After Athea had called out to the eavesdropper, who she wholeheartedly believed was none other than her daughter Viora, no one ca out imdiately.
There was no sound for a mont, then Viora erged from behind the pillar, her movents fluid and silent. She didn’t look like a child caught eavesdropping; she looked like a Warlady who had just confird the location of her target.
Her ice-blue eyes, so much like Athea’s own, held no fear, only a cold, unwavering certainty and a look of profound betrayal. And she felt that way, too. If her mother really had a secret son, then she had betrayed not only the Queendom but the entire matriarchal order.
The scary part was that, if the Tribunal and other Queendoms found out about this, then the stability of the entire Lumina line would shatter, and their family would be ruined.
Calyra let out a soft sigh swirling the wine she had carried from the dinner table in her glass as if she were a re spectator at a courtly drama.
"Eavesdropping is a habit unbecoming of a princess, Viora," Athea said, her authority snapping back into place like a shield. She didn’t sound like soone who had been caught, or exposed, but like a disappointed mother.
"So is treason," Viora countered, her voice quiet but unyielding. She took a step forward, her gaze bypassing Calyra to lock directly onto the treasonous woman who was unfortunately her mother.
Viora had never been so disappointed in her own mother like she was right now.
"I saw the picture. The one on your desk days ago, and the one Valerie just showed. It’s the sa person. Who is he?"
Even as she asked that question, Viora could already guess the obvious.
Athea’s expression was a perfect mask of regal disappointnt. "You have been chasing shadows based on a fleeting image.
Your imagination has gotten the better of you, so much that," Athea continued, her voice dropping to a low, chilling tone of disappointnt, "you’ve resorted to coercing terrified servants into your little dramas."
Viora froze, the sentence landing with the force of a physical blow that shattered her composure.
Kessa. So that’s why the young servant had vanished without a trace. Her mother hadn’t just discovered the plot; she had dismantled it, erased the pawn from the board, and was now delivering the checkmate with a disappointed smile. It was a brutal, chilling reminder of just how vast her mother’s power truly was, quiet, absolute, and utterly inescapable.
Worried about the young maid, Viora was about to demand that her mother tell her what she had done to her.
Athea’s gaze was rciless. "I had to reassign a young cleaner from the eastern wing this afternoon. Kessa, I believe her na was."
She paused, letting the na hang in the air like a death sentence. "A sha. She seed loyal, but was so easily manipulated into attempting to plant listening devices for a childish ga of hide-and-seek. I had her reassigned to a remote monitoring station in the Barren Sectors. She’ll be overseeing automated mining drones from a very small, very isolated outpost. I trust the silence will teach her the importance of discretion."
The blood drained from Viora’s face. Caught. Not just caught, but utterly outmaneuvered. Her plan, her one move to discover the secret and gain leverage against her mother, had been discovered and dismantled with cold, silent efficiency before it had even begun.
She had sent a pawn into the future queen’s court, and she had taken it off the board without even acknowledging the ga. And the poor girl, Kessa. Viora was now feeling guilty for what she had done.
On the battlefield, she never sacrificed a soldier needlessly; it was a commander’s first and most sacred duty.
Yet here, in this cold war of shadows against her own mother, she had thrown an innocent, a non-combatant into the line of fire on a reckless gamble.
And Kessa had paid the price. The guilt was a cold, sharp weight in her chest, the kind a leader feels after a fatal miscalculation.
Across the room, Calyra took a slow sip of her wine, a faint, deeply appreciative glint in her eyes. The drama was even better than she’d anticipated.
Finding her footing again, Viora spoke. "My imagination didn’t cause the reaction I saw on your face," Viora pressed, relentlessly. "You panicked. I saw it. That boy is not a stranger. His features, the eyes, the jawline, they’re Lumina. He is connected to you, to our bloodline. Now tell the truth."
Athea held her daughter’s stare for a long, silent mont. She saw no weakness there, no room for a simple denial.
It seed like there was no point in lying to her daughter anymore, it was ti to speak the truth.
With a heavy, theatrical sigh, she turned away, walking toward a large window overlooking the twilight gardens. The move was calculated, a general repositioning on the battlefield.
"You are correct," Athea said, her back to them. "He is connected to our bloodline. And you are also correct that I panicked. But you have drawn the wrong conclusion from the right data."
She turned back, her face a mask of grave seriousness. "What you have stumbled upon, Viora, is not a personal secret. It is a state secret of the highest order. A project so dangerous, so forbidden, that if the Tribunal were to learn of it, I would be stripped of my title and tried for treason."
Viora’s relentless focus wavered, a flicker of confusion in her eyes. "A project?"
"Yes," Athea said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that drew both her daughter and her sister in. "For years, I have overseen a secret research initiative. A contingency. Our war is a stalemate. The Vorthak are a plague, but the Fade... the Fade is a curse that targets our world’s very biology."
’What lie is she cooking up now?’ Calyra wondered, but she was already impressed by her sister.
"At the mont it only infects males, but what if it evolves? What happens when it learns to affect us?" Athea continued, her eyes burned with a cold fire. "As Minister of Arcane Affairs, I sought to understand it, to forge a weapon against it."
She let the words hang, her gaze intense. "The project’s goal was to engineer a male immune to the M-degradation. A subject who could potentially wield Vitae, allowing us to study the male genetic structure without its inherent flaws. A living key to potentially reversing the Fade."
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