The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 398: Parasite

A servant entered the room on soft slippers, bowing low. "My lady... the Empress has returned."

Ophelia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pale. "Empress Eris?"

"Yes, my lady. She is in the nursery with the young prince."

Ophelia’s face shifted, a complex play of shadows crossing her features. Relief was the first emotion to strike, Eris was powerful. Eris was different.

Maybe she could do what the healers couldn’t. But behind that relief was a sharp, stinging jealousy. Eris was here to help Caelen.

Caelen would wake up to the sight of the woman he truly loved, while Ophelia remained the background shadow who had merely watched him sleep.

She heard the footsteps before she saw them. Heavy, rhythmic, and purposeful.

She stood from her chair as the heavy oak doors swung open. Soren entered first, his presence filling the room with an icy gravity.

Eris followed, and Ophelia’s breath hitched. Both of them looked exhausted. They were still in their travel clothes, covered in the dust of the road and the soot of the forest.

"Your Majesties," Ophelia said, dropping into a deep, polite curtsy. Her voice was tired and strained, but there was a genuine note of pleading in her eyes.

"Ophelia," Soren acknowledged with a curt nod.

"Tell us everything," Eris said, skipping the formalities. Her voice was professional, distant. She didn’t look at the bed yet; she looked at Ophelia.

Ophelia repeated what Aldric had said, but with the added detail of someone who had been there.

"He just... fell, Empress. One moment he was in the nursery with Rael, showing him a wooden horse. The next, he was on the floor. There was no warning. No gasping for air, no signs of a struggle. The guards brought him here immediately, but he hasn’t moved since."

She looked down at her hands, her voice cracking slightly. "I’ve tried everything. My light magic has always had a healing affinity, but it does nothing. It’s like hitting a stone wall. I don’t know what’s wrong with him."

The silence that followed was thick with unspoken history. Ophelia looked at Eris and felt a familiar, hollow ache.

She’s better at this, Ophelia thought bitterly. She’s better at everything. Even at saving the man who should be mine.

Eris, meanwhile, kept her face a mask. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to see Caelen’s face. She didn’t want to feel the complicated tangle of pity and anger that his presence always stirred. But Rael’s crying voice was still echoing in her ears.

"May I see him?" Eris asked.

Ophelia stepped aside immediately, her movement a silent admission of defeat. "Of course."

Eris moved toward the bed. Soren stayed close, his hand hovering near her back, never letting her stray more than a few inches from his protection.

Caelen lay still. Too still. He was pale, his skin almost translucent under the flickering candlelight. His breathing was shallow, his eyes closed in a way that looked forced, as if he were being held under by a heavy weight.

Then Eris saw it.

She sat on the edge of the bed, and Ophelia tensed instinctively, her hand twitching toward the furs. Eris ignored her. She looked at Caelen’s right arm, which lay outside the blankets. Faint, spider-webbing veins were turning a bruised, necrotic black, crawling up from his wrist toward his shoulder.

Eris hovered her hand over his chest. She didn’t touch him, but she extended her senses, allowing her fire-core to "read" the air.

Almost instantly, her magic recoiled.

"Dark magic," Eris whispered. She looked up at Soren, her eyes wide with recognition. "It’s not a disease. It’s a binding. It’s coiled around his core like chains... like poison."

Soren’s jaw tightened. "Can you break it?"

"Maybe," Eris said, her brow furrowing as she leaned closer. "But I need to understand what it is first. It has a signature I’ve felt before... very familiar"

Ophelia stepped forward, her face pale with confusion. "Dark magic? But how? Who would do this to him? He hasn’t left the palace in weeks."

Eris looked at her sharply. "Did anything happen before he collapsed? Did he meet with anyone? Use anything unusual? Any objects, gifts, anything he might have received?"

Ophelia began to pace, her hands wringing together as she tried to reconstruct the last three days. "He... he was by himself mostly. I don’t know if he met anyone privately, he has his own correspondences. But..." She stopped, her eyes widening as she looked at the bed.

"But what?" Soren demanded.

"He’d been wearing a ring," Ophelia said, her voice trembling. "A new one. A dark stone set in silver. I’d never seen it before. I asked him about it, but he just said it was a gift from an old acquaintance in the South."

Eris didn’t pull away. She leaned in closer, the scent of the medicinal salts fading beneath a metallic, sickly-sweet odor, the smell of rotting magic. She reached for Caelen’s right hand, her movements precise and clinical, ignoring the way Ophelia’s breath hitched in the silence.

The ring was there.

She saw it clearly now, tucked against his pale skin, though the silver band she remembered from the garden had been consumed by a creeping, oily blackness. It wasn’t just a piece of jewelry anymore; it looked like a living parasite. The metal was turning into a jagged, unnatural stone that seemed to pulse with a slow, agonizing rhythm.

Her mind flashed back to that night in the garden, the last time she had stood face-to-face with Caelen before the hunt. She remembered the moonlight catching on his hand, the way a thread of dark magic had slithered toward her like a beckoning finger before he had jerked his hand away, stopping himself.

That ring, she thought, her pulse spiking. He was trying to use it on me.

The corruption was visible now, no longer hidden by a glamor or his own restraint.