Chương 147: Interlude: Let Us Hope So

[Time]: Year 1919 [Location]: Milan'thir · The Palace of Rex Mundi The Inner Sea's archives recorded the Milan'thirskaya bloodline as the bloodline against which witch civilization's power scale was calibrated. Biology had opinions about what that entailed. When a single egg divided to produce twins within a witch bloodline, the historical resolution was unambiguous: the stronger embryo consumed the weaker, dissolving its sibling into concentrated mana to fuel its own development. Tasia and Alucard did not fight.

They hadn't needed to. The nutrient bath surrounding their egg was so outrageously, obscenely saturated with liquid mana that the concept of scarcity never materialized. Neither embryo registered the other as a threat. Tasia reached out in the warm, endless dark, found Alucard, and simply claimed her. Alucard, glutted on ambient resources, accepted the claim without comment. That balance calcified before either of them had developed the capacity for conscious thought.

Their survival, however, was nearly undone moments after hatching by the King of the World herself. Tasia's earliest fragmented memory was the blazing white light of the royal nursery, and Francesca von Milan'thirskaya holding a jagged, iridescent shard of their eggshell. She wore a heavily stained alchemist's apron. Her grey eyes held the specific, terrifying brightness of a researcher who had just conceived a new hypothesis.

The shard was moving, with the slow certainty of empirical inevitability, toward Tasia's mouth.

"The shell retains the full biochemical signature of the womb environment for exactly four hours post-hatching," Francesca murmured, half to herself.

"If we introduce it orally at peak residual saturation, a single controlled ingestion before the mana matrix degrades, the developmental absorption data would be entirely—" A pale hand, carrying the scent of white lilies and cool ozone, closed gently but absolutely around Francesca's wrist.

"Fran," Angie said. The Queen possessed a serenity that could anchor a collapsing dimension. She pried the eggshell shard free, disposed of it, and placed a warm bottle of alchemical formula near Tasia's mouth without raising her voice.

"Step away from the children." Francesca blinked. The hypothesis evaporated, replaced by sheepish, wholly genuine contrition. She wrapped both arms around Angie from behind and pressed her cheek against her wife's.

"Just a thought! A theoretical framework! I love them obviously!" Tasia and Alucard survived their infancy. Genetics were a tyrant that brooked no negotiation. Tasia stood before the floor-length mirror in her chambers, a crystal vial of alchemical silver dye resting on the table beside her. Gold hair. Storm-grey eyes. The unmistakable, overriding uniform of her bloodline. It was a beautiful color. She was entirely tired of it. The heavy door clicked open. Ash walked in.

Her footsteps carried the careful economy of someone rationing how much weight they placed on things. Her cheeks held their permanent unnatural flush, high and stark against pallor that had nothing to do with cold. The air around her vibrated with a faint, suffocating density, a subtle pressure against the atmosphere that made the tips of Tasia's ears ring whenever they stood close. Ash took the crystal vial from the table.

She set it aside, then stood behind her little sister, brushing the golden curls until they caught the light exactly, and rested her chin on top of Tasia's head. Two reflections looked back from the mirror: identical gold, identical grey.

"But if you changed it," Ash murmured, her voice carrying the faint roughness of the fever that never fully left, "how would anyone know you belong to me?" Tasia looked at the two reflections for a long moment. She quietly placed the vial in the wastebasket. She never thought about her hair again. Sixty percent. Alucard had extracted that number from a private ledger during one of her unsanctioned expeditions through the household archives.

Sixty percent of the Milan'thirskaya empire's annual research budget, redirected without deviation: experimental healing clinics, arcane biology faculties, mana-pathology research consortiums spanning six districts. A sum that could purchase a small planetary system, burned every year, for a single patient. And every year, the researchers returned empty-handed. When the doors to the medical wing finally opened, Tasia bypassed the guards at the corridor junction and crossed the threshold.

The air inside was sharp with the metallic, bitter edge of sterilized arcane residue. Ash was sitting on the edge of the examination table, slowly buttoning the high collar of her dress over the fresh, faintly luminescent burns tracing up her collarbone. Tasia crossed the room and buried her face in her sister's lap, her arms locking around her waist.

"Did it work?" Her voice came out muffled against the fabric.

"The resonance array. The one from the Holheim Institute." Ash's hand came to rest on her hair. It moved deliberately. The rhythm of it was the same rhythm Ash always used when she was choosing between what she actually thought and what she had decided was appropriate to say.

"Tasia." Her voice held a resignation so old and worn smooth it had stopped being grief a long time ago.

"Tell Mother she doesn't need to fund the [Telvanian Protocol] anymore. I am already used to the fire." Tasia tightened her grip. She was standing at the edge of an acceptance she refused to offer, and she didn't have the vocabulary to drag Ash back from it. Ash recognized the silence. The weight passed from her voice, replaced by something warmer, chosen.

"The new Chief Court Mage has arrived," Ash said. Her fingers kept moving through Tasia's hair.

"Mother has been singing her praises all morning. She'll be taking over our instruction soon." A pause, something shifting in her tone.

"She's only two years older than me." The previous Chief Court Mage had been a Hortanian Dragon Witch. A tactical genius. The pedagogical skills of a falling rock. Tasia had spent two years essentially teaching herself, bringing her tangled runic failures to Ash, who had always, without fail, identified the flaw in any spell matrix she had never personally studied. In Tasia's private cosmology, the ceiling of talent was her sister. Only two years older than Ash. Tasia frowned against the fabric.

What kind of person could she possibly be? What fraction of my sister does she amount to? A strange, fascinated spark lit up Ash's grey eyes. She looked toward the window. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"When you meet her," Ash said, "you'll understand." The meeting did not happen in a classroom. Three days later, Tasia was sitting in the wrought-iron pavilion at the center of the royal gardens, a heavy grimoire open across her lap, when the ambient magic of the garden shifted. The Milan'thirskaya private gardens were a living archive of botanical extremity, an ecosystem that would reduce any master alchemist to weeping, fanatical ecstasy. Trees with gemstone leaves that chimed in the wind.

Cacti the size of carriages that wept thick, golden tears of pure arcane honey. Massive oaks whose trunks sprouted writhing wooden tentacles, each one blossoming into a brilliant yellow sunflower. Every plant here was dangerous. Several were actively predatory. A figure was walking through the [Blood-Weave] thicket at the garden's far edge. There was no path there. The [Blood-Weave] was a semi-sentient briar patch that actively hunted body heat.

Its thorns were long and blackened, coated in a compound that triggered vascular collapse. The woman walking through it didn't have a ward up. The [Blood-Weave] wasn't attacking. The thorned vines were moving out of her way: bending backward in an act of unthinking biological submission, folding themselves flat against the earth and creating a clear path where none had existed. The moment she passed, the vines sealed closed behind her. Tasia lowered her book. The woman stopped near the eastern trellis.

Growing on it were the dark roses, the ones cultivated by burying legendary creatures alive beneath the soil and grafting the root system directly into their circulatory network, the roses that fed on blood and contained agony. Their petals were a red so deep they bordered on the color of coagulated blood. Tasia waited for her to cast the ward. To conjure a telekinetic severing charm. The woman snapped the stem with her bare hand. The thorns bit into the soft flesh of her fingertips.

Bright, vivid drops of blood welled up, slid down her pale skin, and dripped onto the dark, hungry petals. Tasia's breath caught. The woman lifted the dark bloom to eye level. She didn't flinch. She watched her own blood run down the green wood, her eyes tracking the chemical reaction as it entered her bloodstream. Her gaze drifted past the trellis. A cluster of [Silver-Vein Orchids], shimmering with trapped moonlight, caught her attention.

Her expression shifted the way a cat's does when it notices something small moving. She took a step toward them. But her hand was currently occupied by a toxic, bleeding rose. She frowned at the flower, clearly offended by the inconvenience of physical inventory limits. Then she turned her head. Her gaze swept the garden and landed on the pavilion, on the small figure who had not moved since she emerged from the [Blood-Weave]. She crossed to the pavilion. She stopped at the edge. She did not bow.

She did not drop her posture to meet the young princess at eye level, the practiced deference of every courtier and every tutor. She stood where she was, and looked down. Tasia looked up. Her eyes were the color of the sky between stars, an absolute, crushing blackness that seemed to pull the light from the air around it. Then the woman smiled. Not cruel. Not warm. Simply a smile, existing entirely on its own terms, belonging to no one and requiring nothing in return.

She offered the rose, her bleeding hand extended. She did this with the unapologetic, absolute entitlement of a woman handing a shopping bag to a passing valet, on the foundational assumption that the people around her existed primarily to hold her things when she was done with them. Tasia's aristocratic conditioning failed her completely. She reached out and took the stem, careful of the thorns. The wood was warm from the woman's blood.

"Why are you giving this to me?"

"Because holding it is annoying." Tasia stared at her.

"Then why did you pick it in the first place?"

"Because I wanted to." Tasia sat in the pavilion, holding the bleeding flower, every word she knew completely unavailable to her. The woman turned and walked away. The [Blood-Weave] parted for her exit as smoothly as it had for her arrival. Tasia looked down at the dark petals. The drops of blood still rested on them, dark and wet. She raised her hand to toss the flower into the bushes behind the pavilion. Her hand stopped. She sat there for a long moment, holding it. The garden was full of these roses.

She could pick another any time she wanted, from the safe side of the trellis with proper equipment, and it would be chemically, structurally identical. That evening, Tasia cast a localized chronomancy ward over the flower, sealing it in a crystal case on her desk. She told herself it was an interesting reagent. Aside from the incident with the rose, Tasia rarely spoke to her.

Ovelia's time was devoured by her own frantic, obsessive research in the depths of the Royal Archives, by Francesca's high-level consultations, by Angie's quiet company in the gardens, and, in whatever hours remained, by Ash. Tasia began to see less of her sister. What she saw instead were fragments, collected from doorways and balconies.

She came to the grand library one evening to return a borrowed text and found Ovelia draped across a priceless grimoire with the appalling, cat-like ungracefulness of a creature entirely indifferent to the value of its furniture. She was complaining, loudly and with specific technical citation, about the fundamental architectural failures in the Divination faculty's latest published treatise on temporal probability matrices.

Her voice carried the particular, unfiltered irritation of someone who was personally offended by theoretical arcana that had failed to anticipate her intelligence. Ash sat beside her. She was laughing: a real laugh, bright and unguarded, her grey eyes open with it. Ovelia was mercurial and entirely immune to the concept of social hierarchy. She possessed a terrifying, magnetic gravity that operated on internal rules.

She would take one look at an advanced arcane theorem Ash had spent three days meticulously deriving, tear the foundational logic to shreds with devastating, offhand precision, and then, before Ash could formulate a defense, casually recompile the entire equation on the chalkboard, arriving at a solution so elegant and impossible it made the original problem look like a first-year exercise. Then the mood would end. She would vanish.

She would disappear for days at a time, her presence evaporating so completely that even Francesca and Angie, with the full surveillance apparatus of the royal guard at their disposal, could not locate her. When she returned, she offered no explanations, slipping back into the library or the gardens as if she had merely stepped out for a glass of water. She commanded the future King of the World to bring her tea. To hold her books. To walk beside her through the spring gardens when she decided she wanted to walk.

The commands arrived as naturally as breathing. She never glanced back to see if the Crown Princess was following. She already knew. And Ash loved it. Tasia watched from the balconies. Francesca and Angie watched too. Their eyes held a careful, quiet warmth when they watched. The grand hall was velvet and crystal and the sustained, calculated noise of geopolitical theater. Ash and Ovelia walked through the parted crowd together.

Ovelia was talking rapidly, gesturing with her wine glass, caught in a feverish, mid-stride monologue about a theoretical application of dimensional folding that so flagrantly violated established physics it bordered on academic heresy. Ash walked beside her, listening with total, focused attention, completely ignoring the room. Tasia followed several steps behind. Ovelia operated on her own internal rhythm, which naturally put her a half-step ahead of the Crown Princess. Her chin was tilted up.

The sheer, overwhelming density of her ambient mana, coupled with the absolute, unconcerned authority with which she held the floor, commanded the space entirely. A high-ranking envoy from Nordenheim stepped forward into their path. She had never visited the capital. She saw the two women approaching, registered the arrangement and dropped into a deep, formal bow of fealty directly toward Ovelia.

"Your Highness." The ambient temperature of the hall plummeted. The music faltered, one beat, then caught itself. The courtiers who knew the truth froze. The envoy's face went white as the whispers rippled outward, and she registered the catastrophic protocol breach. She began to stammer a frantic apology. Ovelia stopped mid-sentence. She looked down at the envoy. She did not correct her.

She stood perfectly still and accepted the bow with the natural authority of someone who felt the title was, on balance, not factually incorrect. She stayed exactly where she was. The envoy's apology had nowhere to land. A panicked aide at the edge of the circle lunged forward to intervene. Ovelia turned her head and looked at Ash. Her expression tightened into a faint, petulant frown, profoundly annoyed that her monologue about dimensional physics had been interrupted by politics. Ash raised her hand.

The aide froze. The hall fell completely silent. Ash looked at the terrified envoy, and then at Ovelia.

"You are not mistaken," Ash's voice rang out across the marble floor, clear and absolute with sovereign weight.

"When you see her, it is the same as seeing me." The silence stretched until it threatened to snap. The political implications hit the assembled dignitaries in sequence, the slowest ones still catching up. Ovelia looked at Ash. The frown dissolved. She turned her back on the bowing envoy, lifted her wine glass, and resumed her lecture on dimensional folding from the exact syllable where she had left off. Tasia stood three paces behind them, watching.

Several days after the banquet, Tasia found Francesca in her private workshop, mapping a draconic transmutation array across a floating holographic board. The golden runic light caught the edges of her glasses. The room hummed with the low resonance of high-tier arcane mathematics.

"Mother," Tasia said. Francesca didn't look up.

"Yes, little spark?"

"I heard she's preparing the rituals," Tasia said.

"To convert into a Dragon Witch. That she requested access to the deep vaults." Francesca's hand paused over the holographic display.

"Will she become our family?" Francesca turned around. The manic academic energy had retreated, replaced by the World King: older, quieter. Careful.

"If she did," Francesca asked, "would you accept her?" Tasia was silent. She thought of the rose in the crystal case on her desk, the blood on its petals permanently frozen mid-drop. She thought of Ash laughing in the library, a sound she hadn't heard in years before Ovelia arrived. She thought of the architecture of their dynasty, already rewritten in some invisible, fundamental way from the moment that girl had snapped a stem with her bare hands and offered the bleeding result without explanation.

"I would," Tasia said. Francesca smiled. The warm edge of it caught the light of the runic array.

"Then let us hope," the King of the World murmured, turning back toward the stars she was trying to remake, "that she feels the same way."