Chapter 602: Fang’s Parting Gift. (Everything Works Out in The End - Mofjell- Cinematic Version)

’Understood.’

Fang knew that Na’thir cared less about his well-being than about losing the last tool he had outside the Duskbound Order’s ties.

Thinking about the White Feast awaiting him as a punishment for such a humiliating defeat, Fang cursed the other two fuckers for dropping dead and leaving this mess for him alone to clean up.

’Damn you all…’

Fang threw Shia one last vicious look before canceling his Blood Moon Sovereign Form.

His swollen muscles contracted, and the monstrous strength filling his limbs receded… only then did he withdraw his Dominion.

His Tree trembled as the enormous Blood Moon dimmed behind it… the moment he forfeited the challenge, a sharp pain cut through his soul!

"Urgh!"

Fang staggered out into the ruined forest, coughing up a mouthful of blood before he even managed to straighten his back.

For a few seconds, he remained hunched over, one hand braced against his knee… the backlash left his thoughts swimming, adding to the exhaustion accumulated from that pointless battle.

Still, his eyes swept across the ruined crimson forest.

He found Jasmine first.

She lay motionless on the broken ground, her once-silky hair falling across her face in dry, brittle strands… faint wrinkles marked the corners of her eyes, and her skin had lost some of its youthful fullness.

Her lips looked pale and slightly cracked. Her chest barely rose, and the powerful life force he had sensed from her earlier had dwindled to a fraction of its former strength.

A short distance away, Idriss leaned against his greatsword’s blade.

He looked even worse as blood soaked the ground beneath him, and his head hung against his chest… if not for the faint pulse lingering inside his body, Fang would have mistaken him for a corpse.

Two helpless victims… and merely tens of meters away.

Under any other circumstances, he would have moved toward them and finished them both.

Now, even standing upright made his knees tremble…

Still, he showed a crooked, sinister smile after noticing Shia’s Tree begin to dissolve and her figure emerge next to it.

As he kept stepping away, he watched the dying father struggle to lift his head toward his daughter.

"I left you a nice gift…"

Without another word, Fang turned and disappeared between the trees before Shia could spot him… in his current state, she could finish him without much of a struggle, or at least hold him down for less than a minute until the reinforcements dropped on them.

So, he ran… or he tried to, as his first few strides almost sent him sprawling… he caught a trunk, pushed himself forward, and kept running.

With Rain dead… Fang knew that the Spatial Jammer would remain active until its energy ran out, since it belonged to Rain.

He had to leave its range before he could escape to the Boundless Expanse.

After he was gone, Shia stood amid the last drifting particles of her Dominion… her head tilted backward, her tangled, bloody hair covering her face, exposing a single crimson eye that looked straight at Cruor’s giant Blood Moon above her.

The shriek of her chainsaws faded as the weapons dissolved in her hands.

"Shia…?"

Idriss watched her through the blood clinging to his lashes, barely managing to force her name from his throat.

After all the time he had spent staring at those Trees, praying for his daughter to return, the sight of her almost made him forget the condition of his own body.

"You… won?"

Shia lowered her head toward him.

Her bloody hair hid most of her face as she stepped away from the dissolving Tree, faltering once before moving faster.

Idriss wanted to reach for her… but his arms remained limp beside his knees, refusing to answer him even now.

Still, his little girl had come back.

And that was enough.

Shia dropped against his chest, and the impact forced a pained breath through his teeth.

He thought she was just too excited and meant to embrace him.

But before he could remind her of his injuries, he felt her mouth close around the side of his neck.

Then… Shia’s sharp teeth sank into her father’s flesh.

"Sh… ia…?"

She pulled her head back, tearing a mouthful free before swallowing it… Her face was that of his daughter, but at the same time… not.

Idriss stared at her through the sharp pain, struggling to understand what he saw… blood covered her lips, his blood, yet her gaze followed the fresh stream running down his neck with a hunger that frightened him more than the bite itself.

For a moment, he felt like he was staring at a wolf in human clothing… something that wore his daughter’s face while deciding where to sink its teeth next.

He recognized that same ravenous look from Fang’s Sovereign Form.

Something must have happened to her inside the Dominion…

The realization barely formed before Shia lowered her head for another bite, forcing him to endure the pain while his thoughts raced for a way to bring his daughter back.

He tried to move.

His fingers remained motionless against the ground.

Shia pressed him against his giant sword’s blade and continued feasting on his flesh… as he knelt there helplessly.

Pain overwhelmed his thoughts… yet his ruined body couldn’t even recoil.

He couldn’t push her away, cover his neck, or lift a hand between her mouth and his flesh.

All he could do was kneel there while his daughter ate him.

"Shia… it’s me…" he whispered.

She swallowed, breathing heavily against his neck before following the blood running down his chest.

His words changed nothing… and neither did Blee’der’s shouts. He kept calling for her to wake up, to stop, trying whatever he could to help her break out of such a frenzied, bestial state.

’Not like this…’

Idriss no longer cared about his life… if enduring those bites meant his daughter survived, he would let her eat until nothing remained.

But what would happen when she regained her senses?

When she recognized the flesh between her teeth and realized whose blood filled her stomach?

Despair crept into him as he pictured Shia kneeling over his remains, trying to understand what she had done… his little girl would spend the rest of her life remembering that she had eaten her own father.

How could he leave her with that?!

’Jasmine… if you can still hear me…’

Idriss reached out through a dimensional message, clinging to the only person who might still stop this.

’Please… stop her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing…’

Shia tore another mouthful from his shoulder, but his concern remained for his little girl, who would wake up afterward…

’Kill me yourself if you must… just don’t let her be the one to do it.’

He had never imagined begging someone to end his life while his daughter crouched against his chest.

Yet all he wanted was to spare her from finishing it.

’Please, Jasmine… don’t let her live with that burden… I beg.’

Idriss’s desperate message reached Jasmine through their dimensional connection, forcing her to turn her heavy head toward him.

Shia crouched against his chest, her tangled hair hiding what she was doing… then she raised her head, and Jasmine saw the blood spilling from her mouth.

A piece of flesh disappeared between her lips.

’Shia… stop…’

Distressed, Jasmine sent the plea through a dimensional message and pushed against the ground, but her elbow folded before she could raise her chest.

Her face struck the dirt, and by the time she managed to look up again, Shia had already sunk her teeth into another wound.

Jasmine tried dragging herself forward, scraping her fingers through the broken soil… barely any distance separated them, yet she couldn’t cross it.

A faint light stirred inside her concealed, ink-black eye.

’Jasmine, don’t.’

N’ibby’s voice reached her through their connection, losing its usual weary indifference.

’You already burned decades of your life putting Rain and the Lurker on Levi’s table! You can’t afford to use Scripture again!’

’Sorry, N’ibby… I have to.’

Jasmine ignored her warning and forced her eye open.

The forest lost its color as always… only this time, layers of Ilthorien inscriptions filled the trees, the shattered ground, and the two figures ahead of her. Some remained steady, while others shifted too quickly for her exhausted mind to follow.

It was like she could see a different reality… a reality crafted out of letters!

Writing her first true Scripture sentence earlier had brought her into Solarbound, transforming her concealed, inked eye into the Eye of Primordial Scripture.

Now, she could see the writing that defined a thing’s structure, its properties, and its connections to everything around it… But seeing those instructions didn’t mean she understood them all.

Jasmine focused on the crimson light descending upon Shia, following its inscriptions into the blood flowing through her veins.

There… something foreign clung to the writing.

A cluster of Ilthorien characters threaded through her blood’s inscriptions, resembling instructions someone had scribbled into a book in a different hand.

Only those characters responded to the Blood Moon’s light!

Each pulse awakened them, spreading their influence through the surrounding writing… moments later, Shia lowered her head for another bite.

Jasmine watched the sequence repeat and understood.

A curse.

The foreign inscriptions received the Moon’s influence and forced Shia’s blood to obey, driving her hunger.

She followed their connection upward, but the Moon’s inscriptions overwhelmed her sight… too many relationships intertwined for her to untangle in her condition.

Forcing reality to change without understanding what she altered demanded a terrible price. Her current condition proved that much… and commanding the curse to stop might consume what remained of her life.

So her gaze moved to the clouds beyond the Moon’s crimson rim.

An ink canopy could shade Shia where she crouched… but what happened when she moved beyond it? Or when the reinforcements carried her father away, and she followed them into the moonlight?

The curse would still be there, waiting.

Jasmine needed to hide the Moon across the entire forest… to make sure Shia could move through it without awakening that hunger again.

Jasmine lifted her trembling fingers.

Black ink gathered beside her hand, forming a smaller brush… even though it was small enough to fit in her hand, she still struggled to raise the tip and draw the first character.

The little warmth left in her body began to drain away.

Her brush faltered halfway through the next stroke, but she forced it onward, joining the Ilthorien inscriptions while darkness closed around her vision.

-Clouds, Conceal the Moon.-

The moment she finished the last stroke, her Origin Seed devoured more of the years she still possessed.

Whether the power came from an Origin Seed or not, the Universe’s Order demanded payment; in blood, in energy, in spirit, or in life force… it would receive it.

As Jasmine’s hand fell to her side, she caught the movement of the clouds through her muddled vision…

Their pale edges rushed across the stars, gathering over the enormous crimson disc as though an invisible hand drew a curtain across it.

From the corner of her eye, Jasmine watched through her fading vision as the red light dimmed on Shia’s shoulders while the foreign inscriptions within her blood fell dormant.

Still there… but dormant.

The last thing she saw was Shia raising her head from her father’s chest… no longer biting him.

Then… darkness consumed her reality.

Jasmine felt her skin drying and cracking as more years drained from her body… brittle strands of hair loosened against her cheek, falling away while the cold sank deeper into her limbs.

She couldn’t even move her fingers anymore.

Yet her lips curved into a faint, relieved smile… the movement split their dry skin, but she barely noticed the sting.

Shia had stopped.

Her friend had finally woken up… while her father still lived.

’I am not useless anymore…’

Jasmine held on to that last glimpse of them as her consciousness faded; the little relieved smile remained on her aging face…