Online: Eiodolon Realms – Child of Ruin-Chapter 50 - 49- Ash and Words Unspoken

The air in the secret room felt heavier than the smoke from the burning fireplace of the house. Eron stood by the doorway, fists clenched so tight his nails dug into his palms. The old man sat hunched on his creaking chair, working a whetstone over the edge of a chipped axe as if nothing was wrong.

But Eron had seen. He had smelled the truth before he had reached that cursed place. The smell of the dead. The smell of the corpses.

That stench from the rotting flesh didn’t just vanish from your mind after you’d walked past it. And the trail of blood—old, dried, black—leading outside the room thanks to his shoes getting bloodstained had been more than enough to make him throw up.

Eron took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice level and stable. But it didn’t work, how could it when that man did something like this.

"You want to tell me," he began, each word a stone thrown at still water, "why there are bodies in the room?"

The old man didn’t look up. The whetstone scraped along an axe blade he was working on each of his move was steady, deliberate. It was as if all this didn’t even faze him.

"Ain’t your business."

"Not my—?" Eron’s voice cracked. His voice was broken, cause of all that had transpired. He didn’t really want to speak, but he had to. "You think I’d just ignore something like that? You know when I first met you I thought of you as a bit eccentric, a bit mad. Maybe I even thought of you as a bit rough around the edges. Maybe even—" his voice broke again "someone I could learn from. But bodies? Rotting in the open like that in that fucking door? That’s not eccentric, old man. That’s—"

"That’s life," the old man cut in, voice like gravel. He still didn’t look up.

Eron stepped forward, his boots thudding against the uneven wooden floor. "Don’t you dare give me some self-righteous crap about life, when you’ve got corpses lying like trash in that room. Who are they? Why are they there?"

The whetstone stopped. The axe remained in the old man’s lap. His knuckles whitened around the handle.

"Go home, boy," he said, low and dangerous.

Something in Eron snapped. "Don’t call me boy. Not after this. Not after I trusted you."

Finally, the old man looked up—and for the first time since Eron had met him, his eyes weren’t distant or dismissive. They were sharp, cutting, full of something Eron couldn’t place. Anger? Regret? A mixture that had churned into something uglier. Something dangerous.

"You think you know trust?" the old man asked quietly.

Eron’s throat felt dry, but the words came anyway. "I thought... I thought you might be rough, maybe harsh. But I figured..... , hell, maybe that’s just your way. Maybe under all that, you’re... I don’t know... a good man."

His voice cracked again, softer this time. "But no. No, you—you’re full of shit. You’re just another liar who pretends they don’t care about anyone, but really you’re hiding something so rotten it’s poisoning everything around you."

The old man’s jaw tightened. "Careful."

"Why?" Eron’s eyes burned, and it wasn’t from the smoke. "What are you gonna do? Add me to your pile?"

The silence after that landed like a fist to the gut. The old man set the axe aside, slowly, like it had suddenly grown heavier than he could lift. His gaze stayed locked on Eron’s, but the fury in it had dimmed—replaced by something colder, older. It was something Eron had never seen before. This emotion of the old man, it was full of hatred and sadness at the same time.

"You think I wanted it like this?" His voice was hoarse now, not sharp. "You think I sleep easy knowing what’s out there?"

Eron’s breath came fast and shallow. "Then explain. Because right now, all I can see is a murderer. A murderer who’s pretending to be a harmless old recluse."

The old man stared at him for a long moment, the firelight casting deep shadows across his lined face. Then, with a weary exhale, he leaned back in his chair.

The old man sighed.

"Fine," he said. "You want to know the truth, you say? I’ll give you the truth. But you’d better be ready for it, boy. Cause once I start, there’s no going back."

Eron’s hands were still shaking, his lips had gone numb from all he had said, but he nodded. He might not be ready for what was to come, but he had to listen. He had to.

The old man glanced toward the window, where the wind rattled the loose shutters. "It started... a long time ago. Really really long time ago. At that time this place was not a village, just a ruin, before the people you saw out there in this village were... like that."

He paused, the words seeming to stick in his throat. His gaze drifted, not really seeing the walls around them anymore.

And then, in a voice so low it barely reached Eron’s ears, he said, "It started with a choice I should never have made. To be honest it was all my fault"

The fire in the fireplace popped, sending a spray of embers into the air. But either of them moved even a bit, neither could care about anything so trivial anymore. The weight of what was about to be said seemed to press down on the room itself.

Eron swallowed hard, the knot in his chest twisting tighter. "Then tell me. W-what was it that you did? How this place came to be and who are those people in that room."

The old man closed his eyes for a moment, as if bracing himself against something invisible. It was as if the old man was remembering something he had removed from his own head. "I will," he said finally. "But you’d better listen, boy. Really listen. Cause this ain’t just a story. It’s the reason I am what I am."