CHAPTER 420: A MOTHER’S PLEA; LET HER LIVE

AMENERIS’ POV

The cave walls blurred past Ameneris Screamers, her feet dragging as her daughter’s maidservant and Ada helped her along. Zelkov’s steady presence shadowed them as he tethered in the precipice of fully shifting at any time.

She could feel his loyalty to Zina like a steady flame, and it burned her almost as much as it comforted her. Because this had always been what she longed for. That the daughter she had no choice but to leave behind would have people that cherished and cared for her.

Yet she didn’t want it like this.

How long had she dreamed of this moment? Her daughter’s face before her, grown and powerful, carrying life in her eyes even as she carried death in her hands. Yet the reunion had been nothing like she had once imagined for twenty-six suffocating years that felt like centuries instead.

There was no laughter. No tears of joy. Only bitterness, and the cold weight of fate pressing like chains around both their throats.

I cursed her with this life the moment I named her, she thought bitterly.

Zina. To live. And yet all she has done is fight to breathe against the gods themselves.

Is this what I wanted for her? A daughter who carries my sins like a shroud?

Her frail chest ached with every step, not from exertion but from the memory of Zina’s eyes when she whispered: Then let me finally carry more life than death.

She could not escape those words. They rang in her ears louder than the quake of stone, louder than the growl of the Deformed in the distance. Zina... her daughter was going back to fight — alone.

"Zelkov," she rasped, halting suddenly in the corridor. Her legs shook but she forced her spine straight, clinging to the remnants of her authority. "Zelkov!"

He paused. Then he turned sharply, his eyes hard as steel.

"Have you forgotten what you promised me?" she said in a voice that managed to muster steel despite her exhaustion, "have you forgotten the day I summoned you with the Runes and asked you to find her?"

Zelkov seemed even more silent than the time he was brought to the Screamers Pack as the illegitimate son of her husband. That strange silence that put him in a light where it seemed his thoughts weighed heavier more than was comprehensible.

"I have never forgotten."

"Then you must go back." Her voice was commanding, imperious, the tone she had used once upon a time as Luna. "My daughter is walking into ruin. If you have ever served me — if you have ever respected me as your Luna, your benefactor, your mother — then you will not let her die alone in that chamber."

Zelkov’s jaw tightened, eyes rioting with a thousand emotions that she never thought it would be possible for him to muster.

"My orders from the Luna Queen is to see you safe, Luna Ameneris. It is the Queen’s order. And it has been my wish for almost thirty years after you abandoned yourself just to save me."

Her throat burned. She wanted to scream, but all that left her was a croaking whisper. "I didn’t save you just for you to remember that day as a nightmare. And if you’re escorting me to safety because you feel you owe me, then you should stop now. What is safety to me if she perishes? If Zina falls, there is no world left worth saving for me!"

Her hand, skeletal and trembling, shot out to clutch his wrist. Her eyes, once cold and sharp, shimmered with unshed tears. "Please... Zelkov. Not as your Luna. As a mother. Go to her. Protect her since I cannot. Let me pay for my sins with solitude — but let her live. I cannot survive it if she makes this sacrifice. Let me... let me be this living sacrifice, Zelkov."

Ada chuckled suddenly after remaining silent for a long time after her betrayal. "Forget it all!" She exclaimed, her grey hair sticking all over the place, "I myself have waited for this day for more than thirty years! And now that it has come, I am no longer afraid. But know this, Luna Ameneris Screamers that I believe in your daughter. She is the Great Seer. And no one decides a great Seer’s fate but herself."

Ameneris stared at the old woman with tear filled eyes. Ada smiled, then turned to Zelkov.

"I know plans must have been put in place, but I ask that you go after the Seer. I might be old, but I still have some skills of my own! I shall remain by Luna’s side and fight to the end with her!"

Ameneris watched as Zelkov stared at her for seconds with eyes so brown they reminded her so much of her husband.

All her life, she wanted to protect the bloodline of the Screamers. And knowing that not just one, but two such bloodlines existed gave her a sense of fulfilment.

Zelkov fell on his knees, his face a blank mask even though his eyes spoke a world of things.

"I shall do as the Luna commands," he said stoically, "farewell... mother."

Ameneris smiled at him, feeling completely assured for the first time in a long while that she had made the right decision to take Zelkov in despite her husband’s betrayal.

She touched his arm, helping him up.

Then he turned his back at her, and left without a word. Just as she hoped and expected of him.

She smiled through the glass of tears that refused to fall just yet, then she said to her company. "I must meet the Seven Witch. For my shame of thirty years, and for the daughter they took away from me."

Zina’s maidservant nodded fervently with a sad expression while Ada smiled.

"You should do that, Luna. I will stand behind you as you stand up tall before them."

"Me too," Zina’s maidservant said in a small voice, "I shall stand with you as well as witness on behalf of the Theta. That is, if you allow me."

Ameneris nodded, and together, they began making their way to the open grounds of the Cave Manor where everyone had converged to take refuge from the crumbling building.