Gauss Renville’s voice cleaved through Ellios’s reverie, sharp and urgent as a fire bell in the dead of a silent night.

  "Son..."

  Gauss turned fully, offering his broad back to the punishing sea gale. His rugged, weathered face now fixed Ellios with a stare stripped of all mockery, replaced instead by a harrowing, terrifying pity.

  "If it is absolute power you truly crave..." Gauss's heavy voice rumbled over the crashing waves. "...You are grievously mistaken to curry favor with the regional lords."

  He spat to the side in raw disgust.

  "Those pathetic Dukes? They are mere puppets saddled with tin crowns, squabbling over stale breadcrumbs at the banquet table."

  Gauss tapped a calloused, heavy index finger against his own breastplate.

  "Myself included. You wasted your journey coming all this way. I am merely a gatekeeper, Ellios. I do not hold the keys."

  Ellios furrowed his brow, profoundly bewildered. If Duke Renville—one of the most formidable warlords in Carta—considered himself a mere porter, then who was the true master of this estate?

  Gauss leaned his scarred face closer, his hushed whisper somehow carrying more weight than his previous roar.

  "If you wish to sit upon the true throne... journey to the Old Mansion of House Sanjaya."

  Ellios’s heart ceased its beating.

  "...Or prostrate yourself before the Jasmine Temple of House Rahessa."

  KRA-KOOM!

  It was no thunderclap from the heavens. The sky above remained sullen and mute.

  It was a thunderbolt detonating directly within the confines of Ellios’s skull.

  Those two names.

  House Sanjaya.

  House Rahessa.

  The blood drained from Ellios’s visage instantly, leaving him paler than a fresh corpse. His legs, which had merely trembled from the wind moments ago, now suffered a total collapse of strength. He had to claw desperately at the freezing stone balustrade just to keep from sliding to the flagstones.

  These were not mere noble surnames. They were the Absolute Taboo.

  Within the high echelons of Carta, those names were never spoken aloud. They were phantoms. They were myths whispered with bone-deep dread in the lightless corners of clandestine chambers. Elders forbade their children from uttering those syllables in the open air, terrified the wind might carry them and summon unspeakable calamity.

  House Sanjaya, the Shadow Architects purported to rewrite history the moment the ink dried in the royal ledgers.

  House Rahessa, the Temple Guardians who gripped the reins of the arcane and the incomprehensible.

  To Ellios's ears, hearing those titles spoken so brazenly upon an open balcony felt like the blackest blasphemy. It felt akin to hearing a man violently curse the gods within the nave of a cathedral.

  Yet, Gauss Renville spoke them with effortless casualty.

  Profoundly casual.

  His tone was flat, natural, and utterly unburdened. As if "Sanjaya" and "Rahessa" were merely the names of next-door neighbors from whom he might borrow a pinch of salt. There was no terror, no trembling, exaggerated reverence. Only stark fact.

  "Y-you..." Ellios stammered, the words snagging in his bone-dry throat. "You named them..."

  He stared at Gauss in absolute horror.

  This old man has gone mad, Ellios thought in a rising panic. He is completely unhinged.

  Let alone seeking an audience—the mere notion of knocking upon their gates sounded like elaborate suicide. And Gauss was instructing him to go there? To march willingly into the maw of the leviathans that even the Kings dreaded to glance upon?

  This revelation was a catastrophic blow to Ellios’s perceived reality.

  All his life, he believed himself a master of the game. He believed he possessed the entire political topography of Carta. He knew who bribed whom, who shared whose bed.

  But tonight, upon this salt-crusted balcony, Gauss had just informed him that he was utterly blind.

  The political games waged by Ellios, Louis, and Reine were nothing more than a pathetic puppet show on the vanguard stage. Meanwhile, behind the heavy velvet curtains, within the untouchable abyss, House Sanjaya and House Rahessa pulled the true strings.

  A violent wave of nausea assaulted Ellios. The world, it seemed, was infinitely darker, deeper, and more harrowing than he had ever dared to conjure in his most feverish nightmares.

  Silence reigned.

  A suffocating, prolonged silence.

  The hurricane gale continued to shriek out in the void, the waves ceaselessly pulverizing the reef, yet to Ellios’s ears, the world had descended into a state of suspended animation. Only the deafening thud of his own heart filled his skull, racing wildly against the suffocating grip of terror.

  Ellios’s brain, an ever-churning engine of calculation, scrambled desperately for purchase. He was a merchant. He was a Randar. To his bloodline, every facet of existence was a transaction. Absolute power, mortal lives, buried secrets—everything bore a price tag. If Sanjaya and Rahessa were the true key-masters, then he simply needed to ascertain what currency they accepted.

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  Ellios swallowed heavily, attempting to lubricate his parched throat. He summoned the nerve to meet Gauss’s ancient eyes.

  "Then..." Ellios’s voice was raspy, nearly swallowed by the gale. "...What transaction can I offer House Sanjaya?"

  He awaited a numeric figure. He awaited an inventory of assets. Gold mines? Classified state intelligence? The King’s own head?

  Gauss turned his head slowly.

  There was no mockery etched upon his features this time. No booming laughter. Only a hollow, glacial stare, as if Ellios had just inquired about the purchasing price of the sun.

  Gauss shook his head.

  Slowly. Resolutely. Wordlessly.

  That shake did not signify "I do not know." That shake signified "There is none."

  It was an absolute, unequivocal rejection of the very concept of transaction. Sanjaya did not barter. They required nothing Ellios possessed. They did not need coin; they forged the currency. They did not require information; they authored the history books.

  Ellios felt the icy tendrils of despair creeping up his throat. The first door had been bolted shut before he could even raise his hand to knock.

  He bit down on his lower lip, fighting the tremors wracking his frame. He had no other recourse. He had to inquire about the second door. The infinitely darker door.

  "Then..." Ellios whispered, his voice trembling violently. "...House Rahessa?"

  The ocean gale seemed to abruptly hold its breath.

  Gauss Renville did not answer immediately. He pivoted his massive frame, raking his eyes over Ellios from his wind-ravaged hair down to his quivering boots. That was not the gaze of a benevolent uncle. It was the clinical, appraising stare of a slaughterhouse butcher estimating the yield of prime cattle.

  Those ancient eyes stripped Ellios bare. Not sexually, but purely biologically. Assessing the quality of his marbled flesh, the density of his bone, the purity of his blood.

  Then, Gauss parted his lips. One word slithered out, flat and devoid of emotion, yet it struck Ellios with a concussive force far more devastating than any physical blow Louis could ever deliver.

  "Your flesh."

  Ellios’s universe violently caved in.

  Not your soul, not your fealty.

  Your flesh.

  Ellios staggered backward, his spine colliding with the freezing masonry of the tower. A profound, sickening nausea violently assaulted his gut. Harrowing visions of Shade Walkers hunting for living hosts, of blood-drenched rituals, of sacrificial meat offered upon dark altars, swirled madly in his mind.

  Before House Rahessa, Ellios Randar—the most aesthetically flawless youth in Ironseat, the heir to the staggering Randar fortune—was nothing more than a slab of fresh meat waiting to be consumed.

  Ellios remained pinned against the glacial stone wall, his chest heaving as he fought down the bile rising in his throat. The words your flesh continued to buzz in his ears like carrion flies refusing to abandon a corpse.

  He felt utterly naked. He felt mortally threatened. He realized that every intricate political strategy he had meticulously constructed over his lifetime was nothing but a fragile house of cards poised before a category-five hurricane.

  Suddenly, a massive, leaden hand descended upon his shoulder.

  THWACK!

  The clap was brutal, nearly fracturing Ellios’s collarbone, yet the jolt of pain was precisely what was required to violently yank his consciousness back from the abyss of panic.

  Gauss Renville towered over him, his fearsome, weathered face now adorned with a broad grin that was bizarrely... comforting.

  "Son..." Gauss softened his tone, though its volume still rivaled a lion's roar. "...Remain here."

  Ellios looked up, his narrowed, watering eyes fixing upon the Duke. "H-here?"

  "Yes. In Dum-Shadd," Gauss decreed.

  He thrust a finger toward the north, toward the distant mountain ranges swallowed entirely by the suffocating night.

  "Do not even entertain the thought of retreating to your father now. Even Mount Rhagas is not the impenetrable sanctuary you believe it to be."

  Ellios gasped. "Rhagas? But... my father employs elite mercenaries. He possesses the most exorbitant defense arrays..."

  Gauss offered a dismissive, guttural snort.

  "Coin buys stone walls, Ellios. But coin cannot purchase a spine. When the world fractures and the shadows begin their crawl, the gold stockpiled in your father's vaults will serve as nothing more than an anchor to drag him down into the abyss."

  Gauss gripped Ellios’s shoulder, a fierce, possessive squeeze. He pivoted his massive frame, sweeping his free hand toward the monolithic black stone battlements encircling them.

  "Dum-Shadd is a different breed of beast entirely!" he proclaimed with savage pride.

  His voice ricocheted off the ancient masonry, battling the thunder overhead.

  "Here, our sole currency is blood and steel. Here, our walls are not purchased, but erected atop the pulverized corpses of our enemies."

  Gauss brought his scarred face inches from Ellios’s, his eyes glinting with a feral mirth that radiated an aura of absolute, terrifying dominance—an aura that turned the marrow in Ellios’s knees to jelly.

  "No one dares lay a finger upon House Renville, Son. Not the King, not the Northern Alliance, and certainly not those phantoms of Sanjaya or Rahessa!"

  Then, the laughter detonated once more.

  "BWAHAHAHAHA!"

  Gauss’s mirth violently shook the balcony, wild and utterly unchained.

  "So long as you stand sheltered behind my back, even the God of Death himself must politely knock upon the gate before attempting to claim you!"

  Ellios stared at the old warlord through a blurred haze. Amidst the shrieking hurricane, the encroaching apocalypse, and the monsters slithering from the void, the maniacal laughter of Gauss Renville somehow sounded like the most rational thing he had heard all night. A deranged guarantee of sanctuary, offered by the most uncompromisingly mad warlord in all of Carta.

  Ellios watched the broad back of the old Duke, still vibrating with his own roaring mirth. The laughter slowly ebbed, usurped once more by the escalating fury of the gale, yet its commanding echo lingered in Ellios’s ears.

  Ellios’s hooded eyes drifted upward, locking onto the heavy iron flagpole anchored to the balcony’s edge.

  There, amidst the violent thrashing of the storm, a colossal grand banner whipped savagely in the wind. The fabric was dense, dyed a deep, dark crimson akin to coagulated blood, yet the sigil emblazoned in its center was embroidered with spun gold thread that flashed with arrogant brilliance every time the lightning struck.

  Ellios murmured softly, his voice barely a ghost on the wind.

  "House Renville..."

  His eyes traced the intricate details of the sigil. It was no roaring lion, no mythical dragon, no crossed swords.

  An Acacia Tree.

  Ellios had once privately mocked that crest. To his refined sensibilities, a tree was a remarkably passive, insipid symbol for a martial dynasty. Yet tonight, perched upon this precipice of jagged coral, he finally comprehended its gravity.

  It was no mundane sapling.

  It was a tree that thrived in the most desolate, unforgiving badlands. Its trunk was gnarled, twisted, yet dense as cast iron; its sweeping branches bristled with vicious, flesh-rending thorns, ready to eviscerate any fool daring enough to scale it. But the most harrowing aspect was its root system.

  Ellios visualized those acacia roots... violently boring through unyielding limestone, pulverizing bedrock, plunging deep into the subterranean depths to viciously claw at the foundational reefs of the earth.

  "A resilient tree..." Ellios whispered, his gaze welded to the violently snapping banner. "...With roots that sink their fangs deep into the bedrock..."

  That tree could not be violently uprooted. The most cataclysmic storms could not fell it. The most savage tidal waves could not wash it into the abyss. It endured by drinking corrosive saltwater and devouring raw stone.

  Exactly like Gauss Renville.

  And beneath the sigil of the acacia, inscribed upon a midnight-black ribbon, were ancient words that Ellios had historically skimmed over in legal tomes with dismissive contempt.

  But tonight, etched against the bleeding sky, those words felt like a definitive death sentence for anyone audacious enough to defy the Duke.

  Ellios read the motto aloud, a mere breath of sound, feeling the crushing, leaden weight of every syllable upon his tongue.

  "I am the Law."

  Not "We Guard the Law," nor "The Law Above All."

  Merely "I."

  Here in the South, there existed no drafted constitution. There was no royal decree. There were no divine mandates.

  There was solely the iron will of Gauss Renville.

  A violent shiver wracked Ellios’s frame. A bizarre, contradictory sense of absolute security inextricably braided with primal, suffocating terror enveloped him. He was seeking refuge beneath the canopy of this thorny, unforgiving tree, within a brutal domain where a single man dared to claim himself as the absolute law of nature itself.