The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 548: Incomplete

The dust motes in the library didn’t dance; they hung suspended in the heavy, stagnant air, like the city itself was holding its breath.

The assignment Ellyn was given, what can kill a god, seemed to possess a physical weight, a jagged edge that cut through the silence. The three of them stood in the center of the vast, shadowed hall, the silence stretching until it felt brittle.

Eris looked at Aldwin, her gaze flat and unyielding. She didn’t blink. She didn’t soften her expression. She simply corrected the premise of the entire conversation.

"We are not going to kill a god old man," she said. Her voice wasn’t raised, but it carried a finality that brooked no argument. It was a statement of fact, a boundary drawn in the dirt. She wasn’t interested in the hubris of deicide; she was interested in the mechanics of a tragedy.

"Ohhhh?" Aldwin didn’t argue. He merely arched a brow, his grey eyes glinting with a sharp, predatory curiosity as Ellyn gestured for them to move deeper into the stacks. "Is that so?"

Ellyn led them toward his workspace, a cluttered corner tucked behind a row of crumbling histories. It was a sanctuary of frantic scholarship.

Despite the chaos of the last few days, the screaming, the soot, the blood on the cobblestones, Ellyn’s corner remained a monument to a different kind of labor.

Books were splayed open like wounded birds, pages marked with frantic ink, notes piled in staggering towers.

"I... I apologize for the state of it," Ellyn stammered, his fingers twitching toward a stack of papers. "I haven’t been able to move forward as quickly as I’d hoped. Since the serpents... since the attack, I’ve been volunteering. Repairing the buildings near the gates, helping the healers with the burns. There are so many people, Your Majesty. So much broken stone."

Eris didn’t reprimand him for the delay. She simply settled into the space, her amber eyes scanning the titles of the books he had pulled. The three of them gathered around the table, a strange triptych of power: the ancient mage, the earnest student, and the fire-blooded empress.

"We are not going to kill a god," Eris repeated, leaning over a map of the ancient world. "We are simply going to find out what happened to them."

The weight of the statement landed heavily.

In the theology of the north, and the south, for that matter, the dragons hadn’t ’happened’ to anything.

They were the architects.

The creation story was a rote lullaby: the dragons gave magic to the world, humans used that gift to fuel their own petty wars, and the dragons, disgusted by the rot, simply vanished into the ether.

"That is the story children are told," Eris said, her voice dropping into a lower, more dangerous register. "The dragons disappeared. They went away. But power of that magnitude does not simply vanish because its feelings are hurt. What if something happened to them? Specifically. Mechanically."

Aldwin remained silent, his arms crossed over his chest, listening with an intensity that made Ellyn shift uncomfortably. He didn’t interrupt. He watched Eris as if he were seeing a portrait being painted in real-time.

"I see you’ve thought about this," Aldwin said eventually, his voice gravelly and old as time itself. "You think more... differently than the others. Most people are content to worship the absence or curse the abandonment. You are looking for the crime scene."

He stepped closer, his fingers trailing over a diagram of a dragon’s wing. "It is something I have been pondering myself. For a long time. Our world is vast,Your Majesty, but it is also full of things that are simply... off. Improbable arrangements. Why is the magic thinning in some places and pooling like stagnant water in others? Why do the ancient ley lines feel less like conduits and more like scars?"

The atmosphere In the room shifted. It was the specific, electric recognition of two people who had been harboring the same dangerous thoughts, finally finding a mirror in one another. They were building a theory out of thin air, a bridge of ’what ifs’ that led toward a dark, uncomfortable truth.

Ellyn watched them, taken aback. He was caught between the greatest mage of the empire and the Empress herself, hearing them openly question the very foundations of their reality.

It was both reassuring and utterly terrifying. It meant his own doubts weren’t a sign of madness or failure; they were a sign of sight. He adjusted his glasses, his mind working through the implications as if he were trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces.

"That is why I gave you the task, Ellyn," Eris said, turning her attention back to the young mage. "I asked you what could kill a god, a dragon, because if something ended them, or contained them, understanding how tells me what they were fighting. It tells me what finally managed to snuff out a sun."

The focus shifted entirely to Ellyn. He felt the weight of their combined gaze, Aldwin’s curious, almost playful expectation and Eris’s heavy, unblinking demand.

"So," Aldwin said gently, stroking the silver of his beard. "What did you find, youngling?"

Ellyn swallowed hard. He delivered his report, drawing on the notes he had presented to Eris earlier but expanding them now, adding the context he had struggled to articulate before.

He spoke of the failed rituals he’d found in the forbidden annexes, the stories of artifacts that crumbled the moment they touched divine skin, and the fragments of fortunes and spells that hinted at a weapon made of ’starlight and silence.’

But as he reached the end, his tone dropped. The academic fervor died away, replaced by a genuine, crushing sadness.

"It’s incomplete, Your Majesty" Ellyn whispered, looking down at his hands. "I’ve searched every corner of this library. I’ve looked through the scrolls that survived the Long Dark. But there is nothing definitive. There is no manual for this."