Novel Full Chapter 1240: The Chosen One [part 2]
Chapter 1240: The Chosen One [part 2]
Sael looked around wildly, saw everyone kneeling, and—despite his confusion—dropped to one knee as well.
Some habits ran deep.
Only Eisha remained standing, though her hand was still pressed over her mouth and tears continued their silent descent down her cheeks.
“Reincarnation of the Constellation,” Anike said, her voice thick with something between awe and reverence. “El Fach, returned. The Awakener made flesh. We are honored beyond—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Northern interrupted, his voice flat as stone. “I’m not a reincarnation of anything. I’m not El Fach. I’m not divine. I’m not whatever mystical explanation you’re currently constructing in your head to make sense of what just happened.”
“You destroyed a constellation-blessed phenomenon,” Judgment said. She was still kneeling, but her tone had shifted from reverent to almost challenging—like she was daring him to deny what she’d witnessed with her own eyes. “You walked into divine punishment and walked back out. You unmade eight hundred years of accumulated spiritual architecture. That’s not—humans can’t—”
“Humans can’t,” Northern agreed. “I’m not human…”
He paused.
’Damn. I’m getting way too comfortable saying that.’
“I’m not human, but I’m also not whatever it is you’re all thinking I am.”
He stood up. The movement made several people flinch.
’Great. Now they think I’m going to smite them or something.’
“Look, I understand this is shocking. I understand it breaks your worldview. I understand you’ve spent centuries believing the Crimson Veil was permanent, immutable, beyond mortal interference.” He gestured vaguely at the now-clear night outside, where stars actually shone instead of bleeding crimson. “But here’s the thing about permanence—it’s usually just a failure of imagination combined with insufficient force.”
“Insufficient force,” Anike repeated numbly. Her eyes hadn’t blinked in at least thirty seconds. “He calls destroying a constellation’s divine judgment ’sufficient force.’”
“I didn’t destroy it through force,” Northern corrected, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I destroyed it through understanding. The force was just… applied understanding. There’s a difference.”
“There is not a difference,” Judgment said. She was standing now, though she swayed slightly on her feet. “That’s the same thing. That’s what the constellations do. They understand the fundamental nature of reality because they exist in its early stages, and they apply force to reshape it. You just described divine action.”
Northern felt a headache building behind his eyes.
This was getting out of hand.
“I’m not a constellation. I’m not even particularly special by the standards of where I’m trying to get.”
He looked around the hall at all the awed, reverent faces—like he’d just parted the seas instead of fixing what was essentially a very complicated magical mistake.
“I’m just someone who got tired of being told what’s impossible and decided to check for myself. I’m just a daemon, okay?”
“The Crimson Veil was impossible to destroy,” one of the Seraphae said. She sounded almost angry about it, as if Northern had personally offended her by succeeding where everyone else had failed. “We tried. For eight hundred years, every Luminary, every Paragon, every Sage tried to find a way to end the long night. To free the trapped souls. To stop the eternal punishment.”
“And none of you could,” Northern said.
Not cruelly. Just stating fact.
“None of us could,” Anike confirmed. Her voice had steadied slightly, though she was still staring at Northern like he’d grown a second head—or maybe like she was trying to see through him to whatever divine essence she was convinced lurked underneath. “Because it was woven into the fundamental structure of this place. El Fach’s blessing and the Crimson Veil were two sides of the same coin. To destroy one would be to destroy the other, and without El Fach’s blessing…”
“The Sanctum falls,” Northern finished. “The islands crash into the ocean, the pacifist protection fails, everything you’ve built for eight centuries ends in about thirty seconds of very expensive real estate plummeting to its death.”
Anike nodded slowly.
“So we learned to live with it. The long night. The trapped souls. The knowledge that our mercy had a dark reflection we couldn’t erase.” She looked down at her hands, which were trembling faintly. “We accepted it as the price of our survival.”
“You accepted it because you couldn’t change it,” Northern corrected, and his tone was gentler than his words. “There’s a difference between philosophical acceptance and pragmatic surrender. You told yourselves it was necessary because the alternative was admitting you were trapped by your own blessing.”
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Several Seraphae looked away uncomfortably.
“And yet,” Judgment said quietly, “you changed it. The blessing remains—I can feel it, the Lumisphere of the Rising Fall is unchanged, El Fach’s power still flows through this place like water through stone. But the Crimson Veil is gone. You separated what we believed was inseparable.”
“Because they weren’t actually connected,” Northern said, sitting back down with the weight of someone who’d just run a marathon. “They just grew together over time until everyone assumed they were the same thing. The Veil wasn’t part of El Fach’s blessing. It was a consequence of how you used that blessing. Eight hundred years of reflected violence accumulated until it became self-sustaining. A side effect that everyone mistook for divine intention.”
He suddenly looked very tired again.
’Explaining the difference between correlation and causation to people who think I’m a god. This is my life now.’
“I just… removed the side effect. Unnamed it. Told reality it didn’t have to exist anymore, and reality agreed. Simple.”
“Simple,” Sael repeated faintly. “He calls it simple.”
“The Child of Prophecy,” Anike breathed. She was still on one knee, and now Northern noticed that her hands weren’t just trembling—they were shaking like leaves in a storm. “The one foretold to reshape the balance. To break the chains of the old order. We thought—I thought—it would be metaphorical. Political. A shift in power structures and ideology.”
“Not literal destruction of divine phenomena,” Judgment finished. She laughed—a short, sharp sound that was almost hysterical, like her brain was trying to process something it fundamentally couldn’t fit into any existing category. “Not a man who walks into constellation-blessed eternal punishment and just… decides it doesn’t get to exist anymore.”
“I’m seventeen… or at least almost,” Northern said. “Not really a man…”
’Then again… I guess I can say I am a man. Technically. Whatever.’
***
[A/N]: If you noticed, the prose format has changed slightly, based on some beta readers opinion, this versions helps more with immersion. So I decided to just switch it up. I don’t mind a feedback or two. Thank you