Chapter 1225. I Think You Deserve to Know Who You’ve Been Speaking To

Chapter 1225: 1225. I Think You Deserve to Know Who You’ve Been Speaking To

Valentina looked down at the obsidian desk, her vision blurring as hot, stinging tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. This wasn’t just shame; it was the agony of exhaustion.

For thirty years, she had carried this secret like a shard of glass embedded in her heart; every time she spoke of duty, every time she upheld the law of Aethelgard, that glass twisted deeper.

She had been the perfect headmaster, the perfect diplomat, and the perfect liar, all to shield a ghost from the very institutions she commanded.

Finally, the dam broke. The words began to spill out, raw and unvarnished, her voice trembling with the weight of three decades of unspoken grief.

"She wasn’t always like this," Valentina whispered, the confession sounding hollow in the cavernous office. "She was gentle once."

"Softer than I ever was... If you could have seen her before the world poisoned her... she would have wept at the sight of this city." A bitter laugh and half sob escaped her throat. "Our father’s scandal—that disgrace—it didn’t just ruin our reputation; it shattered her."

"It broke something fundamental in her soul that never fully healed."

"When she finally severed herself from the Starlight name, when she drifted away from everything we represented to build that... that Legion of Anti-Reincarnators... I let her go."

Valentina closed her eyes, the memory of a younger Celestina flashing behind her eyelids like a fever dream. "I told myself I was protecting the family name by staying away."

"I told myself that if I acknowledged her, the Council would hunt her down... But I was lying."

"Even then, I was lying." Her voice dropped to a broken murmur. "I think, if I’m honest, I was simply afraid."

"Afraid of what I might find if I actually looked for her..."

"Afraid that I would see the monster the world had made her and realize I was responsible for letting it happen."

She spoke of Celestina’s growing resentment of how the girl had watched the reincarnator system corrupt the natural order of Erosyne, seeing it as a cancerous cycle that denied souls their true purpose.

She laid bare the trauma of their separation, the wound that had never closed, the resentment that had festered into a crusade.

Xerollion listened with the terrifying patience of a statue. He nodded slowly, the motion almost imperceptible, as if he were merely checking off items on a list.

In his mind, he was already weaving Celestina’s trauma into a weapon, calculating how her crusade against reincarnation could be manipulated to serve his own dominion.

There was a faint, private irony beneath his mask, a stillness that Valentina was too broken to interpret, but it was there: the unnerving calm of a man confirming a truth he had already heard once before, years earlier, from those same lips in a room that no longer existed.

The silence that followed was worse than the confession. It was the silence of a predator who had finished feeding on a memory and was now ready to strike at the living.

"One more thing," Xerollion said.

The shift in his tone was subtle, but it felt like the click of a crossbow trigger. "Helena... Your daughter."

"She still hasn’t returned from her mission with Leonidas."

The effect was instantaneous. Valentina’s head snapped up, the grief in her eyes replaced by a sharp, piercing terror, the raw, primal fear of a mother.

For a moment, the headmaster vanished, leaving only a woman clinging to the last thread of hope she possessed. Her hands gripped the desk so hard the wood groaned under her touch.

"She’ll be home soon," Valentina said.

She forced her voice to steady, summoning every ounce of maternal conviction she could muster. "Her last letter was clear... Their mission is nearly complete."

"She is capable, Xerollion... She is strong."

"Perhaps within the next few weeks, she will return to Aethelgard."

She spoke with a desperate certainty, as if her words alone could summon her daughter back from whatever darkness she had wandered into.

Xerollion didn’t offer reassurance. He didn’t offer comfort.

He simply met her gaze with those cold, unreadable eyes behind the mask, and the words he spoke next felt like a promise of inevitable doom.

"Good," Xerollion said. "I want to meet her the moment she returns."

A silence more profound than the one before descended upon the room, but this was not the silence of exhaustion; it was the silence of an approaching storm.

Valentina stared at him, her pulse hammering against her throat like a trapped bird. Every instinct she possessed, every defensive spell woven into her very marrow, screamed at her.

’Why?’ The question burned in her mind.

Why would a conqueror, a being who had just systematically dismantled a kingdom, express interest in a young commander who was still leagues away?

Was she being baited?

Was Helena a hostage she hadn’t even realized she’d lost?

The wariness in her eyes sharpened into something dangerous, something almost desperate.

"What interest could you possibly have in my daughter?" she demanded, her voice cracking with restrained fury. "She is not a pawn in your game of thrones, Xerollion."

Xerollion did not answer immediately. Instead, he performed an action so alien to his predatory persona that it froze the very air in Valentina’s lungs.

Slowly, deliberately, he raised one gauntleted hand to the edge of his mask.

"Before that," he said, his voice carrying a strange, almost nostalgic cadence that made the hair on Valentina’s neck stand on end, "I think you deserve to know exactly who you’ve actually been speaking with."

The mask didn’t simply fall off. It dissolved.

Valentina watched in horrified fascination as the pulsing, violet-black energy that had formed the impenetrable visor began to liquefy.

The shadowy substance writhed like living smoke, bleeding back into his skin, flowing into his pores in tendrils of malevolent light. As the darkness receded, the face beneath was revealed.

Valentina’s heart didn’t just skip a beat; it seemed to stop entirely.

The face was achingly familiar. It was a face she had seen in countless commendations, a face that had graced the stained glass of the Grand Academy’s hall, a face she had personally guided, mentored, and praised.

It was the face of the boy who had been the academy’s brightest star, the prodigy who had shown more promise than any student in three centuries.

The hero who had stood at the front lines of every crisis, the one she had trusted with the innermost secrets of Aethelgard’s defenses. The one she had considered a son in all but blood.

Rex. Rexilion.

"No..." The word was barely a breath, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony. "No, it can’t be..."

Valentina’s composure didn’t just crack; it shattered like glass under a warhammer. Her eyes widened with such violent shock that the muscles in her face seemed to spasm.

Her chair shrieked against the marble floor screeeeeeeee as she lurched backward, rising reflexively from her desk as if the very air around her had become poisonous. The chair toppled, clattering to the ground behind her, but she didn’t notice.

Her entire world began to collapse inward. The devastating arithmetic of the last few hours began to rearrange itself with terrifying speed behind her eyes.

The surrender wasn’t just a defeat; it was a betrayal. The speech in the plaza hadn’t been a tyrant’s monologue; it had been a performance.

And her confession, her raw, bleeding vulnerability about Celestina, about her deepest shames and her most guarded secrets, hadn’t been given to a monster. It had been fed, piece by piece, to the one person she thought would have died to protect her.

Every word she had spoken, every strategic weakness she had revealed, every vulnerability she had exposed in her moment of weakness... she had handed them all to the wolf she had raised herself.

She stared at him at Rex and saw not the hero of Aethelgard, but the architect of its annihilation.