Ellios shook his head, feeling violently trapped between two distinct executions. If the landmass to the West was currently ablaze with Ramos Boa's revolution, then the ocean churning before them was no less lethal.

  He closed the distance to the balcony's stone balustrade, pointing an accusing finger toward the pitch-black, violently rolling horizon.

  "However, Uncle..." Ellios interjected, his voice pitching up an octave driven by an urgency he could no longer mask. "Is the sea not equally compromised?"

  He snapped his gaze toward Gauss, demanding a logical riposte.

  "My intelligence network may be finite, but spies seeded within foreign ports do not sleep. Hundreds of naval vessels belonging to the United Nations Forces are currently executing hard turns."

  Ellios drilled a glare into those ancient eyes.

  "They are converging upon the Port City of Gant. That is the very gate to your domain, My Lord Duke. Ironclad warships, long-range artillery, a total blockade..."

  Ellios began ticking off his trembling fingers.

  "...It is merely a matter of days, Uncle. Not months. Days. They will arrive upon your oceanic doorstep, besieging this fortress from the vanguard while Ramos drives a spear into the flank."

  Silence reigned for a fleeting second. The sea gale roared, delivering a fresh volley of stinging salt crystals.

  Then, the quiet shattered.

  "BWAHAHAHAHA!"

  Gauss Renville’s laughter detonated once more, this time louder, wildly unchained, as if actively challenging the thunderheads rolling across the sky. He slammed his massive palm down upon the stone lip of the balcony. CRACK!

  "Son, oh, Son..." Gauss wiped a tear from the corner of his eye—born of mirth, not terror.

  He stood perfectly upright, puffing his broad chest out toward the raging open ocean far below. He spread his arms wide, as if intent on embracing the hurricane itself.

  "Do you genuinely believe this Southern Sea is their ally?" Gauss demanded, the timbre of his voice plummeting drastically into a low, lethal register. "Do you believe this water serves merely as a paved highway for their iron ships?"

  Gauss turned his head slowly toward Ellios. The feral glint beneath those thick, snow-white brows made Ellios’s courage actively shrink. That was not the gaze of a sane man. It was the glare of an absolute fanatic.

  "This sea..." Gauss whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying cocktail of reverence and sheer arrogance.

  "...Is my ancestor."

  Gauss pointed downward, toward the black waves brutally pulverizing the reefs.

  "The ancestors of House Renville do not slumber within terrestrial graveyards, Ellios. They are dissolved within these very waters. The salt currently crusting upon your face is the bone-ash of my great-grandfathers."

  Gauss sneered, exposing teeth that were yellowed yet formidably strong.

  "Let the foreign armada come. Let them drag their steel and their black powder into my 'front yard.' They shall learn one absolute truth..."

  Gauss returned his gaze to the sea, speaking as if addressing a gargantuan, slumbering leviathan at the bottom of the abyss.

  "...That uninvited guests to the Southern Sea are never permitted to return to the surface."

  Ellios stood paralyzed, his tongue reduced to lead. He stared at that aged back with a tumultuous blend of horror and profound awe. Gauss Renville was not discussing naval strategy. He was speaking of something infinitely older, darker, and purely primal.

  And for the very first time, Ellios felt that the United Nations armada might currently be sailing directly into their own watery mass grave.

  The briny sea gale seemed to carry ancient, ghostly whispers. Gauss Renville had ceased laughing. He leaned casually against the stone railing, his back to the raging ocean, studying Ellios with an inscrutable gaze—a volatile mix of pity and dark amusement.

  "Son..." Gauss began, his voice low yet piercing the roar of the wind. "...Do you believe in magic?"

  The inquiry sounded utterly ludicrous to the ears of a modern political operator like Ellios. However, recalling what he had recently devoured from his purloined data-slate—the classified reports of Shade Walkers and Holy Fire—he found he could not instantly spit the word "no."

  Gauss offered a faint smile, recognizing the hesitation.

  "Your father, Godric Randar, must have instilled a thorough understanding in you all these years... regarding everything..."

  Ellios scowled. "My father speaks solely in the language of profit and margins, Duke. He does not peddle in fairy tales."

  "Incorrect," Gauss sliced in swiftly. "He does not speak of them to you, because to him, they are not fairy tales. They are commercial facts."

  The old Duke patted the freezing stone lip of the balcony.

  "Godric is a masterful merchant, Ellios. But the wares he trades are not merely tangible goods. He traffics in classified intelligence."

  Gauss gazed up at the suffocatingly overcast night sky.

  "He possesses records and archaic knowledge far more comprehensive than any royal library regarding the ancient history of Carta. He knows precisely where the dragon bones are buried; he knows the exact incantations required to crack ancient vaults."

  Ellios fell silent. The mental image of his father as a tedious, miserly merchant began to fracture, usurped by the infinitely more terrifying silhouette of a sovereign gatekeeper of forbidden knowledge.

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  "I suspect..." Gauss murmured, his severe gaze returning to Ellios. "...Your father currently possesses a sounder mind than any other ruler upon this continent. Including the King, including myself."

  Gauss began to recite the names. He recited them like a geography tutor calling roll for provincial towns, flat and entirely devoid of fear.

  "He visualizes the fractured seals of Mirror Canyon..."

  "The Valley of Death drawing its first breath..."

  "The Iron Mountains violently trembling..."

  Every name spoken made the fine hairs on Ellios’s arms stand erect. Those were universally recognized as cursed coordinates upon the maps of Carta.

  "The Anukh Ramj, the Undead slumbering beneath the permafrost..." Gauss continued, his eyes gleaming. "...And the Shade Walkers, the shadows of the void slithering down from the stars."

  Gauss drew a long, deep breath, inhaling the violent storm air as if it were a bespoke cologne.

  "And regarding the Dark Gate..." Gauss pointed his chin toward the north. "...Which shall tear open tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow?!" Ellios burst out, his eyes widening in sheer horror. "You mean the apocalypse is tomorrow?"

  Gauss chuckled softly. A remarkably dry sound.

  "Apocalypse? No, Son. Not an apocalypse."

  Gauss shook his head with casual dismissal.

  "To your father, and to those of us old men who maintain the ancient oaths..."

  Gauss’s expression smoothed into profound tranquility. An unnatural calm.

  "...He perceives this merely as a standard ritual event. A routine operational protocol for the spiritualists and the military, mandated to be executed once every five centuries."

  Ellios froze. His jaw slacked.

  "Merely a... cycle?" Ellios whispered, utterly incredulous.

  "A cycle," Gauss affirmed. "Like a harvest season. Only the yield being reaped consists of souls and monsters. Your father has been stockpiling inventory for this 'gala' since his youth. He is not panicking, Ellios. He is simply waiting for the customers to arrive."

  Ellios’s world violently spun on its axis.

  All this time he had believed Carta was hurtling toward total annihilation. He believed the King was rabid, the Crown Prince a brutal sociopath, and his own father apathetic.

  As it turned out, he was the fool. He was the panicked child shrieking at a solar eclipse, while the elders around him merely donned protective eyewear, knowing with absolute certainty the sun would rise again once the darkness passed.

  This war, this impending horror... to Godric and Gauss, this was merely "routine business" conducted every five hundred years.

  Ellios looked upon the old Duke with a gaze that had begun to severely falter. The absolute conviction in logic and tangible reality he had clung to so fiercely was slowly fracturing before Gauss’s absolute, ancient certainty.

  "Uncle..." Ellios’s voice wavered, nearly swallowed by the roaring sea gale. "...I do not know..."

  He swallowed a mouthful of bitter, salty saliva.

  "Is it... is it truly that lethal?" he asked softly. "I mean, monsters? Dimensional rifts? It sounds like a bedtime fable crafted to terrify children into sleeping early."

  Gauss exhaled a long, heavy breath, the sound rough and grating, like a whetstone dragged across a dulled blade. He fixed Ellios with a stare of profound disappointment, as if looking upon a genius pupil who had catastrophically failed the most rudimentary exam.

  "Gods below, Son..." Gauss muttered, shaking his silver-maned head.

  "You are far too enamored with politics," he continued, his tone laced with mockery. "You are far too preoccupied with reading expressions, analyzing micro-movements at banquet tables, deducing who is sleeping with whom..."

  Gauss leaned his scarred visage toward Ellios.

  "...Yet you remain entirely ignorant of the history of Carta itself."

  Ellios felt the sting. His intellectual ego flared defensively.

  "I read history, My Lord Duke," Ellios retorted, the pitch of his voice rising. "The Randar Library is one of the most comprehensive in the realm. I have memorized the royal lineage from the First King to the present day. I know every civil war, every trade pact, every localized famine..."

  He felt he had thoroughly consumed and comprehended those historical texts.

  And within his memory, everything was perfectly mundane.

  The Carta history he had digested was a human history. A chronicle of power struggles, economic shifts, and territorial expansion. There were no anomalies. There were no chapters documenting torn skies or the undead rising from glacial ice. If such things existed, they were merely footnotes relegated to abandoned, archaic superstitions.

  Yet, as he fiercely attempted to defend himself, a highly specific memory slithered into the forefront of his mind.

  Regarding the Texts of the Dark Gate.

  Ellios fell utterly silent. His parted lips slowly clamped shut.

  It was true. The tome existed.

  It was sequestered within the primary, highly restricted collection of House Randar.

  Ellios remembered that day, years ago. His father, Godric Randar, had returned home bearing a small, heavily padlocked iron strongbox. Godric had paid an astronomically exorbitant sum for it—enough capital to purchase a minor island outright.

  At the time, a younger Ellios had merely laughed cynically. He assumed his father had been swindled by a charlatan antiquities dealer, or was simply indulging the eccentric collecting habits typical of nouveau riche aristocrats.

  The tome was decrepit. It reeked of damp rot and dried blood. Its contents were penned in a Byzantine cipher detailing celestial cycles and the tearing of planar rifts.

  Father purchased it... Ellios thought, his eyes darting restlessly. ...Not as a display piece?

  All this time, Ellios had dismissed the book as mystical drivel. An expensive, utterly useless artifact.

  But tonight, with Shade Walkers reportedly crawling the borders and Duke Renville casually discussing a "five-hundred-year harvest," Ellios felt the blood in his veins turn to slush.

  Was that priceless tome more than a mere collector's item?

  Was it... an operational manual?

  "So..." Ellios whispered, his voice violently trembling. "...Father was not collecting antiques. He was purchasing an itinerary?"

  Ellios gripped the stone balustrade of the balcony with crushing force, gripping so tightly his fingertips blanched white, entirely drained of blood.

  Yet, that desperate grip could not arrest the fine tremor that originated in his hands, slithering up his forearms to violently shake his shoulders.

  He was trembling.

  Not from the freezing night air, though the temperature had indeed plummeted drastically. He was trembling because the very bedrock of his reality had just been seismically shattered by a single, mundane word regarding an "itinerary."

  Far below, the sea continued its merciless assault.

  KRAKOOOOM!

  The concussive boom of the waves pulverizing the cliff face sounded like the unending volley of heavy siege cannons. White sea foam vaulted high, licking the air, carrying the dense, choking aroma of salt and marine decay.

  The hurricane gale intensified, shrieking like tortured souls through the jagged crevices of the fortress masonry.

  The wind violently assaulted Ellios, completely ravaging his typically immaculate hair. Fine strands were whipped wildly across his face, lashing his cheeks and stinging eyes, reducing his appearance to something unkempt and profoundly fragile. He made no effort to smooth it. His hands were entirely occupied with bracing his body to prevent a total collapse beneath the crushing weight of reality.

  He felt agonizingly small. He felt utterly foolish. He felt like a brittle, dead leaf trapped within the vortex of a category-five hurricane.

  Ellios slowly turned his head to the side.

  There, a mere two paces away, stood an entirely different breed of entity.

  Duke Gauss Renville.

  The old man stood absolutely motionless. Not a single muscle fiber twitched. His heavy mantle snapped violently in the gale, but the physique beneath it appeared forged of cast iron, deeply rooted into the earth's crust.

  Gauss did not fight the wind; he allowed the wind to shatter itself against him.

  He stood as resolute as the black coral reefs suffering below. Hard, primeval, and utterly unyielding. His eyes stared unblinking into the abyssal dark, as if he had witnessed this exact storm a thousand times over and had simply grown bored of it.

  The contrast was a physical agony to Ellios.

  On one side, there was him—the brilliant, cunning Young Fox—now violently shivering in terror, his hair a tangled mess, his legs drained of marrow.

  On the other side, stood Gauss—the Old Lion he had dismissed as archaic—standing tall, actively defying the universe, prepared to embrace the apocalypse with open arms.

  Ellios swallowed a mouthful of bitter saliva. Upon this freezing, salt-crusted balcony, amidst the deafening roar of the crushing waves, he finally, devastatingly realized the astronomical gulf separating a mere "political player" from a true "Gatekeeper."