Chapter 77: Ashes of the Crimson

Galen looked genuinely startled by what Evalia had just said, and across the hall, more than a few nobles seemed to be reconsidering how serious tonight’s turn had truly become.

"Which is exactly why I’m asking every senior house here to remain calm," Varka said, his voice carrying over the murmur.

"Please, have your people lower their weapons and ease off their mana. I intend to take this matter as seriously as it deserves."

House Versys lowered their bows first. One by one, the other noble houses followed, exchanging uneasy glances as they talked themselves down from the edge.

It helped that the Dusk Feather itself hadn’t moved at all inside its cage, showing none of the violence everyone in the hall had braced themselves for.

"This sounds like a far more serious matter than any of us realized," Amelia said. "Are you entirely certain of what you just told us, Lady Evalia?"

She asked it carefully, as much a warning as a question, urging Evalia to weigh her next words before she spoke them. Only minutes ago, Amelia herself had been pressing Varka over what looked like a deliberate withholding of information. But if what Evalia had just claimed was true, then the Dusk Feather’s sudden appearance tonight was never simply a trophy from one of Varka’s hunts, as most of the room had assumed.

Beside her, Irvine had gone quiet, one hand resting against his long mustache, a sure sign that his mind had turned to something far heavier than the argument he’d been having only moments before.

"I’m quite certain, Lady Amelia. I saw it myself, and so did the soldiers under my command. After I cut down that Direwolf, something happened that I still can’t explain."

The whole hall leaned in, waiting to hear exactly what that something was.

But Evalia hesitated, the words catching somewhere behind her teeth, her eyes flicking first toward the Emperor before she went any further.

Varka caught the hesitation at once, understanding that whatever she held back now might matter more than anything said tonight.

"Tell everyone here exactly what you know, Evalia. All of it."

Her lips pressed together for a moment longer. There was a real chance that speaking this aloud, in front of every noble house present, would shatter the fragile calm that had only just settled over the room. But Varka had given his word on it, and he clearly meant for her to hold nothing back.

"As you wish, Your Majesty. Allow me to finish what I started to say. After I struck down that Direwolf... its body turned to ash and vanished."

A silence fell across a good portion of the Seven Pillar families.

But the reaction splitting across House Augusta, House Winter, House Pneuma, and House Austur looked entirely different from the rest.

Their faces drained of color, fear settling visibly into every one of them, and even further below, among the lesser nobility still holding plates of half-eaten cake, hands began to tremble, and more than one plate slipped and shattered against the floor.

"Sister, why has everyone gone so tense after what the Matriarch just said?"

Alicia turned to Cecilia, searching her face for some explanation of why the room had curdled so suddenly into dread.

Cecilia didn’t answer right away. Something was already turning over in her mind, some half-formed memory trying to surface. As far as she understood it, a Dark Beast, once defeated, didn’t simply disappear into ash.

Its body remained intact, the same as any ordinary beast or any ordinary creature. The only real difference between one Dark Beast and another was the raw strength each one carried.

What Evalia had just described pointed to something fundamentally abnormal. And every noble of sufficient rank in that hall, every Patriarch, every Elder, understood exactly what it meant for a Dark Beast to burn away to nothing after falling.

It meant danger of a kind none of them wanted to name out loud.

"There is only one event in recorded history where a defeated Dark Beast turned to dust. It happened when the Crimson ancestor who once commanded thousands of them fell. Every beast under that bloodline’s control turned to ash and vanished the instant his hold over them broke."

The answer hadn’t come from Cecilia.

It came from Lucian, whose eyes stayed fixed, unblinking, on the creature in the cage, the same creature that seemed, for reasons he couldn’t name, to be staring back at him and no one else.

Why does this thing keep looking at me? Is there something about me that’s caught its interest?

He checked himself over without quite meaning to, searching for anything that might explain it. But the Dusk Feather’s sharp, faintly luminous eyes stayed locked on him, not on the sword at his hip, not on anything he carried. On him.

Cecilia confirmed what he’d said without hesitation, a memory of her own surfacing alongside his. She remembered her mother telling her something nearly identical once, and she’d heard it again from Dean Lucy at the Academy, who’d lectured once on the Dark Beasts of that era.

Dean Lucy, Cecilia explained, had told the story of the hero Malyutta, who had single-handedly held back thousands of Dark Beasts in that war.

Every one he struck down had burned, the same way, into ash. Scholars who studied Malyutta’s accounts afterward had found a plausible explanation. Dark Mana, unstable by its very nature, grew volatile under the direct control of Crimson blood, enough to push the heat of a creature’s own nervous system past what its body could bear.

The moment that Crimson blood lost its grip, the beast’s already unstable body spiraled out of control entirely, and what remained of the Crimson blood inside it ignited, burning the creature away from the inside out.

"Not bad, Lucian, for a blind man." There was something almost approving in Cecilia’s tone now. "As far as I knew, only the empire’s highest circles, or someone close to a Seven Pillar family, would even know a detail like that.

Most people these days only know the monster stories, nothing about what actually happened, especially since the Crimson clan doesn’t even exist anymore. Did your own Patriarch tell you that?"

It was, strangely enough, the first time Cecilia had ever sounded like she was giving him credit for anything.

Unfortunately for her theory, Lucian hadn’t learned it from Cassius at all. It had come from Rumelia, offered almost in passing when he was still a boy who’d asked an idle question about something that happened eighty years ago.

What struck him now, oddly, was how closely her account matched the detailed version Cecilia had just given, down to the mechanism itself.

"I’m afraid I only know a little of it, and only from Rumelia."

Lucian said it plainly, and Cecilia’s curiosity visibly sharpened at the mention of her name.

She’s right, though. Rumelia really is sharp. Maybe I should ask her more about this, since she clearly knows more than how to craft a Relic. If I asked her about history, I’m fairly sure she’d know a great deal more than that, even about continents beyond our own.

But that thought brought him up short on something else entirely. Where were Rumelia and Isabella right now? Both of them should have been waiting nearby, and yet, scanning the hall as far as he could see, there was no sign of either of them.

"Wait, Sister. Does this mean the Crimson clan has come back?"

"About that..."

Cecilia fell silent, unable to answer a question that heavy.

Alicia’s words had landed on exactly the fear sitting, unspoken, behind every important face in that hall: whether the Crimson clan, long believed destroyed, might somehow be moving behind all of this.

Lucian, hearing the same question, went quiet too, a memory of his own rising to meet it.

Is this Lumina’s doing?

He remembered, with sudden clarity, the way Boien had once moved under Lumina’s control, by some method that had looked disturbingly close to what the Crimson clan itself had once wielded. It wasn’t impossible, he realized now. Lumina might genuinely be capable of something like this.

At the front of the hall, Varka closed his eyes, hands curling into fists where they rested on the arms of his chair. He sat like that for a long moment before rising at last and walking toward the caged creature.

Then he spoke, his voice carrying to every corner of the room.

"Exactly what you’re all thinking right now, the crown has already considered. There is a real possibility that this Dark Beast is being controlled."

"And whoever is controlling it may well be connected to the Crimson clan. For that reason, I intend to discuss this openly, before all of you, and decide together what it means for the fate of our empire."

A fresh wave of fear swept the hall at his words.

Guards moved at once, carrying in a long, heavy table and setting it down at the center of the floor below the dais.

Then Varka turned to the Seven Pillar families and ordered every one of them down to take their seats together. An emergency council was about to begin.