My Father Ordered His Own Mother's Execution and Forgot My Name—Then the Secret of His Relic Throne Revealed the Terrifying Truth About Our Enclave
I held the journal, tears blurring my vision. Each page was a testament to Malachi’s struggle, a silent scream against the insidious poison of the throne. The childish scrawls of my name, the crude drawings of my face—they were not signs of indifference, but of a desperate, dying love.
“This is unbearable,” I whispered, tracing one of the faded lines. “He endured this for twenty years.”
Gideon put a hand on my shoulder, a rare gesture of comfort from the usually stoic metallurgist. “He fought hard, Evangeline. More than anyone knew.”
I turned to the final entries, just a few days before his death. The script was almost illegible, a frantic jumble of lines, but individual words, written larger, bolder, stood out like desperate beacons.
“ABIGAIL… CROWN… EVANGELINE… NO…”
My blood ran cold. Abigail. My foster mother. The pious matriarch. The woman Malachi had sentenced to death.
I tried to piece together the fragmented words, my heart pounding. Malachi’s last, fading thoughts.
“He wasn’t sentencing her to death out of madness,” I whispered, a horrifying truth dawning on me. “He was trying to protect me.”
I flipped back a few pages, searching for context. The handwriting was slightly clearer here, though still struggling. One entry, dated three weeks prior, outlined a troubling discovery.
“Abigail… herbs… powder… from the rock… she makes me forget.”
My hand flew to my mouth. Pulverized throne-ore. Caleb had described the psychotropic properties. Abigail wasn’t just manipulating him; she was actively accelerating his cognitive decay.
“She was poisoning him,” I choked out, the words catching in my throat. “Using the throne’s own essence against him.”
The cruel irony of it. The man sacrificing his mind for the enclave, being systematically undone by the very woman he’d trusted.
“Why?” Gideon asked, his voice low, his analytical mind searching for motive. “Power?”
“She always craved influence,” I said, a bitter taste in my mouth. “To be seen as the true matriarch, beyond even the King.”
I remembered the early years, Abigail’s subtle whispers, her constant presence by Malachi’s side as he aged. How she had always seemed to “guide” his decisions, especially in matters concerning the religious council.
“The execution order,” I realized, the pieces finally clicking into place, the true horror of Malachi’s last act. “It wasn’t a death sentence for a pious mother. It was an isolation order. A desperate act to remove her from the sanctum, to stop her from reaching me.”
Malachi had seen her intentions. He had seen her trying to place the psychotropic crown upon my head, using me as her puppet. He knew the throne would destroy me, just as it had destroyed him. In his final, fragmented moments, with his mind ravaged, he had issued the only order he could to protect me from her machinations. An order that, to everyone else, looked like an act of monstrous cruelty.
My father hadn’t forgotten me. He had used his last ounce of will to shield me, even as his words, his very memories, betrayed him. The man I thought a tyrant, was the last line of defense. And Abigail, the saintly foster mother, was the true viper in the heart of Zion’s Rest.
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