Chapter 118. The Absolute Basement of Her Despair
William’s peripheral vision was a red-stained blur of violence, but his focus was sharpening into something lethal. With Catherine safely extracted from the immediate slaughter zone, and his students... those stubborn, brilliant girls holding their ground with a competence that ignited a fierce, aching pride in his chest, he finally turned.
The restraint he had maintained since the masked man first emerged from the shadows didn’t just slip; it shattered like glass under a sledgehammer. The measured calm of an instructor died, replaced by something colder, more primal, and infinitely more dangerous.
"Stay alive, girls!" William’s voice roared over the wet tearing of flesh, a command that carried the weight of his entire soul. "Hold that line or I will drag you back from hell myself!"
But his eyes were locked on the center of the storm. The masked man, which was the architect of this crimson nightmare.
"I had no other choice but to deal with you myself!" William said while pointing at the masked man with his sword.
The masked man laughed. "Show me then!"
...
Deep beneath the surface of her unconsciousness, Catherine felt herself plummeting.
It wasn’t a physical fall she knew, in some detached, analytical corner of her mind, that her body lay motionless on the gore soaked earth but her consciousness was sinking through layers of something far more treacherous than sleep.
Her memories were dragging her down, pulling her past the familiar edges of last night’s meditation and plunging her into the lightless trenches of the past she had spent years trying to bury.
The darkness gave way to the first memory. She surfaced at the edge of the collapsed dungeon, three hours after her desperate escape.
The air there had been stale, tasting of pulverized stone and old blood. She remembered standing before the royal investigators, her voice sounding hollow and mechanical as she delivered coordinates and casualty reports.
’One survivor confirmed... Sector seven compromised... Estimated casualties: Eighty percent.’ The words had felt like stones dropping into a well.
A distant part of her mind had screamed that this was a hallucination, that she would wake up any moment to the sound of Aldric complaining about the bitter taste of mission rations.
But she hadn’t woken up. The dream logic accelerated, time compressing with sickening speed until she was standing on the precipice of a nightmare she had refused to articulate for eight years.
She was at the funeral.
Four coffins stood lined up in the morning mist, each one agonizingly empty. Nobody’s had been recovered from the collapsed tomb, just twisted metal and broken promises.
Catherine remembered the specific, visceral horror of staring at those empty boxes, realizing they were meant to contain people who had once been so vividly, undeniably alive. She saw Aldric’s parents in the crowd.
His mother’s face wasn’t just sad; it was hollowed out, a grotesque mask of grief that seemed to have eaten away her very humanity. His father stood beside her like a statue carved from grief itself, his eyes fixed on some distant point, refusing to meet Catherine’s gaze as if her very existence were an accusation.
Then she saw her. A young woman from the supply corps, standing on the periphery.
She was clutching a small, worn ring in one trembling hand, her knuckles white. Catherine’s heart twisted with a fresh, searing pain as she remembered: this was the woman Aldric had whispered about weeks before the expedition.
He had been planning to ask her to marry him once they made it home. But now... she was just a ghost holding a ring for a dead man.
The crowd swelled in her mind. She saw the twins’ extended family and an entire village of mourners who had traveled miles to honor two young archers who had died together, inseparable to the very end.
She saw Mira’s distant, reserved relatives, their quiet, watchful presence echoing the loneliness Mira had always carried.
Every single one of them looked at Catherine.
In this dreamscape, their eyes weren’t just sad; they were accusing. She saw gratitude in their stares—gratitude that she had carried the information out, that she had sealed the rift and saved thousands.
But beneath that gratitude lurked something far more corrosive. It was a heavy, unspoken pressure that had settled into Catherine’s chest eight years ago and never truly left.
It was the silent question that every grieving face in that crowd seemed to be screaming without making a sound.
’Why did you live when they didn’t?’
Catherine, suspended in that purgatory of memory, found herself standing once more before those four empty coffins. The morning mist felt like ice against her skin, and the accusing stares of the mourners pressed against her like physical weights.
For eight years, she had been a fortress impenetrable, silent, and utterly alone. But here, in the raw, unfiltered depths of her own subconscious, the fortress finally crumbled.
She didn’t just cry. She broke.
It began as a shudder in her chest before erupting into a raw, guttural wail that tore through the sacred silence of the funeral. This wasn’t the controlled, dignified weeping of a noblewoman; this was the sound of a soul being flayed alive.
She collapsed to her knees in the mud, her hands clawing at the earth as if she could dig her way out of her own skin. Her whole body convulsed with the force of a decade’s worth of suppressed agony.
"I’m sorry!" she shrieked, the words breaking apart into jagged fragments. "I’m a mess...! And I’m such a fucking disgrace...!"
The profanity felt foreign and desperate, a crack in her composure that refused to seal. "I should have found a way!"
"I should have fought harder, bled more, died more, or done anything to save you!"
"I should have refused the order!"
"I should have been in those coffins with you instead of carrying this rotting corpse of a life for eight years!"
The confession poured out of her like blood from an arterial wound unstoppable, messy, and devastating. "Every single day I wake up wondering why the hell I’m still breathing when you’re not!"
"Every day I feel your absence like a blade twisted in my gut!" Catherine punched the ground. "I don’t deserve this... I don’t deserve to be alive!"
As the last of her strength drained away, the funeral scene began to unravel. The grieving families bled into grey streaks, the coffins dissolved into smoke, and the overcast sky bled into a void.
The world didn’t just fade; it ceased to exist.
Total, absolute darkness swallowed her. Catherine remained kneeling in the nothingness, spent, hollowed out, having finally reached the absolute basement of her despair.
She was alone in the abyss she had spent eight years circling but never truly daring to enter.
Then, something shifted.
It wasn’t a sound, but a pressure, a presence gathering in the blackness. It wasn’t cold or threatening; it felt strangely warm, like sunlight filtering through water.
Slowly, impossibly, four familiar silhouettes began to coalesce from the void.
Aldric appeared first. He stood there exactly as she remembered him: broad-shouldered, solid as an oak, with that infuriatingly easy grin that used to make her blood boil and her heart sing all at once.
His left hand rested casually against the hilt of his sword, a weapon that bore no fresh wounds, no blood, no memory of its end. Beside him, the twins, Rowan and Wren, materialized like twin flames, standing shoulder to shoulder with that inseparable bond that even death couldn’t sever.
And then there was Mira, quiet and watchful as a sentinel, her presence settling into the darkness with the same understated gravity she had carried in life.
Catherine stared up at them, her vision blurred by tears and disbelief. Her mind screamed that this was a hallucination, a cruel trick played by her fracturing psyche.
"No... You’re all... not real," she whispered, her voice cracking. "I’m losing my mind..."
"This is just... the darkness from the trauma that starts playing with me again..."
"Does it really matter?" Aldric asked.
He crouched down to her level, his movements fluid and unbothered. The warmth in his eyes was devastating.
"Real or remembered, Catherine... we’re here now."
"And you need to hear this properly, because you’ve spent eight years refusing to listen to anything but your own guilt."
"I can’t listen if I let you die," she choked out, the words tasting like ash. "I ran while you stayed."
"You did exactly what we told you to do." Aldric’s voice held no anger, no reproach, only a terrifyingly patient certainty. "Listen to me, Catherine..."
"Look at me. I didn’t send you running because I thought you were weak or because I made some pathetic calculation that your life was worth more than ours."
"I sent you because I believed with everything I was that you were the one who could carry our legacy forward."
"I sent you because you deserved to become something more than what that dungeon tried to break... That wasn’t pity, but that... was faith." His grin softened into something more serious. "The same faith I had in you from the first day you shook my hand with the wrong one and didn’t even flinch."
"I didn’t earn that faith," she sobbed, pressing her forehead against her knees. "I ran like a coward..."