Chapter 89: The Seven Towers

"You... how could it answer you... impossible. Impossible. Only she could ever..."

The shock on Rhaiven’s face was raw, unguarded, utterly unlike him. Lucian had touched the Codex, the thing Rhaiven still believed was a Grimoire, and it had answered.

He’d handed it over with one clear expectation: that nothing would happen at all. He remembered testing another White Awakening bearer once before, someone who wasn’t his sister, and watching that resonance fail completely.

Only his sister had ever made it respond, and even she, carrying her own gift for the Light element, had never produced anything close to what had just torn through this hall.

Everything he’d ever been told about that Grimoire said it was ordinary. A Light Grimoire, nothing more, nothing rarer than that.

Now that certainty cracked open inside him, and a thousand questions rushed in through the gap.

Somewhere in the middle of it, a memory surfaced on its own, his sister’s face, the two of them together in the last stretch of time before her illness took hold.

He still carried those moments close, closer than almost anything else in him.

He believed, however foolishly, that if he carried out his task well enough this time, he might see her again.

At least, that was what he let himself believe.

That belief blinded him badly enough that his hand stayed locked around Lucian’s throat, his grip tightening past the point where Lucian’s face had already started turning blue.

Then, before he could let go on his own, the flat of a blade arrived at his own throat instead, close enough to draw a line of cold steel against his skin, wind snapping behind it from the force of the swing.

Rhaiven’s hand sprang open on reflex, releasing Lucian at once.

He took in the scene around him. Lucian, doubled over and coughing. Beside him, a knight in black armor steadying him upright.

And standing just past them both, the owner of the sword now leveled at his throat, a young woman with pale gold hair, amber eyes fixed on him without a single blink, every line of her radiating a fury that had clearly been building long before this moment.

Kaelyn recognized her instantly.

"Sister Jeanne... what are you doing..."

Jeanne didn’t spare him a glance. The Phantom unit arrived close behind her, a portion of them falling in as her escort, the rest settling into a tense, ready stance aimed squarely at Rhaiven.

It wasn’t only House Sarnel demanding answers now. Irvine and Amelia both turned toward Rhaiven, wanting to know exactly why he’d just done this to Lucian.

Rhaiven raised both hands slowly into the air.

Jeanne’s voice, when it came, was cold enough to cut.

"Why did you dare put your hands on my brother’s throat?"

She turned back to Lucian, who was still fighting to steady his own breathing, one hand pressed against his bruised throat, fingers trembling from the grip that had nearly closed it shut.

And then, before he could fully recover, new text bloomed across his vision, spilling down toward the floor he was staring at.

✦ [HARMONY]

✦ [Congratulations, Conductor. You have obtained the Omni Map. Within it, the Conductor may trace the location of the Seven Towers of Lysandra.]

Seven Towers of Lysandra?

The question had barely formed when he felt it, a faint tremor rising from somewhere near his hip, from Sonata itself.

✦ [HARMONY IS RESONATING THE OMNI MAP WITH SONATA]

✦ [RESONANCE SUCCESSFUL]

✦ [INITIATING VISUALIZATION OF THE OMNI MAP FOR THE CONDUCTOR]

A wash of blue light unfurled across his vision, resolving into something vast, an entire world’s geography laid bare at once, shaded terrain and ghostly outlines of territory stretching further than his mind could easily hold.

He’d never seen a map this complete in his life.

His attention snagged first on one marker among the seven, a tower sitting somewhere on the continent of Eosia, surrounded by an expanse of pale desert sand.

Something about its shape tugged at a memory buried deep in the Chronos Domain vision he carried, a structure he was certain he’d glimpsed there before.

Is that one of the seven Lysandra towers... and what’s actually inside it? Could the other crystal fragment be sitting somewhere inside one of these?

He turned the thought over with a grim, focused seriousness, and the more he examined it, the more it felt like the only answer that actually made sense. It would explain, better than anything else had, why the green-cloaked man wanted this map so badly, why finding these towers mattered enough to tear a family apart over it.

His gaze slid to another marked location, this one clearly set within the continent of Arta.

One of the towers stood inside the Calamity Forest itself, a forest that, according to this map, dwarfed anything people on the outside had ever guessed at.

It wasn’t only trees. A vast lake sat buried somewhere deep within it, nearly the size of an inland sea, ringed by dense, ancient jungle, and at its center, strange and deliberate, sat two islands rising out of the water.

Shifting his focus further east, past the lake, he caught the faint outline of what looked like another tower, though its exact position dissolved into fog on the map itself, its surrounding geography too obscured to read clearly, whether it sat within...

This can’t be real. How could anyone have built something there at all?

He was still lost in the Calamity Forest’s visualization when Helia’s voice cut through from somewhere above and to his right.

"Lady Jeanne, this is only a misunderstanding."

Helia and Gareth stepped forward together, moving to calm her, insisting there had to be a reasonable explanation behind whatever Rhaiven had done.

"A reason?" Jeanne’s voice climbed.

"What reason could possibly cover this? Do you think I don’t know he’s the one who handed my brother this strange Grimoire in the first place? Look at what’s happening right now, Princess. Doesn’t it strike you as suspicious that he meant to hurt someone here tonight?"

"Watch your tone, Lady Jeanne. Lord Rhaiven would never do something so reckless in front of this many witnesses."

Gareth’s words cut straight across hers, but Jeanne only raised her voice further, refusing to be talked down.

"If it was truly an accident, then why did his hand close around my brother’s throat? Did the two of you somehow miss that part?"

Gareth and Helia both fell silent at that, neither one able to argue their way around something that had happened in plain sight of the entire hall.

Rhaiven felt the shift in the room settle over him, understood exactly how deeply suspicious the scene had become in everyone’s eyes.

Whatever burning curiosity he still carried about what Lucian had just done with that Codex, he set it aside, choosing instead to work out a way through this before it cost him anything further.

He bowed his head, low, offering his apology to Jeanne, to everyone gathered, to the Emperor himself, for his own carelessness.

He claimed the Grimoire he’d handed Lucian was simply unstable, that the resulting burst of uncontrolled light was nothing more than an unfortunate accident born from that instability.

Helia leaned toward him, her whisper sharp, barely holding back a flood of her own frustration.

Why, she demanded, would he say something like that out loud? Didn’t he realize that claiming the light had come from Lucian’s own Sacred Mana, however uncontrolled, was the same as admitting the boy’s power was real?

"Are you out of your mind? If Lucian keeps insisting against this expedition with his mouth running loose, my father may change his decision."

"I understand, Your Highness. But as I’ve already told you, even with this strange disruption caused by our blind friend here, the outcome is already settled. His Majesty will send people into the Calamity Forest regardless. That much I can promise you."

Helia studied him a moment longer, sharp and unconvinced, before letting out a slow breath and choosing, despite everything, to trust him, even though she’d now heard that same promise more than once tonight without knowing exactly what plan gave him such confidence in it.

Jeanne, meanwhile, hadn’t finished with him at all.

"Answer the question. What was your reason for this."

"Enough, Jeanne."

The command came from the front of the hall, loud enough to silence everything else.

"Father, but this man, he—"

"Didn’t you hear him apologize already? He’s told you himself he’ll take responsibility."

Cassius’s voice left no room for argument, and Jeanne, however unsatisfied, lowered her blade and drew her Phantom soldiers back from the standoff.

Varka rose, about to put a question of his own to Lucian directly. Every eye in the hall turned toward him on reflex.

But before he could speak, a guard at his side pressed a letter into his hand.

Retave caught sight of it clearly as it changed hands.

"Isn’t that Korven’s seal? Our furthest border territory?" He frowned, something uneasy creeping into his voice. "And that’s a black-and-red seal. Doesn’t that mark it an emergency dispatch?"

Varka went still, reading in silence.

He wasn’t the only one. Across the hall, messengers were reaching several of the other Seven Pillar families as well, each one carrying the same urgent black seal.

Then, from the direction of the hall’s doors, the sound of running footsteps cut through everything, fast and uneven, someone clearly not caring who saw them lose their composure.

It was Nora, one hand clutching her glasses to keep them from flying off, sprinting toward Cassius with none of her usual poise intact.

"Father!"

She’d wanted no part of tonight’s event from the start, which made her sudden, breathless arrival all the more alarming. Something had clearly gone very wrong.

Cassius caught sight of the letter in her shaking hand, its black seal already broken, already read.

Nora hesitated, her eyes sliding away from his face, unable to meet it directly, before she forced the words out anyway.

"Father... this is an emergency letter from Elder Tervis, who’s been escorting Sister Patricia. She’s gone missing, somewhere in the middle of the Beasts attacking the city of Korven."

She held the letter out toward him, her gaze fixed somewhere over his shoulder, anywhere but his face.

Cassius refused to believe it at first, certain Patricia should have been safely within Orvis Academy’s walls. But the report from Elder Tervis was plain enough.

Patricia had been undergoing a field examination assigned by the Academy, stationed in the Korven region, when the Dark Beasts broke through without warning. Her current condition was entirely unknown.

Fury rolled off Cassius in waves as the full weight of the letter settled over him.

He ordered Elder Meron to ready the household’s forces at once, then turned and commanded another of his servants to summon every Elder currently on duty back to the estate, to prepare for immediate departure toward Korven.

Cassius wasn’t the only one receiving news like this tonight. Across the hall, other noble families were opening letters of their own, finding the same kind of loss waiting inside.

Korven sat closer to Orvis Academy than any other city in the empire, which meant every family with a child still studying there now faced the same fate as Patricia, or worse. And Korven wasn’t only a border town. It was one of Bravenheart’s own trading hubs.

This wasn’t only a matter of missing children anymore. One of the empire’s own economic centers now stood under direct threat.

Varka rose fully to his feet, his own letter still gripped in one hand, and his voice rang out across the hall, carrying to every corner of it.

"All of you. By now, you’ve likely heard the same news I have. The Dark Beasts have broken through Korven’s border."