Chapter 425: Saintess Of The Argent Flame [III / Bonus - ]

Chapter 425: Saintess Of The Argent Flame [III / Bonus Chapter]

And so that was how the nightmare continued.

For six long unrelenting years, humanity marched across the scorched reaches of the realm, butchering demon hordes in a war of total attrition.

And in the pitch-black subterranean bowels of the Meolion Kingdom, inside the damp stone crypt that had become the Prison of the Saintess, Aurelia was forced to endure death every single day.

Day after day... Month after month... Season after season...

She endured decapitations while sitting in total darkness.

She endured having her chest cleaved open while she was attempting to chew on stale crusts of bread.

She endured having her ribs caved in by siege-class abyssal bludgeons, her limbs torn from her sockets by feral fiends, her throat crushed by demonic fangs, and her lungs liquified by sulfurous necrotic flame.

Over and over again, tens of thousands of times, the Argent Flame coiled through her shattered flesh like living silver serpents, dragging severed tendons back together, welding splintered bone, sealing open arteries, and forcibly re-igniting her consciousness so that she could serve as the living shield for the next strike on the front lines.

Eventually, death stopped being a terrifying concept.

It stopped being an agony to fear. It became nothing more than a dull mechanical afterthought... an irritating interruption of the dark silence she sat in.

’Ah... another spear through the liver,’ She would think as blood filled her mouth in the dark. ’The third vanguard must be pushing through the marshlands.’

’My left leg just shattered into twelve pieces... The cavalry must have hit a trench.’

’My throat just tore open... Someone was ambushed in their sleep.’

The boundary of her torment did not stop at the edge of the battlefield.

During the fourth year of the endless campaign, an abyssal miasma seeped into the kingdom’s central aquifers and riverbeds.

It planted insidious seeds of necrotic soul-rot into the spiritual veins of every living human within the realm’s borders.

It did not kill instantly, but rather ate away at their life-force, threatening to turn the entire populace into decaying husks.

To prevent the collapse of society, the High Council and the Grand Patriarch forced Aurelia to cast a kingdom-wide web of the Argent Flame, tethering her soul directly to the life-force of every single citizen across the provinces.

From that moment on, her hell evolved into an unbearable cacophony of borrowed misery.

She was no longer just paying the blood-debt of the warriors facing demons on the front lines. She became the living receptacle for every scrap of physical violence, sickness, and mundane agony that occurred across the entire empire.

If a drunken blacksmith got into a tavern brawl in the Upper Ward and had his jaw broken, Aurelia’s teeth cracked in the dark, her mouth filling with coppery blood.

If a thief was captured in the slums and flogged with barbed leather, the lacerations mirrored themselves with searing precision across Aurelia’s back, peeling her skin to the bone.

If a laborer in the northern quarries was crushed beneath a falling boulder, Aurelia’s pelvis snapped, pinning her to the damp floor as her bones violently ground together until the silver fire forced them into place.

Even the smallest cruelties... a child being beaten by a cruel master, a merchant cutting his finger on glass, a soldier stubbing his toe against an iron chest reverberated into her flesh.

She lived in a permanent state of being mutilated, burned, crushed, and regenerated without a single second of peace.

And yet, eventually, humanity finished the war. The demonic hordes were wiped from the face of the world.

And today... today was meant to be quite a glorious day.

SCREEECH!

The heavy rusted iron hinges of the outermost dungeon gate groaned loudly in the gloom.

A royal guard pushed his way down the winding stone corridor, his iron-plated boots clattering against the slick steps. But the moment his hand shoved open the thick timber door of the inner cell, what hit him first was the smell.

It was a suffocating wall of stench.

The royal sanitation crews and prison attendants had long since stopped cleaning the deep cells; no one had set foot down here in over two years because the priests declared the room "spiritually toxic."

The air was a humid stagnant swamp of rotting biological waste, old coagulated blood, dried vomit, and the nauseatingly sweet, coppery odor of burnt flesh and constant regenerations.

The stone floor was slick with layers of dried and re-melted crimson fluids that had pooled and dried into black tar-like crusts across the flagstones.

The guard instinctively gagged, coughing violently into his armored gauntlet as his eyes watered from the pure toxicity of the air.

"By the gods..." the guard wheezed, stepping into the gloom with his hand resting on the hilt of his broadsword.

He raised his lantern, letting the yellow light wash over the corner of the cell. Sitting on the filth-encrusted stone, slumped against the damp wall, was Aurelia.

She looked utterly grotesque.

The radiant, golden-haired beauty who had once been the revered High Saintess of the realm was completely gone, replaced by a hollow emaciated husk.

Her skin was a translucent sickly gray, pulled so tightly over her visible ribcage and hip bones that she looked like a skeleton wrapped in paper.

Thick pale-silver scars covered every single square inch of her exposed flesh... a chaotic horrifying mosaic of thousands of healed lacerations, missing patches of skin, and deep burn marks.

Her matted platinum hair was caked with grime and old blood, hanging over her face in greasy tangled knots.

The guard looked down at her with unfiltered disgust, curling his lip in open contempt.

"Look at you," the guard sneered, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "A filthy, wretched creature rotting in her own filth. You look like a demon that crawled out of the bottom of an open sewer."

Aurelia did not answer as she could not see the guard’s face... she could not see the yellow glow of his lantern either.

Aurelia was blind.

Years ago, during one of the great battles against an abyssal demon lord, an invisible blade of demonic energy had cleaved across Cassian’s eyes in a blinding horizontal arc.

When the Argent Flame had violently pulled the fatal wound across the soul-link, the silver fire had attempted to regenerate her shredded retinas while simultaneously burning through a massive influx of abyssal venom.

The chaotic clash of divine fire and demonic corruption had burned her optical nerves into charred ash, leaving her retinas completely milky-white and hollow.

She had lived in pitch-black darkness ever since.

The guard stepped forward, his heavy boots splashing through the dark residue on the floor. He reached down, unhooking the heavy iron chain that bound the rusted collar around her throat.

"Get up, freak," he barked.

Without an ounce of gentleness, he gave the iron chain a savage upward yank, hauling her bodily off the stone floor by her neck.

Aurelia’s bare, scarred feet dragged against the flagstones.

Her joints popped and groaned under her frail weight, but not a single sound of complaint escaped her lips. She simply let herself be dragged forward, moving like a corpse being hauled to a disposal pit.

He pulled her up the long spiraling staircase, through the heavy iron portcullises, and into the torchlit upper garrison.

"Take this garbage," the male guard grunted, shoving the end of her chain into the hands of two female guards who were waiting in the clean tiled anteroom. "Wash the stench off her before she makes the whole palace vomit."

The two female guards took hold of Aurelia’s bony arms, leading her down a bright, polished corridor and into an expansive dressing chamber filled with steaming bronze tubs and clean linens.

"Today is the day all of your suffering finally ends, Saintess," the first female guard said as she unhooked the chain from her collar, her voice surprisingly gentle, carrying a strange hollow tone of pity.

"That’s right," the second female guard chimed in, pouring a bucket of warm, rose-scented water over Aurelia’s trembling shoulders. "The war is over... The demons are extinct and today, you are going to be celebrated by the entire kingdom."

Aurelia said nothing.

She stood motionless in the warm water, listening to the soft splashes and the rustle of coarse linen as the two women began stripping away the rotting rags that clung to her dried wounds.

She felt the sponges scraping against her scarred collarbones, her emaciated thighs, and her sunken ribs.

As they washed her, the two women couldn’t help but whisper to each other, their voices carrying clearly in the quiet room.

"Look at her body..." the first guard murmured, running a cloth over a brutal, jagged scar that ran from Aurelia’s shoulder to her hip. "She’s so thin... It’s horrifying. Remember when she was crowned Saintess? She was the most breathtaking, voluptuous beauty in the entire realm. Noble lords wrote songs about her figure. Now... she looks so ugly and broken it’s not even a joke. There isn’t a single spot on her skin that isn’t ruined by scars."

"She looks like a patchwork doll that was ripped apart and sewn back together a thousand times," the other woman agreed in a low somber whisper.

Aurelia said nothing.

Her physical eyes were dead, but her internal spiritual sense... sharpened into a razor-thin diagnostic tool through six years of enduring soul-trauma mapped out the room with terrifying precision.

She could perceive the subtle mana signatures of the two guards, the warmth of the hearth, the texture of the fine silk robes they draped over her damp frame, and the careful hurried motions of their hands as they combed through her tangled platinum hair.

They were genuinely trying to make her look pretty.

One of the attendants stepped in front of her, opening a small jar of scented white powder.

With a careless jab of a velvet puff, she slammed the cosmetic powder directly onto Aurelia’s hollow cheek, sending a cloud of fragrant chalk into her nose and mouth.

Aurelia let out a sharp cough with her dry throat convulsing.

"Ah! I am so sorry, Saintess!" the woman gasped, frantically patting her chest and waving the air clean. "I didn’t mean to do that!"

They continued their work, their hands smoothing perfumed oils into her skin, lining her lips with red paste, and carefully arranging her long platinum-blonde hair into neat, flowing waves over the shoulders of an immaculate pristine white dress.

Even the heavy iron collar that had bitten into her neck for six years was unlatched and cast aside, leaving her throat bare and unencumbered.

A dark fragile thought flickered through the cold embers of Aurelia’s shattered mind.

’Is this really it...? Is the nightmare truly over...? Will I finally see Cassian again...?’

A wave of pure venomous ice pooled in the bottom of her stomach, burning with an intensity hotter than any fire she had ever absorbed.

’When I meet him...’ Aurelia thought, her fingers subtly curling against the smooth silk of her skirt. ’When I stand before him and hear his voice... I will not thank him. I will not weep with joy. I will curse him to the deepest, most agonizing pits of hell. I will curse him, I will curse the Grand Patriarch, I will curse the King, and I will curse every single citizen who slept peacefully in their beds while I died ten thousand deaths in the dark. I will curse all of them...’

"You are ready," the female guards announced, draping a heavy velvet-lined travel cloak over her shoulders and pulling a deep hood over her face to conceal her milky-white eyes.

They escorted her out of the palace garrison and into the open courtyard.

The crisp morning air hit her skin, carrying the scent of fresh pine and distant woodsmoke... scents she had not smelled in six agonizing years.

She was helped up the wooden steps into a luxurious, enclosed carriage, the velvet curtains pulled shut against the outside world.

"It is going to be a wondrous, unforgettable celebration," the guard captain assured her through the carriage window as the iron-shod wheels began to turn, clattering over the smooth cobblestones of the capital. "The entire city is waiting to greet you..."

Aurelia said nothing.

She sat perfectly still on the cushioned leather seat, feeling the sway of the carriage as it navigated the winding streets.

The distant sound of thousands of voices began to bleed through the wooden carriage walls... a massive roaring ocean of sound that grew louder with every passing second.

Suddenly, a horrific suffocating sensation clamped down upon her throat.

"Gah!"

It was not a physical blade or a reflected wound. It was a potent and colorless alchemical gas that had been secretly funneled into the enclosed carriage through hidden runic vents beneath the seating.

Aurelia’s breath seized in her chest. Her throat closed up, her spiritual sense spun into chaotic static, and her weakened body went completely limp.

The darkness swallowed her whole as she slumped against the carriage cushions, losing consciousness.

CLANG!

The heavy sound of an iron latch locking into place echoed in her ears.

Aurelia gasped, her consciousness violently snapping back into reality as the lingering effects of the paralytic gas were burned away by the natural, defensive reaction of the Argent Flame in her blood.

She tried to move, but her limbs were completely immobilized.

She was kneeling on a raised wooden platform.

Heavy, cold, high-grade suppression chains were wrapped securely around her wrists, her ankles, her waist, and her neck, bolting her frail, kneeling frame directly to the thick oak timbers beneath her knees.

Above her, resting against the nape of her neck, she could feel the cold heavy shadow of an iron bracket which was the guide-rail of a massive executioner’s block.

And surrounding the scaffold was a crowd of unimaginable scale.

Tens of thousands of people filled the grand royal plaza.

The noise was an earth-shaking roar... a deafening cacophony of bloodthirsty screams, violent jeers, and furious stomping that shook the very foundations of the execution platform.

Through her spiritual sense, Aurelia recognized them.