All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 271
- Chapter 280
298 chapters
Chapter 274. Ethan's Confession
The hush in Amelia's chamber was a living thing: thick, heavy, redolent with the scent of blood and ozone and failed miracles. The shard of gold remained in the wall, a dull accusing eye. On the bed, Amelia did not sleep so much as was absent. Her breathing was the faintest whisper, a suggestion of life where none seemed possible. Her skin was translucently pale, and the dark carvings upon it looked less like inscriptions of power, more like cracks in porcelain.They had taken shifts. Kaelen, whose will was a tangible force, would sit vigil, his silent presence a bulwark against the nothingness that threatened to claim her. Sophia, her healer's hands useless, would change the cool clothes on her brow and try to feed her spoonfuls of broth that were mostly refused by a body that had forgotten how to swallow.But it was Ethan who spent the most time there. While the others fought the tangible wars—the Healing War in the wards, the political war with Faren—Ethan fought the war of memory.
Chapter 275. Sophia's Loyalty
The Citadel had learned a new rhythm, its cadence determined by the shallow, fragile breath from Amelia's chamber. The grand strategies, the political maneuvering, even the grim progress of the Healing War-all of it felt distant, secondary to the vigil held in that quiet room. The world was waiting to see if its heart would beat again.Sophia drifted through the halls like a ghost herself. The fierce, protective fury that had sustained her during the confrontation with Faren had burned away, leaving behind a fine, cold ash of exhaustion. She would check on the orphanage, on the wards; her movements were efficient but robotic. Her own garden, that once sanctuary, felt like foreign ground. The vibrant red of the roses seemed garish, an insult to the gray pallor that had settled over everything.And always, her path led back to that door.She found Ethan there, as she knew she would. He was sleeping in the chair, his head tilted back at an uncomfortable angle, a forgotten book open on hi
Chapter 276. Carving of Sacrifice
The plague did not arrive with a bang, but with a silence. It was the silence of the sparrows that did not greet the dawn, the silence of the market square where the cheerful clamour of barter had once thrived, and the silence that had fallen over Lyra’s little brother, Kael, whose laboured breaths were the only sound in their small, dark room.It was called the Grey Sorrow. It did not kill quickly or violently. It leeched the colour from the world, first from the periphery of one’s vision, then from the very soul. Victims would speak in monotones, their emotions fading like a washed-out painting. They would stop eating, not out of nausea, but out of a profound, grey apathy. Finally, they would simply lie down, their eyes open but seeing nothing, and cease to breathe, as if they had forgotten how. The city of Aethel was drowning in shades of ash and dust.Lyra fought it with every fiber of her being. She forced bright broths between Kael’s lips, described the vibrant crimson of sunset
Chapter 277. Mentor’s Ascension
The stillness after the Rebirth was a fragile thing, and Mentor felt its weight like a physical pressure. He walked through the streets of a city that had forgotten the taste of fear, and the very peace felt like a betrayal. The vibrant, tri-toned light of the new Obelisk, the laughter from the Caduceus Circle’s hospice, the open, trusting faces of the people—it was all a beautiful, dangerous lie. He was a man built for the stark geometry of survival, for the clear, brutal lines of enemy and ally. This soft, blooming world had no place for him.He was the last true Warden. The others had become gardeners, diplomats, healers. They spoke of harmony and balance, words that felt like ash in his mouth. They had forgotten the most fundamental lesson: that the universe was not built on balance, but on power. And power, left unguarded, would always be stolen.His obsession was the vault. While Ethan saw it as a sanitarium for contained sorrow and Sophia saw it as a memorial, Mentor saw it as a
Chapter 278. The Battle of the Obelisk
The lull that followed the plague was not the Grey Sorrow’s hollow emptiness. It was a quiet thick with memory, a city breathing deep for the first time in years. Aethel was a scarred jewel, its colours restored but its psyche forever marked. And at the centre of its collective memory, both a shrine and a scar, was the sun-bleached carving of Lyra on the fountain rim.For Kael, Lyra’s brother, the memory was a constant, low-grade hum of pain beneath the vibrant noise of life. He had grown from a boy rescued from grey oblivion into a man, his eyes the same rich earth as his sister’s, but shadowed by a loss he could never fully articulate. He became a Warden of the Obelisk, part of the order founded by Old Man Hemlock to understand the black spire and protect the city from its price. They were scholars, not soldiers, dedicated to ensuring such a sacrifice would never be needed again.But memory, as the Obelisk itself seemed to testify, is a fragile bulwark against the hunger of the prese
Chapter 279. Amelia’s Decision
The memory of light was a ghost in Amelia’s veins. It was the echo of a white-hot inferno that had once coursed through her, the phantom weight of a consequence so vast it had unmade a war-machine and a man in the same breath. She had been Kael, the brother, the Warden, the final, furious argument in the Battle of the Obelisk. And then she had been nothing. And then, impossibly, she had been again.Her return was not a resurrection. It was a re-calibration. The Obelisk, that silent arbiter of cosmic balances, had not been finished with her. It had consumed the life of Kael, the boy who had become a weapon, but it had preserved the essence within—the cumulative understanding, the love, the sacrifice that had defined both Lyra and her brother. That essence had been poured back into a new vessel, carved from the same obsidian as the monument itself and given breath by its inscrutable will. She was Amelia, the Remembered.She looked human. She felt the sun on her skin, the ache of old memo
Chapter 280. Sophia Intervenes
The hush after Amelia’s departure was the loudest sound Elara had ever heard. It was not an empty silence, but a dense, heavy one, filled with the ghost of a completed pattern. The Sky-Shard was gone, the Resonant Dissonance had vanished, and the world had snapped back into a focus so sharp it was almost painful. The people of Aethel moved through their days with a reverent caution, as if afraid a sudden noise might shatter the newly restored order. They tended their gardens, repaired their homes, and looked with uncomprehending eyes at the new mandala carved beside Lyra’s figure on the fountain—a beautiful, complex mystery.For Elara, now the de facto leader of a city grieving a living idea, the mystery was a burden. Amelia had been their compass, their interpreter for the Obelisk’s cold language. Now, they were adrift. The Wardens, once scholars of consequence, had become caretakers of a void. Their meetings were hushed, circular things, filled with the question none could answer: "W
Chapter 281. Amelia Refuses
The hush after Amelia’s departure was a sacred, terrifying thing. In the council chambers of Aethel, it was a weight that stifled debate. For Elara, leading a city that had lost its north star, it was a constant, humming anxiety. But for Sophia, the quiet orphan with twilight eyes, the silence was a language. She spent her hours not in frantic study, but in stillness at the base of the fountain, her fingers tracing the sun-bleached image of Lyra and the complex, mysterious mandala that was Amelia’s legacy. She was listening to the spaces between the stories, and what she heard was a new, dissonant note.It began as a whisper, a faint, gritty sensation at the edge of perception, like fine sand in the mechanism of the world. Then, the small, impossible things started. A patch of snow in a sunlit courtyard refused to melt, instead burning with a cold, blue flame. A perfectly healthy oak tree shed its leaves in a single afternoon, each leaf falling as a polished, black stone that rang aga
Chapter 282. Ethan’s Plan :
He finds a way to bind the plague into the shards.The golden dawn that had healed the Obelisk did not vanquish the Grey Sorrow. It had been suppressed, yes, its progress halted by Lyra’s ultimate sacrifice and the city’s hard-won stability. But a plague that feeds on emotion and life cannot be truly eradicated; it can only be quarantined. It had retreated into the shadows, into the forgotten corners and the wounded hearts of Aethel, a latent sickness waiting for a moment of collective weakness.Ethan knew this better than anyone. He was not a Warden, not a soldier, not a descendant of sacrifices. He was an archivist, a man whose world was the dust-scented, parchment-filled halls of the Great Library, a place that had become a sanctuary for those who preferred the company of the dead to the complexities of the living. He had been a young man during the Grey Sorrow, and while he had not lost his colour as completely as some, he had lost something else: his faith in grand, singular solu
Chapter 283. The Shards’ Rebirth
The stillness that settled over Aethel after Ethan’s binding of the plague was unlike any the city had known. It was not the hollow silence of the Grey Sorrow, nor the heavy, grief-stricken silence after a sacrifice, nor the tense quiet of waiting for the next disaster. This was a deep, profound, and gentle quiet, the sound of a world finally allowed to heal. The inverted shards, stored in their vault, hummed with a contained, neutralized energy. The Obelisk on its crag stood, its golden filigree gleaming softly in the sun, a monument to a balance that had been argued for, bled for, and finally, understood.But for Amelia, whose consciousness was now a permanent, shimmering pattern within that balance, the silence was not an end. It was the beginning. She perceived the world not through eyes, but through the flow of energy, the interconnected web of life and consequence. And she saw that while the sickness was contained, the vessel was… weary.The Obelisk had been a conduit for immens