Chapter 300 Baptism in Scarlet V

Moonlight bled over the manor's stone balconies, casting the garden in a pale, sterile light. Where once laughter echoed and servants lit lanterns with whispered greetings, only silence remained.

Lenara stood at the highest balcony like a priestess before her altar, Nick at her side, and between them—on her knees in the cold marble—Elyra.

Her bloodstained gown clung to her like a funeral shroud. Her hands were painted in dried gore up to the elbows, her face a canvas of madness and ritual. She whispered to the wind, to someone who wasn't there.

"Mother says I'm ready now," she said, tilting her head toward the severed hand she cradled in her lap. "She says the silence below needs music. Screams… for a chorus."

Lenara's smile was soft, indulgent. She knelt and cupped Elyra's face in blood-warmed hands.

"It's time for your baptism, my little night-bloom," Lenara whispered. "A gift to your birthday. Forty-five families. And a few wandering souls. Make this land red. Paint your truth across their walls. Drink your fill."

Elyra's eyes gleamed. She nodded once, solemn, like a bride given her vow.

Nick chuckled, stepping in and grabbing her cheeks tightly with one hand—forcing her lips to part.

"You hear that, pretty thing?" he growled. "Time to bless the fields with entrails. Have fun."

Then he leaned forward, tongue tracing the drying blood on her lips before whispering into her mouth, "Make it hurt."

Elyra blinked slowly.

Then she smiled.

She rose without a word.

She didn't walk to the village. She danced.

Barefoot, trailing a long sash of intestine she'd tied around her waist like a belt, she sang in a soft voice. Her melody was sweet, tender—like a lullaby sung to a dying child.

A lone man spotted her first, walking toward her in confusion.

"My Lady…?" he asked, recognizing the noble's daughter. "What happened to you—"

She hugged him. Held him tight.

Then shoved her hand into his mouth, forcing it down his throat until she gripped his spine through the back of his gullet and ripped it free in a single, wet pull.

The body twitched and it started to fall. Elyra caught it and licked up some blood.

She spun with the spine, laughing. "Thank you for your offering. May you live on forever in the blood," she said, and tossed the remains aside like a rag doll.

The next house she entered was quiet.

A mother held a baby. A father dozed in a chair.

Elyra watched them for a while from the shadowed window, humming.

Then she entered.

She didn't break the door. It opened for her.

The mother turned, startled—relieved at first. "Lady Annilysa…?"

"No," Elyra said softly. "Not anymore."

The baby giggled.

Elyra's hand blurred.

The baby never cried.

The mother did. So did the father, briefly—until she pinned his jaw shut with her fingernails, tearing the skin down to the bone. She forced the wife to watch as she skinned her husband's face—inch by inch—while humming the same lullaby her mother once sang to her.

"I saved your son," she said. "The world would've hurt him. I kept him clean."

The mother begged for her life.

Elyra kissed her forehead.

"Don't cry," she whispered. "Blood turns bitter when salted with tears. Soon we'll all be together in the blood."

Then she crushed the woman's skull between her hands like an overripe fruit. Lifting her bloody hand she drank the woman's blood and then went on to sample the blood of her husband and child.

By dawn, ten homes were dead.

By midday, fifteen more.

Elyra painted messages on the walls in blood. Prayers. Verses. Questions to the dead. Things like:

"Father, was this enough to earn your voice?"

"Mother, should I save the girl in the orchard?"

"Do you like this one, or shall I start again?"

Villagers who ran were hunted.

One man tried to climb the sentry tower. Elyra let him get to the top.

Then she pulled a rope and waited for the man to look down.

"Do you see the angel?" she asked.

He wept. He prayed.

She leapt thirty feet straight into the tower, landing without a sound.

"Your prayer reached the wrong god," she said, and drove her fingers into his chest—plucking out his heart like a cherry from a bowl.

She took a bite, licking the juice from her fingers.

Some tried to hide.

Some took up arms.

Some offered their children.

It didn't matter.

Every death was different.

Some she skinned.

Some she bathed.

Some she sang to sleep before opening their throats with a kiss.

One she buried alive—then dug up just to hear the screams as he gasped his last breath.

She wrote a poem in a child's blood using her fingernail:

"Red flows deep and soft like spring

A song of pain, the dead shall sing

The world forgot the saint who bled

So I'll remind them: all things red."

By nightfall, not a single soul lived in the village.

Elyra stood in the center of the square, soaked head to toe in blood, her dress stuck to her skin, eyes wide with joy.

She knelt.

"Do you hear them now?" she asked aloud to no one.

She nodded.

"Yes, mother. Yes, father. I did good. I listened."

She held out her arms.

Nick and Lenara appeared from the tree line, walking through the smoke and stench with pride in their eyes.

"She's perfect," Lenara whispered.

Nick cracked his knuckles. "Our little saint."

Elyra smiled and began to spin, arms wide, as if praising the sky.

"I gave them release," she sang. "I gave them peace. Now they live in me. In the blood. In my song."

She bowed her head.

And the stars above blinked in silence.