"Lucia, over here!"
The mont his iron boots cleared the threshold of the outer arcade, Lucia caught Malenia's bright, high-pitched shout cutting through the crisp morning air.
Lifting his visor, he noted that the heavy, gold-trimd carriages of the Haligtree Palace had already dropped anchor beside his courtyard marker. The young princess was poking her small head out from the velvet-lined carriage window, her arm waving with frantic, un-disciplined velocity to catch his attention.
"We've been keeping vigil at your gate for a considerable watch!" she cheered, directing the driver with a sharp point of her finger to bring the team closer to the steps. "Hurry, clear the saddle and climb inside with and Brother!"
"Your Highness, our orientation?" Aegis inquired, his hand resting against his broadsword as his eyes scanned the Haligtree outriders.
"The paraters are fine; I will migrate to their cabin," Lucia instructed smoothly, adjusting his traveling cloak. "Maintain command of our line and follow our rear axle."
With a fluid, athletic bound, Lucia dropped from the marble steps, bypassed the lead horses, and cleared the threshold of Miquella's carriage in a solitary leap.
Left with no alternative, Aegis led his cohort forward to coordinate logistics with the Haligtree Palace guard captain. The officer anchoring the opposite line was likewise a young, pure-blooded Knight Commander; the two drakes locked eyes across the cobblestones, sharing a helpless, unified smile. Tracking the current dostic alignnt of their respective masters, the builders might as well physically tear down the listone walls separating Valeria Hall and the Haligtree gardens. Under these conditions, rging their vanguards didn't even violate baseline protocol.
The two squads of knights smoothly conford into a singular, massive iron box. Insulating the carriage of the three Empyreans within the absolute center of the formation, the column rolled out from the thoroughfares, marching directly toward the Great Outer Wall.
The mont Lucia settled onto the velvet cushions, his focus sharpened. Malenia was encased in an extraordinarily intricate, beautiful formal dress, but her baseline complexion was noticeably paler than her usual paraters. It was only because her initial, child-like excitent was temporarily masking her internal trics that he hadn't registered the decay the millisecond he breached the cabin.
Glancing at Miquella, the structural damage was twice as apparent. Beneath the boy's delicate, aristocratic features lay a bone-deep, terrifying exhaustion. The gold radiance of grace normally burning within his pupils was dark and sluggish—the unmistakable clinical signature of a massive, catastrophic overexertion of both divine power and ntal focus, a state bordering on absolute burnout.
Lucia's analytical engine deduced the layout instantly. Miquella had likely layered high-tier recovery miracles across his own channels multiple tis over the morning watch; his system had reached a point of absolute non-responsiveness, rendering further incantations useless until his biology could slowly purge the fatigue.
"What manner of crisis hit your house this dawn?" Lucia asked, his voice sinking into a low, worried register as a dark premonition tightened his gut.
"Malenia experienced a minor fluctuation during her waking cycles, but Brother has already executed a total correction, so do not fret!" the girl chirped, her smile bright and un-fused. As she spoke, she leaned her torso across Lucia's lap, her eyes darting to his left and right before she pouted in deep confusion. "Where have you packed Shirley?"
"The frost outside the walls is too biting today, so I commanded her to remain by the hearth," Lucia murmured, his fingers gently smoothing her copper hair.
Malenia let out a long, disappointed 'oh,' her small mouth twisting into an permanent pout as she twisted away from his palm, retreating to the absolute furthest corner of the carriage to brood in isolation.
Lucia turned his visor back to Miquella, his expression turning pitch-black. The localized body temperature he had tracked through his fingertips while touching the girl's scalp had been fluctuating violently between a freezing chill and a burning heat. Her internal trics were in a state of absolute chaos.
"Malenia, close your eyes and let your cycles rest," Miquella said softly. He reached down to retrieve a heavy velvet travel blanket from the bench, draping the wool across her shoulders and thoughtfully tucking the edges beneath her slippers to insulate her from the draft.
The little girl monitored the tight, permanent strain knotting her brother's brow, then glanced at Lucia's grim visor, her eyelids blinking lazily. "Lucia... I am not genuinely angry with your ledger. I will fully forgive your lack of a fox the millisecond I wake up, so you are legally forbidden from maintaining a dark face with my brother."
Lucia's psychological defense dissolved instantly. He forced a soft, reassuring smile across his lips, leaning down. "An equitable bargain. Sleep well, little one. When your eyes open, my ledger will be clear as well."
Malenia let out a quiet, fragile sigh of relief, her long eyelashes dropping as she conford her fra to the cushions. She was thoroughly spent; within minutes, the soft, rhythmic cadence of her breathing filled the cabin—a series of tiny, kitten-like snores.
Lucia rose with microscopic care, tiptoeing across the floorboards to slide beside Miquella. He dropped a heavy, grounding palm onto the boy's trembling shoulder, his voice a bare whisper against his ear. "Disclose the arithtic, Miquella. Did the Scarlet Rot breach her seals this morning?"
Miquella's fingers flicked, channeling a microscopic spark of Faith to manifest a temporary, low-frequency sound barrier between their bench and the sleeping girl. Even that basic operational manipulation seed to drain the remaining oxygen from his lungs, his shoulders slumping heavily.
With the periter secured, he let out a long, ragged breath, his head dropping into his palms as he nodded. "The regression detonated at the third hour of the watch. The internal voltage was vastly more severe than any recorded tric. Father cleared his calendar to descend to her chambers personally, but the result was blank. His divine power is monolithic, Lucia, but its frequency is too sterile. Because she and I are conford as twins from the sa source, my un-fused grace is the solitary energy capable of damping the fire."
He ran his slender fingers through his golden locks, violently ruffling the hair until it was a chaotic maze—the first ti Lucia had ever witnessed the young prince lose his courtly composure.
After a long, suffocating silence, a raspy, broken whisper escaped from between his arms. "I exhausted every vector... I committed every asset in my database..."
"I deployed the Golden Fundantals, the ancestral runic arrays, the rarest alchemical tinctures, the highest-tier Perfury arts... but that god-cursed rot remains clutched to her marrow like a parasite feeding on stone! I lack the data to calculate her survival tiline. Three winters? Five?"
His lungs panted for air, his forehead creased in agonizing psychological pain. He looked at Lucia, his voice trembling with a raw, terrifying vulnerability. "My engine cannot map an existence where her light is dark. Lucia... do you comprehend that level of desolation?"
"The Greater Will hand-delivered an absolute mandate across our crowns, commanding our houses to ascend as the gods of the next era... Heh." Miquella let out a cold, hollow, borderline psychotic laugh. "If my intellect lacks the capability to preserve the solitary sister born of my own mother's flesh... what manner of Empyrean am I?"
Lucia's lips twitched, his mouth opening to deliver a sentence of comfort, but his modern cognitive filter found itself entirely bankrupt of syntax. There was no phrase in any library to dismantle that depth of despair. All he could execute was a silent physical calibration, shifting his bulk to allow his shoulder to absorb the weak, trembling weight of Miquella's fra, his mind turning the dark gravity of the plot.
"Father initially issued an executive command for the two of us to remain insulated within our gardens today," Miquella whispered, his voice steadying slightly against Lucia's plate. "But the mont she broke her fever, she adamantly refused the pillows. She demanded her boots clear the gates to welco our siblings."
"The court views her as a simple child who understands zero trics, but her intuition is sharper than any administrator in the palace. She carries an permanent worry for Father. She senses that our incoming siblings harbor a lethal, un-yielding hatred toward his crown... and her soul whispers that this hatred was spawned by our very existence. So she forced herself into her finest silk. She desires our brothers and sister to accept her fra... to accept ... and to forgive Father."
Lucia turned his head, his silver eyes locking onto the sleeping girl across the cabin. Curl-bound within the heavy velvet wool, her features were dangerously pale, the slight knot between her eyebrows a living signature of the phantom agony still gnawing at her bone. Yet, even in her sleep, her lips held a tiny, faint vestige of a smile—perhaps anchored by Lucia's promise, or perhaps because her soul was looking forward to a reunion ten winters in the making.
Within the gaplay loops of his past life behind the screen, Lucia had personally faced that peerless, un-blockable blade. He had witnessed the titanic, crimson flower detonate across the south, transforming the prosperous fields of Caelid into a putrid, decaying hell of rot and madness. Like every player who had navigated the wastes, he had once judged Malenia's terminal offensive as an act of absolute, unmitigated lunacy—a desperation that didn't rely break a magnificent warlord, but systematically dragged millions of innocent, un-aligned mortals down into a biological abyss.
Yet here, looking at the fragile, pale child huddling under the wool, his perspective fractured.
Behind the terrifying imagery of the Goddess of Rot blooming amidst a mountain of corpses, he could now see the solitary, terrified little girl who had spent her entire existence carefully guarding a tiny, microscopic corner of the world. A sanctuary that held nothing more than a few loved ones and a handful of mories—protecting them with the exact, desperate ferocity of a child shielding her favorite toy from a bully.
When that tiny corner was eventually violated by the civil wars of the Shattering—when every entity she protected was crushed into the dirt, leaving nothing but an permanent, howling void within the branches of the Haligtree—that kind, simple, preternaturally wise girl died in the dark.
The entity that would later burst from the scarlet petals was no longer the princess huddling in this carriage. It was an abstract instrunt of cosmic decay, engineered to force all living things to scream in agony.
Lucia's jaw locked, his silver eyes turning cold and absolute as he reached across the gap to smooth the velvet blanket over her shoulder.
"Banish the anxiety, Miquella," he whispered, his voice dropping into a low, sovereign register that vibrated with a deep, hidden voltage. "With my shield anchoring this line... the corner will not break."
He pushed the wooden blind aside, the pale Altus sunlight cutting across his sharp features. In the gray distance beyond the knights' spears, the shimring, vast expanse of the Rodel Lake was already clearing the horizon.
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