All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 251
- Chapter 260
298 chapters
Chapter 254. Shadows Over Nations
was in the wake of the Mending Tide that the world was scrubbed raw with hope. The reconstruction in Silverhold was not a desperate struggle for life but rather an act of focused, almost joyful creation. New stones were laid with songs instead of curses. The name "Amelia" became interwoven in daily life to be synonymous with safety, with the dawn, and with a second chance.But in the quiet spaces where power was brokered and information was traded, a different, colder current began to flow. It started as a whisper-a ghost in the machinery of the new peace.Ethan, his body healed but his spirit still attuned to the frequencies of dread, was the first to notice the pattern. He had been given a quiet chamber in the Citadel, a place to recuperate and continue his archival work. His task was to help compile a true history of the war against the blight, to ensure no lesson was forgotten. But the documents that crossed his desk-trade ledgers, diplomatic correspondence, scout reports from th
Chapter 255. The Prophet Unmasked
Unseen manipulator. Ghost in the ledger. The idea festered in the council chambers of Silverhold: a splinter none could quite extract. They analyzed trade routes, interrogated captured low-level cultists who knew nothing, and sifted through the ashes of the Screaming Pinnacle. They found only echoes and dead ends. The architect of their suffering was a silhouette, a void in the shape of a mind.It was Ethan, haunted by the Shadow's lingering chill and driven by a scholar's obsessive need for answers, who finally found the thread. He wasn't searching in the recent past, but in the ancient one. Buried in a sealed annex of the Citadel's archives, a place even the League's record-keepers had forgotten, lay a collection of artifacts recovered from the Aegis Spire in the years following its fall. Not weapons or tools of power, but personal effects. The detritus of the Keepers' final days.Among yellowed maps and shattered focusing crystals lay a small, locked chest of Veridian heartwood, it
Chapter 256. Mentor’s Betrayal
The journey back to Silverhold was a silent, funereal procession. The revelation hung over them, a shroud wrought from betrayal and a grief so profound it defied tears. Amelia was a statue of sorrow, her glowing carvings seeming to burn with a cold, shameful light. The last whispered words of the Prophet, "I will free you from the cage of being," were a poison in all their minds. This was not the ranting of a fanatic but the twisted love song of a broken heart.For days, Amelia withdrew. She dismissed her guards, her attendants, even Sophia's gentle offers of companionship. She stayed in her chamber, and from within, they could sometimes hear a low, resounding hum-a sound of such immense, concentrated anguish that it made the very stones of the Citadel vibrate in sympathy. She was communing with the echoes, they realized. Reliving every memory, every conversation, searching for the cracks through which the Silence had slithered into the man she loved.When she finally emerged, she was
Chapter 257. Sophia's Crisis
The world had been saved. Amelia was back. The celebrations had faded into the steady hopeful rhythm of reconstruction. And Sophia was utterly, completely lost.It was a quiet, insidious feeling, like a slow leak in a wineskin. At first, it was masked by sheer exhaustion, by the bone-deep relief that the fighting was over. But as days turned into a week, then two, the absence of purpose began to yawn before her, a chasm she had no idea how to cross.Her shards were gone, fused into Amelia’s being. The Fire that had warmed her chest, the Winds that had hummed at her hip, the deep, geometric certainty of Understanding—they were now part of a greater whole. She could still feel their echo within her, a faint, permanent resonance, but it was a memory of power, not power itself. She was a lake after the river that fed it had been diverted; she was slowly, inevitably, going stagnant.She tried to find her place. She walked the healing wards of Silverhold, but the physicians there no longer
Chapter 258. Ethan's Reunion
The world had a new center of gravity, and her name was Amelia. In the weeks since her return, the Citadel of Silverhold had reoriented itself around her quiet, luminous presence. Councils were held where she listened more than she spoke. Disputes were brought to her not for judgment, but for the profound, settling peace that seemed to radiate from her. Ethan watched it all from a careful distance, a scholar observing a phenomenon he had helped create, yet could scarcely comprehend.He had been avoiding her.The excuse was his health. The physical ravages of his imprisonment and the Shadow's touch had faded, thanks to Amelia's initial, sun-warm mora of light. But the psychic wounds were deeper, more complex. The memory of the violation was a cold stone in his gut. The Shadow was gone, but the feel of it remained—a greasy residue on his soul, a perpetual instinct to flinch from strong emotions, from connection, from the very light that Amelia embodied.And then there was her. The woman
Chapter 259. Carving of Doom
The fragile peace which had fallen on Silverhold was a thin sheet of ice on a deep, dark lake. Ethan’s reunion with Amelia had been a time of profound healing, a crack of real sunlight in the gloom of the recent revelations. But the shadow of Alaric’s betrayal—the cosmic horror of his claim—lay over everything, a permanent winter in the heart of their summer.Amelia, who had become the still point around which the world turned, began to grow restless. The serene smiles she offered to petitioners became more strained. The obelisk carvings on her skin, which usually pulsed with a soft, steady rhythm, began to flicker unpredictably, sometimes flaring with anxious light, sometimes dimming to near-invisibility. She took to walking the highest parapets of the Citadel at night, her head tilted as if listening to a distant, dissonant melody.Sophia found her there one night-a lone, luminous figure against the star-dusted velvet of the sky. She wasn't just looking up at the stars; she was trac
Chapter 260. The World Fractures
The Carving of Doom was a secret held in the white-knuckled grip of Amelia’s inner circle. To reveal it would be to unleash the very despair they sought to fight. So, they wore masks. Amelia continued her serene progress through Silverhold, her touch bringing peace, her presence a balm. Sophia forced herself to tend her garden, the simple act of nurturing life a desperate prayer against the coming nihilism. Kaelen drilled the guards, finding solace in the straightforward geometry of discipline and order.But the world wasn't blind. It saw the cracks in the saintly facade. It felt the shift in the wind.The first fissure appeared in the Free Cities. A delegation arrived in Silverhold, not with the awestruck reverence of pilgrims, but with the polished calculation of merchants. Their leader, a sleek, silver-tongued man named Lord Valerius of Port Seline, bowed low before Amelia in the great hall.“Lady Amelia,” he began, his voice with a respect not quite reaching his eyes. “Your return
Chapter 261. The Crimson Sickness
The political fractures splitting the world were a luxury, a debate for those with full bellies and secure walls. It was a luxury that disappeared overnight.It began in Port Seline, Lord Valerius’s own city. A merchant ship, the Golden Venture, limped into harbor, its sails stained and tattered. The crew was dead, not from storm or sword, but from a sickness that left them drenched in their own blood, their bodies marked by strange, crimson weals that pulsed with a faint, internal light. The harbor master, fearing a resurgence of the Blood Plague, quarantined the ship and burned the bodies.It was too late.The sickness did not spread through the air, or by touch, or even by the psychic miasma of former plagues. It was carried in the blood. A single drop was a seed. A mosquito, gorged on an infected dockworker, became a flying dagger. A shared razor in a barbershop, a brawl with split knuckles, a mother wiping a child's scraped knee-each was a highway for the blight.They called it t
Chapter 262. A Cure That Fails
The pressure in the Citadel was a physical force, thick enough to taste. It was the flavor of blood, sweat, and crumbling hope. Lord Valerius had abandoned all pretense of diplomacy. He paced the war room like a caged wolf, his accusations now a constant, low growl. General Yvaine’s stoic silence was worse, a judgment carved from granite. They didn't need to speak; their presence was a demand. Do something. Or step aside and let us burn the infected in their homes.Amelia had withdrawn into a deep, terrifying stillness. For three days she had secluded herself in the chamber that had once housed the Shard of Understanding, now nothing but an empty room filled with the ghost of sharp, silver light. She was not praying. She was working out a calculation. The obelisk carvings that tattooed her skin, normally a soft glow, were dark, as if all her energy was being drawn within for one colossal effort.Sophia felt the building tension like a coming thunderstorm, as she was barred from the in
Chapter 263. Sophia's Jealousy
The hush in the Citadel after the failed cure was a different kind of plague. It wasn't the hungry silence of the blight, but the stunned, hollow silence of a faith shattered. The air itself felt thin, starved of the hope that had so recently filled it. And in that void, something ugly and familiar began to grow in Sophia’s heart.A small, cold seed of resentment, it had been, watered by the sight of Amelia's profound, theatrical failure. Sophia, at least, had failed quietly, dignified in her uselessness, holding hands and offering water. Amelia had turned a plague ward into a slaughterhouse with a wave of her hand. The Saint Reborn hadn't simply failed-she'd made a spectacle of her own impotence.And yet, they still looked at her.That was the real poison. In the days and weeks that followed, the council, the people, even her friends, they didn't look to Sophia, the one who had actually healed hundreds with nothing but stubborn compassion and a shard's power. No, they flocked around