Now that Julius had been effectively silenced, Nyx imdiately stepped forward, her eyes bright with urgent curiosity.
"Hero, can you please tell us what’s really going on?"
Her voice was steady but intense.
"I feel like I’m getting close to understanding, but I don’t know the full truth yet."
Other elves quickly joined in, their voices overlapping:
"Yes, Hero, please clarify everything!"
"I’m so confused!"
"Is it really true that Julius and the forr Patriarch were working together?"
"How is that even possible?!"
Leona, Lulu, and Luna all looked toward Luca as well, desperate for answers.
Luca looked around at all the expectant faces slowly letting the tension build until everyone was practically vibrating with anticipation.
Finally, he nodded.
"Yes." He said simply. "That is the truth of the matter."
Gasps erupted from every corner of the square.
"Julius and the forr Patriarch truly have been colluding with each other for quite so ti now."
Luca continued, his voice clear and firm.
"They’ve been working together to bring everyone in this village under their complete control."
The crowd erupted again:
"How could this be?!"
"So it really is true?!"
"They’ve been planning this together all along?!"
"But HOW? How did they even coordinate this?"
Luca raised his hand for silence, and the noise gradually died down.
"You might be wondering." He said. "Why exactly both of them would collude in the first place."
"What could possibly have been their goal from the very beginning?"
Everyone nodded eagerly. That was exactly what they wanted to know.
"It’s actually quite simple." Luca’s expression beca thoughtful. "If you think carefully about what sort of person your forr Patriarch was, what he truly valued, what he truly believed..."
"...you’ll understand the truth."
One of the elves spoke up hesitantly, almost as if questioning herself.
"...What sort of person was he?"
She paused, then answered her own question with growing conviction.
"From what I rember...what was most striking was how much he hated female elves. He treated us terribly, looked down on us constantly, like we were inferior beings."
Other elves imdiately chid in, their voices growing louder with rembered anger:
"He looked at us like we were servants—beneath the n in every way!"
"We had to follow whatever orders the male elves gave, no matter how unreasonable!"
"He hated anything that supported female elves or gave us any power!"
"He was a horrible, horrible person! Not a single woman in this village liked him!"
"We always pitied the Grand Matriarch for being married to such a man!"
Everyone nodded in emphatic agreent, old resentnts bubbling to the surface.
"He was also obsessed with his bloodline."
Nyx’s voice cut through the murmurs, cold and bitter.
"He was proud of his royal lineage. He valued it above everything."
She clenched her fists.
"I know this personally." She continued, her voice dropping, becoming more raw. "Because I was born from a woman who wasn’t formally married to him, he treated as...as a half-blood. As lesser. Even though I was his own daughter."
Pain flashed across her face.
"He never liked from the very beginning. He would look at with open disdain. And he would say, right to my face, that I was a mistake."
"That I shouldn’t show myself in front of him."
"That my very existence was shaful."
Leona’s expression crumpled with sympathetic pain.
She knew how much her sister had suffered because of their father. She rembered countless nights when Nyx had cried herself to sleep as a child, heartbroken by their father’s casual cruelty.
Luca’s face softened with genuine sympathy.
"I’m sorry you went through that, Nyx. No child should ever be treated that way by their parent."
But then his expression sharpened again.
"However, with what you and everyone else just said, you’ve given the perfect foundation to explain what really happened."
He looked around at all the assembled elves.
"Let paint a picture for you."
"The forr Patriarch was a man who despised won having any power over n. He absolutely hated the idea of giving female elves opportunities or authority."
"And he was also soone who valued pure bloodlines above almost everything else, he would never let his lineage be tarnished or diluted."
His eyes glead with intensity.
"Now, given all of that, I want you to think carefully and answer this question:"
He paused, letting the silence stretch.
"Do you really think that such a man, soone who valued those principles so deeply would willingly allow a female elf to take the reins of power and beco the next Matriarch?"
The silence was absolute.
"Do you really think he would allow his own daughter to take the throne knowing that she would help other won? Knowing that she would elevate their status?"
Faces grew grim. Eyes dropped.
Leona’s face went pale. The realization was dawning on her—cold, terrible, unavoidable.
The villagers shook their heads.
"No. He would never."
"I knew that man. He looked down on us with disdain. He would rather die than let a woman rule."
"That’s right. It never made sense. Why did he let Leona beco matriarch?"
Luca smiled.
"Exactly."
He spread his hands.
"Everything about the forr Patriarch—his beliefs, his prejudices, his pride should have made him oppose Leona’s ascension."
"He should have fought it. He should have done everything in his power to prevent it."
Then his expression beca questioning, almost puzzled.
"But surprisingly...he actually did. He allowed Leona’s marriage to go through. He permitted her ascension ceremony to proceed. He didn’t fight against it at all."
His voice grew sharper, more probing.
"So I ask you: Why do you think that happened? Why do you think he didn’t oppose it, despite everything he believed?"
This confused everyone even more, because Luca was right—that didn’t make sense at all.
The elders especially looked troubled. They had actually thought about this contradiction long ago.
They had wondered why Leona had been able to claim her position so easily.
They’d expected the Patriarch to fight it tooth and nail, to find so way to block her succession, to cause problems.
But he hadn’t done any of that. And they had simply accepted it as good fortune and moved on without questioning it too deeply.
Now, though, they were deeply suspicious.
They all turned toward Luca, waiting for the answer that would make sense of this mystery.
Luca’s expression beca almost sympathetic, as if he pitied the forr Patriarch, despite knowing what a terrible person he’d been.
"It’s because..." He said quietly. "...he had no other choice."
Confused murmurs rippled through the crowd.
Luca explained patiently.
"Luck simply wasn’t on his side. His first child was born female, which was already deeply disappointing to him."
"Then his second child, conceived specifically in hopes of producing a male heir, was also born female."
He shook his head.
"This disappointed him beyond asure. He desperately wanted a son. But unfortunately, elves don’t have particularly high reproductive rates."
"And he knew, that there was sothing wrong with his own body that made it impossible for him to father any more children."
The crowd was listening with rapt attention now.
"So he found himself in an extrely difficult position." Luca continued. "He had only two daughters and no male heirs at all."
"But at the sa ti, he couldn’t simply give the position of village leader to so random male elf."
His voice took on a tone of bitter irony.
"Because that would go against all traditional values and norms. The leadership had always been passed down through blood, from parent to child."
"And more importantly, his own pride wouldn’t allow it. He was far too proud of his royal bloodline to just hand power over to soone with lesser blood."
Looks of dawning realization began appearing on faces throughout the crowd.
Luca’s voice grew darker, more ominous.
"And so, because he couldn’t accept either option—couldn’t accept a female heir, but also couldn’t accept giving power to soone outside his bloodline—he ca up with a third solution."
He pointed directly at Leona, his finger steady and accusing.
"He decided to make his next heir into a puppet leader. Soone who would hold the title of Matriarch in na only."
Then he slowly turned his pointing finger toward Julius, who physically flinched as all eyes followed the gesture.
"And the person who would actually control that puppet Matriarch, his own daughter Leona would be..."
"...Julius himself. The man he decided would be the true ruler of the Elven Village."
The mont Luca announced the truth, another wave of shock swept through the village.
"So...it’s always been a plot."
One elf said, her voice trembling.
"Both of them, the son-in-law and the father-in-law working together to control their own wife and daughter."
"How could they be so cruel!?"
Another elf shook his head, her face pale.
"This is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting to even think about!"
"It’s like they saw Leona as nothing more than a tool. A puppet to be manipulated."
"And her own father...how could he do this to his own child?!"
The villagers were overwheld.
Emotions swirled chaotically—shock, disgust, anger, and a deep, bone-weary exhaustion.
Just when they thought they had finally grasped the truth, another layer was peeled back, revealing sothing even more sinister beneath.
They felt like they had been through a hundred revelations in the span of an hour, and their minds were spinning.
Several elves looked like they desperately needed to sit down or perhaps have a strong drink.
But none were as shaken as Leona herself.
She had always known that her father was a difficult man. Cold, demanding, dismissive of everyone.
But she had never imagined...this.
The thought of her own father colluding with Julius, plotting against her, using her as a pawn in their sche—it was almost too much to bear.
She wanted to deny it. She wanted to scream that it couldn’t be true.
But the more she thought about it, the more the pieces fell into place.
Her father’s sudden acceptance of her marriage to Julius.
His lack of resistance to her ascension.
The way he had always looked at Julius with sothing approaching warmth, sothing he had never shown her or Nyx.
It made a horrible, terrible kind of sense.
Nyx felt the sa revulsion curdling in her stomach.
She rembered all those years of her father’s cold stares, his dismissive words, his barely concealed disgust.
She rembered how he would bla their mother for not bearing a son, how he would rage and throw things when reminded that he had only daughters.
She rembered how he had looked at Julius—with pride, with approval, with the affection he had never shown his own children.
And now she understood why.
Julius was the son he had always wanted. The heir he had always dread of.
And Leona and herself were nothing more than obstacles to be managed, tools to be used, and then discarded.
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