Chương 150: Interlude: For Whom

[Time]: Year 1936 [Location]: Milan'thir · The Palace of Rex Mundi and the High Council Chamber The ashes of the Third Hell Crusade of 1920 had not fertilized the soil of a new era. They had merely revealed how little soil there was to begin with. The veterans had returned with poisoned blood and a refined hatred for their neighbors. The grudges had crystallized. The years that followed smelled, to Tasia von Milan'thirskaya, of rot. It was a grinding, tectonic reality.

War was not a variable; it was a scheduled event on a calendar no one had agreed to burn. And the High Council, engineered to function as the operational cabinet of the realm, had ceased its pretense of governance. The ambitious had stopped lowering their voices. The hesitant sharpened their knives. The most brilliant, paranoid minds of a generation gathered daily across the Council's tiered floor and performed their loyalty with the commitment of an ensemble cast that had memorized the same lines for years.

The play was titled: Who is the Clown? Tasia stood motionless in the shadows of the heavy velvet drapery, watching the afternoon light fall across the parlor's polished floor as the newest piece was introduced to the board. The room was weighted with aged Earl Grey and impending treason. Francesca von Milan'thirskaya sat with immaculate, terrifying elegance, her porcelain teacup resting delicately against its saucer.

Across from her sat Ovelia, her spine perfectly straight, her hands loose in her lap, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the walls of the estate: the specific, drifting focus of a woman reading the final pages of a book while everyone around her was still debating the preface.

"The current Grand Witch Chancellor," Francesca began, her voice a smooth, measured ribbon of sound that left no room for interruption.

"Mary Noeffler. Born of Milan'thir. Her talent is absolute. By all laws of origin, her loyalty should belong to the Crown. Instead, her ambition has grown ravenous enough to dispense with camouflage. She is a splinter driven deeply into the flesh of this family." Ovelia continued examining an invisible architectural feature of the far wall.

"Josephine Durant and Don Gil Ross. Heroes of the era. Their spines are forged iron. They hardly seem like products of Casendiara." Francesca set her cup down with a deliberate click.

"And that is precisely the problem. They are Casendiara's daughters first, and the Crown's servants second, if at all. It is a profound pity." She turned.

"Then there is Famia Schüder. Her operational capabilities are transcendent, singular even among the Grand Witches. But she is a Shadow Demon. Fickle by nature. If the necessity arises, you may expend her as a disposable pawn. Do not mistake this for an endorsement." Francesca's gaze swept across the remaining members of the Council with the expression of a woman dismissing irrelevant data.

"As for the rest, they possess a surplus of ambition and a terminal deficit of talent. They are atmospheric noise."

"If you possess the intent," Francesca murmured, "the Chancellor's seat is yours to take." Ovelia nodded. She did it in the exact way a person nods when agreeing to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home. Ovelia's presence in the High Council was almost insultingly pristine. An orphan. Untethered from the secular webs of the aristocracy. Her sole political credential was a meteoric tenure as the Chief Court Mage, and now she had been airdropped directly into the Council chamber.

She was, to anyone with functioning eyes, a blatantly obvious Royalist plant. Her predecessor had been violently ousted in a political maneuver engineered by the Milan'thirskaya family: a textbook demonstration kill. The rest of the chamber did not think twice. They were incensed. The probing began the moment her administrative credentials were formalized. Mary Noeffler moved first.

She found Ovelia in the shadowed alcove of the Council's archival corridor, long after the preliminary sessions had adjourned, when the marble halls had emptied and the only sounds were footsteps and distant political machinery. Mary stepped into the dim light and bypassed the theater entirely.

"You see the board," she said, her voice dropping into a register of intimate, razor-sharp clarity.

"You see it clearly. Nobody in this building actually believes you are the Crown's loyal hound. Including yourself." Ovelia stopped. She turned. She looked at Mary Noeffler for a long, quiet moment.

"The Milan'thirskaya family will lose this war," Ovelia said. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. The words had the flat, frictionless certainty of a mathematician reading a proven equation aloud.

"I have already told them." She turned and walked away down the corridor. Behind her, Mary Noeffler finalized her assessment. She told me the truth. Not the political script I expected. Famia Schüder was the High Council's paradox. She possessed the face of a flawless, treasonous femme fatale. Her sharp black wolf-cut bled violet mana at the tips. Her mouth curved at its corners into a permanent, enigmatic smile that made her look as though she was perpetually harboring some intricate, romantic conspiracy.

Because she was a Shadow Demon Witch, and because she looked the way she did, the Council took no time reaching its verdict: a mechanism of betrayal operating under a perfect mask. To her patrons, the Milan'thirskaya family, she was "a disposable pawn if necessary." In reality, she was the most uncomplicated, ruthlessly earnest entity in the chamber. She navigated the world with weaponized, literal sincerity. In the political arena, it functioned precisely like armor. Armor that kept everyone out.

Including the people she wanted to let in. She had learned, early on, to use the face. To let it work for her. In a chamber full of people who concealed everything, she was the one person with nothing to hide, which meant the enigmatic smile was the only thing standing between her sincerity and the people who would exploit it. She stepped into Ovelia's new office, the familiar smile in place.

She was prepared for the customary pattern: the veiled probing, her own honest replies, and the glacial skepticism that inevitably followed when people refused to believe she meant exactly what she said. Ovelia looked up. She looked at Famia, and her expression shifted. Not with the careful calculation of someone conducting an assessment. With the specific brightening of a person who had just found exactly what they were looking for. Ovelia smiled. It was bright, sudden, and un-political.

"Are you truly a Shadow Demon Witch?" Ovelia asked, her voice carrying a light, teasing lilt.

"Are you quite certain you aren't a Hound Witch?" The enigmatic smile froze on Famia's face. A hound. Just the word, dropped into the open air with total, cheerful directness. The exact same brutally literal register Famia herself deployed when she informed people that their hat was objectively inferior to an alternative hat. She opened her mouth. Ovelia extended her right hand. Palm facing upward.

The gesture arrived with the absolute, unreasonable entitlement of someone who had never once considered the possibility of non-compliance.

"Give me your hand," Ovelia said. Famia looked at the outstretched palm.... This is literally how you train a dog. Objectively, her brain filed, you do not ask a Grand Witch to present her paw. This is not a defensible opener for a professional engagement. A formal objection is not only warranted, it is mandatory. Famia's arm moved. She placed her gloved hand into Ovelia's palm. Ovelia's fingers closed around hers: firm, shockingly warm, an anchoring heat that burned straight through the leather.

She gave Famia's hand a single, deliberate shake. The bright smile gentled into something that had, impossibly, the weight of a vow.

"From this moment forward," Ovelia said quietly, "your loyalty belongs to me." Her gaze held. The warmth in it was not political.

"I will never throw you away." Famia's throat did something involuntary. The catalog ran: This is an absurd statement from a woman you met six minutes ago. The structural framing of this entire interaction is that of someone training an animal. You are a professional. The correct response is to establish, in precise terms, what 'loyalty belongs to me' entails before committing to anything. There are seventeen objections available and not one of them— She looked at the smile.

She felt the warmth of the palm holding hers. Famia Schüder did not pull her hand back. The enigmatic smile returned to her face, exactly as it always was, exactly as it always looked. Only she knew it sat slightly differently now. Like armor, after the wearer had forgotten, for one unguarded moment, that she was wearing it. I am only leaving it here, she noted, with clinical firmness, because I am a polite professional. The seismic event arrived during Ovelia's first official public assembly.

Across the Council's tiered floor, the atmosphere hummed with the friction of a dozen misaligned factions. Mary Noeffler held the floor.

"I have found Ovelia to be exceptionally reliable," Mary announced. The silence that followed had physical mass. Mary Noeffler did not publicly praise Royalist pawns. Even if this was a multi-layered strategic deception designed to sow paranoia in the Milan'thirskaya family regarding their own piece, a commendation of that magnitude from the Grand Witch Chancellor required a foundation of substantial truth to execute. When the session formally adjourned, the architects filtered into the grand corridors.

Don Gil Ross walked alongside Josephine Durant through the thinning crowd, the two of them moving in a pocket of isolated, untouchable honor amidst the swirling rot. Josephine's expression carried the crystalline clarity of someone who had survived enough battlefields to see past the noise.

"In the end," Gil said quietly, her eyes fixed straight ahead.

"Whose interests do you believe she will ultimately act for?" Josephine kept walking.

"I believe," she said, "that she fundamentally does not understand what the concept of for whom means." Gil looked at her. Josephine looked back. A single, silent look of comprehension passed between them. The transcript of the session reached the Milan'thirskaya estate before the Council doors had been locked for the evening. In the parlor, Francesca lifted her cup and took a slow, deeply satisfied sip.

"As expected of her," Francesca murmured. Beside her, Angie leaned back against the cushions, her eyes glinting with sharp amusement.

"Mary Noeffler is not nearly as intelligent as she believes herself to be." By the window, Ash stood with her back to the room. The eldest daughter of the Kings of the World had not turned when the matriarchs arrived with their congratulations. She had not turned when the strategic implications were laid out across the table. She stood silhouetted against the evening light, her expression carrying a weight that did not share the room's triumphant energy: heavy, spent, like a door that had been quietly closed.

"Ovelia told her the truth," Ash said quietly. A brief silence settled before the matriarchs exchanged a glance and swept out to begin drafting the next phase of the war effort. The heavy doors clicked shut. The room settled. Tasia stepped out from the shadows of the velvet drapery and walked across the carpet, stopping beside her sister. The sky over the capital had bled into a bruised, darkening purple.

"Sister," Tasia said. Her voice was steady.

"If we lose this war... what will happen?" Ash turned her head. She looked at Tasia with the expression of someone who had already grieved what was coming.

"Tasia," Ash said gently, the words falling into the quiet room like dust settling on a tomb.

"Losing is not the most terrifying thing."