Chương 261: 290 - The Bull's Investigation

"So, this is what I have," Antonius said as he led Leon over to a table covered in wooden boxes of various sizes and stacks of official documents.

"All the physical evidence our investigators were able to collect and copies of sworn statements from every witness we were able to find, though to be fair, we weren't able to find many. Other than that, I've procured everything from birth records to extensive reports of the damage inflicted on Lord Artorias' villa and upon Argent Palace."

"Argent Palace?" Leon asked in slight confusion.

"The old palace in Teira that House Raime built," Antonius explained.

"It's since been declared a black zone, anyone who trespasses there is considered a traitor to the Kingdom or a foreign invader and immediately put to death. Not even I or my siblings, or even my uncle are technically exempt from such punishment, though the likelihood of it being carried out if we were to trespass there isn't high."

"I see, I didn't know it had a name," Leon said.

"I got a distant look at the place as I passed through Teira on my way south from the Northern Vales. I imagine it must have been a beautiful estate before it was attacked."

"Few care to use its name anymore," Antonius admitted, "but as a historian, I'm a fan of such things. I deeply regret that I never managed to see it when it was intact, as you're not wrong, it was supposedly a palace that put all others outside of the Four Empires to shame."

"It's a good name, then," Leon said.

"Where should we get started?"

"I think we ought to proceed chronologically, starting with the very first thing we were able to find from Lord Artorias' villa, then move on from there." Leon nodded, following the Prince's lead.

"Lord Artorias married a woman of unknown birth named Serana and moved to the capital to serve my Royal Father," Antonius began. The Prince thought that Leon likely knew these things, but he wanted to make sure they were on the same page.

"Using the money he made as a knight, he bought an estate and built a small villa upon it. It was a secluded place, with no guards and mostly covered in forest."

"Sounds like he valued his privacy," Leon muttered, though it was more for Antonius' benefit so the Prince knew he was following along. Leon himself was already intimately aware of just how little Artorias enjoyed crowds and uninvited guests if he wasn't in a sociable mood.

"Indeed. This actually turned into something of a problem when, a little over eighteen years ago, a battle broke out at the villa. The local Legion guards were eventually alerted, but when they arrived at Lord Artorias' deliberately isolated villa, the battle was long over, and the villa was in ruins. Lord Artorias, his wife, and their newborn son were nowhere to be found, and believe me, my Royal Father looked for them.

Not even a month later, Archduke Kyros himself arrived to participate in the investigation, but still, no trace of the family was ever found."

"Any clues as to who attacked the villa?" Leon asked with a long frown. He had to fight back even more than just a frown, though, as he felt a stinging in his eyes and his heart beat faster as it tried to flood his bloodstream with magic.

"None besides a few disparate details," Antonius replied.

"Lord Artorias and his wife were both on record as being too weak to use elemental magic, and yet there were signs of wind, light, ice, earth, and most notably, fire magic all utilized. In fact, more than half of the evidence discovered for elemental magic was related to fire." The Prince directed Leon's attention to a report detailing the damage done to the villa and its surroundings, and from melted stones to ash on the ground, most of it was related to fire.

"Using this evidence, we concluded that there were one or more users of fire who attempted to defend the villa, and the attackers were a mix of mages capable of using most of the other elements, though notably lacking fire," Antonius explained.

"How do you know that?" Leon asked.

"Most of the fire damage was consistent with someone using much larger attacks, the sort that might be used if one were outnumbered and surrounded. What little we could glean from the evidence of the rest of the magic was that they were mostly used as a defense against fire, or in attacks designed to hit one person. Of course, we can't know for certain without having been there, but our investigators were thorough and they're quite good at their jobs, so I believe their report." Leon nodded.

He knew that the fire users were his mother and her cousin Ryker from when Artorias had told him this story. The evidence collected by the Kingdom's investigators backed that up, but that wasn't what Leon wanted. Instead, he wanted something he didn't already know about, something he might even be able to use to tie Justin Isynos to the attacks, or failing that, something that might prove his innocence.

Antonius and Leon continued to talk about the aftermath of the attack on Artorias' villa, but there was little discussed that Leon wasn't already aware of. Antonius even showed him an exceedingly detailed diagram of the villa with markings indicating where the damage was and what the investigators believed caused it—the best the Prince could do without the King authorizing Leon to access the villa, which had also been declared a black site like Argent Palace—but Leon wasn't too interested in such details.

There was nothing in the reports that might reveal to him the identity of the attackers. Just as they were about to move on to the attack on Argent Palace, though, something stuck out to Leon. It was a fragment of black cloth that he found as he dug through a box of personal affects with a white pattern embroidered upon it. The cloth was soft and seemed to be a fragment of an article of clothing rather than something like a handkerchief or banner or other kind of embroidered cloth.

The partial design stitched into the torn fabric, though, was what drew Leon's eye.

"Can I see that diagram again?" he asked the Prince, and Antonius passed him the plans. In the center of the floor of the living room was a mural that was replicated with extreme accuracy on the diagram, consisting of mostly black tiles and a flowing white design. Leon held the cloth he'd discovered up against the mural and found that the fragment on the cloth perfectly matched about half of the mural in the diagram.

"Look at that!" Antonius muttered as he noticed the same thing now that Leon had drawn attention to it.

"Do you know what this mural is?" Leon asked the Prince.

"I… can't tell," Antonius admitted with a frown.

"I would've just said it was a decorative design, but if it's also on a fragment of clothing, maybe it's some kind of sigil. Whatever it is, though, I don't recognize it. It's certainly not the sigil of House Raime, that's a golden eagle with its wings spread… I'll look into it, though…" Leon frowned slightly, and then with a borrowed piece of paper, he quickly copied the design and enlarged it quite a bit.

As he surveyed his work and made sure it was as accurate as he could make it, he quietly thanked both his time spent writing enchantments and spells and the elegant simplicity of the mural making it relatively easy to copy. If it were an actual image, then he'd be out of luck and forced to either remember it as best he could or try and get a more detailed copy of the mural made for his reference. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The mural did seem to him to be some kind of sigil, but if it depicted anything specific, it was too abstract for him to see it. If he squinted hard enough and looked at it from the right angle, it could've been some kind of roaring animal head, but it was impossible for him to be sure. If it was what it seemed, then it might've been anything from the reptilian head of a wyvern to the sleek head of a mane-less lion.

Leon resolved to tap into the Heaven's Eye information network and seek anything he could find on it, but he wasn't going to rely on finding anything concrete resulting from that. Leon went through the information collected again, searching for any similarly small but potentially important clues, but found nothing.

He was a little disappointed but not too surprised that nothing of much substance turned up from Artorias' villa; Leon already knew far more about what happened that night than even Prince Antonius did, though he wasn't going to let the Prince know that. It was time to move on.

"How about Argent Palace?" Leon asked.

"Hmm, yes," Antonius said with a grimace.

"That was a whole other affair. Lord Artorias' villa was relatively isolated here in the capital, leaving no known witnesses to the events that left his villa in ruins. Argent Palace, on the other hand, being right in the center of the second most populous city in the Kingdom, had quite a few surviving witnesses, so we have a rough idea of what happened."

Antonius led Leon around to the other side of the table and began to shuffle through some more papers, eventually retrieving another diagram of the central administration building of the palace.

"So, here's what we know," Antonius began as he drew Leon's attention to the diagram.

"About two years after Lord Artorias' disappearance, three individuals clad all in black and with their faces covered appeared in the atrium of the central palace. I'll save you the time asking and just tell you that as of right now, we still have no idea who these people were or why they attacked the palace. And attack the palace they did, as the first indication that they had arrived was when the front doors were torn from their hinges."

"How warded were the doors?" Leon asked." Heavily," Antonius replied with a grave look.

"I'm not too familiar with the specifics of how well guarded Argent Palace was or the exact nature of the wards woven into the structure, but I do know that it was legendarily impregnable. However, whatever was there clearly wasn't enough; the interlopers went through those doors like a hot knife through butter.

The atrium was filled with several dozen people at the time, as any ought to expect from such a powerful and influential noble as the Raime Archduke, and about half of them were killed in the blast that brought down the door. From what the survivors told our investigators, the magic used seemed to be water, though we can't know for certain."

"Water magic brought down the doors?" Leon asked, seeking clarification. Water magic had innumerable uses, but the destruction of fortifications was something generally left to earth or fire magic.

"Yes," Antonius confirmed.

"After that, the three individuals were surrounded by a couple hundred of the finest knights that Archduke Kyros had in his employ in less than two minutes. They had barely moved an inch, as if they were waiting for just such a thing to happen. The leader of the Raime knights demanded their surrender, while the supposed leader of the three, in an oddly incongruous display of politeness, requested to see the Archduke.

"By this point, all of those who survived the initial attack had managed to flee, and we no longer have any accounts of what happened. Whatever transpired next, we have no idea. However, when the local Legion and additional Raime knights arrived at the scene, all of the knights that confronted the three were dead, as was Archduke Kyros Raime and his firstborn son, Alexander Raime. Argent Palace itself had been almost completely destroyed in the fighting." Leon clenched his teeth and balled his fists in anger.

He had no personal relationship to Kyros and Alexander, but they were still his family and Argent Palace was his family's possession. Just hearing these small bits about what happened infuriated him to no end.

"Is there anything else we know about these three attackers?" Leon quietly asked the Prince as he fought to contain himself. Fortunately, he didn't think Antonius had noticed his anger.

"There is," the Prince replied with a smile.

"The battle that took place was known to nearly all of Teira, it was so intense. The skies of Teira were filled with bolts of silver lightning, and they were answered with pillars of ice and beams of light. The lightning was obviously from Archduke Kyros and Lord Alexander, while we believe the ice was from the one who brought down the doors and the light from his accomplices."

"And we know it was a 'he'?" Leon asked as he instantly thought of Justin Isynos. It was an almost insignificant detail, but one he still noted.

"If his voice was any indication, then yes we do," Antonius said.

"Anything else?" Antonius thought for a few brief moments, but then shook his head.

"Nothing immediately comes to mind, though I suppose it might be relevant to note that the three aforementioned kinds of magic were the only ones witnessed, meaning that by the time Archduke Kyros and the interlopers fought, all of His Grace's knights were likely dead, otherwise we would've received reports of their magic as well. The time between our survivors evacuated and the start of the battle was a matter of minutes, which should go to show the sheer power of the three who attacked the palace."

"And the Archduke was a seventh-tier mage, correct?" Leon asked. He knew that when Artorias left the palace after marrying Serana, Kyros was a seventh-tier mage, but he wanted to know if that had changed in the subsequent few years.

"According to our records, he was," Antonius said. Leon nodded, having a general idea of what went down. It was clear to him that in the two years following the attack on Artorias' villa and Artorias' subsequent flight to the Northern Vales, those who attacked the villa were probably searching for him. However, they were obviously unable to find him, which probably led them to believe that Artorias was being sheltered by Archduke Kyros.

Their attack on Argent Palace was likely an attempt to flush Artorias out or to force Kyros to reveal his location. If Kyros had any idea of where Artorias had gone, he clearly didn't say, and when he understandably came to blows with those who were hunting his prodigal son and the grandson he'd never met, he was killed, along with Alexander, his only other child. The more he thought about it, the more incensed Leon became.

He wasn't unhappy about his upbringing—he grew up with a loving father and learned a great many skills that had kept him alive in the two and half years he'd been in the Bull Kingdom—but in the few minutes it took Antonius to narrate the events that took place sixteen years ago, the more it hit Leon just how much he had lost and how much he would never know. He could've grown up not just with Artorias, but with Serana, Kyros, and Alexander.

As far he was aware, he was the only member of his family that still drew breath. He didn't even know if his mother and her two cousins were still alive, and given the amount of force that was deployed against them, he was starting to think that they were long dead, as well. At the very least, he knew that something happened that had kept Serana from looking for him, as Artorias had made it clear enough to Leon that Serana loved both her husband and their son, and that she would've looked for them if she were able.

'Or maybe Mother is alive and well and we've simply never run into each other, and her side of the family is just waiting for me to find them. And maybe the Thunderbird will come back to life and whisk me away to their location and everyone will be happy and have cake,' Leon bitterly and sarcastically thought. His hand shook with barely contained anger and grief and he was struck with the sudden urge to return to Elise's estate and get back to training. He'd need every ounce of power he could get, after all.

"Are you all right, Leon?" Antonius asked the obviously not all right Leon.

"I-I'm fine," Leon said, his voice cracking and wavering in his current state. Antonius wasn't convinced, but he wasn't going to press the issue—he didn't know Leon well enough and neither did he have the social skills to do so.

"Let's j-just… look into these documents," Leon said as he grabbed a random stack of papers and began to leaf through them. They were the incident reports from the investigating knights containing the sworn statements from the survivors of the attack. There was nothing within that he didn't just learn from Antonius.

"… Right…" Antonius muttered as he did likewise, but he was as distracted by Leon's current state as Leon was processing the story just told. And then, something occurred to him.

'Artorias' son was named Leon, wasn't he?'