Chapter 199 - 198: The Truth She Never Knew

Eleanore felt something cold settle deep in her stomach. "It’s been growing this entire time. Inside me."

"I believe so. Which means he’ll come back for it eventually. Fragments like that don’t simply sit dormant forever, and a man patient enough to wait this long isn’t a man who’s given up his claim on it." Serenya reached out, cupping Eleanore’s face gently, the same way Caelestis so often did, the resemblance so striking it ached. "You must be careful, Eleanore. More careful than you’ve ever been. When he comes for it—and he will—it won’t be a conversation. It will be a fight for something he considers rightfully his, and I don’t yet know what removing it from you would cost."

"Could it kill me?"

Serenya’s silence was answer enough, and Eleanore felt the weight of it settle heavy and cold against her chest, made sharper still by the small, fragile life growing inside her that she now had to protect from a danger she barely understood.

"I don’t know everything," Serenya admitted softly. "I died before I could uncover the whole truth of it. But I know enough to warn you, and I know enough to tell you this—trust carefully. Not everyone around you is who they appear to be, and the fragment inside you makes you more valuable, and more vulnerable, than you’ve ever fully realized."

"How do I protect myself? Protect the baby?"

"Find answers before he finds you first," Serenya said, her form beginning to flicker faintly at the edges, the white space around them trembling as though the connection itself were fraying. "Kess, the mage Hael brought back—she may know more than she’s told you so far. Dark magic recognizes dark magic, even when it wears a gentler face."

"Wait—" Eleanore reached out desperately as Serenya’s form grew fainter still. "Please, I have so many more questions—"

"Why?" The word tore out of Eleanore before she could stop it, raw and broken, still on her knees on the cold floor with the box clutched to her chest. "Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you—"

The white space rippled again, Serenya’s form solidifying once more though it looked thinner now, more fragile, as if holding this connection open a second time was costing her something significant.

"I didn’t leave you by choice," Serenya said, voice trembling. "I need you to understand that first, before anything else."

Eleanore stared at her, something wild and disbelieving rising in her chest. "What do you mean?"

Serenya stepped closer, and in the strange, shifting light of that white space, Eleanore finally saw it properly this time. It is a distant memory but she also looks exactly like the mother she used to live with in her original word. Who died to faith as she thought but turns out it had more depth to itself.

"You’re—" Eleanore’s voice broke entirely. "You’re my mother. From the original world."

"Yes," Serenya whispered, tears spilling freely now. "From the world you were taken to. The one you left behind when you woke up here."

Eleanore’s knees buckled, and she sank fully to the ground, the box slipping from her fingers as decades of unspoken grief she hadn’t even known she was carrying rose up all at once. "I don’t understand. How is this possible? I thought I’d taken over someone else’s body. I thought Eleanore Sinclair was already—"

"There was an accident," Serenya said, kneeling now too, reaching for her daughter’s hands with desperate tenderness. "A carriage crash, in this world. My husband, my son, you and I. We were travelling when an accident took place. You were just a child barely able to move. My husband and Caelestis were not breathing when I checked them. I thought Caelestis didn’t survive it. And you—" her voice cracked entirely, "you were dying too, Eleanore. I felt you slipping away in my arms, and I could not let that happen. I refused to let it happen."

"What did you do?"

"I found someone," Serenya said. "A man with power I didn’t understand and shouldn’t have trusted, but I was a mother and friend watching her promise die, and I would have made any bargain in that moment to stop it. He offered me a way to save you—not in our world, where the damage was already too severe, but somewhere else entirely. Another life, waiting for a soul to fill it, in a body already dying of its own accord in a world far from ours."

"Eleanore Sinclair," Eleanore whispered.

"Yes. She was already gone, in every way that mattered, when he found her. He didn’t take a life that wasn’t already ending. He simply gave you a door to walk through before yours could close completely." Serenya’s grip on her hands tightened. "In exchange, he asked for something of his own to be carried alongside you. A fragment of his power, hidden within the transition itself. I didn’t fully understand what I was agreeing to. I only understood that it was the only way to keep you alive, and I said yes without hesitation."

"And you," Eleanore said slowly, everything clicking into place with sickening clarity. "You died too. In the crash. And somehow you ended up here too, as Caelestis’s mother."

"The magic that carried you here needed an anchor," Serenya said. "Someone already tied to you by blood, willing to guide the transition safely. I made the same bargain, in a different form, arriving years before you did, so that when you finally came through, you wouldn’t be arriving into a world with no one who already loved you waiting on the other side."

Eleanore was openly sobbing now, the weight of it, her mother, whom she thought was her actual mother, turns out to be her god mother, her mother-in-law. Who dies twice over just to give her this chance, weaving herself into a family she’d then have to leave before ever revealing the truth, settling over her with a grief too large to fully hold.

"You gave me Caelestis," Eleanore whispered. "You raised the man I ended up falling in love with, and you never got to see any of it."