Chương 157: Interlude: A Few More Words

[Time]: 1996 / 2004 [Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Eastern Courtyard / The White City · A Gala Adeline stepped through the Anser bone archway and found her immediately. It was never a matter of searching. The geometry of any room was simple. When Adeline walked in, her wings were folded into a cool, moonstone bone-white, ivory horns glinting emerald at their tips. She could look deceptively, almost violently harmless when she chose to. The crowd knew better.

They adjusted their posture, averted their eyes, and took those subtle, shuffling half-steps back regardless. Irene never did. She simply stood where she was: a still, golden sun in a room full of nervous shadows. Adeline's eyes locked onto that stillness, and the cool mineral light of the Spirit Sea courtyard dissolved. The year was 1996. Irene had recently ascended to the Fifth Seat. Adeline, conversely, was a walking contagion. She had won the plagiarism trial.

The verdict had been clean and legally unassailable, constructed on the deliberate ruins of Lily Cable's career. Then, before the gallery doors had closed, Lily stood before the press corps and delivered the only sentence that mattered. That was sufficient. A Plumed Dragon Witch ascending to Arch-Witch was already a generation-level anomaly her enemies had been patiently waiting to dismantle. The trial victory had merely redirected their methods.

What could not be destroyed legally was erased socially: a coordinated, impeccably sustained erasure in which the space Adeline occupied simply ceased to exist. She attended the gala out of pure spite. She wore a scandalous smile and sipped champagne inside a perfectly empty radius of quarantine, and the evening ground forward around her without friction. Then Irene arrived. The doors opened, and the room's gravity tilted.

A ceaseless tide of Arch-Witches, dignitaries, and political opportunists surged toward the newly minted Grand Witch. Adeline watched from the periphery, positioned, as always, at the precise edge of Irene's line of sight. Close enough to be visible if someone cared to look. Far enough away to be entirely dismissible if they didn't. She studied the rim of her glass. She waited for nothing. Then a shadow fell across her table. Irene had navigated through the crowd.

She stopped beside Adeline, and the ambient chatter in the immediate vicinity dropped to a dead silence.

"It is so good to see you again, Miss Adeline," Irene said softly. Adeline gave a light, careless chuckle, her theatrical armor slipping perfectly into place.

"I rarely hear anyone say that." The political blast radius was immediate. For the Fifth Seat to willingly, openly greet the Inner Sea's most socially radioactive figure bordered on a scandal. The surrounding Witches froze. Then, as the ruthless social calculus resolved itself (if Irene acted alone, it was a target on her back; if the collective engaged, it was simply polite society functioning as intended), the room thawed. Stiff, reluctant nods materialized in Adeline's direction.

Strained murmurs of acknowledgment. The ghost had been miraculously noticed, by mutual, self-protecting agreement. Adeline navigated the sudden influx of forced civility with flawless, venomous grace. She returned every pleasantry. She smoothed every jagged edge. And then the crowd reabsorbed Irene. When the gala ended and the last carriages departed, Adeline stood alone on the terrace, staring at the empty gardens below. If the ink staining my name weren't so dark, the thought surfaced, quiet and useless.

Would the geometry be different? I only wish I could have spoken a few more words with her. The memory snapped. The golden chains bit into her wrists with the warmth and absolute weight of condensed sunlight, and Irene pulled. Adeline felt the force and her body supplied the rest: the staccato strings of a violin, the soft press of polished marble against the soles of her heels, the specific, irresistible pull of Caroshadel at three in the morning. Por Una Cabeza.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. She had spent a lifetime learning to outmaneuver every person in every room, and she had never once succeeded here. She was reeled in. She looked up at Irene. Adeline deployed her primary defense. The mask of the woman who felt nothing and feared no one. Then Irene's hand moved. Irene's hand closed around the base of Adeline's tail. Precise. Deliberate. A reprimand. A blade strike barely qualified as a tickle.

A human Witch's grip should have registered as nothing at all. But Irene's physical constitution was a biomechanical impossibility. The grip landed with precisely enough force to bypass the scales and register, direct and clear, on the nerve endings underneath. More importantly: it was Irene's hand. Adeline gasped. The sound was genuine, involuntary, and completely exposed. Her spine arched. The mask fractured for one catastrophic, authentic fraction of a second. Panic seized her in the same instant.

Adeline violently overcompensated, flooding her features with an exaggerated, scandalized flush, weaponizing the reaction before it could be decoded. Bite the lower lip. Let the emerald eyes water slightly. Warp the raw, unguarded truth into exactly the kind of theatrical rumor a shameless degenerate would manufacture on purpose. Irene's hand snapped back as if she had grabbed a live voltage wire. Adeline held the smirk in place. Really, she complained to nobody.

Lady Berenice, the darkly rakish, who made me dance until I couldn't think. Does my reaction genuinely shock you this much? Of course. You didn't mean anything by it. You are simply this gentle to everyone. The crowd parted. Mephisto descended like a localized abyssal trench, her fury radiating outward in visible, suffocating waves. Ah. Adeline's internal processor noted the arrival with the calm efficiency of someone receiving confirmation of a prediction. Her old friend. The calculus was clean.

Adeline was the instigator, the notorious pariah, the Plumed Dragon Witch standing in chains at a state banquet. Being handed over was the most logical outcome in the room. Irene stepped forward. She placed herself between Mephisto and Adeline, her posture certain. Adeline stared at those shoulders. She stopped knowing what to do with her hands.... Why?

"Berenice, you bastard!" Mephisto's voice cut through the courtyard like a blade drawn slowly across stone.

"Are you protecting her?! Damn it, I always knew your willpower was weak! You can never resist a blonde, emerald-eyed beauty! Have you been seduced by her?! Are you siding with her over us?!" Adeline's internal alarms immediately screamed. This narrative cannot be allowed to take root. The political damage alone—"That's not what this is," Irene said, her voice calm.

"You can't attack her here, Mephi—" Adeline let out a microscopic, silent breath. Right. She's the Fifth Seat. She's maintaining order at a state event. She hates chaos. She is not doing this for me. She anchored herself to that rationalization with both hands and held on. Then Irene's posture shifted. The rationalization crumbled to ash. Lady Berenice was Irene's buried history, an era of unapologetic degeneracy that the Fifth Seat had spent long since entombing beneath layers of unshakeable grace.

Irene had just exhumed it. She had weaponized her most private, embarrassing persona in front of half the High Council: not to restore order, but to de-escalate the specific threat to Adeline. Everyone in the courtyard had seen it. Adeline snapped her wrists. The magic-suppressing rune bands hit the marble floor and carved a small, clean crater. Forged as anti-dragon countermeasures, their suppression algorithms multiplied exponentially against specific draconic bloodline markers.

Adeline's physiology was a transgenic masterpiece, a genetic chimera deliberately spliced with factors from practically every known dragon species in existence. By possessing all of them, she had triggered every single overlapping penalty, isolation ward, and targeted countermeasure the bands contained simultaneously. Structurally, what she had just done was impossible. She had been capable of that from the first frame. Irene turned.

She looked at the broken bands on the floor, then at Adeline's unhurt, unconstrained hands. No anger in her golden eyes. No preparation for a secondary restraint.

"How did you do that?" Adeline felt the corners of her smile threaten to collapse. She locked them into place with the last of her considerable willpower.

"How I did it isn't important," Adeline said smoothly.

"What is important, darling, is that I need to learn that particular technique." She called her darling because the mask allowed it. She called her darling because, at that specific moment, it was the only word she had. What she did not say, what she swallowed down whole, was: Stop protecting me. If you keep doing this, I will not survive it. She did it anyway. She watched the warmth leave Irene's face. Irene walked away. Beneath her ribs, her heart was perfectly quiet, save for a faint, persistent ache.

The banquet ended. The delegates dispersed. Before Adeline could fully extract herself from the venue, she heard footsteps behind her. Irene approached with the unhurried serenity of someone who had already set aside whatever had occurred between them. The math had been more interesting than the grievance. Adeline looked at the woman who had burned her own dignity to shield her, and who had then walked back across the courtyard because the puzzle was more interesting than the grievance. She laughed.

"If you truly wish to know," Adeline said, "I shall send you the data tomorrow." The following morning, a junior Plumed Dragon Witch arrived at Irene's private estate, bowed once, left a single sealed envelope, and vanished. Irene broke the wax seal. The paper didn't unfold. It shattered, fracturing into hundreds of immaculate, floating fragments that hung suspended in the morning air.

Yellow morning-star mana flooded the room, the particles spinning faster and faster until they carved a vortex-shaped spatial door directly into the fabric of Irene's study. With a heavy, metallic clunk, a full-sized steel filing cabinet slid out of the portal and settled onto the rug.

Bolted to the top drawer was a neatly written placard: [All R&D Data, Structural Schematics, and Experimental Records Regarding Label Magic] Resting on top of the cabinet was a small, elegantly penned note: Condition of transfer: I require you to share your ongoing research progress with me. Irene stood in her study, her fingers resting on the cold steel of the top drawer. A complex, unreadable emotion moved through her eyes. She exhaled, slow and deliberate, shaking her head.

"Miss Adeline," Irene murmured to the empty room, a rare, unguarded smile touching her lips.

"You truly are a woman of your word."