On an early morning in the twilight of late autumn, the jagged eastern promontories stretching toward the borders of the capital were shrouded in a dense, freezing mist. This specific high ridge sat a re thirty leagues from Leyndell's outermost defensive rings; standing upon its five-hundred-ter summit was sufficient to map the entire architectural layout of the Golden Royal Capital.
A sudden, thunderous burst of iron-shod hoofbeats broke the morning silence, the reverberations interspersed with the low, rolling howls of apex predators.
Within minutes, a massive vanguard of knights encased in polished silver plate broke through the wall of fog. Each warrior bore a heavy, pale blue cloak embroidered with the brilliant, silver-white Crest of the Star and Full Moon—the sovereign sign of the Carian Royal Family.
The cohort maintained an aggressive, sweeping pace before drawing their mounts to a halt across a wide, frosted adow near the crest. The outriders forming the front line systematically split to the flanks, un-sheathing the central core of the column.
At the head of the inner circle rode a towering veteran mounted upon a magnificent, snow-white Dragon-Scale stallion. His heavy plate was embedded with starlight glintstones that shimred even in the dim mist, and the cross-guard of the monolithic greatsword buckled to his saddle pulsed with a pale blue lunar light, venting faint, crackling strands of dark sorcerous energy.
The attire—a flawless, mathematical integration of heavy martial steel and high-tier astrological sorcery—marked his status as a Carian Knight. Unlike the standard royal guardsn tracing the periter, these specific paladins were hand-selected by successive lunar queens. Though their active roster had never breached the limit of twenty blades across history, their nas comprised the absolute, apex military deterrent of the Liurnia basin.
The vanguard's na was Moongrum. He was the first, the strongest, and the un-yielding shield anchored to the crown of Rennala.
Behind his heavy stallion followed three silhouettes who still bore the lean, green proportions of youth. The three Carian demigods had renounced the luxury of the royal carriages; instead, each straddled the spine of a massive, silver-white direwolf. These giant beasts were the direct, pure-blooded descendants of the Red Wolf that had guarded the family's hearth for a generation. Beyond their terrifying physical attributes and an analytical intelligence that matched a human scholar's, their marrow was saturated with starlight, granting them the innate capacity to manifest floating clusters of Glintblade Sorcery with a turn of their skulls.
"Follow my line," Knight Moongrum commanded, his voice a flat, gravelly rasp as he nudged his stallion up the final rock face. The three demigods fell into step behind his cloak.
The mont their boots cleared the lip of the highest cliff, the morning mountain gale combined with the rising sun to violently tear the mist away. The four entities stood poised at the absolute edge of a vertical drop, and the glittering, overwhelming majesty of the Golden Capital was suddenly laid bare beneath their eyes.
"Children," Moongrum spoke, his gaze remaining fixed on the distant golden boughs of the Erdtree towering over the roofs. "Does any scholar among you recognize the ledger of the stone beneath our feet?"
A burly, broad-shouldered youth with a wild mane of flowing red hair was the first to answer, his voice already carrying the deep boom of a warlord. "The archival scrolls record that this promontory and the surrounding valleys comprise the flashpoint where the final phase of the War of the Dragon Tree detonated."
"It was on this ridge that Godwyn the Golden locked steel against the Ancient Dragon Fortissax, trading blows for three days and three nights without pause. Though Godwyn claid a narrow structural victory on points, his golden lightning failed to fracture Fortissax's inner scales. Concurrently, the Priestess Lansseax slaughtered twelve high heroes of the Erdtree vanguard within seventy-two hours, systematically breaking Radagon's offensive capability and forcing the two empires to cease hostilities, converting their crusade into a joint alliance."
"An accurate recitation," Knight Moongrum nodded with grim satisfaction. He turned his eyes toward a slender, narrow-faced youth whose long golden hair was bound by a simple velvet cord. "Rykard. Add your filter to the boy's summary. What do your eyes read?"
The golden-haired youth paused, his dark eyes narrowing as he analyzed the distance. "My brother's tactical record is comprehensive. If my own engine offers an addendum... it is that following that slaughter, the alliance binding the Dragon and the Tree cannot be evaluated through a sterile court poem about 'turning foes to brothers.' Godwyn may have shared a mutual, martial reverence with Fortissax, but the raw arithtic is simpler: the Erdtree halted its crusades because its military treasury was entirely spent. They compromised with Farum Azula—and with our house—out of absolute logistical necessity."
"Oh?" Knight Moongrum's silver eyebrow lifted, a razor-thin smirk touching his mouth. "Our own peace treaty with the capital was locked fourteen winters past. Why would they calculate our house as a threat during their dragon campaign?"
Rykard's delivery remained flat, thodical, and entirely devoid of heat. "The coexistence of peer states across history is never the byproduct of a legal scroll; it is the mathematical result of great powers lacking the raw voltage required to annex each other's borders. In the closing phases of the Dragon War, though our banners maintained a neutral ceasefire with Leyndell, our smithies never stopped shipping refined alloys and glintstone caches down the river to Farum Azula. Marika—and that man—both understood an absolute axiom: if the dragons reached a point of systemic annihilation, Caria's vanguard would clear their leathers to preserve the sky."
Hearing the boy absolutely refuse to articulate the word Father, neither the veteran knight nor Princess Ranni, who sat silently monitoring the winds from her wolf's spine, exhibited a single flicker of surprise. Only Radahn's massive shoulders tightened, an expression of indescribable, ancient bitterness clouding his young face.
"Ten winters past, the Warlord Godfrey's crusade had reached its absolute periter," Rykard continued, his voice dropping into a low, venomous register. "The scouts within the southern badlands reported that the Eastern Legion and the First King had been violently stripped of their grace and exiled by the Queen. Though the court scholars argued it was a trap engineered by Marika to display a false vulnerability to the outer cults, subsequent campaigns verified the truth of the ledger."
"At that exact juncture, the Western Expeditionary Army under that man's command was frozen in Liurnia, entirely paranoid of our borders. The elite heroes assigned to protect the Inner Palace had been scattered across the valleys by the dragons. The Golden Dynasty sat at its weakest structural point in the history of the calendar."
His fingers dug into the thick silver fur of his direwolf, his jaw locking. "If mother hadn't been... if her mind hadn't been systematically bewitched by that man's golden rhetoric... if Caria and Farum Azula had combined their armants to launch a coordinated strike on those gates, we possessed the trics to reduce the Erdtree to ash in a single season. If we had cleared the board then... how could Mother have descended into this broken state?"
A heavy, suffocating silence dropped across the crags, the wailing mountain wind the solitary frequency remaining on the mountain.
Across the recent winters, the Full Moon Queen's cognitive stability had utterly collapsed. Knight Moongrum was legally registered as the military tutor of the three royal heirs, but the reality ran deeper—he had functioned as their surrogate father, monitoring their trics and shielding their developnt with a quiet, fierce devotion.
Consequently, he understood that while Rykard appeared the most insular, calculating, and cold of the three children, the boy harbored the most passionate, volatile affection for his family. Once that love had been betrayed by Radagon's departure, the energy had mutated into a bone-deep, radioactive hatred for the man who wore the golden seal.
When Rykard spoke his treason, his mind intentionally bypassed the biological reality that if Radagon had never crossed the threshold of Rennala's manor, the three siblings would exist as nothing more than un-written dust. He only registered a solitary truth: ten winters past, his mother, his brother, his sister, and his own soul possessed the most pristine, blissful existence on the continent—and that man had heartlessly liquidated it all to buy an imperial throne, dragging everyone who loved him into a freezing abyss of despair.
"But he... he remains our blood," Radahn whispered, his massive head dropping as his eyes tracked his direwolf's paws. "He is our father."
"He is not," a cool, razor-sharp voice cut through the wind. It didn't belong to Rykard. It erged from Ranni, her lips parting for the first ti since they had cleared the Lift.
The biting mountain gale whipped her dark red locks across her visor like a dancing, crimson fla. Her voice carried a beautiful, aristocratic clarity, yet it held a distinct, raspy isolation—like a hidden, dark spring bubbling through a mountain cavern.
"He was rely a transient," she whispered softly to the stone. "A passerby who has cleared our gate."
Within the grand central chambers of Valeria Hall.
Lucia's eyelids slowly lifted, the boiling, red-gold draconic vitality racing through his veins gradually dropping into a rhythmic, manageable pulse. In the dim light of the study, a series of dark red forks of Ancient Dragon Lightning seed to flash montarily across the depths of his ice-blue pupils before dissolving back into his skin.
"Aegis," he commanded, his voice echoing through the heavy oak panels. "Conform twenty elite Storm Knights to saddle paraters. Have them stand by at the gate marker. You will accompany my shield to the lakeside pavilion within the watch."
Aegis, who had maintained a constant vigil outside the study door, imdiately barked a formal acknowledgent, his iron boots crunching against the marble as he went to mobilize the line.
Lucia reached across the ebony wood, his fingers locking onto the leather-wrapped hilt of the Godskin Stitcher he had harvested from Samuel's void mory. He drew the steel from its lacquered scabbard; the long, narrow, celadon-tinted blade instantly emitted a soul-chilling, iridescent cold radiance that seed to draw the ambient heat out of the room.
He monitored the geotry of the rapier for a brief mont, then slung the scabbard securely across his spine. With a fluid, balanced movent, he reached down to buckle the ancient Dragon-Scale Blade he always carried to his left hip. He was dual-sheathed for maximum lethality.
Shirley bounded across the rug, her small paws scratching at his greaves as she attempted to trail his cloak, but Lucia bent down, gently scooping her form into his palms to deposit her back onto the velvet cushion. The little silver fox looked up at his visor, letting out a soft, confused whimper.
He gently stroked the soft fur between her ears, his tone turning warm and reassuring. "The gale outside the walls is too biting today, little one. Remain by the hearth and sleep. My boots will clear these thresholds before the night watch locks the gates."
He turned on his heel, his heavy traveling cloak billowing behind him as he strode out of the main hall into the open arcade. A sudden, violent gust of freezing wind swept past the columns, causing him to pause.
A solitary, withered yellow leaf from the golden-leaved maple anchoring the central courtyard was caught by the current, fluttering lazily through the gray air before dropping face-down onto the cold marble.
The autumn had officially closed its ledger. The winter of Leyndell had arrived.
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