EMILIA GOODSKY'S POV
Ask the Emperor what victory tastes like, and he will answer that it tastes of gold and power. Ask the General, and he will assure you that it tastes of honor and glory. Ask the soldier, and he will reply that it tastes of women and wine.
Ask me, and I will tell you the truth.
Victory tasted of blood and disease, like the metallic burn of a dagger pressed against my tongue; of hunger and fire, like a feast consumed by flames before my eyes. Its breath stank of ashes and death, like a field sown with afflicted specters that haunted me in my dreams.
I had lived long enough to understand that the path of war was like an endless snake slithering beneath my skin, forged from millions of rotting corpses under an unrelenting sun, stretching toward a horizon I would never reach, forever shrouded in mist.
Dozens of times I watched young soldiers march before me, intoxicated with patriotic fanaticism, singing aloud the supposed glorious deeds of the past. Their endless hymns rose like desperate prayers to an indifferent wind as they raised majestic banners that waved like dancing ghosts in the morning mist. How foolish they were! How foolish I was too to believe in something like that!
They did not know—as I ignored for so long—that the bards lied with every verse, that their banner was nothing more than a filthy rag waving like a forgotten leaf at the end of autumn. Soldiers did not win wars; they only fought them with trembling hands and terrified eyes. They killed and died at the edge of a sword, in an orgy of shattered bones and broken dreams that were lost to the wind like ashes.
Blow after blow, their weapons played the macabre symphony of the crusade: sword against shield, like the roar of a wild beast tearing through the night; arrow against armor, like the lethal buzz of a wasp before injecting its poison; mace against helmet, like thunder splitting the skies in two; and steel against flesh, like a knife ripping through the most delicate silk.
And above the deafening clamor of metal, the agonized screams answered the questions no one dared to ask: Who was the vassal of the mightiest lord? Which of our masters would write History with the blood of others? Whose king's greed deserved more innocent sacrifices?
In the center of the room, upon a bed of white marble carved with intricate designs of leaves and flowers that seemed to mock death with their unchanging beauty, lay the small body of my Cassie, motionless and pale as freshly fallen snow on a silent dawn.
This was not the girl I remembered with painful clarity. She had lost so much weight that her skin stretched over thin bones like fragile twigs about to snap. Her entire being resembled a withered leaf in the height of autumn, as if a mere gust of wind could carry her definitively to the grave. Yet, beneath the fragile ribcage that was barely discernible, her chest rose and fell with each weak breath, reminding me that a spark of life still lingered within that devastated body.
I knelt beside the bed, caressing her face with my trembling hands that had shed so much blood. My blue eyes, once bright and seductive, now dulled and reddened by the piercing pain that lacerated my damned soul.
My long blonde hair, normally immaculate and perfect as demanded by my role as an idealized mother, now fell in disheveled strands over my weary shoulders, some clinging to my tear-streaked cheeks—tears I thought I had forgotten how to shed. I wanted to scream until I tore my throat apart, I wanted it all to be a nightmare from which I would soon awaken in a world where I was not the monster they had turned me into.
I had not left Cassie's side for a single moment since she fell unconscious. They brought me food I barely touched and a cradle in which I did not rest. I, personally, with these hands stained by invisible guilt, gave her the honey, the water, and the herbal mixture that kept her suspended between life and death.
— Foolish girl... —I whispered as I caressed her pale forehead—. These are the consequences of using a skill beyond the physical capabilities of the user.
In the end, those children I cared for as if they were my own made possible what even I, with all my knowledge and power, believed impossible. That barrier protecting the device was something not even I, could break with my abilities.
Despite their extraordinary feat, the escape was far from complete. The control stone that deactivated the teleportation artifact had a hidden mechanism that alerted us caretakers when the device was disabled, in the unlikely case that the children managed to disarm it.
In other words, Susan already knew the children intended to escape, and she was not a woman anyone could challenge and live to tell the tale.
I hated war with every fiber of my being. I loathed it with an intensity that consumed my soul day after day, but I never expressed it aloud. Upon hearing my name in the refuge's hallways, men spat on the ground with contempt, women crossed themselves as if they had seen the devil, and children hid under their beds trembling with terror.
They said that I, the Lady of Steel, would make even the mutants pale in comparison. And they were right. I knew it and accepted it as the price of my decision.
My designated purpose was to raise intelligent children day after day to send them as tribute to the Parasites. Though Cassie naively believed the Parasites simply ate the children, the truth was infinitely more horrific: I was one of the few who knew the real reality.
The Parasites did not devour the children; instead, they used their bodies as incubators to give life to their own species. They killed the little ones and deposited their eggs in each of them, profaning their innocent bodies with unimaginable cruelty.
After the egg hatched in the darkness of the flesh, it released a larva that grew gradually while consuming its host from the inside out, feeding voraciously on human blood, flesh, and brain, thus giving birth to an entirely different being: a fully formed parasite that would perpetuate the cycle of horror.
Though these beings could infect any species, the specialized breeding of children proved the most profitable in the long term. This was because the more intelligent a child was, the greater the potential and intelligence the parasite born from their remains acquired. That was the true and terrible reason for the existence of this orphanage I ran with an iron hand.
As the imposed leader of the underground refuge, I committed atrocities that would disgust even the Demon King himself to demoralize my people and make them surrender before facing battle against an enemy they could not defeat.
It was deeply ironic that I did it precisely to save as many lives as possible from a worse fate.
I tried to have the Parasites raise their human livestock without the people of my refuge experiencing the devastating force of their claws directly. That is why I was here, in this position of apparent power that was in reality a prison, for I possessed knowledge and powers no other refugee had at their disposal. After all, I was not born in these catacombs they called home; I knew the outside world and its horrors.
Consequently, the pathetic existence of the adults was inextricably linked to that of those innocent children. The harsh truth was that the adults lived because the children died in their place, a constant and ruthless sacrifice. The underground refuges were built with a single purpose: for women to procreate and give birth ceaselessly, while each child was collected and sent to the various orphanages strategically created by the parasites.
We had no other viable option; the parasites were not only extremely powerful, but the very existence of the underground refuge ironically depended on their protection due to another equally terrifying threat: the mutants.
Most of these deformed beings were incredibly strong and dangerous, making it impossible for common humans to defend themselves on their own. We were forced to grit our teeth and swallow the bile of our dignity, finding ourselves locked up and living like cattle in an invisible pen.