Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 61: Meleth Flower

Passed?

No, wait.

A dissonant thought buzzed in Hettor’s skull. Hadn’t she just been in his treetop city? A breathtaking, warm-smiling woman with a dragon-shadow at her shoulder, promising a different kind of god?

That was mere days ago. He looked around, his own confusion mirrored on the faces of other lords and chieftains. There was a ripple of stunned, uncomprehending silence, then the frantic, silent math behind their eyes.

Of course, yes, the Saintess had been dethroned. Publicly disgraced. But killed? There had been no announcement, no state funeral, not even a whisper of tragedy. She’d simply... vanished before the coronation.

Everyone had assumed she’d been quietly exiled, sent to a remote temple, perhaps. A political disappearance, not a mortal one.

No.

Wait. Wait a fucking minute.

"Most of us who follow the Saintess’s movements would know," Eastiel continued, his voice eerily calm, a guide walking them to the edge of a cliff, "that in the last year, she scoured the continent for the Meleth Flower."

That was true. It had been a quiet, persistent quest, a footnote in her larger tapestry of warnings and interventions. The mythical blossom that could cleanly, safely sever the bond between two individuals.

Why would the Saintess, an enigma who saw futures, need such a thing? She never explained it. So no one had questioned it.

"And if some of you attended the new ’Saintess’s’ coronation just days ago," Eastiel led on, "you would have noticed how Arzhen Vasiliev, her former husband, stood unbound. Her scent was scrubbed cleanly from him."

A collective understanding seeped through the courtyard. The pieces clicked. The former Saintess hadn’t been caught off guard. She had been preparing.

"As expected of Saintess Araceli..." someone murmured. "She predicted her own fall...?"

"And even... planned for the separation..."

"I also heard the Vasiliev prince declare, on many occasions, that his one and only love was his childhood sweetheart, Ruby Vaiva..."

"Ah."

The picture was becoming clear. A year of secret searching for an exit.

"Yes," Eastiel nodded. "For a year, Saintess Cecilia sought the one thing that could free both her and Arzhen Vasiliev."

Then came the logical gap in the narrative. If she had the flower, if she had planned her escape... then why...?

Why did Eastiel say she had passed?

Eastiel’s head bowed, the gentle, tired storm-light smile gone. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face, swallowing his expression, leaving only the stark line of his profile.

"But when I confronted Arzhen Vasiliev at the coronation... demanding to know where she was..." His voice dropped, becoming gravel and grief. "I saw the Meleth Flower fall from his robes."

Silence.

Qinryc shot to his feet as if physically struck, horror in his eyes. "What do you mean—"

"That is a significant accusation to level against a Prince of a Great Clan, Lord Eastiel," interjected another lord, a werecrow with feathers ruffled in unease.

"If he still possesses the Meleth Flower..." a burly Werebear lord rumbled, "...then the Saintess..."

The Meleth Flower was legend given root. A rare, mythical herb that bloomed only with the turning of generations, once and only one, every seventy years. Its petals were like crystallized moonlight, shimmering and white as a ghost in the dark, while its stem was black. Void black.

It was named for ’Love,’ but ironically, its sole purpose was to sever a soul-bond. To unravel fate itself. Cleanly. Safely.

Although it sounded fake, it was not mere folklore. Its existence was documented, its delicate, glass-like illustration printed in royal bestiaries and crudely copied onto market-stall tapestries alike. Everyone knew the story.

There was a famous tale whispered to children. A Weresnake Princess, newly wed to a Weresnake Prince, fell into a deep slumber. For all of autumn and all of winter, she would not wake. Her husband, desperate, sought every cure in the world to no avail.

Then, an old maid appeared. She examined the sleeping princess and drew from her robe a single, glittering white bloom. She asked the Prince a simple question. Are you certain you wish to cure her?

The Prince, blind with love and fear, swore he would do anything.

The old maid instructed him to hold the Meleth Flower between their hearts. As its petals dissolved into light, so too did the golden thread of their bond, vanishing like mist.

The Prince, horrified, turned on the old woman, betrayal sharp as a knife. But at that moment, the Princess awoke. She did not turn to her husband. With tears of joy, she ran past him, out of the palace, to the arms of her true love, a human slave she had been forced to forsake.

The old maid looked upon the devastated Prince and explained, gently. The Princess was not ill. She was dying of a love she could not have.

In the end, the tale said, the Prince forgave the maid and rewarded her.

And that same flower, the instrument of both salvation and heartbreak, had fallen from the robes of Arzhen Vasiliev. Not used in a bittersweet parting, but kept. A trophy. A key to a door that should have been opened for Cecilia, but was instead locked away.

"We all know the Meleth Flower," Eastiel began, his voice dark. "Of its rarity. Its... miraculous cruelty."

"And unless we are children clinging to bedtime tales, we all know the true ending of that story was scrubbed clean. Sanded down for innocence. For hope. For the pretty lie of ’pure, true love’."

Tension seized the courtyard. Jaws clenched. Eyes that had been wide with shock now dropped, unable to hold his piercing gaze. Knees, solid a moment before, felt suddenly weak.

The true ending was not forgiveness.

The Weresnake Prince did not reward the old maid. He killed her in a rage of betrayed pride. And the Princess, finally free, raced to the dungeon only to find her human lover’s corpse, a skeleton wrapped in rags, starved by her own family’s command.

There was no happy ending.

There had never been one.

There would be another story written around the flower soon. Eastiel would ensure, with fire and blood, that no one would ever be able to pretty up this ending. They would remember the truth. Because the poison was never in the petals. It had always been in the betrayal.

"I could not find her body," Eastiel confessed. "I could not find the exact patch of earth where that monster tore her heart from her chest. That is true."

He lifted his head, his eyes sweeping over them, holding them accountable.

"But there cannot be two Meleth Flowers blooming in a single generation. And there was still one more bond that needed breaking for Arzhen Vasiliev to claim his ’true love’."

Ruby Vaiva.

The accidental bond with Nikolas Delanivis, the Arctic Wolf Prince. The inconvenient tether blocking Arzhen’s path.

Ah.

So that was it. The flower wasn’t for Cecilia’s freedom. It was a key for Ruby’s cage. He hadn’t used it to release Cecilia with dignity, no, he had stolen it, preserving its power, and taken her heart as a cheaper, crueler alternative.

"Are you certain it was the Meleth Flower you saw, Lord Eastiel?" a Wereeagle lord asked, seeking one last sliver of doubt. "Are you stating, for the sake of saving the flower for Ruby Vaiva, Prince Arzhen chose to... to rip Saintess Araceli’s heart out instead?"

Eastiel did not elaborate. He did not rage. He simply looked at the lord.

And nodded.

Once.

It was like a spark thrown into a powder keg.

Uproar erupted. A thunderous wave of fury and horror broke the oppressive silence of the cursed sky.

But that couldn’t be true.

Hettor grasped his own forehead, fingertips pressing hard against his temple as if to physically contain the spiraling horror behind his eyes.

If... if Eastiel’s version of events was the truth, that Cecilia had been murdered for her heart, that the flower had been stolen for another woman’s convenience, then who in the name of all the spirits had he seen just days ago?

Who was the woman who stood in his treetop city, whose smile held a weary warmth? Who spoke of serving a different god and accepted his pledge? Who moved with a dragon’s shadow at her shoulder, not as a captive, but as his equal?

Who...?

A ghost?

The thought was ludicrous. She had been solid. She had eaten his food, teased the Dragon Lord, her laughter a real sound in the air. Ghosts did not command the respect of ancient powers.

Yet the evidence Eastiel presented was a locked box, and the key he offered fit perfectly. The flower he witnessed. The motive. The vile plausibility of it.

The two realities, the vibrant, living woman in his memory and the heartless, brutal murder described from the podium collided in his mind, refusing to reconcile.

But staring at Eastiel’s ravaged, utterly convinced face, Hettor felt a doubt begin to ice its way through his veins.

How?