Chapter 81: Blood From His Eyes

The Dusk Feather’s roar tore through the hall, a sound dense enough to scramble the senses of everyone standing anywhere near it.

Even Lucian, well back from the center of the room, felt his head drop under the weight of it, and more than a few nobles crumpled where they stood after only that single cry.

Its wings snapped open, every feather along their length standing rigid and bristling, all of it aimed squarely at Evalia, who stood frozen, unable to so much as flinch against the ringing that still filled her skull.

Elder Lia broke into a run toward her Matriarch, but the storm of loosened feathers reached her first, hurtling straight at her in a dark, glittering wave.

"Matriarch!" Lia screamed, forcing the words out through a wave of dizziness that threatened to drop her where she stood.

She never reached Evalia. A wash of heat rushed past from somewhere behind her, close enough that she felt it skim the edge of her ear, and when she turned her head she caught sight of it clearly: a bolt of blazing fire, already past her, streaking toward the creature beyond.

BOOM!

The fire detonated, and for a moment the whole scene around Evalia and the Dusk Feather vanished behind a wall of smoke and flame, swallowing everyone’s view of what was happening at its center.

Turning toward where the blast had come from, the hall saw Irvine standing with a crimson Grimoire held aloft, its pages wreathed in flame that seemed to burn without consuming them, unmistakable proof of whose power had just lit the room.

With a slow, deliberate motion, he drew his hand back through the air, pulling the last of the fire and smoke back toward himself from a distance, until the view ahead cleared again.

What the smoke revealed left the entire hall staring.

Someone was standing directly over the Dusk Feather’s fallen body.

Rhaiven... he got there that fast. And what is that thing in his hand, is that a Relic too?

Lucian murmured the thought to himself, startled by the sheer speed of the man’s movement, and more curious still about what Rhaiven held, a length of black thread strung with dozens of tiny bells, each one catching the chandelier light as it swayed.

The bell-strung thread pulled taut all at once, winding itself around the Dark Beast’s entire body, biting deep into its already motionless flesh. In the next instant it drew tighter still, slicing clean through the creature from end to end, and the whole hall’s eyes went wide watching Rhaiven do it.

"This can’t be real... that’s genuinely the Crimson technique... that Dark Beast really was carrying the Crimson curse."

Someone in the crowd couldn’t hold the words back, and they weren’t wrong to say it. Every person present, Varka included, watched the creature’s body collapse into black smoke and drifting ash, exactly as the old stories told it, the unmistakable sign of a creature touched by the Crimson clan’s curse.

"As I told you, Lady Evalia, this Dark Beast is nothing like an ordinary one. Fortunate for all of us that Lord Irvine stopped its attack in time, or I never would have had the chance to bring this vile thing down."

Rhaiven said it calmly, dusting his gloved hands once, as though the moment deserved nothing more dramatic than that, though barely a minute earlier he’d argued fiercely against anyone laying a hand on the creature at all.

Evalia offered her thanks to both Rhaiven and Irvine for the rescue, bowing her head in apology for the recklessness that had put the whole hall in danger.

But even as she said it, some part of her mind kept circling back to the same unanswered question: how could a creature she’d been certain was already dead, an empty shell without a single drop of blood left in it, crumble apart exactly like a true Crimson curse?

Elder Lia and a pair of soldiers from House Melampus stumbled their way over to their Matriarch, who stood scratched and visibly shaken, helping her upright between them.

Rhaiven, meanwhile, turned and made his way back toward Helia, unnoticed in the uproar now sweeping the hall.

Helia didn’t look pleased to see him. She leaned in, her voice dropping to a murmur only he could hear.

"Rhaiven. Didn’t you tell me catching even one of these Dark Beasts would be difficult? Why did you kill it instead? How are we supposed to lead the rest of them to that place now, with this one destroyed?"

Rhaiven only shook his head, tucking the bell-strung thread back inside his coat as he answered, just as quietly.

"The Matriarch had already sensed my Necromancy at work in it, Your Highness."

The moment he said it, Helia’s gaze cut sharply back toward Evalia, now being helped into her seat. Something in Helia settled into certainty: that woman might well be a threat to everything she and Rhaiven had planned.

"I had no choice but to destroy it. But don’t worry yourself, Your Highness. What I just did will only make the nobles more anxious, and more eager to push the empire into investigating that forest as quickly as possible."

Helia’s tension eased, if only slightly, at that.

Rhaiven’s prediction held true. It didn’t take long before the hall’s uproar curdled into something louder and far more frightened, every conversation circling back to the same dreaded question: had the Crimson clan truly returned?

Across the room, the Seven Pillar families huddled with their most trusted aides, drafting orders. Plenty of lesser nobles were doing the same, coordinating with whoever they trusted most to put every soldier they had on alert along their own borders, watching for anything that looked wrong.

Patriarch Pentaron of House Austur rose abruptly and strode toward the Emperor’s seat, dropping to one knee before him in open supplication.

"Your Majesty, we need to move quickly now and investigate that forest. It seems some remnant of the Crimson clan is still out there in this world, and we have no choice but to face it."

A chorus of agreement rose from a good portion of the hall at his words.

Others agreed in principle but hesitated all the same, afraid of walking into that forest with nothing to go on, nothing but the terrifying shape of whoever they’d be facing.

Varka listened to every voice raised in that hall, weighing it all with care. But a few of the Patriarchs still hadn’t committed either way, watching, waiting, Irvine chief among them.

In Varka’s own mind, Irvine and Cedric were the two men in that room, besides himself, capable of making a decision this heavy with a clear head. This wasn’t the first time, after all, that the three of them had stood together against something the whole continent feared.

Whatever strain still lingered between himself and Irvine, the scar of an old decision neither of them had ever quite laid to rest, Varka was confident that Irvine would set it aside, at least for tonight, in the face of something this much larger than either of them.

"What’s your read on this, Irvine?"

Irvine’s eyes met Varka’s across the table, one hand drifting to his mustache, turning something over in his mind before he answered.

"My opinion?" He let the question hang a moment. "All I can tell you is that when I moved to stop that creature, I felt Dark Mana thick enough to choke on. I’d say it’s entirely possible that thing really was being controlled by someone, and that whoever it was, they chose their moment well, while the rest of us had our guard down."

A hush fell over the table at that. Hearing it from Irvine, of all people, lent the possibility a weight it hadn’t carried before.

"So you’re saying the Crimson clan has genuinely risen again?" Cedric’s fingers drummed against the table’s edge, a nervous, uneven rhythm that betrayed how little he wanted that to be true. "Didn’t the four heroes seal the Nightkeeper, their ancestor, completely? How could anyone still be controlling a creature like that now?"

"It wouldn’t have to come directly from the Nightkeeper himself for a creature like this to be controlled," Galen cut in. "We all know how many the Crimson clan once numbered. I’d stake my own name on there still being some of them left in this world."

"Your Majesty, Galen isn’t wrong to say that." Another voice rose from further down the table. "This may well be connected to whatever remains of the Crimson clan. The wiser course is to investigate, before this gets any further out of hand."

Varka had heard enough opinions now from enough corners of the hall to weigh the matter properly. To settle it once and for all, he called for a vote among the Seven Pillar families.

"This is precisely why I summoned every one of you here tonight. My plan, if all of you agree to it, is this: Helia and Rhaiven, with that new Relic of theirs, will lead the observation force into the Calamity Forest."

Rhaiven and Helia exchanged the faintest of smiles at that, already picturing the company of elite soldiers, drawn from all Seven Pillar houses, that would soon be placed under their command.

"All those in favor of this proposal, raise your hand."

Varka’s voice carried heavy and final across the hall as he called for the vote. With only seven Pillar houses present, the matter would be decided by exactly seven hands, raised or kept still.

A few of the families clearly wanted more time to weigh a vote this costly before committing it.

House Sarnel needed none at all. Their hands went up without hesitation, Helia’s marriage into their house leaving them no reason to withhold their full support.

Austur’s Patriarch raised his hand a breath later, and Versys followed just as quickly, both already committed to the forest’s investigation.

House Melampus, House Pneuma, House Winter, and House Augusta, meanwhile, remained locked in quiet, urgent conversation with their own trusted advisors.

"Irvine, what are you waiting for? Cast your vote already. You saw with your own eyes how dangerous that monster was tonight."

Pentaron pressed him, clearly impatient for Irvine to fall in line behind the plan.

But Irvine was still turning the weight of a risen Crimson clan over in his mind.

He remembered, through his own father, one of the four heroes of Arta himself, that the clan should have vanished from the world entirely, sealed away completely when all four heroes struck the Nightkeeper down together.

Without that ancestor’s blood running through them, the clan’s remaining descendants were never as powerful as legend made them sound. But that blood, the one gift that let them bend Dark Beasts to their will, remained a horror no one in this hall could afford to underestimate.

"On one hand, I don’t want any part of this. If Princess Helia succeeds in finding whoever’s behind this, Princess Andromeda’s own standing in the coming succession takes a real hit."

"But on the other, I can’t ignore what that report just told us, how many of my own elite soldiers we’ve already lost. I won’t let my men become another meaningless casualty count like the one sitting in front of us right now. And if I do nothing at all, this whole empire pays for it."

Irvine murmured through every angle of it, weighing one outcome against the next, searching for the one that cost him least.

Then, cutting through his own thoughts, a new commotion broke out somewhere near the Emperor’s seat.

"Your Majesty. Please, stop our forces from entering the Calamity Forest."

"That’s Lucian!" Irvine’s head snapped up. "What is he doing over there? And why is there blood running from around his eyes?"

Irvine wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Almost no one in the hall had noticed Lucian cross the distance to stand this close to the throne.

House Sarnel looked just as blindsided as everyone else, utterly unaware that Lucian had planned anything like this at all.

"What do you think you’re doing, Lucian!"