Chapter 980. The Same Hands That Fix My Stance Crushed Their Entrails

Chapter 980: 980. The Same Hands That Fix My Stance Crushed Their Entrails

Aurelia had not slept properly since the incident in the corridor. The exhaustion wasn’t merely physical; it was a corrosive, psychological weight that settled behind her eyes like powdered glass.

Every time she closed them, she saw the fractured expression on his face, the way reality seemed to splinter around him.

She clung to the rationalizations like a drowning woman to driftwood. She told herself the sleeplessness was the price of discipline, the relentless administrative burden of managing a son who had become a volatile variable in her carefully ordered world.

She checked his meals with obsessive precision; she monitored his movements with the cold calculation of a warden.

A guard now stood silently outside his door, not as a punishment, but as a necessary barrier between Theo’s fractured psyche and the rest of the world. She convinced herself that this vigilance was her duty, a necessary tax paid for the preservation of order.

But deep down, in the hollow spaces where her conscience resided, she knew she was lying. The sleeplessness wasn’t vigilance; it was terror.

The household was still draped in the grey, pre-dawn silence when she began crossing the rear corridor toward the kitchens. The air was cold, smelling of old stone and extinguished beeswax.

Her footsteps were muffled, ghostly echoes against the flagstones. She was moving earlier than any servant would expect, seeking the solitary comfort of routine.

Then, the silence shattered.

Theo’s door swung open with a violence that reverberated through the narrow stone passage. The crash of wood against stone sounded like a gunshot.

Aurelia’s body reacted before her mind could process the sound; her fingers instinctively flew to the hilt of the dagger strapped to her hip, her knuckles whitening as she prepared to draw.

Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird, adrenaline flooding her system, sharpening the edges of her vision.

Theo stood framed in the doorway, a silhouette of chaos against the dim light of his room. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, now wrinkled and stained, clinging to his frame like a second, diseased skin.

His hair was a matted thicket, disordered from restless tossing, but it was his eyes that stopped her breath. They were bloodshot, pupils blown wide with a wild, unslept quality that screamed of mania and exhaustion.

There was something primal in his gaze, something that suggested the boy she knew had been replaced by something hollowed out and dangerous.

A cold dread pooled in her stomach, heavy as lead. Her mind raced through possibilities.

’A seizure? A psychotic break? An attempt at violence?’

"Mother," he said.

The word didn’t flow; it broke. His voice cracked violently on the single syllable, raw and shredded as if he had been screaming into the pillows for hours.

He took a step forward, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, like a marionette with tangled strings.

Aurelia froze, her hand still pressed against the knife, her muscles coiled to spring or flee. The tension between them was a physical thing, a live wire stretched to the breaking point in the narrow space.

"I need to tell you something," Theo continued, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps that sounded disturbingly like sobbing.

He fixed her with a stare so intense it felt like it could draw blood. "And I need you to actually listen, really listen, before you decide what you think about it."

Aurelia’s fury ignited instantly, a searing, white-hot flash that burned through the fog of her exhaustion. It was the reflexive, defensive anger of a woman who had been hollowed out by days of damage control, managing the catastrophic fallout of her son’s previous unraveling.

Her patience wasn’t just thin; it was gone, incinerated by the relentless stress of maintaining a facade of control while her world crumbled.

"You are supposed to be confined to this room," she hissed, her voice dropping to a dangerous, razor-edged register that promised pain. "You do not get to simply breach your confinement because you decided you had something to say!"

"You have forfeited the right to speak without permission!"

"I know!" Theo exploded, the sound raw and ugly.

He took a stumbling step toward her, his hands shaking so violently they looked like blurred shadows. "I know I shouldn’t be here..."

"I know I’ve fucked up, I know I’ve disappointed you, and I know you want to throw me back in that cell and bolt the door!"

"But none of that matters right now... none of it compares to what I need you to hear." His eyes searched hers with a terrifying intensity. "Please... Just this once."

"For the love of whatever gods are left, listen before you punish me for what I’m about to say."

Something in the sheer, unvarnished desperation of his voice struck a nerve in Aurelia. It was a primal frequency; she recognized the specific, reluctant pause of a mother who had spent three decades learning to distinguish between her son performing a tantrum and her son experiencing a genuine psychological collapse.

This wasn’t defiance; this was a man drowning.

"Speak," she commanded, though her grip on the dagger loosened fractionally. "Quickly, and quietly, before the household wakes and finds you standing outside a door you are not permitted to touch."

"Choose your words carefully, Theo... Your next breath could be your last."

Theo took a breath, but it didn’t steady him. It came out as a shuddering, broken gasp that rattled in his chest.

His mind was screaming, a cacophony of images that refused to dim. ’I saw it... I saw the truth behind the mask. ’

’I saw the monster beneath the mentor.’

"I saw something," he began, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that carried more weight than a scream. "Last night and the night before that in whatever passes for sleep now."

"It’s not sleep, Mother... It’s a liminal hell where my mind goes when my body finally collapses from exhaustion."

’I saw Rex."

Aurelia stiffened, her entire body going rigid. "Rex has nothing to do with--"

"You don’t understand!" Theo interrupted, his words tumbling out in a desperate, unstoppable torrent. "I saw him! But not as the man who trains with me!"

"I saw him yesterday...! Now, I fucking knew that he wasn’t human!" Theo clenched both his fists. "He was something ancient, something terrible!"

"He was the one all along...! The one who wears armor forged from living stone, and I saw the mask." His breathing became ragged, his eyes darting as if the memory were physically attacking him. "I saw him tearing this city apart with those same hands, the same hands that have been correcting my footwork, guiding my stance, and touching my shoulders in the training hall for the last two weeks!"

"Those hands were slick with blood, Mother...! I saw the entrails spray against the cobblestones as he crushed them."

Aurelia went utterly still. The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin as pale as the stone walls surrounding them.

A cold sweat broke across her brow.

"He is Tremor," Theo said, the name hitting the air like a death sentence. "The Forbidden Earthen Apostle!"

"The butcher of the plaza... The monster responsible for the slaughter, the one who left half this city in ruins and half its people in graves!"

"I saw it as clearly as I am seeing your face right now!"

"I saw him reveal himself not to a stranger, but to Iris’s boyfriend, Tremor, when he showed his true form... I saw the connection."

He grabbed his own hair, twisting it as if trying to extract the memory from his skull. "I know how it sounds!"

"I know I’m the madman... and I know I’m the boy who lost his mind in the guest room, the boy who can’t be trusted!"

"But I am telling you the truth! Rex is the monster we’ve been hunting!"

"Theo," Aurelia said, her voice cracking with a warning weight that could have felled a lesser man. "Stop... Stop this instant."