Chương 72: Chapter 5: The Immensity of the World

Later, after anonymous maidens brought a tray of food with overwhelming visual and olfactory complexity, juices of exquisite and unknown flavors, Selena immersed herself in solitude and books. The tray had been a spectacle in itself: small delicacies arranged like petals in an edible garden, colored sauces drawing patterns on porcelain, meats so tender they fell apart at the touch of the silver fork.

Selena had eaten with the mechanical precision of someone who needs fuel, not pleasure, tasting each bite without truly savoring it, her mind already flying toward the bookshelves long before the last maiden crossed the door. The afternoon faded between pages. She scanned several history tomes, her fingers sliding over engravings of battles and endless genealogies. Many only delved into the milestones and grand narratives she had already glimpsed in Corren's books, in that cave that was knowledge in itself.

But there was a gain, a concrete fact that her philologist's mind caught greedily: the names. The noble houses were not just the grand dukes and the monarchy that already sounded vaguely familiar. Now she stumbled upon a precise and convoluted hierarchy: dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, baronets, lords, knights… an ecosystem of stratified power where each title was a rung on a ladder of ambition and loyalty. Beyond anything else, the search led her to something she desired.

There, under the rule of the Grand Duke of Thyll, was the House of Scargoth, led by a baron. It didn't say much more about them, only naming them as minor nobility with prosperous lands of mollucapras and endless valleys. It was almost irrelevant within the nobility itself. The precision of the language comforted her; it was familiar ground, a map she could read even in the absolute darkest of times. However, beyond that taxonomy of power, the books did not offer the profound knowledge she craved.

The chronicles were clean of the blood and mud of truth, polished until they became instruments of propaganda. Night fell with its indigo mantle, and as soon as the darkness began to take hold of the corners, Anne and Clara entered the room again. Their movements were silent and efficient ballet. Without a word, they approached the bed and began the ritual of preparing the linens, smoothing the silk sheets and arranging the blankets of incredibly soft fleece.

Selena watched them from the chair, and an expression of genuine, unacted annoyance formed on her face. It made for a deep irritation of someone accustomed to her independence, to making her own bed, to serving her own food. The idea that someone had to dress her, feed her, and now tuck her in, like a child or an invalid, felt profoundly absurd, almost obscene in its comfort.

Once the act was concluded and already dressed in a nightgown of silk so fine it seemed to weigh nothing on her skin, Selena let herself fall onto the mattress. The feathers gave way under her weight, enveloping her in a cloud of comfort that should have been the prelude to a restorative sleep. But the heaviness of her eyelids fought against the maelstrom of her mind, against that whirlwind of thoughts that refused to settle.

In the gloom, with the day's noises silenced, her consciousness began to wander, navigating between the few fragments of truth she had managed to wrest from her new reality. At least she had obtained answers. She knew now who Selena had been, not entirely, not fully, but it was a thread that would guide her. If she acted well enough, if she managed to wear the mask of the capricious duchess with the precision of a consummate actor, she would go unnoticed. Survival, once again, depended on her ability to lie.

Kaela, she thought, and the name was a pinch to her heart, a physical pain that ran through her chest like an electric shock. The image of the young woman, with her torn scream that seemed to rip from the depths of her soul, echoed in her memory with terrifying clarity. It was not just a scream of pain, but of absolute loss, the certainty that the universe was stripping everything from her, once again.

The expression on her face when the blood touched her fingers, that instant in which reality imposed itself with all its rawness, would be a scar Selena would carry forever etched deep within her being. She sighed deeply, carrying the pain in her heart like a dead weight that threatened to sink her. She needed time, she needed information, she needed to lower the guard of her captors. Between that swirl of unanswered questions and the echo of Kaela's weeping, her exhausted consciousness began to relax.

The threads of reason loosened, and sleep, a heavy and inevitable mantle, caught her completely. Immediately, a dream reality closed around her. She saw herself surrounded by a group of four men and a woman, their silhouettes fuzzy in an oppressive environment, laden with a tension that could be breathed like a thick fog. The air itself seemed to weigh tons, an invisible pressure crushing lungs and clouding the mind. It was a man who spoke first.

He was tall, nearly two meters of imposing stature, a figure that promised a deep and authoritative voice, the type of man who ordered and was obeyed without question. However, when he spoke, his tone was surprisingly kind, almost cordial, though no less serious for it. It was the kindness of someone who knows that words do not need to be shouted to be heard, of someone who has learned that authority does not need volume. —Remember to stay together —he said rigidly.

His words floated in the heavy air, suspended like leaves on a pond. —The dungeons are not a game. The man continued moving his mouth, his lips forming warnings that Selena could not hear, as if a veil of silence intervened between her and the sound. Until, suddenly, the noise returned to her ears with the violence of an avalanche, capturing the end of his sentence: —... they are cursed places, where the laws of reality bend to the point of the most absolute horror. The dream then lost all sound again.

A deep and unnatural silence took hold of the scene, a mutism more terrifying than any scream. But the images continued, mute and ghostly, projected on the screen of her unconscious with a cruel sharpness. The group began to move forward, entering the gloom. Selena looked at herself and only saw a dark and indistinct shadow, just like her companions. She could barely sense it was her by her height, slightly shorter, a smaller silhouette among anonymous giants. Until they crossed the threshold of the dungeon.

Then, a single sound erupted into the auditory void, a sound that seeped into her dream and her soul with the force of a catastrophe, with the power of a world crumbling. It was not the sharp cry of a person, but a deep and tenacious weeping, a sob multiplied by thousands, by tens of thousands. It was the sound of pain itself, a collective and eternal lament rising from the stones, from the air, from the very darkness that enveloped everything.

A suffering so vast and ancient that it chilled the blood in her veins, paralyzing her heart for an eternal instant. The vision faded completely, consumed by that choir of agony. She woke up with a start, the silk sheet soaked in cold sweat, a primitive fear clutching her chest until she could barely breathe. Her heart galloped wildly, a frightened animal in the cage of her chest. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Another nightmare, she thought.

Will I never be able to rest? Then, a sharper, more cutting thread: Is it because I'm locked in here? Is it the fear of this cage? But the worst came after, when the panting subsided and her eyes, adapting to the gloom, swept the room. The gauze curtains swayed with a ghostly languor, the iron chandeliers hung like sleeping spiders, the carpets muffled any sonata. Everything was in its place. Everything was beautiful. Everything was in prison. I'm still here.

In that instant, after the echo of the weeping of thousands, she could only feel it for what it was: the most refined and hopeless cell she had ever imagined. The walls of noble wood were bars; silk carpets, chains. She focused on her breath, controlling it with that technique she had learned, she gradually calmed down. She inhaled to a count of four, held it, and exhaled to count of eight.

The rhythm anchored her, returned her to reality, reminded her that she was still alive, that she could still think, that she could still fight. Once calm, she stood up, and the white silk nightgown slid over her skin like a ghost's caress. Her bare feet sank once more into the carpet, and she walked with silent determination toward the library. There, her gaze ran over the leather spines of different colors: browns, greens, vermilions, some so dark they looked like coal.

Many names and titles paraded before her eyes, promises of knowledge she sought greedily, like a thirsty woman in an oasis of paper and ink. It was one in particular that stopped her gaze, a volume of dark blue leather, almost black, with golden letters that read:"The Other Crowns: A Geopolitical Compendium of the Karys Continent." Below, the author's name: Tarek al-Zahir.

Something in that title, in the ambition it suggested, in the promise of a world beyond the walls of her cell, called to her like a magnet, like a voice whispering from distant lands. She took it in her hands; the book was heavy, solid, with that density only acquired by volumes that have been consulted over and over, that have traveled, that have lived. As she opened it, a scent of old paper, leather, and ink rose like perfume from other lands, a living exhale from distant lands of the room.

The book began with an introduction by the author, a prologue where Tarek al-Zahir thanked the kingdom of Erabergh with elaborate prose and a hint of kind irony for having granted him asylum and legal status.

"To the land that welcomes me, though I do not share all its blood, I owe the ink with which I write," it said, and the phrase resonated in Selena with a familiarity that made her uncomfortable. Then, the self-proclaimed poet and historian continued, explaining that the continent of Karys housed five other nations besides Erabergh, sharing an immense territory and a history intertwined by war, trade, and faith.

However, he refused to focus on the small kingdoms or scattered countries, as for him they were invisible on the grand board. He referred to the book itself as a compendium of geopolitics and origins of neighboring kingdoms or, with a touch of lyricism,"a journey to the very heart of each nation, beyond blazons and swords." Selena settled into the garnet velvet chair, sinking into its comfort while her mind opened to the journey the book proposed.

For a moment, she stopped being a prisoner in a golden cage to become a traveler, an explorer of worlds of ink and paper. The first chapter took her to the frozen domains of the north: Khelganor. Tarek described it as a kingdom traversed by deep and somber fjords, where the cold bit to the bone and the mountains rose like gods of stone and ice, their peaks covered in eternal snows that never saw the sunlight.

It was ruled by a High Jarl, a title that resonated with echoes of axes and mead halls, of banquets where one drank from the skulls of enemies and swore loyalty with blood. Their kingdom, the author narrated, was not born of a treaty, but of a violent rebellion against what they called"the golden yoke of Erabergh." They had been sworn enemies of the crown for over eight hundred years, whom they considered decadent oppressors who had fallen into disgrace, into the sloth of civilization.

Their army was fearsome, composed of powerful berserkers who fought in a battle trance, blind to pain and thirsty for blood; and their navy, the drakkars, sailed the northern seas like hungry wolves, their serpentine prows emerging from the fog to sow terror. Reading, Selena could almost feel the icy wind on her face and hear the war chants emanating from the pages, an ancestral echo of violence and freedom. The second chapter was a total shift, a direct journey to the author's land: Sandstrohm.

More than a kingdom, it was a sultanate that emerged from the colonization of Erabergh in the vast, hot deserts of the south. There, where the sun scorched the skin and the sand erased footprints, the colonizers had erected immense libraries that, after independence, Sandstrohm adopted as a fundamental part of its cultural wealth. They were famous, Tarek wrote with palpable pride, for their commercial sharpness and intellectual depth, which rivaled and even surpassed that of Erabergh itself in some areas.

Their merchants were legendary, capable of selling ice in Khelganor and spices in the kitchens of the royal palace. Their army, the fearsome riders of the desert flyers, was a legend among the dunes, capable of appearing and disappearing like mirages. Selena smiled slightly; she felt an instant sympathy for this people of scholars and merchants, a glimmer of hope in a world that so far had only shown her brutality and empty nobility.

The third kingdom took her east, to Veridia, a confederation of city-states settled in fertile valleys where the earth was so generous it gave three harvests a year. After becoming independent from Erabergh following a devastating plague that weakened central control, they adopted a decentralized government and a practical vision of life, where merchants held more power than the nobles of other countries and citizens dictated policy.

They maintained a relationship of pragmatic respect and fierce commercial competition with Erabergh. They were not friends, but neither were they enemies; they were awkward partners on the great board of Karys, rivals who needed each other to prosper. The fourth neighbor was Theosyra, a peninsula to the west bathed by tempestuous seas, which had been Erabergh's proudest and most loyal colony.

But a great religious schism, a dispute over the interpretation of sacred texts that had lasted decades of theological debates, had shattered that loyalty forever. Now, the Theosyrans considered themselves the sole guardians of pure doctrine and looked upon the metropolis with mutual cultural contempt and a theological rivalry that poisoned any possibility of reconciliation. Their temples were more austere, their rituals more severe, and their faith a flame that burned with the intensity of the damned.

And then there was the fifth, the one that defied all norms: Jingdao. An ancient insular empire in the southeast was the only civilization Erabergh considered an equal, a rarity in a world of rigid hierarchies. Their relationship was governed by a millennial"Pact of Friendly Waves," a non-aggression and mutual respect agreement that had survived wars, plagues, and dynasty changes.

Their power was essentially naval, and they guarded the knowledge of explosives with jealous secrecy, an advantage that kept them an unpredictable and formidable power, capable of turning any maritime confrontation into a massacre. Their culture, their religion, their very way of seeing the world were completely foreign to everything known on the continent. They were a mystery within an enigma, a riddle no one had managed to decipher in millennia.

The light of dawn filtered through the windows, painting the carpets with pink and gold tones that advanced slowly over the wool. Selena was immersed in the descriptions of Jingdao's war fleets, her mind sailing through seas of ink, imagining war junks with silk sails and bronze cannons that spat fire and death, when the soft but unmistakable creak of the door opening interrupted her literary journey.

Anne and Clara entered with the silent synchrony of a well-practiced ritual, their bodies moving in unison as if they shared the same nervous system. Their faces, though serene, carried a barely perceptible tension, a glint of urgency in their eyes that had not been present during previous care. Something had changed. The world of"The Other Crowns" vanished, replaced by the oppressive reality of the room.

The weight of the book on her lap was no longer a comfort, but a reminder of the fleeting nature of her mental escape, of how fragile that paper castle was that she had built to evade. It was Clara who broke the silence, her voice a thread of formality that cut through the scented air like a knife of ice. —My lady, your uncle, the Grand Duke, arrives today at noon. We must dress you appropriately. The words fell into silence like slabs, like stones in a pond whose ripples expanded without control. The Grand Duke.

The name resonated within her with the dull echo of a bolt sliding shut, with the weight of an iron door being sealed forever. Valerius. The man whose orders kept her confined, the invisible architect of her enclosure. The only family of the original Isabella, and now, her current jailer. The figure that loomed over all of this like a gigantic shadow, whose contours she was only beginning to glimpse.

The man who had ordered her brought back, who had sent his soldiers to rescue her from her voluntary exile in the streets of Terracanto.