Chapter 223: The Truth About Mother

Book:Alpha's Rise and Luna's Love Published:2024-6-4

Ethan didn’t know why Grace suddenly brought him to the Moonlit Forest. “Why? How did you know about this place? Do you know something?”
Grace didn’t answer him; she just kept moving forward.
Not getting an answer, Ethan felt uneasy. Grace seemed unusually serious today, as if she were about to announce something significant. And this unknown event filled him with anxiety. His intuition, especially in unfavorable situations, was usually accurate.
They followed the path until they reached a cave, where Grace stopped.
Ethan lowered his head and noticed many scattered footprints on the ground-footprints from many people intermingled. This place had hosted someone before. He raised his head and examined the cave, finding traces of past habitation.
“Who used to live here?” His voice trembled slightly, and an answer was on the tip of his tongue. However, he dared not say it. He wanted to hear Grace say it in person, or rather, he wanted Alexander to tell him.
Grace turned around, her profile intermittently illuminated by the shifting light and shadow. Ethan suddenly couldn’t produce any sound; he felt like he already knew the answer.
“Was it my mother?”
Grace nodded. “Because she was affected by the wizard’s sorcery, she couldn’t leave this forest for many years. I heard that when she was finally seen, the shackles on her feet had nearly absorbed all the energy inside her. Once deprived of that energy, a person would naturally die. They removed the shackles for her, and although it absorbed her energy, it also sustained her life. After taking off the shackles, she aged rapidly and died after seeing the last rays of the setting sun.”
Ethan’s expression remained unchanged.
Thinking he didn’t believe her, Grace said, “I’m sorry, but…”
“Who put the shackles on her?”
Grace hesitated.
“You know, don’t you?” His eyes turned bloodshot. “Who exiled her to the Moonlit Forest?”
They both knew the answer, but Ethan couldn’t say it himself. Grace could only tentatively say, “I think it might be Alexander?”
Without the uncertain tone, there was no one else but Alexander with the authority to exile a Luna from the tribe.
Alexander killed his mother! Every time he asked his father about anything related to his mother, Alex refused to talk, as if it were an unspeakable topic. It turned out that the unspeakable thing wasn’t his mother, but Alex himself! It was something he did to his mother that made him unable to speak about anything related to her.
He fiercely punched the cave’s stone wall. The hard rock cracked under the force filled with anger and hatred. Even though his hand was bleeding, the physical pain was far less than the crack in his heart. Now, he could understand how Grace restrained herself from killing him when she thought the Grand Elder had died. He now wanted to rush back to Alexander’s palace, drag him down from that supreme position in front of the entire tribe, and question why he treated his mother like this, why he treated his mother’s son like this.
Moreover, he wanted to punch Alexander over and over again, returning all the suffering his mother endured over the years. This way, Alexander could understand what he had done wrong.
He knelt at the entrance of the cave, his heart splitting into an irreparable rift. But he couldn’t cry; he never learned how to cry, never learned how to express sorrow. From the moment he was forced to leave his mother’s embrace at birth, he lost the right to shed tears.
Grace crouched down. In this moment, she didn’t want to maintain a hostile posture with Ethan. She wanted to offer him some comfort. Having been a person who suffered herself, she subconsciously extended her hand to protect others when she saw them in pain, even if it was Ethan.
“Don’t be like this. If you want to cry, just let it out.”
She wrapped her arms around Ethan, pulling him into an embrace. Ethan’s head hung limply on her shoulder. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to see her… From birth until now, I’ve never let go of that obsession. I just want to call her ‘mom,’ see what she looks like. Even if it’s not the same as in the photos, it doesn’t matter. I just want to see her.”
Unmet needs during infancy, the desire for a mother’s embrace, the need to suckle from a mother’s breast-all these turned into hidden dangers buried deep in his mind. His desires expanded limitlessly, and sometimes, he didn’t even know what he wanted. But circumstances dragged him forward, and he walked numbly ahead.
Desire, once a seed parasitic on the tree of his yearning for his mother, transformed into a black hole that could devour everything-others and himself.
“I know… I know. I can hear it all.”
Ethan had confided in Grace about few genuine things, all related to his mother. Grace understood that kind of yearning. If there were a deity willing to fulfill her deepest desires, she wouldn’t ask for wealth, power, fame, or status. She only wanted to return to that wooden house-the house where she lived with her mom and dad. It was the origin of all her desires.
“She was thinking of you until the very end. Although she spent the latter part of her life in this enormous cage, she never stopped yearning for you. In her final moments, she was asking Maggie about her child, whether she had seen a wolf cub that was half-wolf and half-vampire. But because no one had seen such a being, nobody could answer her question. Even I didn’t know that you had vampire lineage.”
Ethan covered his forehead. Since childhood, he was taught the first thing was to hide his lineage; no one could discover that he carried vampire blood. So, he learned to control his innate craving for blood. Walking in the sunlight, even though uncomfortable, he forcefully restrained the pain that was about to overwhelm him, not letting anyone see.
He became extremely adept at enduring pain. Ordinary injuries wouldn’t slow him down. Soon, his hunting skills surpassed those of his peers. Yet, Alexander was never satisfied. In his eyes, there was only indifference and disdain. Ethan started to become paranoid and sinister, much like the present-day Alexander.
But many things turned out to be irreversible from the start, like Peirene falling in love with Alexander, and even more so, Ethan’s desire for Alexander’s approval from the very beginning.