Chương 200: The Empire's Envoy

In the midst of this psychological chaos battering Sylvester's mind, at the peak of the political and military tensions secretly tearing Seiron apart, and only hours before the coronation ceremony planned to be a coronation in blood, something happened that no one had anticipated. A development that stopped the clock in the ducal palace and made the new tyrant's heart skip a beat. It was no sudden attack from Dex, and no magical thunderbolt. It was a sound. The enormous bells of the palace's main gate tolled.

But these were not the rapid, jubilant ceremonial strokes announcing the arrival of invited nobles for the festivities, nor the intermittent alarm strokes announcing an attack. These were slow, formal, heavy, and frightening strokes. Each toll shuddered in the chest like a magistrate's hammer announcing a death sentence. They announced the arrival of a person of immense significance, a person who does not wait for permission to enter.

The massive iron gates swung open with a thundering creak, and into the palace's outer courtyard rolled a carriage that resembled nothing Seiron had ever seen. It was an enormous carriage, entirely black, crafted from rare Blood Ebony wood, polished with supreme magical care until it gleamed like dark mirrors, reflecting the distorted images of the terrified guards.

It was drawn by four massive night horses: horses of pitch black that reflected no light, their eyes glowing with a faint red glimmer, exhaling cold blue vapor from their nostrils into the morning air. Their hooves were forged from enchanted steel, striking the stone ground and producing a sound resembling muffled gunshots. But what froze the blood in the veins of everyone in the courtyard was not the carriage's size or the demonic horses, it was the crest engraved in pure raised gold on the main door.

A crest known to every child, every mage, and every noble across the entire Empire: "A black raven clutching a silver scale, standing upon a broken skull." The terrifying crest of the Imperial Inquisition. The carriage stopped with a frightening slowness and complete silence before the wide marble staircase leading to the palace's main entrance. A dense and deadly silence settled over the vast courtyard.

The birds stopped chirping, the guards held their breath and stiffened into postures of complete attention, their eyes fixed on the ground in fear of meeting the gaze of the carriage's occupant. Even Sylvester, who was drowning at the peak of his madness and paranoia in his wing and had been refusing to receive anyone, was forced, when he heard the carriage described, to swallow his fear and don the mask of reason and dignity.

He knew with absolute certainty that ignoring this crest, or being slow to receive the Inquisition's envoy, meant literally declaring direct war on the Imperial throne itself, a political and military suicide from which there was no escape. Sylvester descended the staircase with rapid yet unsteady steps, surrounded by a trembling retinue. When he reached the base of the staircase, the dark carriage door opened slowly. No army emerged, no armed guards. A single man stepped out.

He was a man of abnormally great height and a frightening thinness, his bones appearing on the verge of piercing his taut skin. He wore a long, flowing coat that brushed the ground, not made of cloth, but appearing woven entirely from the dense black feathers of ravens: feathers gleaming with a faint metallic blue that was unsettling to the eye in the sunlight. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that covered the upper half of his waxen-pale face.

He was the Supreme Inspector, Baron Croft, the figure about whom horror stories are told to corrupt politicians before sleep. Known in the capital's corridors by the title "Dissector of Lies," his more terrifying epithet was "The Raven." He was the right hand of the Imperial Intelligence chief, and the man who is dispatched only when the Empire intends to uproot the roots of corruption, or uproot the heads of nobles. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

Sylvester advanced with unsteady steps, trying to control the trembling of his lips. Cold sweat was pouring in abundance beneath his silk collar. Despite the headache ravaging his skull, he tried to paint a diplomatic welcoming smile on his face, bowing slightly in what was, for a prospective duke, a thinly veiled insult, yet he had no choice.

"Your Excellency Supreme Inspector Baron Croft..." Sylvester said in a voice he tried to make sound confident, but which emerged hoarse.

"What a magnificent surprise and indescribable honor for Seiron and for Williams Palace. We did not anticipate your arrival with such speed, nor were we notified in advance, had we known, we would have prepared a formal reception befitting your lofty Imperial stature." Croft did not return the greeting. He did not bow a single inch, and the visible lower portion of his face showed no change of expression. He stood where he was with absolute coldness, like a statue of black ice.

He raised his right hand very slowly and drew his black leather glove, finger by deliberate finger, in a motion calculated to test Sylvester's nerves. When Croft spoke, his voice was extremely quiet, graveled and completely devoid of any emotional inflection.

It resembled the sound of dry paper rustling across the marble of an old graveyard, yet it carried a hidden authority and a suppressed magical force that made the powerful guards in the courtyard lower their heads further, as though an invisible weight were pressing down on their necks.

"Sylvester Williams..." Croft pronounced the name slowly, as though tasting a putrid flavor in his mouth and spitting it out. He used neither the title "Lord" nor "prospective Duke", a deliberate stripping of all legitimacy. The Inspector turned slowly and looked at the city's high walls, then closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as though smelling the air to analyze its components.

"The Empire, Williams, does not send its Ravens to take afternoon tea, nor to attend trivial nobles' parties. We do not come for pleasantries." Croft returned his gaze to Sylvester, fixing his two dead gray eyes, which reflected no light, on Sylvester's tense and bloodshot ones.

"We have lost contact with the Sixth Legion entirely. The victorious Sixth Legion. Five thousand elite soldiers, equipped with the finest gear, led by a seasoned general of Vargas's caliber, they vanished completely. Evaporated like a droplet of water in a desert. And where? Inside your lands, within the borders of your province." Croft paused for a moment and tilted his head slightly to the right, like a bird examining a broken prey.

"And you, you who claim to control this province, send pale reports to the capital. Reports that speak coolly of 'unexpected atmospheric disturbances in the forest' and of 'a locally sourced rebellion' that led to losses. Weak, childish reports, full of holes that not even small children would believe, let alone the head of Imperial Intelligence." The Inspector stepped one pace forward. Just one pace, yet Sylvester felt an immense pressure nearly crushing him.

It was no physical pressure, it was a terrifying combination of suffocating political weight and the cold magical radiation that distinguishes the Inquisition's senior inspectors. Sylvester felt as though the air had been vacuumed from his lungs.

"I have come here to see the situation with my own eyes," Croft continued in his whispering, killing voice.

"I have come to determine what manner of man you are. Are you merely an incompetent, stupid, and weak ruler who cannot protect the Imperial borders entrusted to him? Or are you, a complicit traitor in the disappearance of His Imperial Majesty's soldiers, concealing a secret larger than you can hold?" Sylvester swallowed with tremendous difficulty. His mouth was dry as stone. He felt the hangman's noose coiling slowly around his neck and tightening from every direction.

The rebels igniting fire from below, the Imperial Inspector closing the sky from above. No escape.

"Where is the Sixth Legion, Sylvester?" Croft asked, the words emerging like sharp blades.

"And why does the smell of turmoil, fear, and hidden blood fill the alleyways of your city, hours before your so-called coronation? Your answer, and what I discover here, will determine whether you keep your head on your shoulders to wear the crown, or whether I take it with me to the capital in a small wooden box as evidence of your treason."