My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 979: Patient Monster: Veiled Past

While her master did what her master always did, which was apparently smile, charm, ruin Legacy families and step into the next catastrophe with the casual grace like he were walking into a candy shop, Eira forced herself to continue with her own assignment.

The encounter with Lucienne still clung to her.

It had not left her skin:

The Monster’s voice, soft and terrible beside her in the cold height of the night, still lingered near the edge of her hearing like a whisper reality had failed to erase. Eira had faced terrible things before and she had lived through punishment, imprisonment, ancient darkness and enough terrifying shit while in the World of Power and the Eternal Prisons to make other beings apply for retirement from existence itself, but Lucienne was different.

Lucienne did not feel like a threat approaching from outside but a truth already standing behind you, waiting for the rest of the world to notice it was too late.

Still, Eira did not allow the fear to poison her head.

Fear was useful when held properly: It sharpened the senses and reminded arrogance to sit down and keep its mouth shut for once, a miracle humanity had almost never achieved.

But fear, if allowed to rule, became a leash.

Eira knew enough about leashes. She had worn too many, broken some, and watched others tighten around people who never understood they were being led until the cage door closed with a polite little click.

So, she’d held her ground, well, she’d been floating but... same logic.

Lucienne was one of those inevitable things unfolding inside her master’s life, one of those merciless events that did not care whether anyone approved of it.

Eira had no power to stop her and she did not even pretend otherwise.

Perhaps, at some point, even Phei’s family had realized how useless it was to fight the Monster directly:

’Instead of continuing to attack her, antagonize her, and lose dignity in increasingly expensive ways, I think they had built a more respectable system of observation around her.’

Watch. Measure. Prepare. Interfere only when necessary.

A wise approach, really, though "watch the obsessed immortal monster politely" was not a strategy most families had to include in their domestic safety plans; The Ryujin Tiamat family, naturally, had to be dramatic.

The only saving grace was this: Lucienne did not wish Phei harm.

That was the thin golden line running through all the terror.

She did not want to kill him or destroy him.

Heck; Lucienne did not even seem to want to own him in the ordinary cruel sense most monsters understood possession.

No, Lucienne’s obsession was stranger, softer on the surface and far more disturbing beneath. It was borderline psychotic, yes, and the border itself had probably filed a complaint. She stalked him. Followed him. Watched him with an intimacy that turned shadow into devotion.

Once, after many failed attempts, she had even kidnapped him, because apparently when normal women failed to impress a boy, they flirted harder, while Lucienne escalated directly into abduction and domestic fantasy.

From the fragments Eira had managed to gather, Lucienne had taken Phei when he was very young because she wanted to keep him and raise him herself.

Her words had been worse:

Her Little Husband.

Eira grimaced mid-flight.

"Little Husband," she muttered under her breath. "That woman needs prison, therapy, divine sealing, and probably a chair thrown at her head: Not necessarily in that order."

And the truly unsettling part, the part Eira turned over with the care of someone handling a blade by the edge, was that the obsession had survived him growing up. Most fixations curdled when their object changed. Lucienne’s had not.

The Young Prodigy she had wanted to raise had become a young man who dismantled empires on live television, and from what Eira had felt of her tonight, the Monster’s devotion had not cooled by a single degree, but it had simply waited. Patiently like an ancient thing waiting for mountains to wear down, untroubled by the wait because they had already decided how the story ended.

That was the horror of her not that she wanted Phei:

The fact that Lucienne was in no hurry.

Of course, Phei’s family had not allowed it.

They could not.

No family with blood still warm in its veins would willingly allow a Monster like Lucienne to raise their child, grandson or not-yet-grown future calamity.

The First Princess had fought her. That much was known but what happened after that became difficult; not because the past was silent, but because the past itself resisted visitation.

Eira could not truly enter that moment.

That alone said too much.

Her ability allowed her to move back and forth through the pasts of most beings.

Unless someone was freakishly powerful, she could peer into them, follow old choices, unfold buried moments and watch what had already happened as easily as others opened a door. But Lucienne’s past was not a door just like the moment of Phei’s kidnapping and the fight between the monster and the Princess to try to rescue him.

It was a sealed cathedral built inside a storm, consecrated by power and guarded by something that did not appreciate trespassers.

Even the First Princess’s past around that event had become warped, veiled, difficult to touch without feeling as though one had placed her hand against the surface of a sleeping sun.

Lucienne was freakishly powerful.

More powerful than the First Princess, if Eira dared make such a statement aloud.

And that thought haunted Eira.

The First Princess was one of the most powerful Ryujin Tiamat children, a being whose name alone carried enough weight to make ancient houses (not these stupid legacies) sit straighter and adjust their lies.

To imagine someone overpowering her was already unpleasant....

...But to imagine Lucienne doing it and then walking away with that soft, beautiful smile of hers was the kind of thought one placed carefully in a box, locked, buried, and then pretended not to hear scratching at night.

Eira had begun to suspect that the old stories were wrong.

They said Lucienne disappeared after word spread that the Ryujin Tiamat Matriarch was coming to rescue her own grandson.

’But did she run?’