The ground shifted once more beneath them. Not with the violence of an earthquake, but with a more intimate, more revolting motion as if the land itself were growing a spine. The Queen's roots, thick as torsos and slick with coagulated sap, burrowed deeper into the rockbed, curling not like tendrils but like spinal cords threading into ancient vertebrae, twisting and uncoiling like serpents beneath old skin, harrowing and upturning the grotto floor. The grotto groaned beneath her, and the soil that had once seed solid now yielded like soft tissue. Jagged stone buckled and heaved aside, sared wet with greenish fluid, as if her presence softened the very laws of matter.
Each movent sounded like marrow cracking open. No wind, no echo, just the squelch and scrape of roots driving down through unseen flesh. They didn't crawl. They plunged. No searching. No hesitation. As if the island itself had long since been hollowed, waiting for her to return.
More of the roots that coiled through the cave began slithering toward the Queen's bloated form, not crawling but pulled, as if summoned by heartbeat alone. They linked with her body in violent contact, snapping into bark-flesh with the force of at hooks latching into carcass. Charged bark blackened by fla was nded with green vitality, the veins pulsing faintly, like arteries drawn from the earth itself. Her wounds drank deeply.
Ludwig's face contorted, the corner of his mouth tugging downward in a grimace carved by frustration rather than fear. After all that hard work… he could see it. The cursed arithtic of war. Green numbers, mocking and indifferent, rose in the air above the Queen's head, slow at first, one after another, but Ludwig knew the rhythm now. They'd accelerate. She was recovering.
"She's healing," Ludwig muttered, not as warning, but more like bitter acknowledgnt. The kind you say to yourself, because you already know others won't understand.
But one of the paladins heard. He turned sharply, his armor clattering with too-new weight. "The young Noble says that it is healing!"
The Cardinal's gaze snapped to Ludwig, narrow-eyed and sharp, not hostile yet, but tilting there, teetering between mistrust and interest. "How do you know that?" His voice carried the tone of soone used to being the authority in every room, yet now wary he might not be.
"Like a tree," Ludwig said, glancing back toward the Queen, "she is absorbing nutrition from all around." He lifted his chin toward the scars he'd left, still visible, though barely. "The burns I caused her," he made sure to linger on that point, firm enough for emphasis but not too proud, "are already visibly healing." He pointed now, slow, deliberate, to a section of her flank where ash-black bark was shedding itself like old skin, revealing the soft green renewal underneath. The wound was vanishing before their eyes.
There was a pause, filled with the sound of faint squelching from the Queen's roots and the subtle grind of steel as the paladins shifted uneasily.
"Paladins," the Cardinal called, his voice suddenly thunderous, "switch to holy fire! Burn this creature to ashes!"
The order cracked through the chamber like a thrown gauntlet. Imdiately, every paladin raised their swords in unison. The Cardinal and his attending clerics lifted their hands in practiced motion.
"Holy Flas of Purgatory!" the Cardinal bellowed, "Co forth to cleanse the unclean and burn the evildoers in your cleansing blaze!"
The chamber blood with unnatural light.
The blades ignited in hot, white fla, not orange, not red, but a divine white that licked and curled up their hilts, trailing flickers that danced like tiny wings. The flas touched the paladins' faces, brushed against their mail and cheeks, yet did not burn. To them, it was warmth. Grace. Light that knew its own.
But Ludwig… he shifted where he stood.
The heat pressed against his skin like unseen hands. It slid down his chest like liquid needles. His eye twitched.
{You are suffering Holy Damage}
-10hp
-10hp
And he wasn't even the target. They hadn't aid at him, not yet. The flas had rely flared from afar.
He gritted his teeth and did not speak. He held still and bore it.
The first few paladins charged, emboldened by righteousness, voices raised with half-rembered scripture.
Ludwig didn't even follow them with his eyes. There was no point. The end of n like that never changed.
He heard it before he saw it: a shriek, not of the Queen, but of roots piercing plate.
Her roots had already reached both of them. They erupted from the floor beneath, goring up through plate and ribs. The force threw the paladins to the ground, their holy blades falling beside them like discarded torches. Screams echoed, brief, then drowned beneath blood and bark. The Queen pulled their broken bodies inward, toward her chest.
Her spine convulsed, a ripple passing through her fra like a great tendon flexing in agony. The withered crown atop her burnt head cracked apart. It splintered, split, peeled backward like a jaw opening from within, revealing a cavity deep in her chest, a space not born of flesh or bark, but sothing in between.
It pulsed faintly. Not a heartbeat. Not breath. Sothing more sinister.
A cocoon.
Its skin was translucent, slick with sap that shimred in shades of blue and crimson. Veins, black and red, spidered across its surface, throbbing. Like jellyfish flesh trapped inside a knot of roots. It glistened unnaturally, even in the dim light.
Another paladin reached her, shouting sothing about vengeance. The Queen didn't even shift her gaze. She didn't need to.
A tendril, barbed and thorned, darted outward with impossible speed. It pierced his stomach, the sound not like tal, but like gristle being torn by a butcher's hook. The paladin's cry never ca. Only blood. His body twitched once in the air, divine light flickering on his armor, and then it was gone, swallowed inward. Pulled into the cavity.
Three bodies now, cradled against the pulsing sac like infants curled around a womb that never asked for them. Roots reached outward, tethered to their flesh, draining it. Color left their skin, eyes turned glassy. Within seconds, they withered like fruits left too long in the sun.
Another followed. And another.
"That's what was underneath the Queen earlier," Thomas said from atop Ludwig's shoulder, voice hushed, though not in fear.
"The hell is that," Ludwig said, his frown deepening as he peered into the cavity. "Looks like there's nothing inside it. A cocoon that's hosting… nothing?"
"Yet," the Knight King murmured, his tone sharp, absolute as if the word were not a warning but a prophecy.
Ludwig felt it, like iron sliding into place. There was no need for more.
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was heavy, filled with understanding that blood without words.
In that single mont, everything clicked.
It all made sense now. The entire picture. The twisted logic behind this godforsaken island.
The Queen wasn't the threat. Not in the traditional sense. She wasn't a warrior like the Moonflayed King. No. She was never built for conquest. Her strength wasn't in destruction, it was in creation.
The Queen was a servant of the Wrathful Death. One of the three he knew of. And compared to the Moonflayed King, yes, she seed weaker. But that was never the point.
Her value was in what she carried.
The womb within her, seeking the Core, which was her anchor.
That cocoon wasn't housing a parasite. It was gestating nothing. Sothing yet to be born, from pain. From wrath. From ruin.
An empty place reserved for a child. A child of the Wrathful Death.
She bore the womb.
And from the looks of it, she wasn't missing any ingredient... he tightened his grip on his chains as the gears in his mind were doing the job of unfolding all the happenings of the Dawn Islands.
The thought turned Ludwig's undead stomach. thaphorical cold sweat gathered at the base of his spine.
But… why Celine?
Why had the core chosen her?
There were answers. Many, maybe. All of them are true.
Celine's pain. Her centuries of torture. The echoing rage that would have shaken even a saint. Anyone would be pissed off. Who wouldn't be a perfect vessel after that?
And she was a True Vampire. Built to endure. Perhaps the only creature on the island capable of surviving the fusion with the Wrath Core.
Or maybe… she was simply unlucky.
All of it could be true.
All of it could an nothing.
It didn't matter anymore.
Because she was in his arms now, and her body was trembling not from fear.
But from rage.
A low, primal vibration in her chest, like a beast who had caught the scent of its torntor. Her chains tightened involuntarily, clinking like restless bones.
Another paladin scread, his torso torn in half mid-stride. Two more struck the Queen's roots with holy fla, their blades igniting the stone floor beneath them in divine fury, but she didn't flinch. Not even a stagger.
Only her center pulsed. The cocoon was shifting. Growing tighter. Denser. More defined.
Ludwig stepped back, the slick stone groaning beneath his boots. His grip on Celine's chains hardened.
The Queen's presence, albeit surrounded by hundreds of paladins all screaming and charging, tearing at her roots with holy fire. The presence and eyeless gaze were fully and wholeheartedly focused on Ludwig. No, on the vampire behind Ludwig.
And from the gutteral depths of the Queen, a voice echoed.
"Co to ! my unborn child! co to , for i'll make you whole!"
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