My trembling hands groped at my chest. The blade lodged in my heart was piercingly cold.

I slowly shifted my tear-blurred gaze to confirm the owner of the hand gripping the hilt.

Carnesis.

It belonged to my husband, the one who had been whispering words of love to me just hours ago.

Even through the cruel pain, I could not bring myself to believe it. Not once in all the long years I had lived as one of the divine had I imagined something like this.

Tears dripped down my face as I looked at Carnesis. I wanted to see his expression. I wanted to know what face he wore as he drove that blade into me, his own wife.

“Carnesis…….”

I opened my mouth to call his name, and something hot surged up from deep inside me.

“Ugh, why…….”

I tried to pull the blade out with my trembling hands.

“Ugh, you, why would you…….”

My chest burned, and my mind went white and hollow.

In those few short moments, I had thought about it hundreds, thousands of times, and still I could not understand.

“Erflus.”

He was my husband, the one I had spent my whole life with, yet he felt like a stranger I had never met before. The voice that called my name, the eyes that looked at me, all of it felt the same way.

I grabbed the hem of his clothes with my blood-soaked hand.

“How could you, how could you do this to me…….”

He had no intention of even telling me why I had to die.

Realities I desperately did not want to accept came crashing over me. The cruel truth that all the time we had spent together had been for nothing, that what I had believed was mutual love was nothing more than my own delusion.

[I love you, Erflus.]

The echo of his voice rang in my ears, that voice of his that had said those words so often, with such particular tenderness. It gnawed at me. I sobbed and shook my head over and over.

The countless moments I had spent with him flashed before my eyes. Moments that, even now as I looked back on them, would only leave me wretched.

“No, huh, no, ugh, Car, ugh, Car, nesis…….”

Grief, rage, resentment, betrayal, every dark emotion this world held churned and thrashed inside me. All of it felt ready to tear through me and burst out.

I stretched my trembling arm toward him to use my divine power. I cupped his cheek in my hand.

If this much, maybe this much will be enough.

“……Erflus, you!”

A brilliant light exploded from my hand, and he cried out with what sounded like resentment. He covered his face and stepped back.

In a situation like this, who had any right to resent whom? Even now, as I lay dying with every last drop of my power spent, I could not shake that thought.

I severed the vow that had bound our souls together.

The vow made when two of the divine wed was nothing like what humans exchanged. It meant binding immortal souls to one another, a promise to remain together even in death.

But now, dying at my husband’s hands, I had no reason to keep that vow. The vow we had made while whispering our love felt hideous to me now, like a curse.

I had no desire to remain bound to him even in death.

“Ugh……!”

The moment I severed the vow, I tried to seal his divine power as well.

But perhaps I had already spent too much of my own. Sealing his power completely was beyond what I had left.

A body standing at the threshold of death could no longer bear the strain.

Darkness flickered across my vision.

“Haa, Car, nesis. I, haa, I…….”

‘I will never forgive you.’

Those last words never became sound.