Chapter 91— The Angel of Albion
Private office of Lord Astrea Emberfall;
Night had fallen over the Emberfall manor, thick and cold. A mournful autumn wind blew against the ancient stained-glass windows, making the candle flames flicker atop the massive black oak desk. The room was vast, dark, and oppressive, almost suffocating. The high shelves groaned under the weight of ancient, worn leather-bound books, military maps yellowed by time, and sinister war trophies: broken swords still stained with dried blood, dented enemy helmets, and an imposing black dragon horn mounted on a solid gold pedestal that seemed to watch the scene with its empty eyes.
Lord Astrea sat in his armchair, which was sculpted like a throne, holding a goblet of dark red wine. His harsh face, chiseled by years of battle and consuming ambition, was half-plunged into darkness. His cold, calculating green eyes stared at the dancing flames of the fireplace without truly seeing them. He was relentlessly replaying the scene he had witnessed earlier in the courtyard: his unworthy son, Damian, laughing out loud with the young Prince Arthur under the moonlight. That image gnawed at his insides more violently than the finest poison.
Suddenly, the air in the room grew heavier, denser, as if charged with an ancient and malevolent magic. The temperature dropped brutally. A shadow detached itself from the darkest corner of the office, where even the candlelight seemed to refuse to go. The darkness itself took human form.
Agnor.
The masked man appeared silently, dressed in a black cloak with shifting blue reflections. His face was entirely concealed behind a silver mask engraved with ancient runes that seemed to faintly ripple. His mere presence sent a shiver crawling down the spine.
Astrea did not flinch. He was accustomed to these nightly visits. He slowly set his goblet down on the desk, the crystal clinking against the wood, and spoke in a low, raspy, almost weary voice:
"You are early."
Agnor inclined his head slightly. His voice filtered through the mask, cold and venomous, like a serpent sliding over stone:
"Have you done what I asked, Astrea? If you manage to capture Prince Arthur during his stay here, our agreement will be fulfilled. With the heir in your hands, you will be able to blackmail Richard. The king will have no choice but to abdicate or negotiate on the terms you dictate. At that moment, we will spring the trap, and I will kill him myself. And you... you will finally become the new king of Britannia. Given that you are the most powerful noble after him, without an heir... the throne will rightfully fall to you."
Astrea gripped the goblet until his knuckles turned white. A flash of fierce ambition and pure hatred lit up his gaze.
"The plan is unfolding as expected," he replied. "Upon his return from training tomorrow evening, he will be quietly captured. As for Merlin, he is not a problem; we have already planned to draw him away or temporarily neutralize him with the poison you provided. Everything is in place."
Agnor remained silent for a moment, as if savoring the atmosphere of treason that filled the room, then asked in an almost amused tone:
"And this jealousy that consumes you... is it still as sharp as ever?"
Astrea let out a bitter, almost painful laugh that echoed strangely in the office.
"Richard... The Angel of Albion. That is what they call him, isn't it? A man blessed by the gods, a king loved by his people, a just and irreproachable sovereign. Everything I am not. Everything I could never become, despite all my spilled blood and sacrifices."
He rose slowly, his large silhouette casting an oversized shadow on the walls. He walked over to the window and placed a hand against the cold glass, his gaze lost in the darkness of his estate.
"I spent my life building this family, crushing my enemies, spilling my blood for this kingdom... and he reaps love and glory without the slightest effort. The people adore him. The gods favor him. Even my own son... that miserable failure... looks at him with eyes shining with admiration."
His voice dropped lower, heavy with a resentment accumulated over decades.
"But soon... all of that will change."
Agnor nodded, visibly satisfied.
"There is nothing to worry about. Everything depends on you."
The shadow stepped back slowly and melted into the darkness of the office, disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared, as if swallowed by the night itself.
Astrea was left alone. Silence fell once more, disturbed only by the crackling of the fire. A cold, cruel, and calculating smile slowly stretched across his lips.
"I intended to hire A-rank assassins to dispose of Arthur," he murmured to himself. "At his young age, he won't be able to do anything against professionals. A tragic accident during the return journey... no one will suspect a thing. Then, we will put pressure on Richard, making him believe I still hold Arthur alive, even though he will already be on the other side..."
He raised his goblet as if to toast silently to the darkness.
"Soon... the throne will be mine."
The day of departure arrived, gray and heavy, as if the sky itself bore the weight of their goodbyes.
Damian stood in the main courtyard of the Emberfall manor, his shoulders slumped, his gaze fixed on the royal carriage bearing the coat of arms of Britannia. Arthur was already settled inside, surrounded by his guards. The young prince had tried to smile to comfort him, but Damian felt his heart tighten. For the first time in years, he had found a friend. And now, that friend was leaving.
Merlin, standing near the carriage, adjusted his cloak with a nonchalant gesture. Damian approached quickly, pulled the great mage by the sleeve, stood on his tiptoes, and whispered in a trembling voice:
"Please... take me with you."
Merlin raised an eyebrow, amused. Before he could answer, Arthur's clear, firm voice rang out from inside the carriage:
"Merlin."
The mage turned slightly. Arthur, sitting with an already royal bearing despite his youth, declared without hesitation:
"Take Damian with us."
Merlin inclined his head slightly, a smirk playing on his lips.
"As my prince wishes."
Joan of Arc then leapt down gracefully from the roof of the carriage, her white cloak fluttering behind her. Dressed in her light armor, her sword at her side, she took her place beside Merlin in a flawless stance.
Merlin stepped toward Lord Astrea, who stood on the manor steps, his face rigid. In a calm, almost casual tone, the mage announced:
"Lord Astrea, His Highness Prince Arthur has decided that Damian will accompany him to Britannia. Consider this a direct order from the heir to the throne."
Astrea's eyes widened, then his face hardened.
"That is out of the question. Damian's training is not complete. He would be nothing but dead weight to the prince."
The atmosphere immediately turned glacial. Merlin tilted his head slightly, a cold and elegant smile on his lips, as if contemplating a particularly entertaining insect.
"Oh, my dear Lord..." he began in a sweet, almost compassionate voice. "This is fascinating. You dare to contest a direct order from the crown prince? In front of witnesses? What refreshing audacity. I was unaware that second-rate nobles had developed such a... keen sense of humor."
Astrea clenched his fists, his face flushing red.
"Prince or not, Arthur does not have the right to come into my home and decide who leaves or stays! Much less to take my son as he pleases!"
Merlin let out a low, almost affectionate laugh, as if speaking to a slow-witted child.
"Take your son? Oh, Lord Astrea, don't be so dramatic. One would almost think you actually care about him. How touching... but let us not pretend we don't know what is truly happening here."
He took a step forward, his piercing gaze locking onto the noble's with sovereign contempt.
"Allow me to remind you of a minor, unpleasant truth: the prince's authority extends over the entire kingdom. Including your modest estate. Refusing his order? It is... how shall I put it... a stroke of almost artistic stupidity. One might even view it as the beginnings of treason, if one were in a pedantic mood. But I am certain an intelligent man like yourself would not want to make such a... fatal mistake. Would you?"
The ensuing silence was suffocating. Astrea trembled with suppressed rage, but he could feel the trap closing around him. Merlin continued, his voice smooth as poisoned velvet:
"Come now, don't make that face. Smile. You are offering your son an opportunity you could never have given him yourself. Consider it an act of paternal generosity... enforced."
Astrea finally yielded, his teeth gritted.
"...Prepare Damian's belongings. Quickly."
A few minutes later, Damian went up to his room, his legs shaking and his heart pounding wildly in his chest. The shock of what had just happened left a dizzying void inside him. He looked at his meager belongings laid out on the bed, finally realizing the weight of his choice.
The door creaked softly. Lady Elara walked in, her muted steps betraying an immense sadness. Seeing her little boy looking so frail and broken, tears broke through her makeup. She stepped forward and took him in her arms, holding him tightly against her, as if trying to piece his soul back together.
"Mother... I don't understand why I did it..." Damian whispered, his voice completely broken, muffled against the fabric of her dress. "I... I told Arthur I wanted to leave with them. I'm the one who asked... I'm the one who chose to run away."
She placed a trembling finger on his lips with infinite tenderness, cutting off his guilty stammering.
"Hush, my angel... Do not blame yourself. It is the most beautiful and courageous decision you could have made. You chose to live." A warm tear from his mother fell onto Damian's cheek. "You suffer here... I saw it in your eyes every day, for years, and my motherly heart bled knowing I could only offer you a refuge of a few minutes at night. This manor is destroying you, Damian. It would have turned you into one of those soulless monsters. But with the prince... I saw you smile. A real, pure smile, unlike any you've ever had."
Damian burst into tears, his small sobs turning into deep gasps of pain. He buried his face deeper into her shoulder, greedily breathing in her scent of lavender and rose, engraving that smell into his memory for the years to come.
"I love you so much, Mother..." he choked out, his body racked with tremors. "I'm so afraid to leave you alone with him... I feel like I'm abandoning you to his blows. But I promise... I will write to you every day. Tons of letters. And I will become strong, not like my brothers, but strong enough to come back for you. I will come back to see you as soon as I can, I swear it..."
Lady Elara closed her eyes, stifling a moan of pain at her son's guilt. She smiled through her tears a heartbreaking smile, yet bathed in absolute pride.
"Do not worry about me, my treasure. My only compass in this hell was knowing you were happy. Knowing you are far from here, safe, will be my greatest strength. And I love you from the very depths of my heart, my son. More than life itself. Never forget who you are. Guard your heart and stay just as you are, for your kindness is infinite, my baby."
They remained embraced for long minutes, suspended out of time, before finally having to walk back down together. Each step leading to the courtyard felt like it weighed a ton.
Down below, Damian's makeshift luggage was already packed into the back. In the middle of the courtyard, the atmosphere was freezing. Lord Astrea refused to even look at his youngest son, turning his back on him with sovereign disdain, while Jester and Zairos watched the scene with empty eyes, already consumed by the dragon's blood.
Near the carriage door, Prince Arthur was waiting. Seeing Damian approach, his eyes red but his posture straightened by a newfound dignity, Arthur flashed him a wide, genuine smile a smile that said, 'You did the right thing, I've got you now.'
Damian stopped one last time, casting a final, agonizing look at his mother, who nodded to encourage him not to falter. Then, he returned Arthur's smile. It was still a timid smile, heavy with unshed tears, but deeply sincere. It was the smile of a boy leaving his traumas behind to step toward his destiny.
The two children climbed aboard. The coachman cracked his whip, and the carriage lurked forward with a screeching of wheels, carrying Damian and Arthur away from that cursed manor, toward the capital of Britannia. In the reflection of the window, Damian watched his mother's silhouette shrink bit by bit, until she disappeared entirely into the autumn mist.
Hours later, night had completely swallowed the estate, stretching hostile shadows into every corner of the manor. In the dim light of his study, Lord Astrea Emberfall smiled coldly, his eyes fixed on the flames of the hearth dancing across his expressionless face. The crackling of the wood was the only sound breaking the deathly silence of the room.
The heavy oak door creaked open. Lady Elara walked in slowly, her face still stained with tears, but carrying a glimmer of inner relief she hadn't felt in years. Her son was finally free.
"Now that Damian is gone... you can do whatever you want with the rest," she murmured, her voice trembling but firm, braving the gaze of the man she feared so much. "You can strike me, humiliate me, break what is left of this house. I don't care. At least my son is out of this hell."
Astrea did not move an inch. Then, a low, raspy chuckle, entirely devoid of humanity, escaped his lips. It was a laugh that instantly sent a chill down Elara's spine.
"You really are foolish, Elara," he breathed without even turning around, his voice nothing but a venomous whisper. "That was undoubtedly the first and last time in your life you will ever speak to your son."
Elara's heart skipped a beat. She frowned, a feeling of visceral panic beginning to twist her entrails, failing to grasp the hidden meaning of his words.
"What... what are you talking about?" her voice faltered, losing all its confidence.
Astrea rose slowly, his imposing silhouette blocking the light of the fire, casting a gigantic shadow over his wife. His empty eyes, consumed by the dragon's blood, locked onto those of the wife he had terrorized for so long.
"I hired A-rank assassins to finish off Prince Arthur on the road to the capital," he dropped with icy detachment, as if speaking of a simple business transaction. "Unfortunately for you... they have orders to leave no survivors. They will kill all witnesses. And anyone close to him. Your precious Damian included."
At those words, the world collapsed around Elara. Her face instantly turned stark white, a deathly pallor. The realization that her decision to send her son away might have just signed his death warrant overwhelmed her with a mad, frantic terror.
"No... NO!" she screamed, the howl of a wounded wolf.
Losing all reason, guided purely by the absolute despair of a mother, she threw herself savagely at him. Her hands became claws, pounding on his chest, scratching at his face with all her might, trying to tear apart the monster standing before her. But human rage was nothing against Astrea's raw power.
With a swift, ruthless movement, he seized her wrists, pivoted, and slammed her violently against the stone wall. The impact knocked the wind out of Elara, while Astrea's gloved hand moved up to squeeze her throat with terrible force, cutting off her breath.
"Do not toy with me, woman," he hissed, his face inches from hers, dripping with boundless contempt.
"I will... I will tell King Richard everything!" she screamed in a final burst of defiance, her voice strangled but charged with pure hatred. "I will send him a messenger! I will write a letter! He will know what you did! He will destroy you all!"
Astrea's eyes darkened further. Without a word, he released her throat and delivered a brutal, monumental backhand slap. The sound of the blow echoed like a thunderclap through the enclosed room.
The violence of the impact was so severe that Elara was knocked unconscious instantly, her eyes rolling back. Her body, drained of all awareness, slid limply down the stone before collapsing heavily onto the rug.
Astrea stood motionless, calmly adjusting the sleeves of his lordly attire. He cast a freezing look down at his wife's inanimate body, his lips curling into a sneer of supreme disgust.
"Stupid. This is why I despise women. You are only good for breeding children."
He returned to his desk and sat down, plunging back into his dark calculations, leaving Elara's body lying in the darkness.
Meanwhile, the royal carriage rolled at a steady pace along the dirt road that wound through a dense, ancient forest. The moon's rays projected long, shifting shadows across the polished glass windows. Inside, the atmosphere was deceptively peaceful.
Arthur, sitting upright despite the jolts of the journey, turned his large blue eyes toward his mentor. Intrigued by the slowness of their pace when he knew the extent of the mage's powers, he asked in a childlike voice:
"Merlin... Why don't we just use teleportation magic to return straight to the palace?"
Merlin, leaning comfortably against the velvet cushions, crossed his legs. A mysterious and deeply amused smile stretched across his thin lips as he elegantly adjusted his long cloak.
"Because I haven't the slightest desire to, my young prince," he replied in a playful tone. "And besides, it is so much more fun to travel this way. It's by taking our time that we truly discover the beauty of this world... and, of course, the beauty of our dear Joan."
Outside, seated on the coachman's box with the reins held firmly in her gloved hands, Joan of Arc offered no verbal response to the mage's teasing. Yet, beneath her wide traveling hat, a slight, knowing smile touched her lips. Her sharp gaze continued to scan the surrounding thickets.
Suddenly, the air grew unnaturally heavy.
A few dozen meters away, concealed within the thick foliage of a centuries-old oak tree, a metallic glint flashed fleetingly. An unforgiving eye was pressed against the reticle of a magical alchemical arquebus—a forbidden weapon whose rune-engraved barrel pulsed with an unstable purple light. The barrel aligned perfectly with the silhouette of the young Prince Arthur through the window pane.
CLICK.
A shot of phenomenal power shattered the silence of the forest. A discharge of pure, condensed, and highly destructive alchemical energy tore through the air with a piercing hiss.
**BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!**
The impact was horrific. A devastating explosion struck the right flank of the royal carriage head-on. The woodwork blew into splinters, the structure twisted under the thermal heat, and the interlocking panels instantly dissolved into thick, black smoke. Under the shock of the blast, the vehicle flipped violently onto its side in a crash of metal and the panicked whinnying of horses.
A heavy silence fell once more, disturbed only by the crackling of magical flames. From the bushes emerged two massive, menacing silhouettes. The brothers Siknus and Sekmet, cold-blooded killers ranked A-class by the Shadow Guild, stepped forward slowly, weapons drawn.
"Ultimately, that was disconcertingly easy," Sekmet sneered, spitting on the ground as he theatrically slung his smoking arquebus onto his back. "High nobility targets always think they're untouchable."
"So, I wasn't mistaken about you..."
A low voice, radiating an absolute and terrifying serenity, echoed right behind their backs.
The two assassins spun around as one, their eyes wide with immense shock. Merlin stood there, upright in the middle of the dirt path, his attire impeccably clean without a single smudge of soot he had teleported everyone out of the carriage in a millisecond. Around him, a translucent magical aura an absolute protective barrier he had raised glimmered softly before dissipating.
Beside him, the silhouette of Joan of Arc straightened. The woman known on the battlefields as the Lightning of Albion drew her slender sword.
"Lord Merlin, you never fail to impress me with your sense of observation and your infallible sixth sense," Joan declared, her voice devoid of fear, her eyes locked onto the attackers.
Merlin took a step forward, his usually jovial face transformed into a mask of marble. His gaze turned an icy, almost inhuman green.
"I knew we were being followed from the moment we left the manor grounds," he replied coldly. "I was simply waiting for you to show your rat faces; that is the reason I didn't teleport us directly. Who hired you?"
Siknus and Sekmet realized instantly that they had failed. Driven by survival instinct, they roared and lunged forward. A brief but fierce combat erupted.
Joan bounded forward like a silver flash. Her speed was so prodigious that she left a trail of light in her wake. She had perfectly mastered King Richard's royal sword style a legendary martial art characterized by fluid, airborne movements combined with a lightning-fast, ruthless aggressiveness.
Sekmet attempted a downward slash with his heavy dagger, but Joan pivoted with surgical grace. Her blade deflected the strike with a sharp metallic hiss. Without losing her momentum, she executed a reverse counter-strike: the pommel of her sword slammed violently into Sekmet's jaw, shattering several of his teeth in a spray of blood.
Siknus tried to flank her, his spear aimed at her heart. Joan executed a perfectly timed body feint, the spearhead brushing past her torso. In a spinning motion of frightening speed, she cleanly sliced through the wooden shaft of the spear before delivering a masterful kick squarely to his sternum. The A-rank killer was launched backward, crashing hard against a tree trunk.
"Do not kill them!" Merlin ordered firmly, his voice echoing like a divine command. "We must interrogate them! You are the Donaldino brothers, aren't you?"
But the two assassins looked at each other, a gleam of desperate fanaticism shining in their eyes. They knew what happened to traitors who spoke. In a seamless, terrifying synchronization, they clamped their jaws shut hard enough to crack their teeth, deliberately biting down to swallow a capsule of alchemical cyanide hidden in their molars.
Their bodies were instantly seized by violent spasms. Their eyes rolled back, and they collapsed onto the forest floor, dead within moments with a final, raspy breath.
The heavy, oppressive silence returned. Merlin approached the corpses with measured steps. He knelt without hesitation and methodically searched their leather pouches. His fingers stopped on a small pouch. He pulled out several heavy gold coins, stamped with a highly specific crest: the Lion of Britannia surmounted by a stylized dragon wing.
Merlin's eyes narrowed. A flash of pure fury burned within them.
"I know who is behind this..." he murmured, clenching the coins in his fist.
Behind him, protected by a secondary magical dome that Merlin had deployed around them during the attack, Damian and Arthur slowly stepped out. The two seven-year-old boys, pale-faced and short of breath, stared at the lifeless bodies of the killers and the raw violence of the adult world that had just erupted before them. Shocked and terrified by the speed of the events, they stood, observing one another in silence.
To be continued...