Chapter 40: Miserable

"Aren’t you going to smile? Just a tiny, five-degree lift of the lip?"

"We did not win this victory," Cassian said softly.

Silas paused. "What?"

"We were merely the executioners," Cassian continued, turning his gaze toward the eastern horizon, where the first faint, grey sliver of dawn was beginning to pierce the clouds above the residential cliffs. "The strategy belonged to someone else."

Silas let out a long, theatrical sigh, rubbing his temples. "Oh, by the spirits, here we go again. The Everhart boy."

"He saw the entire board," Cassian said, his voice dropping into that solemn tone that made Silas want to jump off a balcony. "He knew Graves would move the ledger tonight, knew that Crowe was using the catacombs to frame his house. He orchestrated this entire purge... while remaining in his bed."

Cassian turned to look at Silas, his expression unyielding, and carrying the terrifying momentum of an avalanche.

"He has done a great service to House Valemont. And to the empire. He sacrificed his own glory so that justice could be served cleanly."

"He also gave me a severe inferiority complex regarding my thievery skills," Silas muttered under his breath.

"Tomorrow," Cassian declared, adjusting his ceremonial scabbard, "the Imperial Awakening Ceremony takes place. The entire academy will be focused on the Grand Astral Orb. There will be noise, crowds, and political posturing."

Cassian took a step toward the greenhouse exit, his cape swirling softly in the morning draft.

"We will not wait for the ceremony. We go to the Everhart villa now. At dawn."

Silas blinked, his jaw dropping. "Now?! At five in the morning?!"

"A true knight does not delay his gratitude," Cassian said with righteous sincerity. "He is frail. His mana is shattered. He has carried the weight of this conspiracy on his shoulders alone, suffering in silence while orchestrating our moves from the shadows."

Cassian’s eyes softened with a chivalric devotion.

"I will personally ensure he knows he is no longer alone. I will bring him the formal gratitude of House Valemont, and stand as his shield against whatever darkness Crowe attempts to summon next."

Silas stared at his leader’s retreating back for five full seconds.

Then, he slowly turned to look at Seraphina, who was neatly packing her scrolls into her satchel with a serene, glowing smile.

"Seraphina," Silas whispered, his voice trembling.

"Yes, Silas?"

"Our leader is going to kick down the door of a sick boy’s bedroom at dawn to deliver a solemn, fifty-stanza epic poem about chivalric brotherhood, isn’t he?"

"Most likely," Seraphina smiled warmly. "I should pack some medicinal herbs. If Lord Lucien’s nervous shock returns upon seeing Cassian’s intense, unblinking face at six in the morning, we may need to restart his heart."

"I’ll bring the smelling salts," Lyra cackled, skipping toward the exit. "And my scalpel! Just in case his soul leaks out while he’s being emotional!"

***

The morning sun had barely crested the eastern spires of Astraea when Lucien Alaric Everhart woke up to the realization that his physical existence had been thoroughly cursed by an ancient demon of petty retribution.

"Urrrrgh..."

He did not wake up gracefully.

He woke up because his left nostril was cemented shut, his right nostril was whistling like a defective teapot, and his throat felt as though someone had poured boiling lead down his windpipe while he slept.

He lay beneath three heavy wool blankets and his blackberry-colored dressing gown, swaddled like a human burrito of pure misery.

On the nightstand beside him sat four empty mugs of ginger turpentine, six used linen handkerchiefs crumpled into damp, pathetic little balls of despair, and a small glass jar of strawberry glaze that had been cleaned out by his fever-stricken fingers at three in the morning.

"I survived... a cardiac arrest in my past life," Lucien croaked into the depths of his pillow, his voice sounding like a rusted iron rake being dragged across frozen gravel. "I survived... an Abyssal Crawler... in a dungeon ruin. I backhanded... a volcanic silver rapier with my bare hand."

He pulled the blanket down by two inches, his fever-glazed obsidian eyes glaring at the ceiling fresco with venomous, dying fury.

"And I am going to be taken out... by a seasonal mountain draft. The narrative indignity of it. My tombstone will read: ’Here lies Lucien Everhart. Master Strategist. Slain by an unlatched window.’"

DING!

The sound was accompanied by a vicious, pulsating headache behind his bridge.

[ MORNING DIAGNOSTIC ]

Host Condition: [STABILIZING / MISERABLE]

Current Body Temperature: 38.6°C (101.5°F)

Mucosal Congestion: Severe

Notification: The Purge of the Corrupt Roots was executed successfully at 00:14 AM by the Astra Party. Target [Professor Graves] has been detained.

Warning: High-Density Narrative Karma is currently approaching your front doorstep at an alarming, enthusiastic velocity.

System Advice: Put on a shirt. You look like a Victorian ghost who died of consumption behind a bakery.]

Lucien blinked at the floating text through his watering eyes.

"Wait," he croaked, his brain struggling to process the notification through the thick, warm fog of fever. "What do you mean... approaching my doorstep?"

Before his sluggish, disease-ridden synapses could formulate a contingency plan, the quiet tranquility of the Everhart villa was violently obliterated.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

The heavy brass knocker on the front entrance of the villa didn’t just rap; it struck with the force of an imperial siege ram testing a city gate.

Downstairs, the panicked, high-pitched voice of the ancient head butler, Edwin, echoed through the stairwell:

"Your Grace! Young Lord Valemont! What do you have with my young lord’s at this hour?! The young master is in the delicate, fragile stages of a pulmonary crisis! You cannot simply—"

"Stand aside, Butler Edwin," a voice boomed upward, a voice so deep and disgustingly resonant and filled with heroic clarity that it made Lucien’s eardrums physically ache beneath his blankets. "I have brought the gratitude of House Valemont. I know he is awake. A mind such as his does not sleep when the fate of the realm hangs in the balance!"

Lucien froze.

The color did not drain from his face; it was replaced by a cold sweat of horror.

"No," Lucien whispered, his voice cracking into a silent scream. "No, no, no, no, no. Not now. Not like this."

He scrambled frantically to untangle himself from the three heavy wool blankets, but his three points of Strength and two points of Agility betrayed him completely.

He rolled to the left, caught his ankle in the velvet hem of his dressing gown, and went tumbling off the edge of the mattress with the graceful trajectory of a sack of wet onions.

THUD.

"OOF!"

Lucien hit the Persian rug face-first, his nose slamming into his discarded slipper.

Before he could even attempt to drag himself beneath the bedframe to hide among the dust bunnies, the heavy oak doors of his master bedchamber were pushed open with military authority.

The morning sunlight flooded the room, illuminating the swirling dust motes, the crumpled, snot-soaked handkerchiefs, the sticky, empty jam jar on the nightstand... and Lucien Alaric Everhart, currently sprawled flat on his stomach across the floorboards, wearing a disheveled silk nightshirt with small silver clouds, one woolen sock missing, his hair sticking up like a frantic raven that had survived an explosion.

Standing in the open doorway was Cassian Valemont.

The protagonist was dressed in his full, formal mantle of midnight indigo and polished silver plate, looking pristine, handsome, and radiating a faint aura of morning starlight that made Lucien’s inflamed retinas burn with agony.

Flanking him in the corridor were the other three:

Silas Nightingale, leaning against the doorframe with an enormous, mocking, lewd grin, holding a small silver box;

Lyra Veyne, peering around Cassian’s hip with wide, luminous violet eyes, holding a brass jar containing what looked like pulsating green leeches;

And Seraphina Vale, carrying a basket of fresh oranges and smiling with saintly warmth.

The silence that followed was so profound that one could hear a drop of ginger tea drip from the nightstand onto the hardwood floor.

Drip.

Cassian looked down at the floor.

He looked at Lucien’s prone, undignified form.

He looked at the red nose, the fever-flushed cheeks, the watery, glassy obsidian eyes staring up at him from the carpet with the cold, venomous, dying fury of a cornered badger.

His dark blue eyes did not fill with mockery, but with pity.