Ten leagues west of the granite platforms, the diplomatic vanguard that had marched across the continent from Liurnia finally cleared the mist, entering Lucia's field of vision.
The Carian Royal Knights were encased in moon-silver plate and flowing azure cloaks. The crisp wind rolling off the Rodel Basin whipped the deep indigo banners aloft, their surfaces embroidered with the Star and Full Moon Crest, making the descending line look like a river of stars pouring down from the western horizon.
To the east, the welcoming column answered in blinding, dazzling gold leaf. The Rodel Knights maintained an iron, disciplined alignnt of spears and massive greatshields, hoisting the high flags carved with the Erdtree sigil. The bright Altus sunlight struck their heavy plate, reflecting a radiant, almost divine glare across the grass.
The two armies drew their reins exactly a hundred paces apart. From the Carian core, a magnificent paladin in masterwork silver plate urged his white stallion forward, with the three youthful demigods trailing his line on their giant wolves.
From the Golden side, Radagon imdiately signaled his stallion to advance, with Crucible Chief Ordovis maintaining a disciplined, half-step deferential drop to his rear flank. Lucia and Miquella fell into step behind his cloak, anchoring the left and right sectors respectively.
The hundred-pace boundary was obliterated in a heartbeat. The primary operators converged in the neutral grass separating the banners, dismounting in a synchronized rhythm of clanking iron. The Carian Knight un-latched his silver visor, stepped through the turf, and executed a flawless, respectful bow to the King Consort. "Foreign Minister Moongrum. My office extends its compliance to Your Majesty Radagon."
"Lord Moongrum, clear your stirrups; rise," Radagon said, his calculated smile warm as he reached out his hands to support the veteran's gauntlets. "Ten winters have bled off the calendar since our steel last crossed. Across those seasons, whenever my thoughts have retreated to the campaigns of the Western Continent, the mory of your individual performance on the field has remained stable. To lock eyes with your shield today is not rely an honor for my house—it is an honor for the entire capital."
Crucible Commander Ordovis offered a sharp, approving nod from his stirrups. "When your ledger was famous across every border of the continent, I was still tracing Godfrey's line through Limgrave. It has remained a permanent regret of my vanguard that I lacked the opportunity to parse your world-suppressing Glintblade Swordsmanship. If a window manifests during your stay, we must trade points."
"Your Majesty and Commander Ordovis overdraw my trics," Moongrum replied, his smile calm, asured, and entirely un-moved by the courtly praise. "I calculate that the entities Your Majesty genuinely desires to audit today are not an old foreign minister, but the three royal Highnesses of my dynasty."
With a fluid movent, he stepped to the flank, clearing the lane for the three young demigods behind his horse.
Radagon's eyes had already been tracing the silhouettes behind the paladin. Now, his majestic fra moved forward with an un-disguised, desperate urgency. Since he had hand-delivered the amber egg containing the Rune of the Unborn to the Carian manor, seven winters had passed without a single glimpse of his children.
Radahn was the first to clear his saddle, stepping through the grass to deliver his respects. Standing before the towering Elden Lord, his massive shoulders went slightly rigid, a complex, agonizing conflict breaking through his youthful features. His lips trembled for a fraction of a second before a low, gravelly whisper escaped his teeth. "Father."
Radagon's chest rose, a profound emotional fracture rippling through his amber eyes. Just as his hands lifted to offer a warm, paternal squeeze to the boy's plate, Rykard and Ranni stepped into the light, hand-delivering a bucket of absolute frost to his hearth.
The two younger siblings trailed their elder brother's line with cold, synchronized precision. Their faces carried zero emotional voltage. In their syntax, they systematically defaulted to his executive title—"Your Majesty"—leaving an absolute, freezing silence where the word Father should have dropped.
"Children... I..." Radagon's voice caught in his throat. His extended palm froze in the empty air between them, hovering for a long, agonizing watch before dropping powerlessly back to his side.
He cleared his throat, his divine mask re-conforming to his features with a visible strain. "On behalf of my own crown, Queen Marika, and every subject drawing breath beneath the Erdtree... I welco your banners ho."
"My ho isn't anchored to this soil," Rykard muttered under his breath.
Radagon's posture went slightly rigid at the treason, but his analytical engine chose to liquidate the offense. He feigned absolute ignorance of the phrase, smoothly shifting the weight of the conversation to introduce Lucia and Miquella to the Carian retinue.
Facing the Dragon Prince and the young twin Empyrean, neither Moongrum nor the three siblings exhibited a single anomalous reaction. Following a disciplined round of courtly greetings and diplomatic small talk, the atmosphere, which had been frozen to the literal breaking point, finally began to decompress.
Within the quarter-hour, Radagon signaled the return loop, suggesting the company migrate to the pavilion to clear the road. Under the coordinated alignnt of Ordovis and Moongrum, the two armies re-conford into a singular, colossal joint escort column.
At the head of the formation, the two senior knights escorted Radagon, Radahn, and Miquella. Since Radahn had already carved a substantial reputation across the military lists and Miquella's genius for Fundantalist miracles was an established myth, the conversation between the vanguard operators revolved primarily around the technical cultivation paraters of the two princes.
Lucia fell half a step back, locking his stallion's stride side-by-side with Rykard and Ranni within the central core of the column. The half-wolf youth, Blaidd, who had tracked Ranni's shadow since infancy, held his massive Royal Greatsword horizontally across his saddle, his amber eyes pinned suspiciously to the Dragon Prince's flank.
This positioning, while appearing completely casual to an outside observer, was actually the byproduct of a silent, tripartite consensus between the dynasties. Among the three major empires, Farum Azula and Liurnia maintained the most pristine historical alignnt. Combined with the explosive dostic trauma dividing Radagon from his younger children, placing Lucia between the siblings was the solitary feasible configuration that didn't detonate the parade.
Within this central tier, the interaction was noticeably more harmonious than the frozen theater at the front.
Beyond the ancestral peace treaty linking their crowns, Rykard and Ranni quickly mapped a startling realization: this silver-haired Ancient Dragon Demigod was inexplicably, flawlessly conford to their individual frequencies in intellectual depth, historical scope, and personal temperant.
Rykard had spent his youth buried within ancient archives, frequently drafting highly unique, cynical critiques regarding the macro-currents of the continent. He routinely attempted to share these theories with his siblings, but the return data was blank. Radahn's cognitive engine was dumped entirely into military logistics and gravity combat; politics and culture were dead trics to his mind. Ranni, conversely, was a hyper-focused prodigy of starlight astronomy whose naturally detached, cold persona routinely doused his historical enthusiasm with flat, indifferent responses.
eting Lucia, the Carian prince had initially intended to execute nothing more than a superficial, court-mandated social routine. To his absolute astonishnt, within three casual conversational turns, he discovered that Lucia's historical database outclassed his own.
Whenever Rykard cited an obscure, pre-crusade event, Lucia didn't rely quote the relevant classics and summarize the traditional views of the chroniclers; he hand-delivered a series of unique, logic-breaking analyses that either synchronized perfectly with Rykard's hidden conclusions or opened an entirely novel, thought-provoking horizon.
As their horses rolled onward, Rykard looked like a cat whose fur had been ticulously smoothed by a master hand. The more they traded data, the more his engine registered a profound realization: this silver-haired dragon was his solitary intellectual peer on the continent. A deep, visceral sense of having t too late ward his ink-stained soul.
Princess Ranni's matrix was handled through an entirely separate vector.
Lucia could converse with Rykard on equal terms due to his relentless reading hours inside the mory battlefield since his transmigration. But in front of Ranni's astronomical genius, his magic attributes were appallingly low. His intelligence stat had sat at a single-digit nine for a vast season; even after forcing it to thirty through his draconic inheritance, he had zero plans to cast glintstone stars in the short term, aning his technical data on sorcery was non-existent.
But there is always an alchemical 'but'.
What the kind, hyper-focused, slightly proud Moon Princess—who had not yet grown her cold, bitter shell—could never have calculated was that the entity riding beside her stirrup had already researched her psychological buttons across dozens of simulation loops in a past life.
Lacking technical data on sorcery? Nominal issue. Does a grandmaster require an engineering degree to discuss the philosophy of architecture?
Recognizing that Ranni's comprehension of starlight logic already approached Rennala's trics, and knowing she had already finalized several independent spell arrays during her childhood, Lucia smoothly steered the topic toward the philosophy of research. He enticed her to disclose her unique cognitive frawork—specifically how her logic differed from the rigid, conventional geotric constraints popular among the old mages of the Academy.
And then, he executed a high-vantage celebration of her character.
The thodology of his praise was an absolute art form. Attempting to match her technical jargon while lacking stats would read as superficial sycophancy or raw calculation. Consequently, he detached his vocabulary from the complex, tedious specific mathematical theories of glintstone refraction. He hoisted the conversation to a conceptual level, praising her systematic logic, her moral clarity, and the independent architecture of her mind from a high perspective.
He went so far as to cross-reference similar structural deadlocks he had encountered while refining his own Storm Swordsmanship and Dragon Lightning, demonstrating with sound logic how his own training solutions had "coincidentally" mirrored her sorcerous thodology, though his own execution still lacked a fraction of her elegant details. It was only after analyzing her specific insights, he claid with absolute sincerity, that his own engine had achieved total clarity, unlocking a massive progression leap for his future cultivation. He terminated the cycle with a heartfelt, aristocratic expression of gratitude.
Whenever a loop of this conversation closed its ledger, Rykard—still deeply imrsed in analyzing the political implications of the previous historical topic—would impatiently tug at Lucia's sleeve to drag him into the next round of debate, entirely blind to the psychological web the Prince was weaving around his sister.
Concurrently, Blaidd, riding in silence at their rear, watched his mistress's carefully maintained mask of royal detachnt faintly fracture, revealing a subtle, unmistakable spark of joy and intellectual excitent. The half-wolf's instincts told him sothing was deeply irregular on the field. But with his primitive, brawler-tier IQ, his cognitive processors simply couldn't track the velocity of the Ancient Dragon's social maneuvers, leaving him with zero leverage to interject even if his jaw snapped.
The solitary saving grace for the wolf was that the runway for the Prince's performance was restricted to a short ten leagues. Before Blaidd's presence could curdle into total irrelevance, the grueling journey reached its destination. The towering, grand granite walls of the lakeside pavilion finally cleared the horizon ahead.
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