes. Those were the eyes that had watched her learn to walk.
The eyes that had smiled at her over a makeshift wooden sword in a sun-drenched backyard fifteen years ago. The eyes of the man who had told a lonely child that her instincts were not a curse but a gift, a gift that would one day change the world.
"There’s... no way..."
"C-Corwin...?" Catherine whispered.
The name didn’t just leave her lips; it shattered. Her voice broke on the syllable, and Aetherion, the weapon she had just held with such newfound steel, began to tremble violently in her grip.
"No... it can’t be... Why...?!" Catherine gripped the sword hard. "Why are you here... Corwin!?"
The silence that followed Catherine’s whisper was more deafening than any explosion she had witnessed during the siege. It was a vacuum that sucked the air from her lungs and left her standing in a world that had suddenly lost its gravity.
Corwin. The name reverberated through her mind like a funeral knell.
She stared at him, her vision blurring at the edges. The man before her was a nightmare stitched together from memories of sunlight and safety.
The way he held himself even broken, even bleeding from wounds that would have killed three ordinary men carried that same infuriatingly calm posture. That same unshakable stillness she had spent years trying to emulate.
But that stillness was now twisted by something dark, something predatory that she didn’t recognize.
’N-No... This is some cruel trick of the mind again,’ she screamed internally. ’This is exhaustion...’
’This is blood loss...’
’The brain plays tricks when it’s dying, and mine is dying right now... It has to be.’