Home / Fantasy / The Devil's Broken Doll / Chapter 236 - What Lies Beneath

Share

Chapter 236 - What Lies Beneath

last update publish date: 2026-04-22 07:48:14

(Adelaide & Caelum)

The questions Adelaide had held in the tunnel began to gather again under her ribs, heavier now because the visual scale of the Expanse made vagueness harder to tolerate.

“This is not just ‘away from the centre,’” she said after several minutes of silence.

Cael did not look at her. “No.”

“You knew where that tunnel opened.”

“Yes.”

“You know where this path leads.”

A beat, and then, “Yes.”

She stopped walking.

The heat from the nearest forge brushed across her
Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App
Locked Chapter

Latest chapter

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 393 - Written In Blood

    (Apollo)He found three mentions of Arkael.One placed him dead at the western breach. One placed him fleeing through the lower tunnels with a bloodied hand pressed to his side. One claimed he had been seen carrying a child.Apollo went very still. The vault seemed to tilt around that single line.He read it again. Seen carrying a child.No gender listed. No age. No identifying mark. No witness name. The report was unsigned, marked unreliable in a hand Apollo recognised as his own. A cruel annotation slashed across the margin: fantasy born of panic. Discard.His fingers hovered above the words.He remembered writing that.The war had been chaos then, every corridor wet with blood, every loyalist inventing miracles to comfort themselves, every surviving servant insisting someone had escaped, someone important, someone who would return one day wrapped in prophecy and vengeance. Apollo had dismissed most of it because it was mostly nonsense. Hope made liars of the defeated. He had learne

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 392 - Where History Sits

    (Apollo)The deeper he searched, the more the missing places multiplied.Here, a burned census. There, a sealed birth registry with half its pages fused together by ancient fire. A witness ledger where someone had scratched a name out so violently that the parchment had torn. A marriage oath with the final line missing. A ward-tag bearing an Emberborn seal, but no attached record.He read until the chamber smelled of warmed vellum and old dust stirred by wrath, until the torchlight made gold and black dance over his hands, until his eyes ached from lines too small and meanings too incomplete.Nothing.Nothing definitive. Nothing Apollo could hold up to the light and name accusation.That should have pleased him.It did not.The absence had shape. That was what unsettled him. Missing things were rarely clean. Real history bled at the edges. It contradicted itself. It left scars. Yet every path he followed seemed to arrive at the same impossible smoothness, as though someone had careful

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 391 - Convenient Truth

    (Apollo)The records chamber had not been opened by royal hand in centuries, and the mountain seemed to know it, the stone holding a peculiar stillness around the sealed doors, the sort of silence found in tombs built for kings and abandoned by time.Apollo knew that before the doors groaned apart, before the old hinges shrieked into the corridor with a sound like something waking hungry beneath stone, before the first stale breath of preserved dust, dead ink, and cold vellum slipped out to meet him. He knew because the mountain knew. He felt it in the way the wards around the archway tightened at his approach, recognised him, trembled, then obeyed. Ancient locks uncurled from the door’s black iron bones one by one, sigils flaring dull red beneath centuries of grime before guttering out again, as if even magic resented being dragged from sleep for the sake of an old wound.The corridor behind him lay silent. Too silent.The sort of silence that gathered around the Devil when Hell had

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 390 - Think At Me

    (Adelaide & Cael) They resumed walking. The forest grew darker as they moved deeper, though Adelaide’s wings kept the worst of the shadows away. Cael watched the path with renewed focus, but his attention kept returning to her, to the impossible ease with which she carried fire, to the way her emotions brushed his own, to the new markings hidden beneath his sleeves, to the old palace waiting ahead like a sealed memory preparing to open its eyes. Adelaide felt his thoughts circling something and glanced over. “You’re thinking loudly.” “I am not thinking at you.” “You are brooding with force.” “That is not a measurable phenomenon.” “It is now.” He exhaled softly, and for a few steps, the sound of ash beneath their boots filled the quiet. Then he said, “Can you feel Apollo?” The question moved between them carefully. Adelaide’s steps slowed. Not stopped. But slowed. She looked ahead, her expression tightening. “Not clearly.” Cael waited. “That’s the worst part,” sh

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 389 - The Home of Who

    (Adelaide & Cael) “I don’t want to be someone else,” Adelaide said, and the words came so quietly the forest almost took them. The words left her before she could stop them. And once spoken, they seemed to linger in the air between them, exposing something she had not fully understood until that moment. Because it wasn't power she feared. It wasn't the wings. Or the fire. Or the way ancient magic kept recognising her before she recognised herself. It was the possibility that one day she would wake up and find there was less of Adelaide Harrow left than there had been the day before. Her throat tightened. The dream returned without invitation. White hair. Not pale. Not silver. White in the way starlight was white. White in the way sacred flame was white. She remembered standing atop a mountain that seemed to pierce the heavens themselves, the sky torn open above her in ribbons of gold and fire while thousands knelt below. An impossible crown rested upon her head. Not metal.

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter 388 - New To Fire

    (Adelaide & Cael) The forest peeled back in slow, reluctant increments, the path widening into scorched earth where the canopy had been burned to nothing. Above, the sky bled through a veil of smoke, bruised and red, as if heaven itself had been wounded and left to seep into the world below. Adelaide’s wings flared their own sovereign light upward, white and gold against the ruin, and for a moment Cael saw her not as a traveller through the ashes, but as a queen leading the dead forest toward resurrection. The thought unsettled him enough that Emberflame answered. Gold light slid around his fingers before he consciously called it, a small, controlled curl that twined once around his hand and vanished. Adelaide looked down. “You did that.” Cael looked at his hand. He had. Not by command, not even by conscious intent. The flame had risen with the barest thought, answering the shape of his concern before decision had even formed. Once, even as Emberflame grew stronger in Adelai

  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter Ninety-Three - Rest With the Wicked

    (Apollo & Adelaide)As they floated, Adelaide thought of Liam. Of Lyra. Of home. She thought of the cross. The ropes. The cold. The agony. Her mind flinched away from the phantom bite of rough wood against her back, from the weight in her shoulders, from the way her fingers had gone numb. And the

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-25
  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter Ninety-Two - Quiet Between Flames

    (Apollo & Adelaide) The steam curled around them like breath. It rose in slow, ghostlike ribbons, catching the amber bathhouse light and turning it to drifting gold. Each coil carried the mineral bite of heated stone and something faintly sweet, like scorched herbs dissolving into warmth. Adel

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-25
  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter Ninety-Seven - Fallen Aftermath

    (Apollo) The throne room breathed with him—not lungs, but a cathedral that knew how to inhale. Hellfire pulsed in the veins of the black stone—a slow, molten heartbeat answering his. Columns rose like ribs, etched with runes that faintly glowed in the gloom, around the vast chamber. The throne i

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-25
  • The Devil's Broken Doll   Chapter Ninety-One - Alive. Alive. Alive.

    (Caelum Ashborne)His magic moved. Emberflame—thin, threadlike, but unmistakably alive—slipped out of him in a reach he did not authorize. It felt like a hand reaching through time. It seeped through the hairline fracture in the stone as easily as smoke, curling into the chamber in a faint, invisi

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-25
More Chapters
Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status