Stone Cold

Chapter 41

Days were slipping past her like specks of sand slipping through the tiny gaps between her fingers. The tighter she tried to hold onto it, the faster it tried to escape her. As far as her sight allowed, only the widely opened arms of a dark deep sea of history greeted her, threatening to drown her existence, similar to how it had been doing to countless people for centuries. Cradling her half-empty hands to her chest, she could do nothing but watch quietly as everything she knew and believed, slowly but surely, fell apart right in front of her eyes.

Caught in this chaos, only one thing was helping her hold onto her sanity—her husband, Lord Ares.

Although she had been unsure regarding her decision of finding and staying with him when she had arrived in this timeline, the man had been nothing but exceptionally kind to her. In a barbaric society where women had barely acquired the rights to breathe, he had taken a huge leap by putting her way above anything in the list of his priorities. A vampire by name, raised by a witch yet he had turned out to be a better example of humanity than most humans of that time, but she knew better than anyone, the cruelty of humans, unable to accept the harsh reality of their nature, wouldn’t let his untainted faith last forever.

“No matter how strong a chain, there always exist a strain under which it falls apart. Everything, living or dead, has a breaking point.”

She knew Gabriel had not been playing games with her when he had told her this. Every word that he let out of his mouth, held an immensely powerful meaning. The man seemed to know what he was talking about and no matter how she looked at it, she could see that his prediction had taken the shape of materialized truth. She had witnessed it with her own eyes, in her own time.

A pair of emeralds had lost their warmth, a set of rose petals had forgotten how to smile.

It had been a month since Henry’s transition started, a month and a half since she became trapped in the timeline of fifteenth century yet during all these days, the man never gave her any chances to complain. His skills at managing his lordship along with taking care of her-his wife-were impeccable. Despite being overburdened by the excess of duties getting dumped on him after his aid’s transition, the vampire lord always returned home early to prepare food for her himself as she did not have any idea regarding the medieval methods of cooking. Even after she started getting a hang of it, he continued returning early to have food with her every night, gracing her with the sweetest memory of a passing day.

In no time, trapped inside an unknown world, he had become her sanctuary—a sanctuary threatened to be snatched from her any moment.

One important detail she had missed during her initial days in here was finding out the year she was taken back to. To her surprise and horror, they were months away from approaching the mid of fifteenth century, 1450A.D.—the year in which Lord Ares Aléxandros King was burnt in his own castle.

Both of them were aware of it yet no one talked much about it, dwelling on other conversations, trying their best to avoid stumbling upon the forbidden topic. Still at times she found herself urging to probe more into it. She had had a deeper insight of his character, she was aware that he was not so petty as to abhor her for her ancestor’s doing. He did seem rattled at the moment he came to know about everything but he never expressed much emotions regarding that incidence after that.

‘If he already knows that he’s going to get turned to stone, if he’s already aware of Gabriel’s cunning nature and the truth behind the development of our blood bond then why has he become so distant and cold to me in future?’

She often found herself dwelling on the question much more than she wanted to. At times, a bizarre idea of future Ares already being aware of everything that is happening in the past would hit her out of nowhere, but then she’d think about the time she had read that book about him. It was mentioned in there that the lord had never married anyone in his life.