Chapter 137. It Was Never About Information, It Was About You
The giddy, adrenaline-fueled laughter that had filled the clearing moments before felt hollow now, a fragile glass bubble that shattered as soon as Kaela’s gaze drifted toward the center of the carnage.
The students disentangled themselves from William with a sudden, instinctive silence, their faces draining of color as they followed her stare.
There, in the center of the cratered earth, Catherine was kneeling.
She looked small against the backdrop of destruction, her silver armor splattered with black ichor and Corwin’s blood. She was cradling his head against her lap with a tenderness that felt violently wrong given what he had become.
Corwin’s body was already beginning to fail; the corruption was reversing itself, but not in a way that offered salvation. At the edges of his limbs, the flesh was simply... unraveling.
His fingers and toes were crumbling into fine, drifting ash that caught the moonlight like ghostly snow as it scattered into the night air.
William rose immediately, his movements mechanical and urgent. His ribs burned with every breath, but he pushed through the pain, crossing the clearing with quick strides.
His students trailed cautiously behind him, their earlier triumph replaced by a heavy, suffocating dread. They knew this wasn’t a victory anymore.
This was an execution. This was a funeral.
Catherine didn’t look up when they approached. Her eyes were locked on Corwin’s, which were still recognizably human despite the hollow darkness swimming in them.
Her hands trembled where they pressed against his cheek, smearing blood and ash.
"Why?" The word came out as a broken whisper before hardening into something sharper. "Why, Corwin?"
Her voice wavered between a sob and a snarl, vibrating with a volatile cocktail of grief and murderous fury. "Why did you choose this? Why did you become this fucking monster...?"
Corwin let out a wet, rattling cough that sprayed crimson across Catherine’s pale jaw. She didn’t flinch.
Instead, she gripped him tighter, her knuckles white.
"You taught me everything," she screamed at him now, the anger finally breaking through the grief. "You taught me how to hold a blade, how to channel the wind, and how to be someone worth remembering!"
"And then you used that knowledge to become... to become this...? To hunt us...?"
"To try and tear my fucking heart out?" Tears carved clean tracks through the soot on her face. "Was I just another lesson? Was all of it just practice for this nightmare?"
"Catherine..." Corwin’s voice was a ghost of itself.
"Don’t you dare," she hissed, her eyes blazing with a terrifying intensity. "Don’t you dare try to comfort me now!"
"You don’t get to play the martyr... You don’t get to die and leave me with this fucking hole in my chest!"
"Tell me the truth, Corwin! No more riddles, no more corruption, no more goddamn lies!"
"Why did you do it!? Why did you throw everything away?!"
She leaned closer, her forehead nearly touching his, her breath coming in ragged, hysterical gasps. "Tell me why, before you turn to dust!"
"Give me something real to hold onto, because right now, all I have is the memory of a man who never existed!"
The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the distant crackle of fading magical fires and the soft hiss of ash drifting onto the ground. Corwin’s breathing was shallow, each inhale a monumental struggle that seemed to tear at his very lungs.
The cold, mocking edge that had defined him throughout the battle was gone, stripped away along with his flesh. What remained was something raw, exhausted, and impossibly fragile.
When his lips finally moved, the sound that emerged was quiet almost gentle and carried a weight of sorrow that seemed to dim the moonlight itself.
"There is a seal," Corwin rasped, each syllable a wet, grinding struggle against the collapse of his lungs.
Blood flecked his lips with every word, black as ink where the corruption lingered. "Older than this kingdom... Older than most records the crown even keeps anymore..."
"It holds something the Hollow Circle has spent generations working to release a source the old texts simply call boundless..."
"Power beyond anything currently accessible in this world."
Catherine’s grip tightened, her fingers digging into his shoulders as if she could physically hold his fading essence together.
"What does that have to do with me?!" she demanded, her voice cracking like breaking glass. "Why were you hunting me?! Why was it always me?!"
"A seal of that age and magnitude cannot be broken through brute force alone, White Sword," Corwin said, his gaze unflinching even as his left hand dissolved into a cloud of silver black ash. "It requires what the old texts call a living anchor..."
"Someone present and surviving at the exact moment the seal first cracks..."
"Their presence at that instant leaves a resonance, a frequency bound permanently to the seal itself... A seed planted in flesh..."
"One that ripens over years, growing stronger the more it is triggered, tested, and tormented."
Catherine’s breath hitched audibly. The blood drained from her face until she was as pale as the moonlight.
The horrifying implications began to coil around her heart like ice. "Triggered." The word was a strangled sob.
"You mean the fear... The trauma... Every time I froze in battle, every time this darkness resurfaced, and... every time I thought I was losing my mind, you mean that was..."
"Cultivated, yes... Deliberately... Over years of careful, patient pressure. " Corwin’s eyes, still unnaturally sharp despite the hollow decay of his face, locked onto hers. "I searched for over a decade for a child with the raw potential to survive exactly the kind of catastrophic event required to plant that resonance..."
"I needed someone with the strength of character to endure years of carefully engineered trauma afterward without breaking entirely..."
"Someone who would suffer but never shatter." His voice dropped to a whisper that felt louder than a scream. "You were, in every possible measure, exactly what I was searching for."
Behind them, William felt a coldness settle in his marrow that no flame could touch. He had fought monster creatures of claw and fang, but this was something worse.
This was a cruelty so patient, so calculated, that it transcended simple malice. It was a lifetime of agony, designed like an architect designs a cathedral.
Corwin hadn’t just been a villain; he had been a gardener, tending to Catherine’s suffering as if it were a prized crop.
"The Vanguard," Catherine whispered, the realization hitting her like a physical blow to the gut. "Aldric... Mira... The twins... Their deaths... Their slaughter... It wasn’t just to open a physical path to the seal!"
"Their deaths weakened the seal from within, at the exact ritual point required," Corwin confirmed, his chest convulsing as he fought for air. "While you, surviving at that same point of slaughter, absorbed the resonance their sacrifice released..."
"It was never merely about information reaching the surface, White Sword... It was about you reaching the surface."
He coughed violently, a spray of gore painting Catherine’s hands. "You were carrying something inside yourself that would not fully mature for years..."
"Something that needed pressure and fear to properly cultivate it into something usable."
"So the attacks these past weeks," Catherine said, her voice hollow, almost dead. "The disturbances, the reaver, the way everything seemed to close in on us... all of it."
"Testing... Refining... Ripening..." Corwin’s breathing became a series of wet clicks. "Waiting patiently for what your survival had already planted to finally reach a usable state."
His eyes flickered with a final, dying spark of satisfaction. "I confess... I did not expect it to mature quite this quickly..."
"Your reincarnator... it accelerated the process considerably..."
"Whether either of you intended that or not."