Chapter 924: You Are Of My Blood
The world held its breath around him.
Asher stood there, every nerve bright with shock, trying to decide whether he had misheard the most impossible sentence of his life.
His voice ca out raw and unsteady. “W‑What did you just say?”
The woman did not blink. She didn’t need to. Light moved around her in slow, patient waves, obedient to the simple fact that she existed. She began to walk toward him—unhurried, soundless, as if even the ground thought twice about getting in her way. With the barest flick of two fingers, she brushed the air.
The Chronophage—an artifact that had devoured tilines and swallowed gods’ courage—shivered, folded in on itself like a bad dream, and vanished. Not a ripple left behind. As if the universe had decided it would be less complicated if that thing had never been there at all.
“I am Heliara,” she said, the na seemingly echoing throughout his very soul. Her eyes were radiant gold, bright enough to put heat on his cheeks. “Your mother. And I am here to take you back with .”
“What…” Asher’s stomach dipped. His mind searched for sowhere to stand and found nothing. He shook his head, anger and confusion tangling in his chest. “No. Wait. How could you be my mother? I don’t know about this life, but in my previous life my mother was no divine being like you. She was an ordinary human who died… trying to save with whatever strength she had.” His jaw locked. “You can’t be her.”
Heliara’s face didn’t move. No flinch, no frustration, no pity. “This is not the ti to explain things to you,” she said, voice level enough to slice. “You won’t understand.”
“I will understand perfectly fine.” His voice hardened. It surprised him, how steady it sounded when everything in him wasn’t. “So I’m not going anywhere until you explain what the hell is going on.”
“I can’t…yet,” Heliara said. She stood close now—close enough that the gold in her eyes turned the edges of his vision warm. “But you have to co with . Your actions have consequences, and now you must face them.”
Sothing snapped across his patience like dry twigs. “Consequences? Are you fucking kidding ?” His laugh was short and vicious. “What do you think I’ve been facing all this ti?”
He stepped toward her until the gold in the air prickled his skin. “Do you know how long I’ve been cursed into an endless cycle of suffering? And just when I thought I escaped my damned fate after soone I loved suffered much more than , I lost my people again. All of them. And then you—” his voice broke, then steadied on anger because it was easier than anything else “—you show up right after I lose everything all over again and claim to be my mother. You obviously have the power to end this if you wished it, before I lost everything. But you didn’t. So I don’t care who you are or how powerful you are. Don’t think you have the right to claim to be my mother and insult my actual mother. I am not going anywhere with you.”
He turned. Not because of his anger. But because he was afraid of facing a reality that would shatter whatever was left in his heart.
But he didn’t make it through the first step.
The world locked.
His breath froze halfway in his throat. His limbs refused him. Even the tiny muscles in his eyes ignored orders. It wasn’t pain. It was the absence of permission. Asher reached for fla, for rage, for anything that would answer, and found himself trapped in a shape his own body wouldn’t acknowledge.
“You have no choice. I am taking you with , whether you like it or not.” Heliara’s voice ca to him through the stillness, unraised, unhurried.
Inside the cage of his skull he scread at his muscles. No! No!! He tried to move a finger, the corner of a mouth, an eyelid. Nothing yielded. His immortal will, which had held under worse things than gods, t sothing colder than law.
The air changed.
It went colder than cold—past winter, past the quiet of deep caves, into a temperature of aning where life wasn’t a suggestion.
“My son won’t be going anywhere with you.”
A voice followed—the kind of voice that arrives already inside your bones, that your marrow rembers and your blood obeys.
The grip on Asher’s body snapped like old wire. He dragged in a breath that felt like ripping cloth. Knees rembered how to lock. His vision stung, then cleared, then widened as he looked toward the source of the voice.
An old man walked out of the dark that wasn’t there a mont ago.
He wore a cloak of dark silver that drank the light and gave none back. White hair fell from his crown to the middle of his back; his beard ran thick to his chest. His eyes were a dull, tired red—the kind of color one would see in banked coals when the fire pretends it has gone to sleep.
And Asher knew that face the way a blade knows the hand that taught it to swing.
“Duncan… Doru?” he whispered, half relief, half disbelief. The Hell Warden. The master of the Tower of Hell. The man who had his back in the tower and taught him vital things to survive as a demon, “What are you—”
The sky above Duncan changed color as if the world were rembering an older palette. The bright blue, the newborn gold sunlight, the gentle white moon—all that Heliara’s arrival had healed and blessed—recoiled from the space above him.
Dark green bled outward in a slow spill, thick and oily, until it stained the high air. Lightning of the sa color crawled through those clouds in jagged veins, flashing without thunder. The moon on his side of the sky turned the color of venom and pulsed once, as if it had a heartbeat.
Where Duncan’s shadow fell, the grass that had fought its way up monts ago shriveled and lay down. Leaves curled. Blossoms blackened at their edges and fell, one by one, like a shy surrender. Fruit clung for a heartbeat out of habit and then softened into rot that smoked on the branch, as if held by death’s hands. The soil went from warm to grave-cold underfoot. Dead things, newly alive, rembered their first duty.
He kept walking.
With every step, the region of death followed him, a moving island of on that swallowed warmth and gave back nothing but certainty. He ca to a stop a few paces from Asher. The air around the three of them—Asher, Heliara, Duncan—congealed into borders.
To his left, Heliara’s half of the sky burned clean, bright, the sun rich and impossible, the wind slling like life and light.
To his right, above Duncan, the dark green roiled and crackled; the wind slled of death and darkness.
Asher stood between them and felt like a man being asured.
Heliara’s eyes—those radiant suns—changed as her gaze briefly set upon the old man. The gold went a shade deeper, like a ripple under clear water. The effect lasted a breath, then her face set again into sothing that didn’t need expressions.
“You…” Asher said, forcing the word out past the doubt. “Who are you really?” He realized that this man whom he considered as his master was not just so seasoned, old vampire nor a demon but sothing much more terrifying. Could it be…
Duncan’s eyes went from dull coal to ember with a subtle, hungry glow. For a heartbeat—less than that—sothing looked out from behind them that was older than life, older than realms, older than rules. The dark green sky over him deepened, and thunder finally rembered how to rumble, slow and thick.
His lips moved, “I am many things,” he said, and the words were almost kind, in the way a knife can be tidy. His gaze slid to Asher and held. “But above them all and what matter the most is that, you are of my blood..son.”
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