They were still under the sa rules…
Arturo processed that. His jaw tightened another fraction, he didn't like it, but he understood it.
Orion's response ca back in under ten minutes. He simply accepted.
And he added, with the specific elegance of soone who wants their generosity on the record, that there were undoubtedly many honors to be distributed among many entities, large and small, and that nobility would not be noble if its rules were not applied with equal rigor to all. It was a way of saying that the ceremony was where he intended his new order to be made public, and that delaying it only accumulated losses that Julius could spare himself.
Julius responded in the sa register. He expressed appreciation for the consideration. He noted that precisely out of respect for that principle, the ceremony required preparations that honored tradition, and that tradition had its own protocol regarding attendance by lineage.
One lineage, one limited delegation.
Orion accepted that too, without negotiating.
Julius read that acceptance more carefully than all the previous ones, because it was the one that mattered most for what he was building around it. The ceremony hall operated under a fixed attendance protocol, a small number of soldiers per family established by historical precedent that no faction could alter unilaterally without violating the sa rules Orion was invoking to legitimize himself. Which ant that Orion's army, large as it was, would remain outside, separated from the hall by hundreds of substantial historical buildings that weren't easy to destroy or move through quickly.
Inside: only his elite.
Inside also: the elite who answered to Julius, whose numbers were still, despite everything, slightly greater than Orion's inner circle.
It wasn't parity when the crystals were factored in. But it was considerably better than open ground against a full army when the defender was dispersed and exhausted.
"You're giving him the ceremony he wants," said Arturo, who had been reading the exchange in silence.
"I'm giving him the stage where he has the least advantage." Julius folded the final ssage before sealing it. "If what he wants is to avoid spending his crystals on a prolonged war of attrition, then what he has to do is behave during the ceremony. And I want him to behave, because if he behaves that's when I can take enough from him that losing today isn't permanent." A pause. "When I can secure a future for the kids."
Arturo considered that.
"And if he cheats anyway?"
"Then the coup protocols activate." Julius stated it with the calm of sothing already decided, requiring no further deliberation. "Docunts, seals, artifacts, old keys… everything Orion needs to run this castle and a functional governnt instead of a disorganized occupation. All of it disappears into a resistance network that creates problems for him for years. Decades even." A pause. "Ti during which other things can grow in places he isn't watching."
Arturo was quiet for a mont.
"You already have that prepared?" he said at last.
"I've been preparing for it since Orion started marching."
Arturo made the sound he made when his jaw was tight and he was compressing approval into its smallest possible form. Not a complint... Just the acknowledgnt that the information was satisfactory.
♢♢♢♢
The corridor where Larissa listened to Selphira had no na on the castle maps, one of those functional passages that connected wings in ways the protocol had never needed to distinguish or label. But Larissa was going to rember it, because it was where several things beca clear to her at once.
Selphira didn't hide anything from her…
She laid out Orion's situation, Luna's position, the full shape of what was being constructed and what it required. She included her unverified assumptions and identified them as such. She clarified to her their reason why Luna would be moved toward action rather than paralysis or protection.
As a bait…
So as her close friend and family the reaction would be…
But then Larissa said sothing unexpected.
"Tell her everything. Including about her aunt, about the real reason behind what happened to her mother and about her father's sacrifice and why he made it." A pause. "Including the parts that will hurt her most."
Wouldn't that break Luna entirely? To learn finally that everything she had suffered, the family she had wanted back, had been the direct result of the decisions and the absurd plan of soone as close as her father's own brother? Sirius told her that Luna had always believed that most of her misfortune had the quality of a natural disaster, bad luck, the kind she had made her peace with and discovered to carry. Sothing that had happened to her family rather than sothing done to it.
But now this…
Yet Larissa's reasoning was simple and precise: Luna didn't freeze under intense pain, even if her exterior made it look that way. What she actually did, when sothing reached her at the level that mattered, was beco aggressive in a particular and focused way. She would do almost anything to bring down soone who had betrayed her family far more deeply than she had ever known, from the inside, from the beginning.
"So real pain doesn't paralyze her," Selphira echoed slowly, as if placing the piece where it belonged. "I'm glad I spoke with you first." She paused. "I was operating under the wrong assumption, that she was like her father. But she's much more like her mother. It seems I never gave her sothing worth suffering over enough to see that."
Larissa nodded.
"But what if her reaction is too imdiate?" Selphira asked. "What if she acts before we have her position properly set?"
"Isn't that exactly why you found my mana signature first?" Larissa exhaled with a slight smile that had sothing mischievous in it. "You don't need to maneuver or 'guide ' toward it. I understand why it's necessary." A beat of silene. "You can leave the second part to ."
"You caught ." Selphira looked at her with the directness of soone who has assessed their interlocutor and decided they can receive things straight. "But I'm glad to see you haven't lost the touch. I hope you can keep tornting Victor with that mind of yours when this is over. I knew you were the most suited for this part, that's why I told you first. Because you can hold her. You can make sure she hears the complete context before she reaches the conclusion." Another pause. "Or takes action."
Larissa thought about Luna sitting beside Ren's bed, with the stillness that wasn't peace but the surface of sothing that had been pushing upward for a long ti without finding a way out.
"Tell the rest," she said. "The complete plan."
Selphira did.
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