"He fled?" Lucia stared at the flustered, awkward expression tightening Kristoff's youthful features. "I rember when I unlatched my helm yesterday afternoon, the boy's lifeforce was a re thread. To claim he broke his coma, slipped his restraints, and cleared the alley overnight without either of you registering a single vibration... it defies the logistics of his injuries."
The young Dragon Knight's cheeks turned crimson instantly, a sharp cough escaping his throat before he managed to steady his voice. "Your Highness implies... a misunderstanding. I rely frequent Lady Tolisha's dispensary to execute heavy labor during daylight hours. I certainly do not maintain a presence in her private quarters during the watch."
Lucia blinked, montarily caught off guard before realizing the vanguard's focus had veered entirely off the tactical board. Tracing his own phrasing, he conceded the ambiguity with a dry, amused chuckle, waving his hand to clear the air. "A standard administrative oversight on my part. Let us slide past the schedule. Did he leave no ledger or marker before he vacated the cot?"
"There is an artifact, aye," Kristoff reported. He reached up, unbuckling the iron brackets of his golden breastplate to extract a crumpled, stained strip of coarse cloth from an inner pocket, presenting the fibers horizontally across his palms. "He stuffed this beneath his straw pallet, weighted down by a heavy gold imperial ingot. Examine the script."
Lucia took the linen, smoothing the creased fabric against his leather gauntlet. Written across the center in dark, uneven ink was a line of crooked, jagged ideograms. If he hadn't spent hours analyzing the ancient pictographic ruins within the Sky City Great Library, the characters would have looked like random scratches.
'To the doctor, the golden knight, and the white-haired little brother—I interrogated the Misbegotten brawler in the next cot regarding your descriptions. My thanks. This gold token clears my ledger for the dicines. Crossing paths with a creature of my lineage is an absolute misfortune. Our paths are severed here; I pray the stars ensure we never lock eyes again.'
Lucia's jaw tightened, a silent, indignant grumble rippling through his thoughts. White-haired little brother?
As a royal On child who carried a bloodline thick enough to trigger a high-tier Crucible backlash, couldn't the boy have deployed a fraction of courtly elegance in his vocabulary? At the absolute baseline, a student of the capital should recognize the distinction between "white" and "shimring silver," or "hair" and "draconic locks." The lack of syntax was an assault on his aesthetic.
He stared at the crooked linen, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the psychological profile behind the ink. The youth was a fascinating paradox. On one hand, he casually abandoned a rare imperial ingot to settle a common dical debt; on the other, his ssage was saturated with a bone-deep, suffocating self-deprecation. Having rarely experienced a single touch of mortal kindness within the lower city, his imdiate reflex upon waking was to flee back into the dark before his trauma could contaminate his saviors. It was a deeply fractured, defensive psychology.
But as Lucia's blood cooled, he recognized his own analytical bias. He was evaluating the boy's actions through the lens of an upper-city scholar who viewed the On as a standard biological race. For a child who drew his first breath in the wet, bloody filth of the Shunning-Grounds, escaping the transition into a sadistic, mass-murdering monster like the future Lord of Blood, Mohg, was already an extraordinary stroke of structural fortune.
"Beyond the matter of the patient," Kristoff stated, his voice dropping into a formal, heavy cadence. He took three deliberate paces backward, cleared his arms, and dropped his skull into a profound, solemn bow. "I have marched onto the grounds of Valeria Hall to deliver a formal retraction. I must petition Your Highness for clency regarding a transgression born of absolute ignorance and arrogance."
"An apology?" Lucia tilted his head, a silver eyebrow cocking slightly. "Na the charge."
Having breached the initial wall of his pride, Kristoff's posture was entirely stable. His red eyes remained locked onto the marble floorboards, his tone unyielding. "Since the sun rose on Your Highness's arrival in the capital, I—alongside the vast majority of my comrades within the main plaza—have categorized your existence as an un-mitigated, dangerous liability imposed upon Mistress Lansseax and the future of the Temple. Yesterday evening, within Tolisha's walls, I hand-delivered blasphemous words reflecting that exact malice."
"You miscalculate the equation," Lucia interrupted, his smooth voice slicing through the knight's confession. "I am not inquiring about the sins you believe you have logged against my crown. I am asking for the variable that prompted you to shift your alignnt."
A faint, lancholic smile touched the Prince's lips as he turned his back, pacing slowly across the expansive reception hall. "As for being a liability... even if your vanguards lock that thought behind your teeth, my own tactical assessnt yields the exact sa ledger. I am an absolute, crushing burden."
"Your Highness..." Kristoff's head snapped up, entirely stunned. He had rehearsed a dozen different disciplinary scenarios before clearing the outer gates—preparing his flesh for iron irons or military exile. Yet, the Prince's psychological clarity completely overrode his calculations.
"Heh. Drop the martial tension. Consider this a casual audit between soldiers," Lucia murmured, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone as he traced the periter of the hall.
"Since the hour my shell cracked, I have mapped the variables. I am the most volatile political cataclysm the Ancient Dragon Dynasty has encountered in ten centuries. The high court elders and the Senate councilors are paralyzed by my tric; they cannot agree on an architecture for my life. One faction desires to trade my head to Marika to purchase permanent comrcial monopolies in the north; another plots to bind my hand with iron silk, transforming my crown into a puppet to break the executive power of the two High Priests. And a remaining third... they offer a phantom loyalty inherited from the mories of my parents. But until my blade carves an objective display of kingship across this continent, the unyielding, stubborn pride of our race prevents them from surrendering their knees."
"And that friction multiplies when applied to your cohort," Lucia continued, turning to face him. "For the rcenaries who morize our styles but maintain oaths to the Erdtree, my presence is nominal. But for you, Kristoff—for the hundreds of main-plaza knights whose blood belongs strictly to Farum Azula, and for my sister Lansseax—I am a lethal, unavoidable weight."
"Before an Ancient Dragon Empyrean materialized on the board, the skirmishes between our Temple and the New Faction were restricted to petty administrative squabbles over municipal preaching rights. The grand campaign that shattered half of Leyndell ten winters ago has passed; those scars had settled into a stable peace. But the current era has rewritten the rules." Lucia spread his hands, a helpless, elegant gesture. "By accepting the mantle of Empyrean, whether my personal philosophy desires it or not, I am legally conford to hunt the laws of the next age."
"And every entity who aligns with my banner—whether by choice or by sovereign necessity—becos an obstacle that must be violently liquidated by the fundantalist fanatics who worship Radagon's geotric order." He pointed a single, silver-scaled finger toward the white clouds beyond the vaulted glass. "That is the script written for our generation by the Greater Will. No entity drawing breath under heaven possesses the trics to alter the layout—demigods and sovereign queens included."
"So..." He stepped back into Kristoff's space, his silver eyes locking onto the knight's gaze. The brilliant Altus sunlight poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind his silhouette, illuminating the room in a sharp, blinding gold that left no room for shadows. "With a liability of that magnitude standing before your path... why alter your ledger?"
"Because Your Highness did not pause to calculate the political fallout before extending your hand to save an On," Kristoff answered. He stood perfectly rigid, eting the demigod's gaze with absolute, unvarnished clarity. "Your Highness sits at the absolute summit of this world's hierarchy—an Empyrean consecrated by the stars. He is a defiled, cursed exile despised by the dirt. Yet you answered his internal regression exactly as one mortal soldier would pull another equal mortal from a trench."
"Among the three factions you mapped, I claim no ledger," the knight whispered, his chest rising. "I am not a turncoat rchant plotting treason, nor am I a court bureaucrat weaving a web. And I have long since discarded the traditional, blind arrogance of our sky-born kin. I am a knight, Your Highness. A knight, and nothing more."
"And the foundational axiom of a knight's creed is absolute: when your ears register the cry of an entity worth saving, your steel must march to save them."
"That is the solitary tric that drew my boots to the Temple plaza, and it is the compass that has guided my blade to this room. If the script decrees that I am conford to stand by Your Highness's flank..." A gentle, slightly self-conscious smile touched the young vanguard's lips. "...then that solitary reason is more than enough to anchor my shield."
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