Chapter 215: To Find Solid Ground
Without hesitation, the dowager’s hand closed around a jagged shard of the broken vase, porcelain biting into her palm. Holding it, he lunged toward him.
For Osric, time slowed.
He didn’t step back. He didn’t even raise his cane to block her at first. Instead, he watched her come toward him with the patience of a man who had seen too many lives, too many choices, unfold to their inevitable ends. His silver cane was rooted firmly against the floor, his spine straight despite the years that curved it, his eyes steady, and those icy-blue eyes searched hers.
In those dark, frantic eyes, he looked not for the dowager of courtly power and whispered schemes, but for the girl he once knew: the child who had chased butterflies through the magnolia grove, who laughed with the abandon of spring.
Instead, all he found was fury... fury and the hollow ache of someone who had long since crossed a line she could never return from.
Is this what you’ve become? his gaze seemed to ask her, without a word.
The dowager, for all her rage, had understood the question behind his gaze. Her breath hitched, not from exertion, but from the unbearable weight of that silent question. Her fingers clenched around the porcelain, not to strike but because she couldn’t let go. Blood welled between her knuckles as the shard’s edge bit deeper into her flesh. Yet she didn’t stop. She couldn’t.
Somewhere deep inside, she understood: this lunge wasn’t about killing him. It was a violent, desperate act of a woman finally realizing the monster she had become, and unable to halt herself before the precipice. She was indeed lost to hate.
Osric lifted his cane slowly, not as a weapon, but like a man steadying himself before a storm. His face did not twist with fear. Instead, there was quiet, terrible disappointment. A man watching the final ruin of something he had once loved beyond measure.
He was waiting too... to see if she would stop. At least, at the final moment. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t even slow down.
He looked down, out of disappointment.
It was then, he felt a movement by his side. A rush of fabric and air.
A young man stepped between them, a flash of strength and decisiveness. Osric watched that young man as his hand caught the dowager’s wrist mid-swing, the grip firm and unyielding. In one sharp motion, he twisted her arm and flung her aside with the efficiency of someone trained to protect.
She staggered back, her embroidered skirts tangling around her legs. The shard slipped from her bloodied hand and fell to the floor with a dull, ringing clatter that echoed in the chamber like a final verdict.
Osric’s cane tapped the floor once. The silence that followed was heavy, and it was almost...reverent. He didn’t utter a single word.
He merely stood there, breathing slowly, his silver cane grounding him as his eyes, those steady, ancient eyes, rested on her. Not with anger. Not even pity. Just a quiet, irrevocable severance.
The dowager felt it immediately: the snap.
The fragile, fraying thread that had bound them through decades of love, shared memories, scoldings, and triumphs... it finally broke.
The silence was worse than any condemnation.
Her heart clenched with a pain so sharp it made her dizzy. She watched him turn, slowly and deliberately, and glance at the young man by his side. The boy who had intervened, now standing a little taller, his hand still slightly trembling from the encounter.
"Let’s leave, Finnian," Osric said simply.
That was all it took.
The dowager’s breath hitched. A kind of panic flooded her, raw and unfamiliar; something she hadn’t felt since she was a frightened little girl who thought her uncle might leave her behind at court.
"No..." she whispered, her voice hoarse.
Still on the floor, her knees aching against the cold marble, she scrambled forward, undignified, skirts dragging, jewels scraping. At her age, her body was no longer kind to such desperate movements; her bones protested, her muscles trembled. But desperation lent her strength.
She reached him before he could take another step, and her arms wrapped around his leg. She clung to him as though he were the last solid thing in a world crumbling around her.
"Uncle, please," she sobbed, her voice breaking like shattered glass. "Please don’t leave me. Don’t turn your back on me. I’ll do whatever you ask—anything, I swear it. I’ll make it right. Just... don’t leave me... I have no one... No one who truly cares for me... I have no one..."
Osric froze mid-step. The sensation of her hands, once those of a bright little girl who would run to him with flowers and stories, now wrinkled, desperate, clawing, shook him.
"Give me a chance," she whispered, her forehead pressed against his knee, tears soaking the hem of his robe. "I’ll fix everything. I’ll listen to you, I’ll obey, I’ll undo every wrong I’ve done. Just... stay. Stay with me. Please... Don’t hate me... Please don’t hate me..."
For a moment, Osric’s eyes softened.
He looked down at her, not as the Dowager Empress, not as the woman who had allowed bloodshed and betrayal to flourish under her watch, but as his little Isabella. The little girl he had raised after she clung to him. The one who used to chase butterflies in the garden, who would sneak candied plums into his study, who would tug his sleeve and demand stories before bed.
His heart wavered.
He had not seen her like this in decades; stripped of power, of arrogance, of all the walls she had built around herself. Just broken. Just human.
"Granduncle," came a firm, steady voice.
Osric turned his head. Beside him stood Finnian Vaelith, his brother’s grandson—young, sharp-eyed, the future of their House embodied in his resolute bearing. His hand rested protectively on the hilt of his sword, but his voice was calm.
"She tried to kill you, an elder of our house," Finnian said, not coldly, but as one stating an undeniable truth. "You can’t forget that."
The words struck like a bell in the silence.
Isabella flinched as though physically struck. Her hands trembled around Osric’s leg. She looked up at him, eyes wide, filled with a childlike terror at the thought of being abandoned by the only man who had ever loved her without condition.
Shaking her head, she looked at him, pleading. "Please, Uncle... Don’t leave me."