Chapter 1278: A Swan Broken Twice

Phei had not known what to expect from the Goddess and Elena when he finally faced them.

Anger would have been understandable, questions too were inevitable. Tears he could handle, perhaps badly, but he could handle them. What troubled him was the cold emptiness beside his hand, because somewhere inside that empty space his fingers should have been wrapped around a much smaller hand.

Althea’s...

He had only met the girl once.

The memory returned with ridiculous clarity now that he allowed himself to look at it properly, carrying him back to that Sunday at the Academy when Althea Ashford had celebrated her birthday surrounded by Legacy families, children, expensive decorations and a magnificent swan sculpted from ice.

Phei remembered the ice swan better than he should have.

Mostly because he had destroyed it.

Or rather, several boys had decided that humiliating him would improve the birthday festivities and tripped him at exactly the right moment. He had gone sprawling with the ice, shoulder striking the sculpture hard enough to send that beautiful frozen swan breaking apart around him while laughter erupted almost immediately.

Older people and children alike all laughed.

Some people covered their mouths while failing miserably to hide their amusement, while others looked at him with the familiar contempt Phei of that time had already learned to recognize without understanding why he deserved it.

He remembered lying there among broken pieces of translucent ice.

And he remembered Althea:

The little birthday girl had stood several paces away in her white dress with both her small hands holding the sides of her skirt like some tiny princess who had walked out of a story and accidentally discovered that adults and children could be cruel.

She had not laughed.

Her innocent eyes had simply stared at him with Elena besides her all looking at him with hint of sadness they were trying to hide.

Back then, Phei had barely thought anything about any of that; he had been too embarrassed, too angry and far too occupied with everyone else laughing to wonder what was happening inside the little girl’s head.

Now he understood more.

Althea had looked confused even looked up at her sister wondering what was funny to these people that Elena just shook her head.

Perhaps she had wanted to help and did not know how, perhaps she had been frightened of the boys surrounding him. Perhaps she had simply been too young to understand why everyone found another person’s humiliation entertaining.

Whatever the reason, she and her sister had not joined them, the Goddess had raised her children different and that one small girl in a white dress had merely watched him from beside the ruins of her birthday swan while almost everyone else laughed.

Strange how memory worked.

At the time, the ruined sculpture had felt like another miserable thing that happened to him.

Some time later, Phei could trace an entire road from those broken wings; pieces he’d never been able to see that day until when she went missing.

The Ashford Madam had wanted to please Elena using that incident; the circumstances surrounding that birthday and everything that followed had eventually helped bring Phei into the Ashfords’ orbit, then into their estate, then into the life of the woman now standing before him.

A broken ice swan.

One frightened little birthday girl.

One invitation to come and pay for what he’d broken while the real agenda was to have him and Elena in the same place; a mother spoiling her daughter and yet, somehow, somewhere along that absurd road, Phei had become the Goddess’s man.

He had held her, kissed her, and the two made love and they’d become and man and woman and he’d once promised her that what mattered to her would matter to him and he’d protect whatever mattered to her, her loved one.

Now her little daughter was missing and Phei stood before the Goddess empty-handed.

That thought hurt far more than he wanted it to.

Had his promise been empty, then?

His jaw tightened before he crushed that thought where it stood.

No.

Althea’s disappearance had not been his doing. He had not failed because he had ignored the danger or chosen something else over her. Phei had searched until his already wounded soul had begun protesting the strain. Eira had searched with him and the Void itself had searched with them.

With those three together, finding one missing person should have been almost insulting in its simplicity.

Yet every road had ended in nothing like a trace, hidden presence or even swallowed trail he could follow. It had felt less as though Althea had been hidden somewhere upon Earth and more as though someone had taken the place containing her and removed it from the world entirely.

Only after what happened in Anarctica, after his Void deepened again and new powers surfaced from whatever impossible depths remained inside him, had Phei begun understanding just how achievable that might actually be.

One of his newer Void abilities had something like that too;

[Void Pocket]

[Description: A lesser form of Void Dimension. Host may carve a hidden hollow within the Void and shape it into a sealed inner space accessible only to you. Lifeless objects may be kept within the Pocket regardless of size. Beings born from the Void, or whose existence is bound deeply enough to the Void, will remain unharmed within.]

That was what he had used for Eira to create tiny hidden sanctuary cut into the Void itself, beyond ordinary distance and unreachable unless Phei opened the way.

True Void Sense could search nearly a kilometer around him from every direction but the Endless Void could swallow perception far beyond anything Phei currently understood but neither mattered if the thing being searched for was no longer inside ordinary reality.

Phei’s gaze darkened.

Void Dimension.

The name bothered him:

If Void Pocket was merely a lesser form of it, then perhaps one day his power would become the true thing. Perhaps then he would be able to take living beings inside without requiring them to possess some intimate connection to the Void.

And if Phei could eventually do that...

Why couldn’t Danton already possess something similar?

The bastard was an Original Progenitor, after all. Wasn’t he?

He had lived longer than nations and forgotten more powers than Phei presently possessed. Yes, his cultivation remained vastly higher but it was his knowledge and ancient arts made Phei’s look embarrassingly young, and right now, the current situation with him reinforced the same irritating truth.

Danton prepared.

What if he possessed his own hidden realm? What if he could peel open some secret fold beyond ordinary existence, put Althea inside and seal it again? Phei could search every city, every mountain, every hidden chamber and every buried formation on Earth until his soul turned grey from effort and never touch her.

Or perhaps Eira’s suspicion had been closer.

Maybe Danton did not need a separate realm at all.

Perhaps he could sever a single place from the rest of existence, enclosing it so completely that the world stopped acknowledging whatever remained inside. A room could stand ten meters away and still be farther from Phei than another continent if reality itself no longer connected the two places.

The thought should have frustrated him but instead, something almost hopeful stirred beneath it.

Because impossible to find was very different from gone.

Phei now only held onto that distinction.

Elena’s face pulled him fully back into the room, he drew a breath and crossed the remaining distance.

"Elena, my love." Whatever strength she had gathered for this meeting cracked at the sound of his voice. Phei just opened his arms, and Elena went into them without ceremony.

The Goddess came closer as well, and Phei gathered both women against him, one arm around Elena while the other enclosed the woman whose quiet warmth had once felt impossible for him to possess.

For several breaths, none of them spoke.

Then Elena began shaking.

Her face pressed into Phei’s chest and a small broken sob escaped before she buried it against him, fingers gathering tightly in his clothes. Phei closed his eyes and held her more firmly while the Goddess’s hand settled against his back.

"I’m sorry," he said quietly, lowering his cheek against Elena’s hair. "I tried. Gods, Elena, I tried everything I knew how to do, but I couldn’t find her."

Elena’s fingers tightened.