The Guardian gods-Chapter 491

His hand, pale and steady, returned to his cup. He took a slow sip of the crimson drink, savoring the warmth it brought his cold blood while staring past the rising mist outside the high windows of the library. He had gifted them immortality, strength, and a chance to forge their own path.

But perhaps... he had also cursed them.

And himself.

"What do you want?" Roth asked, his voice low and cold.

Ethan stood still, the flickering candlelight casting long shadows across his crystallized limbs. The soft, rhythmic ting of his blood-crystal feet had gone silent now, replaced by a tension that clung to the air like mist. His expression remained unreadable, sculpted from discipline and detachment.

"I am here about our previous conversation," he said, tone neutral—deliberate.

"That being?" Roth asked again, colder this time, his eyes narrowing slightly, glowing faintly in the dim library.

Ethan gave the faintest nod. "Isn’t it time," he said, "for our godling race to make contact with our brethren?"

Roth’s eyes didn’t waver, but the silence that followed was a loud one. His stare was sharp—piercing, as if weighing Ethan’s soul. "Do you think your people are ready to meet them?" he asked, each word slower, more pointed.

This time, Ethan didn’t answer immediately.

He stood there, back straight, his gaze meeting Roth’s not with defiance but with something more somber—conviction.

"No," he admitted at last, and for the first time, his voice cracked the shell of his impassiveness. "We are not. And that is exactly why we must."

He stepped forward slightly, letting his words carry before Roth could reply.

"Our people believe the empire is the summit of all ambition, the peak of all resistance. They believe our existence—our struggle—is confined to this continent, to its politics, its rivalries, its fleeting empires. They think the blood in their veins marks them as something supreme... divine."

Ethan shook his head.

"They are blind. Not out of ignorance, but pride. And I would have shared in that blindness too, if you had not shown me what lies beyond. The stars. The others. The truth."

Roth’s fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the white table, but he said nothing.

Ethan took another step.

"They need to see what I’ve seen. They need to understand that our throne rooms mean nothing in the eyes of beings who shape reality itself. That our petty feuds, our obsessive dances for power and prestige—they are meaningless to the greater world."

He paused.

"I grow tired, Father. Tired of watching them circle one another like wolves in the dark. Tired of pretending that the game they play matters. I sit on a throne that means nothing. And I think... they should know why."

Roth looked at Ethan—truly looked. His eyes searched the lines on his son’s face, the subtle tension in his voice, the crystalline growth across his limbs like a burden he wore with pride. There was no naivety left in him. No boy who once bowed with wide, admiring eyes.

Only a man—one molded by power and disillusionment.

For the first time in a long while, Roth didn’t immediately dismiss the idea. The thought of contact with the other godling races, of breaking the isolation he had preserved for so long, stirred something within him... a sense of inevitability. Perhaps it was time.

But inevitability and readiness were not the same.

And neither were safety and truth.

Roth rose slowly, the motion graceful and silent, yet commanding. His form, draped in flowing robes of inky black, loomed even taller than before, casting long shadows that seemed to stretch unnaturally across the library floor. The fabric whispered as it swept the stone beneath him, like the quiet rustle of wind through a graveyard.

Then, with a simple wave of his pale hand, the world shifted.

The ancient library vanished into nothingness—its shelves, books, and the lingering scent of parchment all swallowed in a blink. In its place, an endless expanse of white bloomed outward in all directions. A void of pure, unbroken stillness. There was no floor, no ceiling, no horizon. Just infinite white.

And silence.

Roth stood at the center, a dark tower in the midst of nothing. Ethan remained where he was, surrounded by the vastness, the sound of his breathing suddenly louder, more real, in the overwhelming quiet.

With a second gesture—a mere snap of the fingers—Roth summoned something into the void.

A flag.

Small and weathered, it fluttered in a wind that didn’t exist. It bore the familiar sigil of the vampire race: a crimson fang biting into a silver crescent, a symbol of their bloodline and divine ancestry. Yet here, in this boundless whiteness, it looked fragile. Insignificant. A flicker of identity in a sea of endless potential.

But then two more flags emerged from the nothingness, each unfurling with a silent force, larger, more vivid.

They bore the same central sigil—still the fang and crescent—but were distinguished by their color. One was a deep, oppressive black that seemed to swallow light. The other was radiant white, almost glowing, etched with patterns of gold and crimson thread.

And at the heart of both, dwarfed by their scale, floated the original vampire flag—reduced in size, embedded within them.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed as the meaning became clear.

He knew what these banners represented. What Roth was showing him wasn’t just symbolism—it was prophecy, it was politics, it was history unraveling before it happened.

The black flag represented the Full-Blooded, those born directly from Roth’s purest bloodline—vampires who clung to tradition, power, and purity. They viewed themselves as the rightful rulers, sacred descendants of a god.

The white flag stood for the Hybrids, born from mixed bloodlines, those with resilience to sunlight, a capacity to adapt, and a new perspective shaped by coexistence with other races. They represented the future in motion—progress, change, unpredictability.

Roth turned to Ethan, his crimson eyes dimmed now, as if weary from what he already knew lay ahead.

"When the time comes," Roth asked, his voice deep and unflinching, "which of these factions... should speak for us?"

The question lingered like a blade suspended in the air, its edge not pointed at Ethan’s throat, but at his very soul.

Roth wasn’t asking about preference.

He was asking about fate.

Who would define their people’s place in the greater world? Who would represent their godling race when they finally stepped out of the mist and shadows, into the light of other divine descendants?

Ethan stared at the flags. The black one pulsed with pride and power, the weight of tradition. The white one shimmered with possibility and uncertainty.

And the original flag—the one he and Roth had first raised themself—sat quietly between them, like a memory being swallowed by its own children.

Ethan stood still, the vast whiteness pressing in around him, yet it was the question that truly weighed on his chest. His eyes, hardened over the years, shifted from one flag to the other—black and white, past and future, purity and change.

He had been born beneath the black flag. Raised among the full-blooded elites, taught their doctrines, molded in their image. But it was the white flag that had sheltered him when his body began to change—when the red crystal began creeping across his skin, when his strength threatened to break him, when others whispered that he was no longer "pure."

It had been the hybrids who helped him endure.

It had been the full-blooded who taught him pride.

Both sides had shaped him, and yet... neither fully defined him anymore.

Ethan stepped forward, his blood-crystallized foot echoing with that distinct ting as it touched the unseen ground. The sound reverberated strangely in the formless world, like a bell tolling from a distance. He moved toward the flags, his voice steady but laced with something deeper—conflict, perhaps... or conviction.

"They are both us," he said finally, his gaze locked on the floating sigils. "Both are born from you. Both are born from this land, and from our struggle."

He turned to Roth.

"But neither is ready to represent all of us."

Roth watched him in silence, the question still lingering between them, unanswered.

Ethan stepped beside the white flag, placing a hand near it, but not touching. His eyes softened just slightly. "The hybrids... They see beyond what lies in front of them. They adapt, they question, they learn fast. Their bodies carry the blood without the curse of the sun, and their minds are shaped by the world as it changes. They might be the future."

He turned to the black banner. "But the full-blooded... They carry our history. Our dignity. They remember what it means to hold power in stillness, to endure centuries unchanged. Their flaw is their pride. But pride... can become resolve, if tempered."

Ethan let his hand fall.

"If we choose one, the other will rebel. That much is certain. They already walk on a thin edge. And when you are gone..."

His voice trailed off. For a long moment, there was only silence.

Then, his gaze lifted again. "I believe the answer isn’t choosing one to represent us. It’s forging something that binds them both. A third path."