Raphael went still.
The pressure of that gaze was real and specific, not the generalized weight of being watched, but the particular sensation of being evaluated by sothing that had the standing to evaluate.
Crossing distance and ti both, landing on him with a familiarity that didn’t quite make sense given that they had never t.
Lv14. Demon Lord Candidate. Superbia.
The sa cardinal sin.
His vision blurred at the edges.
The illusion broke completely.
He was back in the ruined training ground, standing among the ancient bones and corroded weapons, the sky above the castle walls simply dark, no red, no projections, just the ordinary black of a country night and a few stars too weak to matter.
Everything from the past few minutes had the quality of a dream recalled imdiately after waking, still vivid, but already losing the sense of having been real.
He checked himself. No blood anywhere on his clothing.
The blood thirst was present but mild, the level you’d expect from activating Blood Frenzy briefly and then letting it drop, as though nothing had happened.
As though he’d simply stood still through the whole thing.
Except for the cut on his arm, still closing.
"Not purely illusion. Interesting." He watched the wound seal.
"Sothing that blurs the boundary between real and projected. Not just visual, tactile, physical, causal. Large-scale working."
He switched on the torch and moved forward.
The ground floor was wide and almost entirely empty.
Whatever had been here had been removed long before the overgrowth claid the walls, rooms stripped down past furnishing, past fixtures, past anything that could be carried.
The corridor windows were bare fras, the glass gone.
The spaces beyond each door contained nothing but old air and plant growth pushing in from outside.
Only the central room, sothing that had once been a receiving hall, retained any objects.
Stone table, stone chairs arranged around it, both grown up from the floor and therefore impossible to remove.
And on the table: a candle stand.
Gold surface. No dust anywhere on it, despite everything around it being covered.
Ornate casting, elegant proportions, the kind of object that had been made to last and had.
The candle inside was intact, the wick unburned.
"Everything stripped out, and this is what stays."
He examined it without touching it.
"Wrong. There’s sothing wrong with this."
He reached out. His palm passed through it cleanly.
"Projection. Not a physical object." He straightened.
"Can’t be touched. Can’t be lit by fire in the normal sense. Sothing else activates it."
Invisible. Arcane. He thought about that combination for a mont, then extended a thin filant of his own arcane energy from his fingertip and let it touch the wick.
A hissing sound, low and brief.
The candle lit, not with real fla but with its projected equivalent, a sourceless pale glow that expanded outward in a careful radius and illuminated the room properly for the first ti.
Two figures appeared in the light.
One sat at the stone table. Classical noble dress, old formal cut, the kind of tailoring that placed him at least three centuries back.
His skin had the color of old wax, his cheekbones were sharp, a pointed beard frad the lower half of his face, and his eyes were the deep red of blood held in a glass.
On the table before him: two books, bound in leather cut from sothing that had once been living.
A quill, an ink pot.
The second figure stood before him. Plain clothing, hair unwashed for so ti, posture arranged into the shape of a bow, the careful mimicry of soone who had looked up the gesture rather than grown up with it.
"Honored Count Jestan. I’ve heard of your generosity, and the particular nature of your trade. I wanted to present my son to your consideration."
He gestured behind him.
The candlelight didn’t reach far enough to show what was back there, but the sounds ca through, many voices, close together, the specific acoustic texture of a crowd in a confined space.
A boy stepped forward into the light. Rough-spun fabric wrapped around him, the repurposed remnant of a grain sack rather than anything made for wearing.
The vampire called Count Jestan raised his chin slightly. A pipe between his fingers.
He drew from it and exhaled the smoke directly at the boy, who coughed.
"No overreaction. Acceptable physical condition."
He looked back at the father.
"Education? Can he speak?"
The father scratched his cheek and shook his head.
"I kept his costs down. Even the public school charges around one copper every three days, and I, I needed to keep his total upkeep under three gold to turn a profit. That was the priority."
He worked his hands together, the calculation already visible in his expression, and added quickly:
"The vaccinations are all current. I know you prefer healthy stock, so I didn’t cut that corner. One gold coin two silver coins, but worth it, for the quality."
The count’s expression registered mild disappointnt. The father’s face dropped.
"Unacceptable. The educated ones are the worthwhile ones. A creature that can’t articulate a plea at the end, that only stares and shakes its head, no texture to it. Boring." He paused. "However."
His tone shifted.
"First transaction, I’ll allow it as an exception. You have others, your wife must have produced several by now.
Send the rest for basic schooling before you bring them to .
Don’t worry about the expense. Higher quality rchandise generates proportionally higher returns."
The father’s face rearranged itself into the expression of a man watching gold coins accumulate.
"Yes, yes, exactly right, and the price for this one would be..."
The count waved one hand and drew out his coin purse.
He selected a small number of coins and let them fall, scattered across the stone floor near his own feet. Six gold, approximately.
The father looked at the amount. Sothing moved in his expression, briefly, before being suppressed.
He moved toward the coins.
"Who gave you permission to stand in my presence?" The count’s voice was mild, almost conversational.
"You are a lower class of human. You should approach on your hands and knees and take what I’ve given you in your teeth. That is the appropriate form."
He watched the father’s face with the specific pleasure of soone who has arranged a humiliation and is now observing its execution.
The father smiled through it, nodded, and got down.
He crawled across the stone. He lowered his head and took one of the coins between his teeth, moving with the careful restraint of soone who was terrified of making contact with a boot.
The count placed his foot on the back of the man’s head and pressed him flat to the floor.
"Ah! my lord, what are you..."
Even then. Even with his face against the stone. The fear of damaging the boot was louder than the humiliation.
"The sole is dirty. You’ll serve as a cloth. One hundred and thirty gold for these shoes, the privilege of cleaning them with your face should be understood as the gift it is."
Raphael watched all of it from outside the candlelight’s radius, standing in the dark of the room’s edge where the projection hadn’t reached him.
He’d learned from the first illusion, the mont the candle had lit, he’d stepped backward, out of range, and stayed there.
This category of event was well docunted across both federations’ histories and was not unique to any era.
The logic that produced it was consistent: a child was not a person in any legal sense that mattered, the relationship of blood was worth exactly what the parties involved decided it was worth, and there had always been people willing to decide it was worth rather less than a comfortable standard of living.
The institutional version, where families produced children specifically as a revenue stream, had functioned openly in so periods and covertly in others, but had never fully stopped.
An ancient horror presented in plain form, the way historical projections presented everything, without framing, without context, simply as the thing itself.
"Tragedy of the age," Raphael said quietly, to the empty dark around him.
Then from outside the walls, the sound he’d heard in the first illusion, returning.
Voices. Getting closer to the castle. The specific quality of a group moving with unified purpose.
A servant ran into the candlelight from the far side of the room, stumbled, nearly went down, caught himself, and delivered his report in the manner of soone who has been running hard and is not sure how much ti they have left.
"My lord! there are people outside, a large group! the one leading them, I know who she is, she’s from the Church Tribunal! she’s the Grand Inquisitor..."
He swallowed.
"Her na is Clentine Castile."
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