Chapter 523: Chapter 523: Justicia’s Choice
Chapter 523 – Justicia’s Choice
Elijah stood aghast, his face losing all colour at her words. At that moment, he felt like a mirror struck by a boulder.
Shattered. Completely and utterly shattered.
But Elijah was not just anyone. He hadn’t gone through every hurdle, every obstacle of his life, to lose his bearings the moment something happened.
So he clenched his teeth, trying as hard as he could to stop the cracks from spreading through his existence, and parted his cotton-dry lips.
"What... what do you mean, Justicia?" His voice was still soft, his lips desperately trying to hold a smile. "Don’t say such things, please. What you lived... what you lived all this time was nothing but illusion."
"It was not, Elijah."
"It was!" Elijah yelled, losing control for a moment, eyes dilating. "You were not yourself! You were living with more than half your memories sealed and broken and shattered. You were living at half your power, Justicia. You were living in—!"
"Incompleteness?" Justicia cut in, her eyes still brimming with tears. "Oh, Elijah, you fool. Is that what you think?"
"It’s the truth." He gritted his teeth, fighting to keep his composure. "Not what I think but the truth. How can you call yourself complete when your memories, the very things that make you who you are, are incomplete?"
Behind them, Noah and his wives stood together in silence, watching the scene. At that moment, every one of them understood their role in this: spectators.
Nothing more. Nothing else.
They were here to observe and witness Justicia’s choice. To see whether everything they had lived together until now was indeed nothing but illusion in her eyes.
They needed to know. So they closed their hearts as best they could, biting their lips, quietly loathing the sight of any man but Noah standing that close to their sister.
Justicia, meanwhile, was weathering an internal turmoil greater than most external disasters. She sat there powerlessly on the ground, watching the eyes of her past lover on the verge of shattering.
She was there — oh, she was truly there — watching the face of her current husband show nothing but blankness, as if ready to sever anything between them at any moment.
’Please... someone... anything... help me. Help me!’
She cried harder, not knowing what to do.
Her past life with Elijah had been real, broken only by Idalia’s cruelty and madness.
Yet her current life with Noah and her sisters was also real. Even if she hadn’t been fully herself in the way Elijah had known her.
But Elijah was wrong. Deeply, profoundly wrong about something crucial in all of this.
"Ask yourself a question, Elijah." She wheezed, holding his gaze. "Ask yourself...do you love me?"
"Of course—!"
"No!" Justicia shouted, trembling. "Look at me, Elijah!"
Her hands snapped forward, grasping his face and yanking it toward her until their eyes were an inch apart.
"This is who I am now!" She said. "I am no longer the one you knew. I am no longer Justicia of the Celestial Faction. I am no longer the woman you found on Luminary and fell in love with."
She gestured toward her hair — no longer the gold of her past, but the deep crimson-gold of the Vaelgrim family.
Elijah’s lips trembled. His eyes shimmered, and then the tears fell without him being able to stop them.
"This..." he breathed, his voice failing him. "...this means nothing. I still love you, Justicia. We can change your hair back, or you can keep it like this...I don’t care. The Heavens know I don’t care. I only care about you."
"Which version of me?" Justicia replied, biting her lip so hard blood trickled down. "I have lived thousands of years and built a complete set of memories away from you, away from your influence. And no matter how you try to diminish them... those memories are just as real as the ones I made with you."
Elijah choked on his breath.
"So tell me, Elijah." Justicia pressed on. "Do you still love me? Do you still love the woman who loved another man for thousands of years? Do you still love the woman who literally died for that man out of devotion? Do you still love the woman who lived so many things, so many events, alongside women who look at her like true sisters — women who would die for her?"
Every word felt like someone was personally tearing Elijah’s heart, body and soul apart.
Oh, Light above, it hurt. It hurt so much.
Yet Justicia was not done.
"Look at me." She said.
And Elijah did. He looked at her, and seemed only now to truly see it...the woman he loved had changed.
Changed in a way he never could have foreseen. Changed in a way that had carried her further from him, not closer.
And her next words landed like a sledgehammer, confirming his worst nightmare.
"My blood is his." She murmured. "My soul has been shaped by his care. My heart aches every time I consider the possibility of leaving him, of leaving this wondrous family I never had. My existence becomes heavy and unbearable without him. And my body..."
She smiled sadly, her eyes filled with anguish as they held his empty, desolate ones.
For a moment she almost stopped. But she continued. She had to.
So she took his hands and held them tightly, and whispered in the gentlest voice she could muster, thinking it would ease the pain, not knowing it only made it worse.
"My body..." she breathed, "my body can no longer accept anyone else but him. I can’t. And..."
She bit her lip.
"...I don’t want to."
Elijah’s eyes went void.
"This is who I am now, Elijah. This is what thousands of years of memories have made of me." She continued, relentless.
’They changed me completely. And they made the memories I lived with you... nothing but a haze that still clings to me.’
Wasn’t that what they said?
The enemy of memories was never time. It was other memories.
Justicia felt the truth of that in that very moment, and so she asked, already knowing the full answer.
"Do you still love me, Elijah?"
The answer was written plainly on his face.
He didn’t love this version of her. He loved the version she could no longer be, no matter what happened.
And Justicia, too, could no longer love Elijah. Not the way she was now. Even if his love was pure. Even if his love belonged only to her.
She had been a broken woman because of Idalia Marigold. And she had been broken further — changed beyond return — with Noah in her life.
And she liked it that way. Her mind could no longer live the quiet, ordinary life Elijah longed for.
And beyond all of that...
"I..." Justicia said, lifting her left hand to show Elijah the ring Noah had given her — given all of them — forged from his own body. "...I love my husband, Elijah."
No matter how degenerate, lustful, twisted, and arrogant that man was.
Because even with all of that within him, Noah was...
"...the best husband I could ever imagine."
Elijah lost his mind.
—End of Chapter 523—
