Chapter 495. The Abyss Was Real, and It Had Been Sitting on a Throne

Chapter 495: 495. The Abyss Was Real, and It Had Been Sitting on a Throne

Within the hour, the palace gates disgorged a dozen mounted couriers. They tore away in every cardinal direction like arrows shot from a bow, their hooves striking the cobblestones with a rhythmic, thunderous urgency that echoed against the castle walls.

Each rider carried more than just parchment; they carried the death warrant of an empire’s reputation.

Inside those sealed leather satchels lay the evidence Olivia had bled for: the dam engineer’s buried complaint, the original sin that had started the cascade of corruption; the damning bribery trail she had traced through three treacherous layers of false accounts; and the grain contracts that proved the Delmore family had been profiting from starvation weeks before the Celestial crisis had even been acknowledged.

Most devastating of all was the sworn testimony detailing the existence of the forbidden artifact, the proof that a royal prince had traded his humanity for a twisted, Umbral power.

But Albert had not stopped at mere evidence. Before the riders departed, he had insisted on adding one final, personal touch to each packet.

He had taken up his quill and written a brief, measured account in his own steady hand. It was a personal attestation, a vow that he had witnessed the Umbral Concord’s effects firsthand, that he had seen the transformation, felt the wrongness of the air, and could swear under oath that not a single word in those documents was hyperbole.

He had ensured that no diplomat could dismiss this as mere political maneuvering.

William stood on the battlements alongside Albert, the wind whipping at their cloaks as they watched the last of the riders disappear into the horizon, leaving nothing but fading hoofprints and swirling dust mot in the afternoon light.

"Thirty years I’ve served this court," Albert said quietly.

His voice was rougher than usual, stripped of its usual diplomatic polish. "Thirty years of carefully weighing words, of dancing around truths to preserve fragile alliances."

"I have never once sent out a diplomatic packet I was so certain would actually be believed."

He turned his head slightly toward William, his expression unreadable. "Usually, a man spends months, sometimes years, convincing allied courts that a scandal is real before anyone takes proper action."

"We usually have to fight for credibility."

"Today..." he paused, watching the dust settle. "Today, I suspect half of them already know what we’re sending before the ink even has time to dry."

William leaned his elbows against the stone railing, his muscles still protesting the day’s exertion.

"That tends to happen," he said, his voice carrying a dry, bitter edge, "when the proof includes a prince who tried to turn himself into a monster rather than accept losing a fight fairly."

The memory of Alden’s transformation—the wet, tearing sound of flesh reshaping itself, the inhuman shriek that had torn through the courtyard, and the way his eyes had gone black with something ancient and hungry flickered behind William’s eyelids like a fresh wound.

Albert let out a sound—the first genuine laugh William had heard from him in weeks. It wasn’t a happy sound; it was the laugh of a man who recognized the sheer, terrifying absurdity of their situation.

"Yes. I imagine that detail alone will travel considerably faster than anything else in those folders."

"The monster prince. The corruption of blood and bone."

They stood in silence for a moment, two men watching the consequences of their honesty gallop toward the rest of the world. The truth was no longer a secret held within palace walls; it was a living thing, unleashed and hungry.

The truth, once loosed, moved faster and further than even Albert’s careful preparations had fully anticipated.

...

Within days, the truth did not merely spread; it hemorrhaged across the continent. It was no longer confined to the neat, sealed envelopes of diplomats.

The story of the engineered famine became a wildfire, carried by merchants whispering over ale in roadside inns, by travelers sharing grim tales around campfires, and by servants gossiping in the halls of foreign courts. Every syllable of the Delmore deception became venom in the ears of their allies.

The international reaction was swift and surgical. In the great halls of the allied kingdoms, the exploitative treaty clauses that had shackled Celestial for eight agonizing years were torn apart under furious scrutiny.

Legal scholars from three separate kingdoms, men who lived for precedent and protocol, publicly declared the marriage provisions to be nothing more than coerced extortion, utterly unenforceable under any civilized interpretation of treaty law.

But beneath the legal outrage lurked something deeper: terror. The revelation of the forbidden artifact, a relic capable of warping flesh and bone into something monstrous, sent a bone-deep chill through every royal house.

For generations, they had pretended such horrors were myths, bedtime stories to frighten children, but now they knew the truth: the abyss was real, and it had been sitting on a throne.

However, while the world reacted with outrage, the reaction inside Delmore was something far more primal. It was devastation.

"It’s not just anger, William."

"It’s a complete collapse of the social contract," Olivia reported later, her voice hollow as she recounted the intelligence gathered by her trusted contacts. "The common people... they never knew."

"They thought the prosperity was divine favor or simple good fortune."

"They never imagined that the crystal mines flooding their markets and the trade concessions filling their coffers had been paid for with the bones of Celestial’s starved children."

The collapse happened with terrifying speed. In Delmore’s capital, market stalls that had been bustling with activity emptied out in a single, panicked afternoon.

As the story spread from street corner to street corner faster than any royal crier could shout, a wave of revulsion swept through the populace.

Shopkeepers who had spent years quietly profiting from crystal exports found themselves standing outside their own shuttered doors, hands shaking, listening to the horror unfold. Their wealth suddenly felt like blood on their hands.

When the truth finally crashed against the walls of the capital, it did not arrive with a whimper. It arrived as a roar.

Within days, the streets surrounding the royal palace were no longer thoroughfares; they were battlefields of emotion.

Crowds gathered in a sea of desperation, initially demanding answers, then, as the evidence became undeniable, demanding blood. The deception was too vast to be forgiven, too cruel to be ignored.

Banners began to appear, makeshift and crude, bearing the names of Celestial villages that had withered under the famine.

These were not the banners of foreign enemies, but of Delmore’s own citizens—people who had never crossed the border, who had never seen a Celestial farm, but who could no longer stomach the bitter taste of their own comfort.

Every coin in their pocket now felt like a stolen morsel from a dying child’s mouth.

"The protests aren’t shrinking, William," Albert warned during one of their tense evening meetings. "They’re swelling... Like a wound that refuses to clot."

He was right. What began as a few hundred angry voices had mutated into thousands.

The plaza outside the palace was packed wall to wall, a human tide of fury pressing against the royal defenses. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, smoke from torches, and the raw, unfiltered electricity of rage.

No amount of royal guard presence could contain it; no hastily drafted proclamation from the crown could pierce the din of the mob.

Most telling of all was the silence of the crown’s own sword. Reports reached the palace that the royal guards men who had grown up in these same streets had refused orders to disperse the gatherings more than once.

They stood frozen, weapons lowered, unwilling to raise steel against their own neighbors, their own families, who asked for nothing more than the truth they had been denied for eight years.

The very foundation of the kingdom was cracking, not from an external attack, but from the weight of its own lies.