Chapter 245
“People are beings who persist through the memories of others.”
It’s often said that those who leave deep imprints on others continue to live in their hearts even after death.
But what of the opposite?
What happens when the only woman who ever truly lived and breathed in a man’s world forgets him?
The moment Ysaris broke her oath, Cain experienced death.
Everything that constituted his being shattered. Cain Jenut ceased to exist.
And so did “Ysaa.”
With Cain gone, the Ysaris Chernian he alone remembered—the girl, the woman he loved and who loved him—fractured and evaporated.
From that moment on, Ysaris was no longer his lover.
Ysaris Tennilath. A stranger wearing the corpse of the dead Ysaris Chernian.
That was the shape she took in Kazhan’s eyes.
“You asked me why I never spoke of Cain. Why I never talked openly with you.”
His crimson eyes, dark and sunken, traced her face—sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two—every era of the woman he loved overlapping like ghosts. The years of loneliness and torment, believing he was the only one who remembered, rose unbidden.
“What could I have said to you, who’d wiped Cain from your mind? At best, it would’ve been a corpse lamenting to another corpse.”
There was nothing to say to a stranger who didn’t know him—or herself. He wasn’t so weak as to bare his wounds to an outsider.
“And I’ve no taste for self-flagellation. I had no desire to relive watching a thing wearing Ysaris’ face deny Cain again.”
A single mention of Cain would force him to witness her rejection anew.
Kazhan was already wretched enough. He had no intention of pouring salt on a mortal wound or branding himself with searing iron.
And so, he mourned. Alone.
For himself. For his lover. For their deaths.
“A shame, Princess.”
This was why, from the engagement onward, he called her Princess.
“Why should I grant your request, Empress?”
And after marriage, Empress.
Kazhan could never treat Ysaris Tennilath as Ysaris Chernian.
The only legacy she left him—the only thing he truly possessed—was her body.
“I told you, didn’t I? You’re mine. Don’t handle yourself carelessly.”
He had a rightful claim to Ysaris’ flesh. At least, he believed so.
The blood-soaked path he carved as Uzephia’s tyrant was all for her. He’d even secured her consent to marry.
And so, Kazhan took the body of the living Ysaris Tennilath—the corpse of the dead Ysaris Chernian. He buried himself in the traces of his beloved, devouring them again and again.
“You resent me, but know this, I suffered as much as you did. Perhaps more.”
Kazhan didn’t always cleanly separate past and present. Watching her, speaking to her, holding her—he wavered endlessly between the two.
He told himself she was a different person, yet searched for Chernian in her. Resented her, yet obsessed. Watched her fall, yet desperately protected her. His words and actions diverged; his reason and instincts split.
Madness was the right word.
In truth, Kazhan had been mad since the moment Ysaris denied him. A ghost of the past haunting a living body.
His upbringing, his exile, years of Tennilath’s corruption, and tragedies born of irreversible misunderstandings—
In a world that bent and broke him, love for one woman was his only tether.
Even now, as Ysaris said goodbye, Kazhan loved her.
……
……
Silence settled in the study.
Between the two, standing motionless, it was Kazhan who finally spoke again.
“You could have said something too.”
“…Said what?”
At her guarded reply, his voice dragged, slow and deliberate.
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