novelraw Chapter 42: 3RD POV.
Chapter 42: 3RD POV.
Chapter 42: 3RD POV.
He found it incredibly hard to accept. The woman he had labeled as a heartless villainess, a monster who only cared about her own amusement, had been his silent guardian before he even knew her name.
"Y-You’re saying you never intended to eat me?" he asked, his tone unsure. The question felt stupid now, given the look on her face, but he had to hear it.
"Did you really see me as a monster from the very beginning?" Persephone asked.
She stared at him with those teary eyes, and for the first time, Jacob saw the loneliness that Garin had talked about.
She looked like a child who had tried to do something nice and had been kicked for it. "Is that all I am to you? A monster?"
Jacob felt a pang of guilt, but then he remembered the rest of the cave. Recalling the horror he felt when he first explored this place. Which grounded his thoughts.
"But what about those guys!" Jacob said, his voice gaining strength as he pointed a finger at the pile of skeletons tucked away in the dark corner of the cave.
"How do you explain that! If you’re so ’kind,’ why are there human remains in your home? You can’t tell me they just decided to take a nap and forgot to wake up!"
"Are you humans really this heartless?" Persephone asked.
Her voice was shaking now, and her clenched hands were trembling so much that the water around them was vibrating.
The look of hurt on her face became even deeper, turning into a look sadness that Jacob hadn’t thought her capable of feeling.
"They were all in the same situation as you," she said, her head dropping as she looked at the floor. Unable to look at the deceased remains due to grief.
"I found them alright! I didn’t try to harm them... I just wanted to save them."
" I found them on boats, or clinging to pieces of wood after storms. They were dying.... Just like you were."
She took a shaky breath. "I tried to help every single one of them. I would bring them food every day, some of them were afraid of me too... Some gladly accepted my help.".
" With each situation I felt hopeful that maybe one.. just one of them would survive."
" But without the transformation... without fresh water... I knew they wouldn’t have lasted for long anyway."
Reaching this point, her voice began to crack as if she were remembering something tragic, something that had repeated itself over and over again until she couldn’t take it anymore.
"The first one told me it was possible to turn humans using my blood." she whispered, a single tear finally breaking free and drifting away into the water. "Back then I had no idea it wasn’t guaranteed."
" Each time I tried, something always went wrong with the process...." She bit her trembling lower lip.
" I watched them get weaker till they stopped eating."
" Some of them even turned on me mid way...."
" Once something goes in the way you never expected, you humans always have a way of blaming someone else for everything." She looked at Jacob with a broken smile.
" Most of them died because they transform properly, some had side effects, others didn’t turn out like I’d hoped... I didn’t mean to but.... they begged me to put them out of their misery."
She looked at the skeletons, and for a moment, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Jacob saw the weight of all those years of isolation. Every skeleton wasn’t a meal she had eaten; it was a failure she had lived through.
It was another person who had died in her care because she didn’t know how to keep them alive.
"I didn’t want you to be like them," she said, looking back at him. "That’s why I tried everything I could to keep you alive."
" It was nice seeing you so spirited even when placed in such a hopeless situation." A fond smile suddenly touched her lips.
" I’d already sworn to myself that I wouldn’t try so much again."
" But seeing you like that gave me the strength to try one more time."
" And that’s why I changed you so you could survive."
" I gave you the strength of the sea so you would never have to worry about starving or drowning again. And I thought... I thought for once, someone would stay."
Jacob sat there, frozen. He looked at the bones, then at the woman crying in front of him.
The villainess he had been trying to escape was just a lonely girl who had spent years trying to save people who were already dead, only to be hated by the one person she finally managed to save.
He looked at his hands again. The "curse" he had blamed her for was actually her attempt at a gift.
It was a messy, violent, and terrifying gift, but it was the only way she knew how to keep him from becoming another pile of bones in the corner.
The silence in the cave was different now.
The tension was still there, but the anger was gone, replaced by a complicated, heavy truth that Jacob wasn’t sure how to handle.
He had spent so long thinking of himself as the hero escaping a monster, but in her story, he was the only success in a long line of tragedies, and he was the one who had broken her heart.
"Persephone..." he said, rather than calling her sea witch or using honourifics.
But did he really deserve to be friendly with her after everything he’d done.
AN: Hahahaha, who else thinks Jacob messed up big time here. To think poor Persephone has been misunderstood all this time. As her creator, I also owe her a serious apology. Poor Persephone.
But wait? Is Jacob really at fault here? Or were his actions warranted.
Feel free to drop your thoughts on the comments, the more active the better hehehe.
Also, I forgot to mention, besides using Powerstones to get bonus Chapters. Now you can also get bonus Chapters by donating golden tickets. I’ll re-update it in the synopsis so stay tuned.