Days after the hearing, things finally began to settle.
At least, on the surface.
The North's Watch, once overwhelmed by the sudden surge of magical beasts, had fallen silent.
Almost unnaturally so.
The creatures that had once stormed its walls, that had torn through defenses without pause, all collapsed at once.
No struggle. No warning. Just… gone.
Dead.
No one could explain it. Not the witches stationed there, not the supernaturals assigned to maintain the boundary, not even the observers sent by the Senate.
In the end, it was written off as a magical anomaly. A strange magical event.
None could have predicted it. Unexplainable to even the greatest minds of the Witching Hour.
Unbeknownst to them, the truth was far simpler.
The Delyths had ended it.
Beneath their experiments with Rift Cards, they had developed more than just a way to deploy beasts.
They had created a failsafe—a kill switch embedded directly into the creatures themselves.
A drug laced into their systems, designed to respond to a specific mana signature unique to their lineage, their rituals.
With a single trigger, every beast they released could be erased.
And just like that, the north was quiet again.
Clean of the noise and rampaging as if nothing had ever happened.
Elsewhere, far from the aftermath of it all, life moved on.
Emilia Willow now walked beside Aurora, carrying a handful of bags that were far too ordinary for someone like her.
Clothes, essentials, things she had never really owned before.
She moved stiffly at times, like she wasn't fully used to this kind of life yet. Like her body still expected something else.
Violence, maybe.
She glanced at Aster once or twice during their walk, still not fully used to the truth she had learned—that Charlotte Sweeiz, the one she now followed, wasn't what he appeared to be.
A man.
Hidden beneath layers of magic so refined it didn't even feel like a disguise.
She never did question it. Didn't even ask. She had simply accepted it, the same way she had accepted everything else since stepping into the Lunarium. Besides, living under Aster's care had been quite the days for her.
Quietly, as the two shops for items.
"Uhm… Aurora?" Emilia finally spoke, her voice uncertain, like she was testing how it sounded outside of silence.
"Yeah?" Aurora replied casually, not even looking at her as she scanned through another rack of clothes.
"I'm a Calamity now…" Emilia said, her grip tightening slightly around the bags.
"Learning directly under Ms. Charlotte… being called her disciple…" She paused, then smiled faintly. "I don't regret it."
Aurora didn't answer immediately.
"I've always hated them," Emilia continued, softer now. "They deserved everything that I did."
Silence lingered between them.
"I understand it now," Emilia added, glancing at her. "You became one too, right? Because of them. The Welsch."
Aurora finally looked at her, then reached out and ruffled her hair, almost absentmindedly.
"They might have deserved it," she said. "They might not have."
A small shrug.
"Doesn't really matter now." She started walking again. "We're here. That's it."
A pause.
"So just enjoy it. Life, I mean. Forget the rest."
Emilia nodded slightly, though her smile didn't fully reach her eyes.
They stopped by a café not long after. With still a bit of money left on what Aster had provided for them to buy Emilia some stuff, Aurora playfully pulls her tongue out towards Emilia who's already laughing.
It was small. Quiet. Normal. The kind of place Emilia had never stepped into before.
Aurora was already halfway through her second slice of cake.
"By the way…" she said, mouth full, completely unbothered. "How did you do it?"
"Do what?" Emilia blinked, genuinely confused, though she was already reaching for another bite herself.
Aurora swallowed.
"The killing of your family."
Emilia paused.
Just for a second.
"Y-You don't have to tell me, I was ju—"
"It's fine," Emilia cut in, waving it off. "I already told Ms. Charlotte."
A small giggle slipped out.
"She laughed."
Aurora didn't react to that.
Emilia leaned back slightly in her seat, eyes unfocused as she started recalling it.
Before she had ever been sent to the Lunarium, Emilia Willow belonged to a family that prided itself on Healing and its many applications.
They were known for pulling people back from the brink of death.
And Emilia—
She was one of them.
A candidate for the next Arch-Witch as the current was getting older and the family is in need of a new one. Someone meant to carry that legacy. But she was never treated like it.
She was the black sheep. Not because she couldn't heal. But because of how she worked around it.
Even as a child, something about her had always been… off.
They caught her in the gardens more than once. Holding a dying rat, carefully mending its wounds, restoring it perfectly. Only to stab it again the moment it recovered. Not out of anger. Not out of cruelty. Just curiosity. She wanted to see what changed. What stayed. What broke first.
Healing, to her, was never sacred. It was a process.
A cycle.
Something to test, to repeat, to perfect.
And no matter how many times they tried to correct her, she never changed.
If anything, she improved.
And for that, they didn't just discipline her.
They broke her.
The whispers never stopped. The looks. The quiet disgust masked as concern. Her siblings avoided her until they didn't have to pretend anymore. Then came the mocking.
Then worse.
Healing magic may have made the bruises disappear but It didn't erase what came with them.
They called her wrong.
Broken.
Something that shouldn't have been born into their family.
And the elders—
They let it happen.
Because to them, such were needed to enforce their teachings.
Then came the Lunarium.
Charlotte's coven.
They sent Emilia. Not out of hope but because they didn't care what happened to her. They saw the many families sending their family members and decided to send someone out of note, Emilia.
Mary, the professor of the school of Restoration, taught her with the many students.
Quiet. Soft. Almost fragile.
But her lessons—
They made sense.
"Restoration… isn't just healing,"
Mary had said once, her voice barely above a whisper to the point the students even had to reached out of their seats just ot hear.
"It's… everything that keeps something from falling apart."
They learned more than closing wounds. They learned how to purge poison. How to undo curses. How to counter necromancy by restoring what it corrupted.
Not by force—
But by correction.
"Don't fight it…" Mary would murmur. "Understand it… then bring it back."
Others struggled with it. They were either too slow or too precise on how they handle their flow of mana. Especially when they handled necromancy. They got too uncomfortable.
Emilia didn't however.
She understood immediately.
Because this—
This was how she had always seen it.
Healing wasn't kindness. It was a process.
"…Ah," Emilia whispered back then, smiling faintly at her hands.
"This is possible."
So she left. Quietly. No one had stopped her as they never really found out. Charlotte, thinking she returned to her family, she called them. However, no one looked for her and her family didn't really give a damn.
And when she returned—
She didn't go back to the Lunarium.
She went home.
"Ms. Emilia, you've returned," the butler greeted, opening the gate.
She stepped forward. Placed her hand on his chest.
And he melted.
No struggle. No scream.
Just flesh dissolving into something unrecognizable.
Green liquid dripped from her fingers.
Poison.
It was so concentrated that it had turned green. Way too refined and perfect for it to be a simple poisonmancy.
After that—
It wasn't even a fight.
Mist spread across the estate before anyone understood what was happening.
Bodies fell.
One after another.
Some melted. Some choked. Some simply collapsed where they stood.
By the time her family realized—
It was already over.
When the enforcers arrived, she was standing in the center.
Surrounded.
Still.
Looking up at nothing.
"…And that's it," Emilia finished, taking another bite of cake like she had just finished telling a normal story.
Aurora stared at her for a moment.
"…Oh."
That was all she said. Because there wasn't really anything else to say.
By the time Emilia was taken in—
There was nothing left of the Willow family.
Only her.
And just like that—
A new name was added.
Another title whispered across the Witching Hour.
Not with confusion. Not with doubt. But with certainty.
Another had been born.
The fourth Calamity.
The Witch of Malignancy.