Transmigrated as the Villainess Princess - Chapter 261

Chapter 261: Seal

The world shifted beneath their feet the moment they stepped through the Convergence Gate.

Miraen blinked.

One breath, and the scent of old parchment, wet earth, and lavender assaulted her senses. The wind no longer sang in fragmented tongues—it whispered through the trees of the Virelan grove, steady and warm.

They were home.

Elyon collapsed to one knee beside her, burying his hand into the soft moss with disbelief. “It’s real,” he said. “We made it.”

Korrin turned his face skyward, eyes wide. “It feels… heavier here.”

Lira nodded. “The realm here doesn’t bend. It doesn’t shift around our desires.”

Miraen looked back through the gate.

Aeliana stood at the threshold, luminous in the space between worlds. The final ember pulsed at her heart, no longer separate from her. She was both girl and starfire now—mortal, yet deeply altered.

“You’ll find your way back?” Miraen asked softly.

Aeliana smiled. “I have to. I’ve seen what waits in the cracks. There are other echoes… other versions of us. Some broken. Some twisted. But some… still searching.”

She pressed her hand to Miraen’s. “This isn’t an ending. It’s the place where endings become beginnings.”

And then, with a final whisper of starlight, the gate closed.

Silence.

Then: birdsong.

Real birdsong.

Miraen let the weight of it all sink in—the earth beneath her boots, the rustle of wind through leaves untouched by magic, the ache in her limbs from months spent fighting not just monsters, but fate.

They were home.

But peace had never come easy.

Within a fortnight, their return stirred rumors. People whispered of fallen stars, of returned ghosts, of a girl who had died and come back wearing starlight like a second skin. The Conclave of Writ-Keepers demanded answers. The Queen of Ashenvyre offered a summons. And worst of all, the Order of Silent Flame—the very sect Miraen had once defied—sent envoys to collect her.

“Is it always like this?” Korrin muttered. “Come back from saving the world only to be put on trial for it?”

Miraen gave a tight smile. “It is when the world fears what it doesn’t understand.”

Elyon, ever the tactician, offered a suggestion: “We give them a story they can believe. Not the truth. The truth is too much.”

But Miraen disagreed.

“I’ve spent too long burying truths. If we’re going to move forward, it has to be with open hands.”

And so, she stood before the Council of Mirrors in the marble hall of Iridane, robes torn but her voice clear, and told them everything. Not the sanitized tale of glory, but the blood and bone and sorrow that led them to Aeylith’s broken tower. She told them of Elydrith—not as a monster, but as a memory unhealed. Of Aeliana’s fracturing. Of the ember.

Of what might still be coming.

The council was silent for a long time after she finished.

Then, unexpectedly, it was the High Speaker—a grizzled woman with one eye and a voice like wind through thorns—who leaned forward and asked, “What does the ember mean now?”

Miraen answered with honesty. “It means possibility. It means that what we think is lost may not be. That fate isn’t final.”

The High Speaker nodded.

And let them go.

—

In the months that followed, each of them chose different paths.

Korrin returned to the outlands of Durvalyn, taking up the forge where his grandfather had once smithed swords for war. But instead of weapons, he began making instruments—flutes, lyres, small wind chimes tuned to the songs he remembered from Aeylith’s dreaming temples.

Lira traveled north to the frost monasteries, seeking the old tongues and forgotten songs that only whispered through the ice. Her voice, once cracked from battle, returned stronger than before—haunted, beautiful.

Elyon disappeared.

No notes. No farewells.

Miraen woke one morning to find his cloak folded at the base of the tree outside her home, with a single message stitched into the lining: “Some debts I must pay alone.”

She searched, briefly, but found no trace.

Instead, she waited.

The dreams started quietly.

At first, it was just Miraen. She would wake in the night, breath shallow, the scent of starlight clinging to her skin. She saw visions—distant, flickering. Aeliana walking through fields of glass. A sky inverted. Eyes watching from behind doors that did not exist.

Then others began to feel it.

Farmers reported stars flickering in strange rhythms.

Children whispered of voices behind mirrors.

Priests complained of cold shadows at the edges of the altar flames.

Something was stirring.

It started with the rivers—first the Yelthen, then the Telmar. The waters slowed, thickened, then shimmered with iridescent light like liquid moonstone. Fish no longer swam in them. Only silence.

Next came the mirrors.

Anywhere reflections could be seen, figures moved that did not match the viewer. Smiles lingered too long. Shadows blinked independently.

The people began to panic.

And Miraen knew.

Elydrith had not been destroyed.

She had been… changed.

Released.

And whatever force once kept her bound in the Eclipse Spire was no longer holding.

Which meant—

Miraen went back to the Convergence Grove.

She waited in the rain for two days.

On the third day, the air shimmered—and the gate opened.

Aeliana stepped through.

But she wasn’t alone.

Behind her, hovering like a shattered moon, was a new fragment of the ember.

Pale. Flickering.

“Is it her?” Miraen asked.

Aeliana nodded, sorrow heavy in her eyes. “It’s what’s left of her… but it’s growing. It’s collecting pieces from other realms. Not just our Elydrith.”

“You mean there are more?”

Aeliana’s voice cracked. “A thousand. Maybe more. Every version of her ever made, every regret we never faced. She’s becoming a chorus.”

Miraen stepped forward. “Then we end it.”

Aeliana shook her head. “No. We begin again. This time, not with fire or blades… but with memory. With light.”

Behind them, the stars blinked out—one by one.

Not in death.

But in anticipation.

The realm had changed.

Aeliana raised her hand, and the ember flickered—casting a path through the trees, through the worlds, through the wounds left open.

Miraen took her sister’s hand.

“I’m with you.”

And together, they stepped into the unknown.

Again.

But this time, they were not fractured.

They were whole.

And the chorus of the lost?

Would finally hear their song.