Chapter 82: Blood From His Eye

No one had seen him move. Not one soul in that hall had noticed Lucian cross the distance to the Emperor’s feet, until he was already there, one knee bent against the marble, head bowed before Varka himself.

Not even his own family had seen it coming.

Cassius watched his seventh son kneeling in the open with an expression that gave almost nothing away, though something in him had clearly come loose. He said nothing himself.

A few voices from House Sarnel’s own table had already begun to react, and that alone told him something far worse than the scene in front of him: that more of his own household had known Lucian was here tonight than he had.

He turned, slow and deliberate, to the Elder seated at his side.

"What exactly is happening here, Meron?"

"Forgive me, Patriarch. I don’t know myself what Young Master Lucian thinks he’s doing."

"Oh. So you did know he was here." Cassius’s voice stayed level, which somehow made it worse.

"Has someone replaced the Patriarch of this house while I wasn’t looking, that all of you could agree to keep something this important from me? Have you also forgotten that I exiled him from this household?"

The flat calm on Cassius’s face cracked just enough to show what sat underneath it, and Meron felt the chill of that look travel all the way to the ends of his hair.

He explained, quickly, that he’d never meant to hide Lucian’s presence from his Patriarch at all, only that he hadn’t yet found the right moment to say so, not since Cassius himself had only just returned from the capital.

And Cassius had made it plain enough, hadn’t he, that he wanted no more heavy news dropped on him tonight, not after failing to track down the very Saintess he’d needed, settling instead for whatever the Order of Lumielle had seen fit to send in her place, a matter Cassius still understood nothing about, buried somewhere on the fourth floor of his own house.

But Cassius was not a man who swallowed an excuse whole simply because it was offered smoothly.

"Who brought him here?"

Meron’s mouth shut like a trap.

"If you’re going to stand there saying nothing, then this is Jeanne’s doing."

Cassius arrived at the answer on his own, and it fit too neatly to be wrong. Of every child left to him, only Jeanne still carried any real closeness to Lucian, any trace of care for him at all.

And Jeanne, conveniently, was the one face missing from tonight’s entire affair, supposedly still within these very walls. The coincidence only sharpened his suspicion rather than easing it.

"Forgive me, Patriarch. But it was the young lady’s own order that Lucian be brought back into this household."

Jeanne, it seemed, had already secured Meron’s quiet loyalty well before tonight, enough to keep the truth about Lucian contained to the fewest people possible.

Cassius turned the thought over once, wondering exactly what his daughter thought she was doing, defying him outright and pulling one of his own trusted Elders onto her side to manage it.

But this was not the moment to chase that question down. What mattered now, in front of every noble house in the empire, was the boy currently making himself the center of the Emperor’s own council, advancing on Varka as though the crown itself owed him an audience.

It didn’t last. Imperial guards closed on him first, and House Austur’s knights were faster still, a ring of drawn blades arriving at Lucian’s throat before he’d covered half the distance he intended.

Pentaron himself stepped into the gap, his own body planted squarely between Lucian and the Emperor’s line of sight.

The whole hall had already turned Lucian’s behavior into gossip once tonight. Now it curdled into something harsher. This wasn’t an awkward scene anymore, people muttered.

This was a young noble disrupting a matter of state and, by the look of those blades at his neck, threatening the Emperor’s own safety.

Some of the nobles present had never quite believed the old rumor that House Sarnel carried a failed son among its ranks, not given the family’s record. Watching Lucian now, more than a few of them found themselves believing it after all.

Worse than that, even. The word moving through the crowd now wasn’t failure. It was madness.

And it answered, for several of them, a question they’d been turning over since the ball began. Why had the engagement between Lucian and Helia truly ended, and why so suddenly replaced with his own brother? Watching him now, kneeling and shouting before the throne, the answer felt obvious.

No one believed a princess with Helia’s record would ever have been matched with a man unfit for his own mind. Surely the crown had simply found him out in time.

Jeers rose from more than one corner of the hall. Somewhere behind him, a voice called for House Austur, or the crown itself, to simply have him taken away.

Lucian heard every word of it. None of it moved him, not his body, not whatever was left of his pride. He couldn’t have answered them if he’d wanted to.

Because behind the blood sliding slow and steady from both his eyes, he was looking at something no one else in that hall could see at all.

A single word burned into the dark behind his eyes first, alone, pulsing once like a struck bell before anything else arrived.

✦ [HARMONY]

The noise of the hall fell away from him entirely, thinned to something distant and underwater, replaced by a low resonant tone that seemed to rise from somewhere inside his own skull rather than the air around him.

Then the rest of it unfurled, line by line, each one arriving with a fresh stab of heat behind his eyes, as though something were being forced open rather than invited.

✦ [WARNING. THE CONDUCTOR HAS TRIGGERED QUEST: GNOSIS.]

✦ [QUEST — GNOSIS: Prevent the resurrection of the Archon, the Nightkeeper, by stopping the sacrifices from entering the Calamity Forest in his name.]

✦ [SHOULD THE CONDUCTOR FAIL: PROJECTED LOSS OF LIFE, NO FEWER THAN 28.302.062 SOULS.]

The text didn’t stop there. It kept unspooling in front of him, relentless, and it wasn’t only the staggering scale of that number that struck him breathless, a figure close enough to half the continent of Arta’s entire population, close enough to the whole of Bravenheart itself.

It was what came after it.

Names. Tens of millions of them, scrolling past faster than he could truly read, and from somewhere inside that endless column, certain lines rose and burned brighter than the rest, as though the text itself meant for him to see these ones first.

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Jeanne Sarnel]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Rumelia]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Adrian Sarnel]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Cassius Sarnel]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Irvine Augusta]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Claudia Augusta]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Amelia Winter]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Cecilia Winter]

More names kept coming, faster now, too many for his mind to hold onto, each one landing like a blow he had no way to brace against, as though the text itself understood exactly how to make this unbearable, and meant to.

My eyes, my whole body, they’re still burning. I can’t stop this, I can’t make it stop appearing.

Even names belonging to people he had no love for at all rose among them, offered with the same cold certainty as the rest.

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Kaelyn Sarnel]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Rhaiven]

✦ [Casualty Confirmed: Helia Cantarella Bravenheart]

The heat spread through the whole of his body now, and still kneeling there before the throne, Lucian couldn’t force out a single word in answer to Pentaron, who was still demanding to know what exactly he thought he was doing.

Then, after a stretch of time he couldn’t measure, all of it simply vanished.

The bleeding from his eyes slowed, then stopped.

He fought to steady his own breathing, still half lost in the shock of what he’d just witnessed, and though he understood almost nothing of the system behind that text, one truth had burned itself into him clearer than anything else: if the whole continent of Arta wished to avoid living through the Nightkeeper’s return, then nothing, nothing at all, could be allowed to lure them into the Calamity Forest.

He steadied his breath, and ignored Pentaron entirely. He turned back to the Emperor and said, nearly word for word, what he’d already tried to say once.

"Your Majesty. Forgive my conduct, but I beg you to reconsider the expedition into the Calamity Forest. If we go there, the Nightkeeper’s resurrection will be certain!"

He shouted it with everything he had left, even as the soldiers around him finally began hauling him back by the arms.

That last word alone was enough to put a fresh current of dread through the entire hall. The Nightkeeper, spoken aloud, by name, in front of the whole of Bravenheart’s nobility.

---

Far to the northwest that same night, near the edge of the kingdom of Castilla, stood a cathedral built of white stone, the kind that should have glowed faintly even after dark.

Tonight it held no light at all, swallowed whole in a darkness that had no business settling over a place like that.

A hooded figure slipped through its doors carrying a single lantern, the small flame doing little against the black pressing in from every side, and made their way down, deeper, toward a vast chamber cut into the earth beneath the cathedral floor.

"AAARRGGHH!"

A scream tore up from below, loud enough to reach the figure’s ears before they’d even finished their descent.

By the time they reached the bottom, they could feel it before they could see it, something thick and warm pooling around their boots, deep enough to lap at the ankle, spreading out like the surface of a still, dark lake.

Then, all at once, torches around that lake of blood flared to life together, and in the light they threw, a woman sat reflected in its surface, relaxed, a glass held loosely between two fingers.

She should have been dressed in white. Whatever dress she’d started the evening in had long since drowned in red.

Even beneath her hood, the newcomer felt a flicker of real fear the instant that woman’s eyes found hers and held.

"What’s wrong, Natasha? Why do you look so frightened, seeing me like this?"

The voice was soft, almost gentle, and somehow far more threatening for it.

Natasha’s lips trembled before she could stop them, and she bowed her head low.

"Forgive me, Saintess Lumina. I couldn’t bring Cardinal Miranda back. Someone from Orvis Academy took her body before I reached her."

Lumina’s expression bloomed into a smile, and that alone frightened Natasha more than anger ever could have.