"A corpse cart?"
Lucia's posture went rigid. Ahead of their hackney carriage, the lead flatbed wagon ground to a halt beside the massive stone rim of the well. The burly driver pulled a square of coarse white linen from his vest, tied it securely behind his skull to shield his mouth and nose, and casually yanked the stained canvas shroud off his cargo.
The reveal was a jolt to the senses. Stuffed into the narrow bed were over a dozen carcasses of every shape and proportion—Demi-humans, Lion Misbegottens, Winged Chiras, and several heaps of flesh so thoroughly mangled by steel that their original biology was entirely unrecognizable.
They were packed like cordwood. To maximize the ledger of the haul, limbs had been broken and spines twisted into angles impossible in a living fra. They didn't look like the remains of once-living beings; they looked like a mountain of slag waiting to be cleared from a foundry floor.
The mont the mountain air hit the at, the tallic stench of the blood beca an absolute, suffocating wave. Lucia felt a physical sickness twist his gut, a deep psychological revolt against the casual nature of the display.
Yet, the driver standing in the crimson slush exhibited no reaction. Above his linen mask, his eyes were as flat and featureless as stagnant swamp water. Aside from a profound, bone-deep numbness, he carried no more emotion than an undertaker handling dirt.
The man gripped a thick hemp line coiling through the pile, braced his weight, and hoisted a tangled knot of Demi-human corpses onto his leather-clad shoulder. He marched three paces to the lip of the well and dumped the mass into the dark with a heavy, grunting heave.
SPLASH—
The distant, echoic strike against stagnant mud vibrated up the shaft. The driver didn't linger to listen. He casually wiped a sar of fat and gray marrow from his palm onto his apron, turned back to the flatbed, and repeated the motion.
As their carriage rolled past the lane, the final image etched into Lucia's mind before the listone tenents cut off the view was the first wagon rattling away empty, while the next driver in line pulled his mule forward to claim the rim.
It was an endless, industrialized assembly line of waste.
"Where is the source of these bodies?" Lucia asked, his voice tight as he slid the wooden blind shut.
"The auxiliary slave pens, the deep foundational construction sites, the frontier garrisons... but primarily, the Colosseums," Lansseax answered, her tone flat and devoid of its usual warmth.
"The Lower District contains no fewer than fifty grand arenas like Serante, and the minor fighting pits are beyond counting," she explained, watching the rhythmic sway of the carriage lantern. "When the public tournant brackets conclude for the afternoon, hosting a Death Match—where non-humans are designated as the cattle for slaughter—is an iron-clad tradition."
"The executioners are typically baseline, failing fighters whose records are on the verge of ruin. If they can treat the galleries to a sufficiently barbaric, blood-soaked butchery, demonstrating the raw 'vitality and courage' championed by the Golden People, it salvages their contract and wins them a massive surge of public adoration."
"The Demi-humans and Misbegottens they hunt are harvested in batches as refugees from Southern Caelid or the Weeping Peninsula. Occasionally, the slave syndicates source 'exotic tier' stock—Mountain Trolls from the frozen north or Man-Serpents from Mt. Gelmir. After months of starvation and transport iron, they are hollow husks. When they are pushed onto the sands, they face a fully armored knight empty-handed. In ninety-nine percent of matches, the ledger is written before they enter the circle."
"Ninety-nine percent?" Lucia muttered. "And the remainder?"
"If a fighter is so utterly incompetent that they manage to lose to a starving beast, the arena enforcers step in to preserve his life at the final second," Lansseax chuckled darkly. "His career is dead; he is stripped of his rank and banned from the sands forever. The victorious beast is dragged back to the iron cages to bleed in the next exhibition."
"Conversely, if a novice wins his bout but displays rcy—refusing to drive his steel through a surrendered target—his execution is social rather than professional. The Golden People accept weakness, but they utterly despise soft-heartedness. They will tear his fighter license to shreds, pelt him with stones, rotten fruit, and offal, and hurl the vilest insults until he flees the capital out of pure psychological despair. They claim his blood is 'unworthy' of the soil."
She leaned back against the leather cushions. "Of course, that is rely the public theater. The high court houses organize private, subterranean leagues where only landowners and barons are permitted to wager. The fighters are true hero-tier killers, the massacres are total, and the betting lines shift from coin bags to the transfer of slave legions, vast estates, and royal offices. I find their little gas repulsive, so I don't track their logistics."
Lucia remained silent, the heavy click-clack of the carriage wheels filling the void in his thoughts. Not long ago, when he had stood atop the grand pronades of Valeria Hall, surveying the golden sea of Leyndell's roofs, he had categorized the Golden Age as a monunt to human progress—at least structurally.
Now, he recognized that the empire's brilliance and its savagery were not separate currents; they were the twin faces of the sa coin. The holy, magnificent architecture of the Golden Temple shared an umbilical cord with the blood-soaked foundries and fighting pits of the south. Decades from now, when the facade fractured, the reverse side of those golden glazed tiles and pristine marble pillars would be the exact nightmare he knew from the ga: a foul, echoing labyrinth of stone sewers teeming with monsters.
A sudden realization struck his mind. He turned to his sister. "Sister Lansseax... that well where the carts were dumping their loads. Is it a direct artery to the Leyndell Sewers?"
"It is," Lansseax confird, nodding slowly. "Why do you ask?"
"To leave hundreds of untreated carcasses to rot in the foundations... doesn't that risk generating a widespread plague or a localized rot-sickness?" he inquired, though his mind was fishing for a deeper, more restricted answer.
As an heir of Farum Azula with clearance to search the Great Sky Archives, it was logical for him to possess macro-knowledge regarding the continent's ecology. But the capital's internal managent of the Children of the On should have been a sovereign secret entirely beyond his classification.
Ever since Radagon ascended the Elden Throne and spearheaded the rise of Golden Order Fundantalism, the localized atavisms known as the Crucible Aspects—horns, feathers, and tails that held a sacred, primordial status in the ancient era—had been systematically re-branded as tokens of defilent and cosmic corruption. Infants born with these physical markers were hunted under a singular, terrifying label: The On.
In the outer reaches of the continent, the destiny of an On infant was binary: exposure or direct infanticide. But within the walls of Leyndell, the thodology was infinitely more cruel. The midwives would use iron shears to brutally cut away every hard horn across the babe's flesh before casting the bleeding child into the dark of the underground. Those born to the Royal Lineage were spared the shears, but their sentence was identical—eternal, naless imprisonnt within the deep stone vaults.
During the grand welcoming banquet at the Eternal Palace, Lucia had noted the complete absence of the nas Morgott and Mohg from Marika's lips. He had held suspicions, but he lacked the leverage to verify the state of the royal twins.
His connection with Miquella was too fresh and politically delicate to risk probing such an ancestral scar, and Lansseax had tracked his entire life since his hatching; abruptly demonstrating knowledge of a closed imperial secret would spark imdiate suspicion about his origins.
Thankfully, the topic was an open secret among the ancient residents of the Lower District. He had intended to wait for a rumor to surface before casually bringing it up to his sister, but the corpse carts had handed him the perfect tactical entry point.
"A plague?" Lansseax murmured, her eyes narrowing as she looked at him. "No. The Leyndell drainage system isn't a re network of stone pipes, Lucia. It is a vast, fathomless underground kingdom."
She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a low whisper as she confird the existence of the On containnt zones, before sliding into a piece of restricted history that even the Sky Archives had never recorded.
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