Chapter 34: Artist

"Tomorrow, the first root of the conspiracy against my family will be pruned by an oblivious, starlight-wielding protagonist while I enjoy a plate of smoked salmon and poached eggs!"

His heartbeat, formerly racing at panic-attack velocity, slowly began to decelerate, settling back into its slow, rhythmic cadence.

"I am a salted fish," Lucien whispered into the darkness of the pillow, the comforting fog of exhaustion finally creeping back across the edges of his mind.

"A smart, handsome, well-fed salted fish. The knight, the fire.. everything was an illusion. And whatever happens tomorrow... I will see to it after twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep."

He turned onto his right side, tucking his arm beneath the pillow.

The Everhart villa slept.

The ancient birch trees outside the window swayed softly in the pre-dawn breeze, casting long, branch-like shadows across the Persian rug.

And deep within the dark, unfathomable abyss of Lucien’s chest, locked far beneath the sleeping core of his soul, beyond the reach of the System’s current analytical gaze, an ember of pure, blackened iron gave off a faint, imperceptible pulse of cold warmth.

It did not wake him.

Lucien exhaled, his breathing leveling out into the deep, rhythmic stillness of dreamless rest, his face relaxed, composed, and unbothered by the ghosts of eight centuries past.

The private room of the Astra Party did not resemble the sanctuary of a divinely blessed vanguard.

It resembled an illegal botanical research station where four disparate sociopaths had been forced to share rent by an uncaring municipal government.

Located in the apex of the High Spires of Valemont, a colossal tower of pale grey granite jutting directly out of the eastern precipice of Astraea’s floating plateau, the chamber possessed panoramic leaded windows that offered an unobstructed, three-hundred-mile view of the rolling green plains below.

Currently, no one was looking at the view.

At the center of a massive, circular table carved from petrified dusk-oak, Cassian Valemont sat rigidly upright.

His dark-indigo high-collared tunic was buttoned to the exact millimeter dictated by Imperial Martial Code Section 12.

Across his knees rested a polishing cloth and the empty runic scabbard of the Valemont Guardian Lineage, smelling faintly of citrus oil.

His face was an unyielding mask of solemn, classical stoicism.

He looked like an ancient marble statue of a general who had just been informed that his favorite horse had died, his army had run out of salt, and his homeland was being devoured by locusts, yet he had determined that showing emotion would be bad for troop morale.

Directly to his left, Lyra Veyne was squatting on the edge of her high-backed velvet chair like a raven with poor posture.

She was using a rusted bronze scalpel to peel the translucent cuticle from a glowing purple toadstool that was emitting faint, rhythmic whistling sounds.

Every few seconds, the mushroom would shriek, and Lyra would slap it with the flat of the blade, muttering, "Hush now, little peptide, Mama needs your nervous system."

To his right, Garrick Stone was dismantling an entire roasted piglet.

He did not use cutlery, but possessed an iron fork roughly the size of a hay rake, which he used exclusively to wedge meat into his mouth while chewing with the slow force of an industrial rock-crusher.

And perched casually upon the back of a chaise lounge, balancing on his heels with his hands behind his head like an overgrown stray cat, was Silas Nightingale.

The scout’s hazel eyes were dancing with such manic, self-satisfied euphoria that one might have assumed he had personally discovered a forgotten gold vault beneath the Emperor’s privies.

He had spent the last twenty minutes twirling a small, tightly folded square of coarse kitchen parchment between his thumb and middle finger with theatrical, showy flair.

"I’m just saying, Cassian," Silas drawled, his voice a smooth, purring stream of utter insolence, "some people train their vanguard formations for eighteen hours a day until their knees swell up like overripe melons. And other people, people with grace, natural elegance, and blessed with the sacred gift of second-story thievery, simply walk into the lion’s den, pluck the whiskers from the beast, and dance back out without displacing a single speck of dust."

Silas flicked the parchment into the air, caught it with the back of his hand, and pressed it dramatically to his chest.

"You should have seen me. The wind was howling at precisely three knots from the northwest. The Everhart perimeter was guarded by two second-year earth-magic meatheads who were arguing about whether boiled cabbage counts as a vegetable. I slipped through the branches of the silver birch like a phantom! The third-floor balcony was locked, of course, it’s just an amateur latch, five tumblers, rusted brass, I picked it with a single horsehair in three seconds flat!"

Lyra didn’t look up from her whistling mushroom. "The Everhart estate’s architectural blueprints, updated last year by the Western Guild of Surveyors, explicitly state that Duke Darius replaced all second-story balcony latches with double-pin pneumatic pressure locks made of tempered dwarf-steel. If you picked that with a horsehair, Silas, you violated four laws of mechanical friction."

"I am an artist, Lyra! Do not insult my muse with mathematics!" Silas hissed, flipping his disheveled sandy-brown hair over his eyes. "The point is, I entered the sanctum! The bedchamber of the mysterious, tragic little prince! It was dark. The scent of lavender and expensive pastry hung in the air like a siren’s perfume. And there, upon his writing desk, hidden beneath the pathetic, crumb-strewn remnants of an almond tart... was this."

Silas leaned forward, flicking the parchment with a sharp snap across the dusk-oak table.

It slid five feet, coming to a halt precisely two inches from the edge of Cassian’s polished scabbard.

"An encrypted ledger-note," Silas purred, leaning his elbows on his knees, his grin widening into something feral. "Written on kitchen scrap-paper using a third-tier inversion cipher. The kind of cipher that only three people in the entire academy’s intelligence registry know how to decode."