A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones - Bella Forrest Page 0,57

wished to see more. Naturally, my abilities didn’t work here as well as they should have, but I managed to disappear from their sight for a while.”

The Valkyries were dumbfounded, but they didn’t stop searching. The Druid was taken to his appropriate place in Purgatory, though the World Crusher knew nothing of what would happen next for him. She went deep inside one of the giant mountains in a timid exploration. Darkness reigned cold and supreme here. Oddly enough, it felt like home.

“The Valkyries had spurned me, and I resented them for it. They were beautiful and glorious and strong, and they had turned me away,” the World Crusher wrote. “It didn’t feel right. The Berserkers were worse. I’d found comfort in the darkness, but it was there that the punishers thrived. And while the Valkyries were the kind who menacingly drew their swords to warn me, the Berserkers only drew their swords if they planned to use them. They fought me viciously.”

Their blades of pure darkness kissed the steel of her scythe. Black sparks flew angrily whenever their weapons met. These beings covered in shadows had the Valkyries’ eyes but none of their grace. They were violent and mean and vindictive, and they threw the Reaper out of the mountain. She tumbled down the ridge, dizzy and embarrassed. By the time she hit the hard ground at the bottom, she resented this world and the creatures in it.

“I was angry and rejected,” the Reaper said. “And when Order came out to find me, I looked like a fool. She was an astonishing presence. Order was like Death, in a sense. You knew who she was. What she was. What she could do. You understood that this was one of the primal forces of the universe… there was no messing around with someone like her. Worst of all, she never cared for my reasons. She never cared to understand who I was or why I’d come here. No, Order decreed that I did not belong. Nothing else mattered.”

Her face was the last thing the World Crusher saw before an invisible force yanked her from Purgatory and threw her back into her realm, where only Death and the Reaper truly existed.

Only then did I truly understand how lonely the World Crusher must have felt in that moment. How utterly empty and isolated, to be forced to tread between the interesting realms but never be allowed to partake in any of them. Yes, I understood what had hurt her. and I knew a reaction would follow.

A break was sorely needed; reading the World Crusher’s pages was a scarily intense experience. I dreaded going back into her story. Feeling what she’d felt on top of my own sensation was too much, even for someone like me, but I was too far in to turn back now.

“This is so heavy on one’s soul,” I murmured, looking at my husband. He’d stayed by my side on the black marble lectern this whole time.

“Can you take any more?” he asked.

“I can’t stop…” I’d come so far, and the truth was literally beneath my fingertips.

He pressed his lips against my temple. “Remember that I am here for you.”

“I know, babe…” I took a deep breath, bracing myself for more of the World Crusher’s writing. “Round three, here I come,” I mumbled, thankful to have my husband’s unwavering support. The Ghoul Reapers were still lounging about, some dozing off, others drawing circles in the white dust that had settled over parts of the marbled floor. I found myself staring at their murals. What work and talent had gone into making them… Their souls wasted and forced to remain here on Biriane forever. It broke me. They deserved better.

Maybe the World Crusher deserved better too. Either way, the more I read, the more I resented Death for having kept this from us. From me. More often than not, I’d been told we were much alike, but everything here was telling me the exact opposite. Maybe we looked similar, but our characters and our moral compasses were nothing alike. I would never have lied to my creations the way she lied to us. What had she hoped to accomplish by doing any of this? Surely, we would’ve helped. But her ego was just too big. Too toxic to allow her to think straight. It had to be her ego, for nothing else sounded anywhere near reasonable as an excuse.

In the book, decades went by. Centuries. Millennia. Just more of the