8mi Chapter 571 - 570- A Mother’s Pleading for a Child
Chapter 571 - 570- A Mother’s Pleading for a Child
She saw her husband broken, bloodied, and something primal snapped. She saved him—pouring every ounce of her power into a shielding reversal that pulled him back from death’s edge. The toll was massive. Her body convulsed, lungs seizing as dark circles bloomed under her eyes.In that moment, while she shielded Remus, the demons snatched their son. Tiny cries pierced the night as clawed hands yanked him away into the portal of shadow.
"NOOO! MY BABY! GIVE HIM BACK!" Tina wailed, voice breaking with raw maternal agony. She lunged forward, but her legs gave out, forbidden power’s curse ripping her apart from within.
The last image burned into her soul—her son’s tiny hand reaching out, his innocent face twisted in fear, vanishing into the dark.
Emotions crashed over her like a storm. The desperate love of a mother, the gut-wrenching emptiness as part of her heart was stolen. Tears flooded her eyes, mixing with blood from her lips.
’My son... my little one... I carried you, birthed you, fed you... and now they’re taking you? No... please... come back to mommy...’
For years after, she would wake to that reaching hand.
Not every night.
That would have been kinder.
It came on the good nights, the nights when she had almost laughed over supper, the nights when she had nearly believed grief could dull. Then sleep would drag her back there. The nursery. The shattered glass. The portal. That tiny hand. Always that hand.
She searched.
Gods, how she searched.
Remus sent men quietly. Tina went less quietly. Border markets, black archives, abandoned shrines, smugglers, demon cultists, hedge prophets, dying oracles, anyone with a rumor. She spent coin they did not have. She called in favors she should have saved. She tortured one cultist herself after he smiled while describing infant sacrifices.
He knew nothing useful.
She still did not regret what she did to him.
Months became years. Hope changed shape. At first it was bright and savage: *he is alive, I will take him back.* Then it became narrower: *if he is alive, let him be warm.* Then smaller still: *if he is dead, let me know.* That last one shamed her so much she never admitted it aloud.
Remus grieved differently. Quieter. He turned grief into work and work into silence. Tina turned grief into obsession and obsession into damage. They did not stop loving each other, but they became two survivors orbiting the same wound.
And then the mana sickness began.
Not suddenly. First the exhaustion. Then the hands trembling after spells. Then waking cold no matter how many blankets she used. Then the blue in her skin. Then the slow humiliation of being helped into bed by servants who remembered the woman she had been.
She knew what had caused it.
Not the demons alone.
Not fate.
Her choice.
She had used forbidden reversal beyond any safe threshold because Remus was dying and her son was being taken and she had chosen, in one impossible second, to save the husband she could reach while losing the child she could not.
That choice ate her alive afterward.
What mother does that? her worst thoughts whispered.
What mother survives that?
The guild burned around them, survivors dragging them to safety, but the damage was done.
That night became the last time she held her child, the last pure joy before years of searching, fading hope, and this cursed illness that followed.
The guild mistress’s eyes snapped wide open, her recovered chest heaving under the thin fabric of her blouse as Viktor’s words sank like a blade between her ribs.
Her son’s name—lost for years—hung in the air like a filthy promise, twisting her guts with desperate hope and burning shame.
Tina’s fists tightened at her sides, nails digging crescents into her palms while her milk-warm thighs pressed together beneath the arranged skirt.
’My boy... he knows where my boy is,’ her mind screamed, even as heat flushed up her neck from the way Viktor loomed over her like a devil fresh from hell.
"You... you know where he is?" Her voice cracked, thin but laced with steel and sorrow. "After all these years... the nights I lay awake wondering if he was hurt, cold, scared... if he even remembers his mother’s voice..."
Viktor watched her, that devilish curve on his lips, but she pressed on, emotions pouring out in a flood.
"I fought for him that night. Felt my body break from the magic I swore never to use. Saved my husband while they ripped my baby away. Every day since, I’ve wondered—did he cry for me? Does he know I never stopped looking?"
And that was the true breaking point.
Not her illness.
Not being helpless in bed.
Not waking with servants around her.
This.
The moment a mother understood that dignity, rage, and old vows all weighed less than a single scrap of hope about her child.
She hated him for seeing it. She hated herself more for meaning it.
Because she did mean it.
If the road to her son required kneeling, she would kneel.
If it required lies, filth, compromise, or enduring the touch of a man she despised, she would endure it.
Not because she was weak.
Because she was a mother.
Her mind flooded with little things she had preserved like relics: the softness of his ear under her fingertip, the little wrinkle between his brows when he slept, how he quieted when she hummed low against his forehead. She remembered the ache in her breasts when he cried. She remembered the first time he gripped her finger. Such a tiny grip. Helpless and complete.
A child does not know politics. A child only knows who comes when he cries.
And she had not come.
Not in time.
That guilt lived in her bones.
"You don’t understand," she whispered, and now the steel in her voice shook. "I still count the years the way other women count birthdays. I still think, if he lived, he would be this tall now. His voice would sound like this. He would hate this food, or laugh like his father, or ask too many questions. I still imagine seeing him in crowds. Every boy with dark hair—my heart stumbles. Every rumor—every damned rumor—I chase it."
Her breath hitched.
"I know how pathetic that sounds."
She laughed once, but there was no humor in it.
"I know what I must look like to you. A woman ready to be bargained with. A mother rotted hollow by hope."
Her eyes lifted to his again.
"But if there is even a chance... even a cruel, miserable, tiny chance that you know something real... then yes. I will go farther than I ever thought I could."
She looked away then, as though ashamed of the nakedness of the confession.
Not bodily nakedness.
The worse kind.
The soul stripped open.
"When he was born," she said more quietly, "they laid him on my chest before they even finished cleaning him. He was furious. Red and loud and perfect. I thought the world had become simple in that instant. Feed him. Warm him. Protect him. Love his father. That was enough. I would have traded anything to keep that life."