Chapter 73: Smoke Before the Fire

He’d seen enough now to be certain the carving was, in fact, unfinished. What he failed to realize was that the pattern taking shape beneath Helia’s hand was nothing at all like the one Lucian had actually carved, close enough to fool an untrained eye, but fundamentally different underneath.

Rhaiven understood this perfectly, and he used it without mercy, leaning on the crowd’s own ignorance to carry the lie forward. Retave’s expression soured further as Helia appeared, to every watching eye, to be genuinely completing the layer herself.

A ripple of quiet disapproval turned against Retave instead. Whispers passed through the hall suggesting he’d gone too far, willing to tear down his own sister’s reputation out of nothing but fear of being outshone.

The room’s sympathy swung back toward Helia, whole and unbroken.

"Hold on, wait, she really isn’t the one who..."

Retave tried to press the point, still hunting for proof.

Varka silenced him with a single clap of his hands.

"Helia. Is what Retave says true? Is this layer’s pattern genuinely unfinished, and if so, why?"

In truth, Varka understood little of how a Relic’s inner workings actually functioned, even watching the whole scene unfold directly in front of him. But he sensed, plainly enough, that something about Helia’s sudden ability to produce this pattern didn’t sit right.

"There is a reason, Your Majesty. I left it deliberately incomplete, because I needed your permission first, to show the full pattern in front of the public."

The line, Helia knew, had been Rhaiven’s plan from the start.

"My permission? Isn’t this meant to be your own proof, shown before everyone here? Why would you need my permission for that?"

"Just so, Your Majesty. But I fear that if I reveal the complete pattern openly, someone might learn to copy it."

Retave’s suspicion sharpened the moment he registered what topic she’d just steered them toward, one conveniently far from the question of who truly owned the Pocket Orb, and the sanctions that ownership carried.

Every sentence out of her mouth now came out too smoothly, too well arranged. Even the faint tremble that had touched her lips earlier had vanished completely.

"Something isn’t right with her," Retave murmured to himself, watching her with narrowing eyes, certain now that she was steering them all somewhere deliberately.

"And if someone succeeded in copying it, it would interfere with the empire’s plans for mass production, and it would disrupt Your Majesty’s own plans to continue the expedition into the Calamity Forest."

The moment those last words left Helia’s mouth, a voice erupted from the far end of the hall, loud enough to cut clean through every murmur in the room.

Guests turned to their neighbors on instinct, trading glances, each of them silently asking whether they’d truly heard the Princess say what they thought she’d said.

Even among the Seven Pillar families themselves, not one of them appeared to have expected Helia to bring up that name tonight, of all nights.

Cedric had just lifted his wine glass to his lips when a fist came down hard against the table beside him, hard enough that the glass slipped from his hand and shattered against the floor.

The table itself groaned under the blow, nearly splitting where the impact had landed. A low, furious growl rose from where Cedric sat.

"Varka! Did your daughter just say the Calamity Forest?"

It was Irvine, and he sounded furious. The whole hall froze at the words, stunned that Varka held some plan involving that place at all, one none of them had ever heard breathed aloud until now.

A bitter, lingering silence settled over a good portion of the older nobility in the room.

The tragedy of the Calamity Forest was bound up, inseparably, with the Crimson clan, and with a slaughter that had claimed countless lives across the continent of Arta, both noble and common. Eighty years was not so long a span that anyone present had truly forgotten it. Its aftershocks still rippled through Bravenheart and beyond its borders even now.

House Augusta carried its own scars from that night. Irvine’s predecessor as Patriarch had stood among the four heroes of Arta who’d risen to face the Crimson clan directly. He’d been grievously wounded in that fight, and House Augusta had lost half its forces in the same battle. The seat of Patriarch had sat empty for decades afterward, until Irvine, still only seven years old at the time, had taken it up himself to pull his family back from the edge and restore its standing among the Seven Pillars.

Fortunate as House Augusta’s recovery had been, compared to some, Irvine’s family had come through relatively lightly. Not every noble house that fought that night still bore a name today.

Among those lost was the family of Irvine’s closest friend, the child of a Patriarch whose entire house had vanished from the record afterward.

"Answer me, Varka. Have you truly forgotten the massacre those creatures carried out that night?"

"Don’t tell me you’ve also forgotten how many lives were lost, how many noble houses were broken beyond saving, houses like Faeren. We couldn’t even preserve their name, let alone their bloodline."

Irvine let every last drop of that old grief spill out unchecked, giving neither Varka nor Helia a chance to explain themselves first.

House Faeren had been the family of Irvine’s dearest friend, one of the noble houses of Bravenheart that had suffered the worst devastation of that entire war. Their ruin hadn’t ended with the battle itself. A Crimson ancestor had laid a curse over the family and its bloodline, one that left every descendant of House Faeren carrying an affinity disturbingly close to Dark Mana itself. Because of that curse, the empire had later pressured what remained of the Faeren line to surrender themselves for complete extermination, this despite the family having lived under close watch for years without ever once causing harm to anyone.

Knowing his friend’s family stood in mortal danger, Irvine had once arranged, in secret, to smuggle the last of House Faeren east, beyond the empire’s reach. What became of his friend and that family afterward, he had never learned.

Hearing Irvine speak of it now struck Lucian somewhere he hadn’t expected, dragging his mind back to something the Omen had told him once.

Miyu might be from House Faeren herself, one of the very descendants Irvine had once tried to save, the same ones who’d ended up stranded, somehow, on the continent of Eosia instead.

"Irvine, calm yourself. Varka hasn’t finished explaining anything yet, and what happened to House Faeren, we all know, wasn’t entirely his doing."

Cedric, his wine forgotten entirely now, worked to steady his old friend, who’d been shaken loose by a memory he clearly still carried close to the surface.

What Cedric said held some truth. When House Faeren had first come under the Order of Lumielle’s hunt, Varka had only just taken the throne. At the same time, Bravenheart had been in the middle of a sweeping invasion of other kingdoms, ones already weakened by the Crimson clan’s attacks and by the Dark Beasts loosed in their wake. Varka’s attention, in those years, had simply never turned toward hiding what remained of House Faeren.

"Not entirely his doing? If he’d never declared that war in the first place, House Faeren might still have had a chance."

"...Have you also forgotten what that declaration cost us in the north? We lost Viktor because of it, and his wife is standing right here, listening to this foolish little debate of ours today."

The northern territory Irvine meant belonged to House Winter. Viktor had been Amelia’s husband, killed during an attempted invasion of another empire beyond Bravenheart’s borders, a loss that had cost House Winter a portion of its own territory it had never fully recovered.

It wasn’t only Irvine whose composure had cracked tonight, it seemed. Amelia’s lips pressed into a thin, tight line as she fought down whatever rose in her chest.

The entire chain of tragedy, after all, had started with the Crimson clan and the horror that had poured out of the Calamity Forest. Amelia had thought it more than once over the years: if Varka had never let himself be tempted by the sight of weakened neighboring kingdoms ripe for the taking, if he’d never reached for that invasion, her husband might still be sitting beside her tonight.

Off to the side, Helia allowed herself a small, private smile, watching the Pillar families turn on each other over a wound decades old.

Her diversion had worked exactly as intended, and for the moment at least, no one in the hall was thinking about who truly owned the Pocket Orb anymore.