Chapter 83: Under the Heavy Rain

"That woman, causing me trouble even now, in that state." Lumina laughed softly, almost fond.

"No matter. If it was Orvis Academy that took her, perhaps we’ll find ourselves a far more fitting new member out of it."

Her temper, it seemed, had decided to stay generous tonight, even with one of her own having failed a task this important. She looked, if anything, faintly entertained, idly watching a pair of Dark Beasts pace somewhere in the dark edges of that underground chamber.

Natasha, for her part, had already prepared something she hoped might lift the Saintess’s mood further, should the first piece of news not be enough.

"Saintess, I’ve also just received word. The Emperor has approved Princess Helia’s plan for the expedition into the Calamity Forest. With a little preparation on our end, our own plan should succeed without much trouble."

"Oh. Is that so."

Lumina’s response came flat, almost bored, and Natasha found herself studying her Saintess’s face, unsettled by how little that news seemed to move her.

"Saintess... doesn’t this please you?"

"It’s good news. I only already expected the princess and her nobles to be this predictable." Lumina waved a hand, dismissing it entirely. "Right now I’m far more interested in watching one of my sweet pets grow a little smarter. I need its help finding something I want."

She clapped her hands twice, and from the deepest shadow of the chamber, something enormous began to take shape, its outline sharpening with every step it took into the torchlight.

At the same moment, a body came flying out of that same darkness and landed hard on the stone floor, a man, bloodied, his clothes torn to ribbons, barely clinging to consciousness as he began to beg.

"I could be persuaded to forgive you," Lumina said, studying him the way one might study a bruised piece of fruit, "if you’d simply tell me who sent you to kill something precious of mine."

Something in her voice, or perhaps the ruin of his own body lying in front of him as proof of exactly what she was capable of, seemed to make the meaning land, even through the haze he was fighting to stay conscious inside.

"...Sarnel. It was House Sarnel, Saintess. They work with... I was only following orders. Please, give me a chance, I’ll do anything you ask, anything at all."

The man’s voice cracked with every word, pleading, pathetic, and Lumina’s smile only widened in answer.

"Anything at all? Are you certain of that?"

He nodded, desperate, and her smile stretched wider still.

"Since you’ve offered it yourself, one of my Direwolves happens to be rather hungry tonight. He could use the nutrition. Perhaps you’d be willing to help him with that."

The Direwolf was already behind him by the time the words finished leaving her mouth, and it dragged him, screaming, back into the unlit dark where no torch reached.

Natasha closed her eyes rather than watch the rest of it.

When she opened them, Lumina was standing directly in front of her.

"Natasha."

The smile was gone entirely now, her expression serious in a way that made Natasha’s whole body go tight with dread, one hand settling on her shoulder.

"Since your performance today left something to be desired, it seems you’ll need to put in a little overtime."

For one long second, Natasha had genuinely believed she might not see tomorrow. Hearing this instead, she understood, with a rush of relief she tried hard not to show, that Lumina truly meant to give her another chance.

"Starting tonight, I want you to find everything there is to find on House Faeren. I’d hate to see a repeat of what happened last time, Natasha."

Natasha knew the name well enough. What she didn’t understand was why her Saintess wanted anything at all connected to a house that no longer existed on this continent.

"Doesn’t the Saintess already have everything on them? Should we be searching their graves instead, given the whole bloodline is gone?"

Lumina shook her head. She didn’t need bodies, she said. She needed information she still didn’t have.

"Dig deeper into the name of their very first ancestor. And I want the true name of their last living descendant, whatever it actually was."

"Haven’t we already given you a full report on that, Saintess?"

"What you gave me matches the empire’s own official record, word for word. Which tells me they’re hiding something else somewhere, something they’ve buried even deeper since the Order of Lumielle began hunting them."

Lumina took a few more steps past her, then stopped again, as though the thought had only just occurred to her.

"If you find yourself stuck, Natasha, look into something called the Order of Selenea. It once existed on the continent of Eosia."

Natasha bowed her head in thanks, grateful for a thread that might make the search ahead of her far less blind.

As Lumina climbed back toward the cathedral’s main floor, she snapped her fingers once, and every torch in the chamber caught at the same instant, flooding the dark with light. She glanced sideways without breaking stride.

"Gilbert."

A figure arrived beside her almost before the name had finished leaving her mouth, there as suddenly as a curl of smoke settling into shape.

"The Order of Lumielle’s activity report from the last several days, Your Highness. And your own duties as Saintess for the days ahead."

Lumina’s mouth twisted into something close to a pout at the sheer weight of paperwork he was holding out to her. The man, dressed in a Bishop’s formal vestments, offered her a stack of official documents that required the Order’s own seal, each one waiting for her signature.

Somewhere buried in that schedule sat a single date she’d clearly been waiting for. She signed it slowly, a trace of blood still drying along the edge of her hand.

"This date... isn’t this one of the holy days? Everyone will be there, including all the new arrivals, won’t they?"

Gilbert picked up one of the papers Lumina had already signed, answering her without looking up from it.

"That’s correct, Saintess. The Oracle included, arriving right on schedule once she’s done with the Republic of Aquila. And I’m told you’ll have a new rival there as well."

"A new rival." Lumina turned the words over slowly, something almost pleased creeping into her voice.

"Nhmm. How interesting that’ll be. But we’ll have a few new members of our own there too, so make sure everything’s prepared properly, Gilbert. I doubt any of them expect we’ve already claimed ourselves another White Awakening."

Gilbert went on absorbing every instruction she gave him, right up until Lumina stopped short at the door leading out of the cathedral and turned back to look at him directly.

He moved ahead of her and pulled the door open, only to find the night outside had turned violent, rain hammering down in sheets, wind howling in sudden, vicious gusts, lightning splitting the dark overhead again and again.

None of it gave Lumina the slightest pause.

"But Gilbert. Have you finished locating every member of the Order who still refuses to stand behind me?"

"We have, Saintess. The smaller factions are already under our control. A few of the senior Cardinals, however, will need a little more time."

"Good. That settles it, then. I’ll have Isabella begin working her way into one of their cathedrals."

Almost the moment she said it, a horse-drawn carriage rolled into view before the entrance, no driver at its reins, its door already swinging open as though it had been waiting for her all along.

Lumina stepped straight into the middle of a puddle without breaking stride, and the rain stopped, all at once, the instant her foot touched the water.

It held its breath until she climbed into the carriage and pulled the door shut behind her, and only then did the storm remember itself and come pouring back down.

---

Back in the great hall of House Sarnel’s estate, Lucian remained on his knees before the Emperor, still pressing his case against the expedition, still begging that nothing be done to provoke whatever horror slept inside that forest.

The crowd’s mockery hadn’t let up at all. If anything, it had sharpened.

Several voices called out that Lucian hadn’t told them anything they couldn’t have guessed themselves, that naming the Crimson clan as the culprit was no great insight when half the hall had already reached that conclusion on their own.

None of them understood what Lucian understood now, that whatever they were truly facing wasn’t some ordinary descendant of that bloodline at all, but the ancestor himself, the very source the entire catastrophe traced back to.

Lucian shouted back that he wasn’t speaking nonsense, that he knew exactly how it sounded. But when they demanded proof, he had nothing he could hand them, no way to explain that the knowledge had come from a source he didn’t understand himself, let alone could name.

More voices rose against him now, suggesting, loudly, that Lucian was only trying to sabotage his former fiancée, desperate to keep her from winning the popularity this expedition might earn her if it succeeded.

People decided, almost gleefully, that this was simple jealousy dressed up as a warning, though jealousy had nothing to do with what was driving him.

"Hey, you. Get out of here, now."

The voice came from his side, close enough and clear enough that Lucian heard every word of it.