The Substitute Healer (BL)-Chapter 93: The despair remained.

Khaeren could not endure the truth that humanity’s cruelty had been the blade that struck Mirath down in the mortal realm.

It was that same cruelty that shattered their divinity, leaving both sisters unable to ascend back to the heavens as complete Goddesses. Mirath’s body had perished, and her soul, fractured and tainted by mortal suffering, was deemed unfit to return whole.

Khaeren, though still alive, was no less broken with her godhood diminished by grief and fury alike.

Overwhelmed by loss and unwilling to accept a judgment she believed unjust, Khaeren turned her anguish outward.

What had begun as mourning hardened into condemnation, and from that condemnation she wove a merciless curse. It was not cast in a single moment of wrath, but shaped carefully, fueled by every scream she had heard in the mortal realm and every drop of Mirath’s blood spilled by human hands.

And, the curse did not end with Mirath’s death.

It lingered, binding itself to the world of mortals while seeping into generations yet unborn.

It twisted fate, sharpened suffering, and ensured that humanity would never again escape the consequences of its own cruelty. Even centuries later, long after Khaeren had been chained and sealed away, the curse remained active and unbroken like a living testament to a Goddess who refused to forgive.

And so, while the heavens condemned her for defiance, the mortal realm continued to bear the weight of her grief. Khaeren’s body was imprisoned along with her restrained divinity, but her will endured, etched into the very fabric of the world she had sworn to judge.

For three hundred years, Khaeren endured the Darkness Realm.

It’s an abyss where neither light nor mercy reached. There, her divine power was sealed along with her bound wrists in unbreakable golden chains forged by her own mother, the Mother Deity. Each link carried a sacred command, suppressing not only her strength but the very essence of her godhood.

She was left there suspended in eternal shadow where time stagnated and suffering was allowed.

But, she had not been imprisoned solely for casting the curse.

Khaeren’s true crime was her refusal to repent.

The Mother Deity had demanded remorse as an acknowledgment that the consequences of the curse were excessive, unjust and unforgivable but she gave nothing.

She would not bow her head for a world that had murdered her sister, nor would she mourn the suffering of a humanity she deemed beyond redemption. It was this unyielding defiance, more than the curse itself, that sealed her fate in the Darkness Realm.

Ever since Mirath’s death in the mortal realm, Khaeren’s faith in mortals had rotted into contempt.

She saw humanity as despicable creatures driven by cruelty, consumed by lust, and intoxicated by their own arrogance. They prayed with bloodstained hands and cried for salvation only when their sins returned to devour them.

To Khaeren, they were not victims of weakness, but architects of their own damnation.

Her mother, however, saw something entirely different.

The Mother Deity insisted that humans were fragile, fleeting beings. They’re just easily swayed, broken, and too shortlived to comprehend the weight of their actions. Their cruelty, she argued, was born not of malice, but of fear and ignorance.

Where Khaeren saw intent, her mother saw limitation.

Where Khaeren saw corruption, her mother saw a chance for growth.

That clash of belief was a contradiction.

It carved a turmoil between mother and daughter deeper than any prison wall.

And so Khaeren remained bound, not merely by chains of divinity, but by a fundamental truth the Mother Deity refused to accept.

That mercy, when granted to the undeserving, could become a cruelty of its own.

The Darkness Realm was exactly as its name implied.

Shadow swallowed everything while pressing in from all sides until it felt like the world itself was closing around her. There were no true light, warmth and sound, only a suffocating stillness that made even existing feel like an effort, as though the realm resented anything that dared remain within it.

The ground beneath her was nothing but cold, jagged stone, stretching endlessly without shape or direction.

There was no sky to look up to and no horizon to follow, only a vast, hollow cavern that blurred into itself. Thin smoke drifted through the air while carrying no scent, only a bitter cold that clung to her skin and refused to fade.

Nothing lived there.

Time felt meaningless, stripped of purpose, as though the realm existed solely to hold what it was given and never release it.

It was not a place meant to nurture or destroy, only to imprison the soul and the mind.

Torches burned along the rocky walls with their light weak and unnatural. They never flickered, dimmed, and never warmed the air. They existed only to cast long, twisted shadows like a cruel reminder that light still existed somewhere beyond her reach.

Silence ruled the Darkness Realm completely.

It devoured every sound before it could form while making each breath echo painfully in her own mind. There was no comfort to be found here and no distraction from her thoughts, only unending and deliberate emptiness.

And for three hundred years, Khaeren endured it.

Whenever her mother came to visit, it was never out of tenderness alone. The Mother Deity wished to see how Khaeren was faring, but more than that, she came with a single question she asked every time.

Whether Khaeren had learned to repent.

Unfortunately, she never had.

No matter how often the question was posed, Khaeren’s answer remained unchanged.

She would not forgive the humans who had driven her to this fate, who had taken Mirath from her and shattered their divinity. To her, forgiveness was not mercy but it was betrayal. She refused to absolve those who had proven, through blood and cruelty, exactly what they were capable of.

Her mother listened, as she always did, with a patience that felt endless and unyielding.

And as always, her answer stood in stark contrast to Khaeren’s resolve.

To the Mother Deity, humans were fragile creatures who are easily led astray.

It was this difference in belief that kept Khaeren bound more tightly than any chain. Each visit ended the same way with her mother departing with sorrow as well as anger in her eyes, and Khaeren left behind in the Darkness Realm, unforgiven yet unrepentant.

The distance between them was not measured in realms or divinity, but in a truth that neither was willing to surrender.

And so the visits came and went, carrying no comfort and reconciliation, only the quiet certainty that neither mother nor daughter would ever yield.

Mirath, on the other hand, was trapped in a far more fragile and unforgiving predicament.

Ever since Khaeren’s curse had taken hold, Mirath’s existence became bound to a cycle of quiet failure. Her power no longer manifested freely but instead, it was carried by mortal souls chosen as her vessels. Yet those souls rarely survived long enough to fulfill the purpose they had been given.

One by one, they perished often before they could even understand what they carried within them.

The reason was cruelly intertwined with Khaeren herself.

Each human soul that bore Mirath’s power was also bound, through an unseen red thread, to Khaeren’s own fate.

That thread did not symbolize love or salvation, but misery that’s woven from sorrow, suffering, pain, and more often than not, ending in untimely death.

Wherever Khaeren’s curse lingered, it pulled at those souls relentlessly while dragging them toward despair long before Mirath could guide them to wholeness.

For Mirath, this bond was torture.

As a goddess of healing and untainted innocence, her power could not be forced. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

It demanded pure and unbroken trust from the human soul that carried it.

More than that, the vessel had to be free from overwhelming grief, fear, and despair. Only a soul untouched by misery could fully wield Mirath’s divine essence.

But such purity was nearly impossible to find.

The curse ensured that suffering reached her vessels first.

Fear poisoned their hearts and pain clouded their faith that many lost hope before Mirath could even speak to them with their lives snuffed out by the very misery that bound them to Khaeren’s fate.

No matter how gently Mirath reached out, no matter how desperately she tried to guide them, the thread always tightened.

And so, century after century, Mirath failed.

Not because she was weak but because the world had become too cruel for the kind of salvation she represented. Each lost vessel weighed heavily on her as a quiet grief she carried alone while knowing that as long as Khaeren remained bound and unrepentant, her own struggle would never truly end.

But Mirath knew Khaeren all too well.

She understood her sister’s stubbornness, the unyielding certainty that once became her greatest strength and now her greatest curse.

Khaeren would never submit not when she believed her cause was just, not when she was convinced that she had been right all along. And so, for centuries, the rift between them remained unresolved, frozen in defiance and sorrow with no path forward in sight.

This truth weighed heavily on Mirath.

Now, at last, another vessel had been found but hope came paired with dread.

The human soul that carried her power was fragile in a way Mirath had come to fear, prone to dark thoughts, to quiet moments of despair where the idea of letting go of life crept in uninvited. Such thoughts threatened to sever the bond before it could fully form before Mirath could guide the soul toward healing.

So, desperation drove her to do what she had never done before.

She crossed the boundary between God and mortal and slipped into the vessel’s subconscious while moving carefully through memories and emotions she was never meant to touch.

She whispered reassurance where silence had reigned, wrapped the soul in warmth where loneliness had taken root, hoping and praying that the person would understand they were not alone.

But when Mirath withdrew, nothing had changed.

The despair remained.

The red thread still intact.

The soul did not awaken to hope, nor did it fully reach for her power and Mirath, for the first time in centuries, felt a fear she could not heal because even her gentlest intervention had failed.