Chapter 14
Seraphina's Sacrifice
Seraphina's fading power reaches a critical point. She realizes her visions, and the blight, are linked to the encroaching darkness, forcing her to consider a profound, selfless sacrifice.
The air in my small study, usually thick with the scent of dried herbs and ancient parchment, now tasted of dust and decay. It clung to my tongue, a phantom grit that mirrored the insidious rot spreading within me. Outside, the crimson moon, a swollen eye in the bruised velvet of the night, pulsed with a malevolent light, each throb a hammer blow against the fragile walls of my sanity. My own essence felt as thin and brittle as parchment left too long in the sun, threatening to crumble to nothingness.
For weeks, the visions had been a torrent, a chaotic deluge of fragmented images and chilling whispers. Now, they were a mere trickle, each drop a precious, agonizing shard of clarity. The blight, this creeping frost that leached the color from my skin and the strength from my limbs, was not a separate affliction. It was a symptom, a manifestation of the encroaching darkness that Oakhaven, and indeed the world, was slowly succumbing to. And the source of my torment, the fractured glimpses of future horrors, was inextricably bound to it.
I traced the veins on the back of my hand, a spiderweb of fading blue against skin that was becoming alarmingly pallid. The magic that had once flowed through me like a living river, carrying the weight of foresight, was now a stagnant pool, choked with debris. The more I peered into the abyss, the more it seemed to pull at me, a siren song of oblivion.
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