The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 561: The legacy of a dead woman

SORENThe blood was already on my hands before I truly understood what I was cutting through.

It was warm, a stark, steaming contrast to the biting gale of the Northern Reaches, and it coated my palms in a slick, familiar glove. I didn’t remember the strike.

I only remembered the resistance of the mail, the give of the leather, and the sudden, heavy silence of the man who had been my own outrider three hours ago.

The sound of the field was wrong. It wasn’t the rhythmic, thunderous pulse of an organized clash. There were no lines, no banners held high to mark the boundary between us and them. Instead, it was the sound of a war that had turned inward and begun to eat its own heart.

Men were screaming at men who wore the exact same colors. They were shouting the same words, back and forth, a mirror image of frantic desperation.

"Traitor!"

"Stand down, he’s turned!"

"Kill him before he kills you!"

I watched a veteran sergeant, a man I’d decorated myself two winters ago, run at a young corporal.

The boy had his hands up, his shield lowered in a gesture of confused surrender. "I haven’t—" he started to say, his voice cracking with a terrifying innocence.

He never finished the sentence.

The sergeant’s blade took him in the throat, driven by a frantic, jagged panic that left no room for questions.

Everywhere I looked, the structure of the Imperial Army was disintegrating. Units that should have been fighting as a single, cohesive fist were shattered, turned into a dozen separate brawls where no one was winning.

Orders were being barked from three different directions, each voice claiming the same imperial authority, each command contradicting the last.

My own blade moved with a mechanical, cold autonomy. Someone lunged at me from the left, a man in the black-and-silver of my personal guard, and I did not pause to ask why he was aiming for my heart. I simply ended him.

The bodies were everywhere. They weren’t just from this afternoon’s skirmish; they were layered, a gruesome geological record of the last few days. Some were stiff and frosted over, the ones no one had the time or the sanity to move. The smell was a heavy, iron-thick fog that the wind couldn’t seem to blow away.

"Your Majesty—"

The voice cut through the ringing in my ears. A soldier, his face splattered with mud and gore, had spotted me through the chaos. For a fleeting second, his expression was a portrait of pure, unadulterated relief. It was the look of a man who thought the gods had finally arrived to set things right.

Then, the relief cracked.

Something else crawled over his features, something that did not belong on a man’s face while he was looking at his Emperor.

It was a flickering, unnatural distortion, a twitch in the jaw that looked like a puppet’s string being yanked too hard. His grip tightened on his spear. He didn’t hesitate. He charged.

I didn’t let him reach me. As he fell, I watched his eyes. I wanted to see the moment the light went out, but more than that, I wanted to see what had replaced it.

Three seconds later, another man, a scout who had literally shielded me from a stray arrow a moment before, turned on his heel.

The pattern was landing now, a terrifyingly consistent sequence: recognition of my face, followed by a brief glitch of the features, followed by a mindless, lethal attack.

Commands were being obeyed that I had never given. Men were moving in complex, flanking maneuvers on orders that no one present had issued.

Something is wrong, I thought, the coldness in my chest deepening. Not strategically wrong. Not tactically wrong. Wrong in a way I do not have a word for yet.

I caught the next one.

He was a young man, barely twenty, lunging with a rusted shortsword. Instead of driving my blade home, I stepped inside his reach, slammed my forearm into his chest, and pinned him against a supply wagon. I grabbed him by the collar, hauling him up until we were eye-to-eye.

"Look at me," I growled.

I found it. The color was wrong.

I don’t mean his eyes were a different shade. I mean the very substance of the iris was wrong. There was a glitch, a shifting, oily luminescence behind the glass of his eye. It looked like a flame burning in an airless room, a tiny, violet flicker that should not have been there.

The person underneath was still present. I could see him clawing at the surface of his own mind. His mouth opened, his lips trembling as he tried to form a word, but the sound that came out was a discordant, vibrating hum... A noise no human throat was designed to make.

Then, the color reasserted itself. The violet flame flared, winning back the ground the man had briefly held. His hands found my arm, his fingers digging in with a strength that felt more like a machine than a man.

I released him and stepped back, my heart thudding a heavy, dull rhythm against my ribs. What is this?

It had been a month since I rode out of the capital gates. A month since I felt the warmth of Eris’s hand in mine.

In that time, I had brought order back to the border territories, dismantled a puppet governor in the Winter Plains, opening grain stores that had been padlocked while the people starved. I had unraveled a forged trade suspension in the Silver Shores, restoring merchant networks that Vetra’s spiders had been strangling for years. I had seen the fortress of Cael Varrek, where the idea of the "True Empire" was still spreading like a contagion despite every head I took.

And now, I was here. In the Northern Reaches.

The reports had called this the worst of it. They were wrong. "Worst" was too small a word for what greeted me as the host city came into view.

It wasn’t smoke that hung over the city, but a specific, heavy quality of air, the kind of atmosphere that settles over a place where too many people have died in too small a space.

The graves were everywhere, mass pits dug with desperate haste, none of them marked. Some bodies hadn’t even made it to the pits; they lay in the gutters, their hands reaching for doors that would never open again.

The markings on the walls were what truly chilled me. They were carved into the stone, some burned in with hot irons, words in the old script, the ancient language that predated the Empire’s founding.

By order of the Emperor.

For the Emperor.

The Emperor commands.

I stood in the center of a square filled with the dead, looking at my own name used as a warrant for massacre. None of this had been my command. None of this was my will.

This is what my name looks like when someone else uses it as a weapon, I thought. It was a terrifyingly efficient poison.

The news of Vetra’s execution had reached the north long before I did. I had expected the resistance to crumble once their figurehead was gone. I had expected them to realize they were fighting for a ghost.

Instead, they had doubled down. The brutality was worse now, fueled by a frantic, cornered desperation. The logic was sickeningly simple: If Vetra could not win, then the Empire would not be allowed to survive her. If I was to remain the Emperor, they would ensure that my name became synonymous with every cooling body in every province I reclaimed.

Vetra was dead, but she had achieved a dark immortality. She had left her mark on the very souls of these men.

The exhaustion was a physical weight now, a leaden pressure in my joints that no amount of sleep could touch. The sleep wasn’t safe anyway; when I closed my eyes, I didn’t see darkness. I saw the blame.

I built the system she infected, I thought, watching the snow fall on the unburied. I trusted the men she was already turning. I sat in the palace playing at diplomacy while she was out here, turning my people into monsters. These bodies are partly mine.

I wanted to reach for the power Aenithra had promised me in the vision. She had told me that to reach my true nature... to become the what the world required... I had to release my humanity. I had to let go of the tether.

It should have been easy. I was a child of Vetra’s coldness; I hadn’t been given much humanity to hold onto. And yet, every time I reached for that void, something pulled me back.

A face. A voice. The specific, grounding weight of Eris against my side in the middle of the night.

I cannot release what I am not willing to lose, I realized. And I wasn’t willing to lose her. Not for a throne, and not for a world.

I looked back at the soldier I had pinned. He was dead now, caught by a stray bolt from his own side, but I couldn’t stop thinking about his eyes.

It wasn’t magical exhaustion. It wasn’t propaganda. There was something occupying them from the inside. Something placed there.

The memory of Vetra’s experiments surfaced... the things I had seen in her private laboratories before I had her chained. The way she had toyed with the boundaries between mind and matter, soul and vessel.

She prepared for this, the thought arrived with a sickening finality. Long before the trial, long before she stepped onto that platform, she prepared for the possibility of her death. She planted a seed.

And her goal was to burn Nevareth to complete ash.

What kind of spell was this? I wondered, looking at the violet flicker in the eyes of the fallen. What did she leave in these men before she died?

The war wasn’t over. Vetra hadn’t lost. She had simply changed the battlefield from the provinces to the very minds of the men I was supposed to lead.

I wiped the blood from my hands, but the stain remained.