While Kaiden Grey lay in a warm tent with a purring Pharaoh on his back and five women who would die for him sleeping within arm’s reach, a very different scene was playing out in the New Dawn mand quarters.
Magnus Ashborn’s munication artifact activated.
Three seconds of silence. Then the connection accepted, and the face of Eleanora Voss, Senior Director of the Awakened Association’s petition Division, materialized in the air before him. She looked exactly as she had at every briefing, every podium address, every formal interaction Magnus had endured in the past: posed, unhurried, and utterly indifferent to the emotional state of whoever was speaking to her.
"Guildmaster Ashborn," she greeted. "How can I assist you?"
"Did you think I wouldn’t find out?"
Eleanora’s expression did not change. Her hands remained folded in front of her. Her posture remained straight. She regarded Magnus the way a bank teller regards a customer who has arrived at the window with a plaint.
"I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific."
"My daughter." Magnus’s voice was controlled, barely. The kind of controlled that came from a man who had spent decades mastering his posure and was watching it erode in real time. "Alice Ashborn. A registered member of New Dawn. MY guild. peting under Runewoven’s banner."
"You approved this. Your office processed the registration. You looked at a New Dawn member filing to pete under a rival guild and signed off on it without so much as notifying me."
Eleanora blinked once.
"I see. And the issue is?"
Magnus’s hand formed a trembling fist.
"The issue, Director Voss, is that you allowed a member of my guild to be poached into a peting roster without my knowledge or consent. Alice is a minor under my guardianship. She is contracted to New Dawn. Her abilities, her registration, her bat deployment, all of it falls under my authority as her guild leader and her father. You circumvented every layer of that authority when you approved her registration."
Eleanora listened to the entire statement without interrupting. When he finished, she waited a beat longer than was fortable, then spoke.
"Guildmaster Ashborn. The petition guidelines are clear on this matter."
Her tone carried no defensiveness, no apology, no acmodation. It was the voice of a woman reading terms and conditions aloud because someone had failed to do so themselves. "Each peting squad must be approved by the Awakened Association and must provide written proof of a contractual agreement between the individual batants and the guild under whose banner they pete. At no point do the guidelines require that squad members hold membership in that guild."
She paused.
"Alice Ashborn submitted a valid contract with Runewoven. The documentation was in order. Her registration was processed according to standard procedure."
"Standard procedure," Magnus repeated. The words came out flat and dangerous.
"Yes."
"You processed my underage daughter’s defection to a rival guild under ’standard procedure’ and saw nothing worth flagging."
"I processed a valid registration that met every requirement outlined in the petition charter." Eleanora’s gaze held steady. "Managing your guild’s internal roster is not included in my list of duties, Guildmaster. Managing your underage daughter’s life is even less so."
The silence that followed lasted four seconds.
It felt much longer.
Magnus’s breathing was audible through the artifact. The man who had descended from the sky like a god in front of thousands of awakened, who manded respect from veterans twice his age, who had built New Dawn into one of the most powerful guilds in the country through sheer force of will and political precision, was sitting alone in a room, being told by a bureaucrat that his family crisis was not her department.
"This conversation is not over."
"I’m available during office hours," Eleanora replied. "Is there anything else?"
The artifact shattered.
Magnus’s fist went through the projection housing and reduced it to fragments of enchanted crystal that scattered across the desk and floor.
He sat in the dark for a long time.
The silence was absolute. No artifacts humming. No projection light. Just Magnus Ashborn alone in a room full of broken crystal, breathing through his nose in slow intervals that he counted because counting was control and control was what power was all about.
Eleanora’s words circled back.
’I processed a valid registration that met every requirement outlined in the petition charter.’
Valid.
The word snagged on something in his mind and refused to let go.
Valid registration. Standard procedure. Documentation in order. Alice Ashborn, contracted member of New Dawn, had submitted paperwork to pete under a rival guild’s banner, and the Awakened Association had processed it without objection.
But that was impossible.
Magnus’s breathing slowed further. The rage that had driven his fist through the artifact settled into something colder, something with edges, as the operational part of his brain took over.
Alice’s contract with New Dawn was ironclad. Magnus had made sure of it. He’d sat across from the guild’s legal team and built the thing from the ground up, a document designed to hold an S-tier batant in place against the full weight of every guild, government, and private interest that would inevitably e knocking for her.
The non-pete clause alone ran twelve pages. Transfer restrictions. Deployment authorizations. Poaching countermeasures. A loyalty provision that required approval before Alice could so much as participate in a joint operation with another guild, let alone register under one for a sanctioned petition.
Approval.
He had not signed anything.
Yet Eleanora’s office had received a registration packet, verified the authorization, confirmed it met the charter’s requirements, and processed the request.
His hand, the one that had shattered the artifact, uncurled slowly. The crystal fragments embedded in his knuckles caught the faint light seeping from the corridor beneath the door.
The Association accepted the packet as valid. There was only one way to reconcile those facts.
He was betrayed.
By the woman who had carried the Ashborn name since birth. The woman who had not taken a husband’s surname but granted hers to the man she married. The co-owner of New Dawn. Mother of his children.
Vespera Ashborn.
The realization arrived like poison, slow and methodical, seeping through the cracks in his posure one logical step at a time.
Vespera had signed the papers.
Vespera had authorized Alice’s registration under Runewoven.
And if she’d done that, then she also likely knew. She knew that Alice was hovering above their estranged son’s head on live broadcast. She knew the secret was one sharp-eyed analyst away from unraveling.
Magnus had no proof of this. No intercepted munication, no confession, no paper trail beyond the registration itself.
But he knew.
He pulled a second munication artifact from the drawer beneath his desk. Military-grade. Reserved for family channels. His fingers closed around it, and for a moment he simply held it, staring at the dormant crystal in his hand.
Then he activated it.
The connection accepted on the second pulse. No delay. No screening. As if she’d been expecting the call.
Vespera Ashborn’s face materialized in the air. Dark hair. Pale skin. Eyes that held the same flat calm they’d held on the day she’d killed her first level 100 threat.
"You signed Alice’s petition papers."
It wasn’t a question.
"I did."
"You authorized our daughter to register under a rival guild without consulting me."
"Yes."
"Why?!"
User Comments
0 comments from readers