Chương 244: 44. Two Letters 2

When the heavy doors of the council chamber closed behind me, the first thing I felt wasn't pressure. It was speed. Everything in that room was moving with an almost merciless efficiency. The council chamber in Latpan's inner court was colder than the Twilight Audience Hall, and felt more like a blade honed down to its thinnest possible edge. No unnecessary grandeur. No ornament to distract the eye.

High, narrow stone windows sliced the morning light into straight bars of pale gold that fell across the enormous war table at the center. The tabletop held a full territorial map — the Dragon Kingdom's coastline, its interior, its fortresses, its aerial dragon towers — with dozens of colored metal markers driven into it like nails. Beside it lay freshly delivered dispatches, orders with the wax not yet set, and rolled parchments marking supply stations and dragon roosts.

Albatros Dracunia stood at the head of that table. He wasn't sitting. One hand rested on the map's edge. The other lifted, once, and the people below him moved instantly to his intent.

"Reinforce the second-tier anti-air towers along the San Juan line."

"The three coastal dragon roosts shift to wartime deployment immediately. Adult war-dragons assigned first to patrol and interception. No splitting formations."

"Expand Latpan's outer receiving zone into the northern secondary city. Physicians and quartermasters move first. Do not let the nobility's ceremonial nonsense choke off the logistics."

"If the sea dragon clans have truly made contact with Yanxia, every old sea route in the southwestern waters is void. From this moment, unless it carries a royal or a military order, no ship sails the old paths." None of it was loud. None of it left room to breathe. For the first time, I was watching, with my own eyes, exactly how a nation switched itself from capital to wartime nerve center the instant war knocked directly on its door. The orders didn't come one at a time. They fell like blade-strokes.

One landed, someone answered. Another fell, and the next group peeled away to carry it out. Strategists, court scribes, garrison commanders, officers from the dragon-tower reconnaissance chain — all of them stepped forward and back in rotation. The whole chamber ran like a vast piece of clockwork, and Albatros was the still, central gear that decided which way every other piece was allowed to turn. I'd expected, walking in, to feel at least somewhat like an intruder who'd wandered through the wrong door. I didn't.

No one had the spare attention to wonder why I was standing there. Because from the moment the refugees had set foot in Latpan, the entire Dragon Kingdom had run out of seconds to waste on anything that didn't matter. Ignicia stood half a step ahead of me, to my left. She didn't weigh in on every order, but at a few points concerning San Juan and the coastal defenses, she added a quiet line. Albatros said nothing in response, only gave a faint nod, and someone immediately shifted the corresponding marker.

That wordless coordination gave me, for one absurd second, the urge to laugh. Last night, she'd leaned in and told me, in the calmest voice imaginable, that I was the future King of the Dragon Kingdom — a sentence strong enough to give an ordinary man a second soul out of sheer shock. This morning, walking into this chamber, she acted as though none of it had ever happened, as naturally as if that line had simply been a grenade she'd lobbed into my skull in passing.... No.

Thinking about it properly, for her, that probably was exactly what it had been. I'd barely finished forming that slightly disrespectful assessment of a certain fire dragon when Albatros's voice cut off. The whole chamber went still with it. The Emperor's gaze, for the first time, moved past the map and past everyone gathered around it, and landed squarely on me.

"Human." Still as direct as ever. My spine pulled taut without my permission.

"In your judgment — why has the Yanxia Empire invaded this time?" That wasn't idle curiosity. It wasn't let's hear what the outsider thinks for entertainment's sake, either. It was a clean, deliberate test. Like a blade that had, until now, been pointed at coastlines and fortresses, turning without warning to rest lightly against my throat. No one in the chamber made a sound. Even the scribes who'd been writing furiously a moment ago stilled their pens.

I understood perfectly well: if I played deaf now, or produced something that sounded like an answer while saying nothing at all, I'd have earned myself a permanent post as decoration by the door. So I answered honestly.

"I wouldn't presume to state the exact reasons with certainty, Your Majesty." My voice sounded steadier in that space than I'd expected. Possibly because, by this point, so many things had already sent my heart racing that being singled out by an Emperor barely registered as anything new.... No. I take that back. Nothing about this counted as barely anything. I paused, looking at the markers pinned around the Dragon Kingdom's coastline and the San Juan region, and lowered my voice.

"But if you're asking my opinion — this show of force from the Yanxia Empire is most likely a feint." Someone to my right drew a very quiet, sharp breath. I didn't acknowledge it, and kept going.

"Rather than an attempt to conquer the Dragon Kingdom, I'd say it's more—" I lifted my eyes to Albatros.

"—an attempt to pin the Dragon Kingdom in place." This time, the Emperor didn't answer right away. But those eyes — dusk folded into molten metal — finally, genuinely looked at me.

"Fifty thousand troops, merely to hold me here?" Nothing in his tone gave anything away. Only the weight of the question itself. Then I saw the corner of his mouth move, almost imperceptibly.

"... Interesting." The air in the chamber seemed to thin by a degree. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Continue, human." Good. At least I hadn't talked myself into a grave with my opening line. I let out a silent breath and went on.

"Your Majesty. I believe there has only ever been one thing the Yanxia Empire truly wants."

"And that thing is not in the Dragon Kingdom." Albatros asked, "Where, then?" I didn't answer at once. Not for drama's sake — it was that, as the answer reached my lips, I could feel exactly how much it weighed, even myself. So I let it sit for one short beat. Then said it.

"In Eckhaus." Every last rustle of paper in the chamber vanished. Albatros looked at me.

"Explain." I drew a breath.

"A weapon from the Old Civilization." I heard my own voice fall between the stone walls, unnervingly clear.

"— The Spear of Light." This time, even Ignicia didn't speak right away. The entire chamber seemed to be pressed into a deeper layer of silence by those three words. The Emperor said nothing either. He simply looked at me. The silence didn't last long. But it lasted long enough to make it clear that if my next sentence wasn't something genuinely substantial, this room might well be the last one I ever stood in. At length, Albatros spoke. Two words.

"Your proof?" I knew exactly what he was asking. And I knew that in a room like this, one vague detail would strip the weight from everything that followed. So I didn't circle around it.

"Ignicia and I were ambushed by the Yanxia Empire and forced into an emergency landing on a small island," I said.

"On the surface, it looked abandoned. In truth, it was the site of an ancient shipyard left by the Old Civilization." Several strategists' expressions changed at once. I kept going.

"And the Yanxia Empire and the sea dragon clans had already begun excavating a base there." Even the garrison commander standing near the wall, who'd been as still as a statue until now, frowned at that. I raised a hand toward the edge of the map, near the outer seas. The island itself wasn't marked on the official chart, but I still remembered its rough position.

"We went all the way down to the lowest level. At the very bottom, we found the core facility the Old Civilization had left behind. Docked there was a submerged vessel — also from that era." I paused.

"The Spear of Light was aboard it." At that, the dusk-gold deep in Albatros's eyes seemed to darken by another shade.

"And then?" he asked.

"Then we brought the whole site down," I answered plainly.

"At the very least, there is no way for the Yanxia Empire to simply walk off with that ship, or the Spear of Light, anytime soon." The chamber was still quiet. But it wasn't the same quiet as before — not the let's see what this man has to offer kind. This quiet carried real weight. Not because I'd spoken particularly well, but because the moment the Spear of Light became real, everything the Yanxia Empire had done stopped looking like an ordinary border war. Albatros finally straightened, slowly.

Then, unexpectedly, he turned to Ignicia.

"Ignicia."

"Yes, Father?" She answered at once, arms folded, her expression carrying the same matter-of-fact certainty as always — as if she'd known all along he'd call on her at precisely this moment. The Emperor looked at her, and for once his tone carried the faintest thread of appraisal.

"This time, you picked one that's actually useful." I very nearly choked on my own breath. Wait. Picked? Was there not something fundamentally off about that phrasing? Before I could fully process the implications of being described as something that had been selected, Ignicia had already lifted her chin and let out a short huff.

"Did you really need to ask?" She said it with such complete, self-evident certainty that I very nearly forgot this was a war council chamber, not one of her usual hallways, where she could casually render people speechless with a single line and no further effort. What was more alarming was that Albatros raised no objection whatsoever. Not only that — I was fairly sure I caught a flicker in the Emperor's eyes that read, quite plainly: good, at least you're not just dragging people home on instinct alone....

For reasons that should be obvious, I suddenly felt a powerful urge to file a purely symbolic protest on behalf of my own dignity. That urge lasted about a second. Then it was cut off entirely. The side door of the council chamber was thrown open. A close-guard very nearly fell through it. I use the word fell deliberately.

By the standards of the Dragon Kingdom's capital, a guard losing that much composure during an imperial war council meant whatever news he carried had already gone well past anything polite language could soften. He reached Albatros's side, dropped immediately to one knee, and leaned in to report, low. I couldn't hear the words. But I could see Albatros's face.

Even when the Spear of Light had entered the conversation, his expression had only deepened — the look of a mountain compressing dusk and fire down into its own core. Now, listening to whatever the guard whispered, that face, never particularly warm to begin with, went cold in a way that bordered on absolute stillness. Everyone in the chamber felt it. No one dared to speak. Albatros let the silence hold for one breath, then lifted his eyes.

When his voice came, it was pitched low enough to sound as though it were grinding up through the bedrock itself, straight through the floor-stones beneath our feet.

"Cedric. Ignicia. Stay." Something dropped in my chest. Then came the next line.

"Everyone else. Out." No one hesitated. When the Emperor gave an order in a tone like that, there was no second interpretation available. The strategists, commanders, and scribes clustered around the war table cleared the chamber in what had to be record time, and the heavy doors closed behind them. Thud. The sound wasn't loud. But for some reason, it felt as though some worse reality had just reached us — the last bit of cushioning between us and it clicking shut like a final lock.

The vast chamber now held exactly four people. Albatros stood behind the table. Ignicia stood at my left. The close-guard remained on one knee, head bowed, silent. And I found myself sincerely nostalgic for those few minutes earlier when the Spear of Light had at least been doing me the favor of holding everyone's attention. The Emperor raised his eyes to me. This time, he didn't bother circling anything.

"Long-range reconnaissance from the border dragon towers has confirmed a Yanxia Imperial incursion by land." My stomach dropped straight through the floor. In that instant, exactly one thought surfaced in my head — thoroughly undignified, and completely honest.... Fuck. Had this mouth of mine somehow gotten itself cursed? Albatros's voice kept pressing down.

"At approximately the tenth bell this morning, the Yanxia Empire's Sixth and Seventh Army Groups crossed the Blazing Scale Wall from the east and struck the Kingdom of Eckhaus." My throat went bone-dry. This wasn't a small probe. Not a border skirmish. Not even the kind of deliberately blurred grey area that envoys and paperwork could still stall for another few weeks. The Sixth and Seventh Army Groups. A direct crossing. That was every last shred of pretense torn away — both feet planted squarely in open war.

I asked, before I'd consciously decided to:"The signal fires?" Albatros looked at me.

"Lit." He paused, then finished it.

"About an hour later, the first to answer in the northeast was House Rosa." I closed my eyes for a moment. Fine. At least my brothers still knew how to do their jobs. The instant that thought surfaced, the weight in my chest only grew heavier. Because it meant things were already bad enough that House Rosa had mobilized the moment the fires went up.

Those men might be foul-mouthed, short-tempered, and look at me most days like they'd love nothing more than to string me up behind the stables to dry in the sun — but when it actually mattered, they never played dead. Which meant the eastern line was genuinely engaged. And it had likely been brutal enough, from the very first contact, that House Rosa hadn't hesitated for even a second once the signal went up.

"And now?" I heard myself ask.

"Still contested," Albatros answered. Two words. But those two words settled colder in my gut than any elaborately described disaster could have. Still contested. It meant the line hadn't held clean. It also meant it hadn't fully broken. It meant that right now, at this exact moment, people were still bleeding along that line, and until the next dispatch came in, no one would know whether it had been pushed back — or whether it had already been punched through. My fingertips tightened without my permission.

The scale on the back of my left hand pulsed with a faint heat again — not pain, more like a presence that refused to be ignored, as if it too had heard the words Eckhaus is under attack and was quietly, inexorably reminding me: you are no longer simply a man standing here listening to news. For a moment, the chamber held no other sound. Ignicia didn't speak either. She only turned her face slightly and glanced at me.

The look was brief — brief enough to pass for a trick of the light — but it was enough to give me something to stand on amid that sudden, sinking cold. Then, the door was knocked again. Knock. Knock. More restrained than the guard's had been, though the urgency underneath it couldn't be hidden. The kneeling guard glanced back toward Albatros.

"Enter," the Emperor said, cold and flat. The door opened. It was Hans. The Deputy Head of the Eckhaus delegation didn't look like a man carrying good news either. He'd clearly come at a run — his breathing still uneven, dust still clinging to his shoulders, sweat beading at his temple from the pace he'd kept. Even so, the first thing he did on crossing the threshold was bow, as if he'd sooner die than let Eckhaus's dignity hit the floor before he did.

"Your Majesty. An emergency—""I know," Albatros cut him off.

"An attack launched without a formal declaration of war." Hans visibly froze.

"You already—" He wore the expression of a man who'd come barreling in ready to shout fire, only to discover everyone inside had already been through one round of burning. He wasn't the sort to stay stunned for long, though. After exactly one beat, he reached into his coat and drew out two letters. Both seals were still intact. One bore the heavy, formal wax reserved for royal correspondence. The other was clearly styled as a personal, urgent dispatch. Hans presented the first to Albatros with both hands.

"This is a letter from His Majesty King Valerian III, entrusted to me for delivery directly into your hands." Then he turned to me. For an instant — and I honestly couldn't say whether I imagined it — I thought I caught something in the eyes of a Deputy Head normally so rigidly professional it bordered on irritating. Something very brief. Very complicated. Exhaustion. Pressure. And something else that read like: well. It's finally your turn. He held the second letter out to me.

"And, Lord Cedric." His voice wasn't loud, but it was unnervingly clear.

"This is a letter from His Majesty King Valerian III. For you."