The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 312: A mother’s joy

ERIS

The word was a stone dropped into a bottomless well.

"What?"

My heart didn’t just stop; it seemed to wither, a dried leaf caught in a sudden, killing frost. The world tilted, the grand columns of the palace entrance blurring into streaks of grey and blue. I couldn’t breathe. The air in Nevareth was always thin, always sharp, but now it felt like glass in my lungs.

I looked at Rael. My son. My beautiful, golden-eyed disaster. He was pressed so tightly into Caelen’s side that he seemed to be trying to merge with his father’s shadow. He wouldn’t look at me. Those eyes, my eyes, were fixed steadfastly on the stone floor, his small shoulders hunched as if bracing for a blow.

The shock passed, replaced instantly by the only thing that had ever kept me upright: rage. A cold, shimmering anger that acted as a shield for the jagged hole opening in my chest.

"Why would you make up such a lie?" My voice was a whip-crack, echoing off the high arches. I didn’t look at Caelen’s face; I couldn’t. I kept my gaze on the crown of Rael’s head.

"Is this your new game, Caelen? Is this your way of making him hate me more? Haven’t you had enough of making me feel miserable? I left Solmire. I left the throne. I left him. Is my absence not enough of a victory for you?"

I wanted to scream. I wanted to burn the very air between us until there was nothing left but ash and the truth.

"Eris," Caelen said.

His voice wasn’t the voice of the Hero-King. It wasn’t the voice of the man who had looked at me with pity in the halls of Solmire. It was raw. It was the sound of a man who had been stripped bare by the same wind currently flaying me alive.

I finally looked at him. His grey eyes were rimmed with a weary, genuine pain that made my shield flicker.

"Do you really think I’d lie about that to you?" he asked quietly. "About him?"

"Yes," I spat, the word a reflex.

Caelen let out a short, bitter chuckle that didn’t reach his eyes. "I suppose I deserve that. After everything... you must really hate me now."

He didn’t wait for my answer. He couldn’t have handled it, and neither could I. Instead, he shifted Rael in his arms, his touch infinitely gentle, a stark contrast to the way I felt, sharp and jagged and dangerous.

"Rael," Caelen whispered, nudging the boy. "Show her. Show her what you’ve been carrying since we left home."

Rael hesitated. For a long, agonizing heartbeat, I thought he would refuse. Then, slowly, painfully, he lifted his head. His face was flushed with the cold, his white lashes wet. He reached into the small satchel at his waist and pulled out a wooden toy.

The breath left me In a rush.

It was a horse, carved from pale cedar, its edges smoothed by years of small, sticky hands. I recognized it instantly. It was his favorite. He slept with it. He had cried for three days when he thought he’d lost it in the palace gardens back in Solmire.

My heart didn’t just crack; it shattered, the shards drawing blood on the inside.

"I... I wanted to give this to you... Mother," Rael stuttered. His voice was so small, so high, a fragile thread in the vast, echoing silence of the palace. He stretched out his tiny hand, offering the toy like a peace treaty. "So you won’t be mad. So you’ll come back."

The composure I had spent all morning forging, the Ice-Waking, the fitting, the memorial, disintegrated. It wasn’t a graceful fall. It was a collapse. Tears, hot and traitorous, flooded my eyes. I blinked, and they tracked down my cheeks, steaming in the frigid air.

I reached out, my fingers trembling so violently I feared I would drop the very thing he was giving me. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to haul him into my arms and never let go, to beg his forgiveness for being the monster the world told him I was. But I was terrified. If I reached for him, would he flinch? Would he see the fire in my veins and think I meant to burn him?

Caelen didn’t wait for me to decide. He stepped forward, closing the distance between us until he towered over me, bringing Rael directly into my space.

I was sobbing now, quiet, hitching breaths that tasted of salt and woodsmoke. I looked at Rael, my vision blurred, my hands hovering in the air between us. I must have looked hideous, a weeping mess of a Queen, a villainess unmasked by a wooden toy.

Rael reached out, his small thumb brushing a tear from my cheek. He looked confused, his little brow furrowed in that way that was so much like Caelen’s.

"I’m sorry for making you mad, Mother," he whispered.

"I could never be angry at you," I choked out, my fingers finally closing around the smooth cedar of the horse. I squeezed it until the wood bit into my palm. "Never. Not in this life, or the last, or any that come after."

Rael watched me for a moment, then asked the question that I had been running from since the moment I woke up in this second life.

"Then why did you leave?"

The world stopped.

What could I say to a five-year-old? How could I explain the mechanics of a soul that had been murdered?

I left because your father drove a sword through my heart while I begged for mercy.

I left because I was a villainess in a story that demanded my death, and I decided to write a new one where I survived.

I left because loving your father was a sickness that was consuming me, but you... you were the only thing that made the fire worth the burn.

How could I tell him about the hall in Solmire? About the kiss Caelen had given me, the one that made me believe, for one beautiful, delusional second, that he had finally chosen me over Ophelia? Only for him to turn back to her the very next hour, leaving me standing in the shadows of my own palace, an afterthought. An extra in his heroic play.

I remained silent. The words were too big for my throat.

Caelen saw my struggle. He cleared his throat, his voice rough. "Rael, your mother had... important work to do. She had to make sure we were all safe."

Rael didn’t look convinced. He turned his gaze back to his father. "Papa, did you already apologize like you said you would? You said you had to say sorry for being mean."

I froze. I looked up at Caelen, my eyes narrowing through the tears. "What is Rael talking about? What apology?"

Caelen’s face went pale, then a mottled, embarrassed red. He looked trapped. "We should... we should have this conversation in a more private space, Eris. Please."

Every instinct I had told me to turn away. To retreat to the safety of my icy chambers and bolt the door. But Rael was looking at me with such hope, a fragile, flickering light that I couldn’t bear to extinguish.

"Fine," I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. "The Eastern garden. It’s private enough."

I turned and began to walk, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I felt them following me, the two people who defined my past, walking into my future.

After a few steps, I felt a small, hesitant weight against my hand. Rael had reached out, his fingers brushing against mine. I stopped, looking down at him. He looked so small against the backdrop of the massive Nevarethian pillars.

The fear of rejection flared in me again, hot and sharp, but I pushed past it. I couldn’t be a coward. Not today.

" Will you let me... carry you?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

Rael looked up at Caelen, seeking the approval he had been raised to rely on. Caelen nodded once, his expression unreadable.

I reached down and lifted him.

He was heavier than I remembered, solid and warm and smelling of sun-dried grass, a scent that had no business existing in this frozen empire. I tucked his head into the crook of my neck, my arms locking around him with a ferocity that was almost desperate.

My heart threatened to give out. It beat so fast it felt like a bird trying to escape my chest. I buried my face in his soft, pale hair, breathing him in. I ran my hand over his back, tracing the small curve of his spine, confirming the reality of him.

He was real. He wasn’t a memory of a life I had lost. He wasn’t a ghost of the woman I used to be.

He was in my arms.

"Mother?" Rael murmured, his voice muffled against my shoulder.

"I’m here," I whispered, squeezing him tighter. "I’m right here."

As we walked toward the garden, the silence of the palace felt different. It wasn’t the silence of a tomb anymore; it was the silence of a breath held, a world waiting to see if the Queen of Ash could finally find a way to keep what she loved without burning it to the ground.

I didn’t look at Caelen. I didn’t need to. I could feel his gaze on us, a heavy, aching presence. But for now, the only thing that mattered was the heartbeat against my own, and the wooden horse clutched in my hand.

I had been rewritten as a villainess. I had been cast as a monster. But as Rael’s small arms wrapped around my neck, I realized that some stories, the ones written in blood and bone, cannot be erased by any author.

And for the first time since I arrived in this cold, bitter land, I didn’t feel like I was surviving.

I felt like I was coming home.