Chapter 92 — The Burden of Crowns and the Cry of the Soul
The echo of the battle against the Siknus and Sekmet brothers had finally dissipated into the gloom of the forest, leaving behind the acrid stench of blood and sulfur. After gathering the pieces of Britannia, Merlin used sealing magic to erase all traces of the skirmish. The journey toward Britannia, the majestic capital, continued in a leaden silence, broken only by the groaning wheels of the replacement carriage summoned by the mage.
The months passed at the royal palace, chaining together at a dizzying speed. For Damian, this change of life was a seismic shift. Far from the blows and contempt of the Emberfall manor, he discovered court life, but above all, the shadow of an invisible political threat. Conspiracies whispered beneath the gilding. Then, the irreparable occurred.
Barely a few months after his arrival at the palace, the news fell like a guillotine, severing the thread of his innocence: the Emberfall manor had been attacked in the dead of night and entirely razed by fire. His family his father Astrea, and his brothers Jester and Zairos had been exterminated in a blaze of unimaginable violence. When Damian learned of the massacre, a paradoxical pain tore through his chest. It was not just the grief of a son and a brother; it was the vertigo of suddenly finding himself entirely alone in the world, suspended over a void, the sole survivor of a name erased from the map in a single night.
At first, his mind refused the ugliness of reality. He tried to convince himself that it was the work of external enemies, of lawless plunderers, or perhaps the bloody vengeance of a rival faction lurking in the shadows of the kingdom. He wandered through the palace corridors, his mind clouded, clinging desperately to Arthur's shoulder like a lifeline.
"They are monsters, Arthur..." Damian would whisper back then, his eyes reddened by sleepless nights. "The knights will find the bandits who did this, won't they? Your father will send the army?"
Arthur, from the height of his 7 years, lowered his eyes, his fists clenched in the folds of his tunic.
"The King's justice will be served, Damian. Always," he replied, his voice already too grave, almost choked.
But destiny did not stop there. The cruel world of adults refused to grant their childhood the slightest respite. Shortly after, Arthur's mother succumbed to her long illness. This mourning was not merely an intimate tragedy for the prince; it was the trigger for an invisible and irreversible rift between the two boys. On the evening of the Queen's death, Damian braved the guards to join Arthur in the royal chapel, where the sovereign's body lay beneath a white shroud. The young prince was on his knees, motionless, a shadow among shadows.
"Arthur..." Damian murmured, approaching softly, extending a trembling hand toward his friend. "I'm here. I know what it's like... to lose a mother. You aren't all alone."
Arthur did not turn around. His shoulders remained rigid, petrified by a precocious and terrifying dignity.
"You know nothing, Damian," Arthur replied, his voice stripped of all warmth, echoing against the cold stones of the chapel. "They took yours from you by force. I watched my mother fade away even though my father possesses the greatest power in the world, and none of his armies could defeat the disease. Power is an illusion... in the end."
"Don't say that," Damian insisted, tears in his eyes. "We're friends, Arthur, remember? We'll get through this together."
Arthur rose slowly, finally turning to face him. His blue eyes, once so bright, seemed to have gone out, replaced by the implacable coldness of the throne that awaited him.
"Kings do not have friends, Damian. They only have subjects."
From one day to the next, Arthur became distant and cold, locking himself into a total silence. It was not anger that distanced him, but a new gravity an invisible barrier made of secrets too heavy for his age. He was in denial, engaging in one runaway flight after another. The two boys, once so close that they shared their slightest secrets, progressively ceased to speak to each other. They became perfect strangers within the same palace, crossing paths in the dark galleries like two ghosts condemned to haunt the same tomb. When their gazes met, Damian searched for remorse, an explanation, while Arthur let nothing be read except an immense and fathomless weariness. Silence had become their only common language, a gulf of the unsaid that widened with every passing second, until the memory of their bond felt like nothing more than an old, distant dream.
One evening, deep within the subterranean vaults of the Royal Archives, the gloom of the imperial records was not just dark; it was heavy. It weighed upon Damian's shoulders like the weight of centuries and buried secrets. For hours, he had been turning the pages of decayed registers, his fingers blackened by ink and the dust of oblivion. He was desperately searching for a trace, a name, a simple troop movement order from the night his life had shattered into pieces. Nothing. Only the silence of the tombs.
It was then that the sound of shuffling footsteps, interrupted by the scraping of a cane, broke the sepulchral quiet. Vane. The former captain of the guard was now nothing but a shadow of the iron man he once was. Wounded in battle, gnawed by a sickness of the soul that medicine could not cure, he exhaled an odor of impending death and remorse. Damian had been tracking him for weeks, but tonight, Vane no longer ran. His eyes, clouded by tears and fever, sought Damian's gaze. The old man knew his days were numbered, and the weight of his silence had become a torture more unbearable than death itself.
### The Former Captain's Confession
In the flickering, dying glow of a single candle, Vane nearly collapsed onto a rough wooden table. His hand, racked by uncontrollable tremors, rested upon a small, worn leather box, frayed by years of secrecy.
"You are still looking for culprits among the local lords, Damian..." the old man began. His voice was nothing but a hoarse breath, broken by a sob he tried to swallow. "You are wasting your time, my boy. You are scratching the surface of a bottomless pit. The mercenaries who burned your estate, those who executed your people... they only obeyed one man."
Damian's heart skipped a beat. The silence returned, even more oppressive, disturbed only by the crackling of the wax wick. With a gesture that was almost solemn, Vane lifted the lid of the box. His calloused fingers drew out a yellowed parchment, its musty smell suddenly saturating the air of the room. At the bottom of the document, a splash of red wax gleamed like a drop of fresh blood under the unstable light.
Damian took a step back, his breath catching. He instantly recognized the emblem engraved into the material: the golden tree. The personal and inviolable seal of the sovereign.
"Look at the date, Damian. Look at it closely, I beg of you," Vane whispered, tears now flowing freely down his wrinkled cheeks. "It is the day before the massacre. This order for 'territorial cleansing'... it wasn't a military blunder. It wasn't a backroom conspiracy. The document was never discussed in Council. The King drafted and signed it in person, alone in his private chambers."
Vane lowered his head, unable to meet the young man's gaze.
"Your family had become too influential, Damian... particularly Lord Astrea. He was plotting against His Majesty... The throne trembled, and when kings are afraid, it is the innocent who bleed. It was Arthur's father... it was the royal family who funded and orchestrated the end of your people. While you wept over the ashes of your home, they mourned by your side, a hand upon your shoulder."
Damian did not answer. The sound of Vane's words seemed to stifle, as if time had frozen. His eyes remained transfixed by that piece of red wax. It was not just the truth exploding; it was his entire past being rewritten in horror. The shared meals, the vows of allegiance, the childhood laughter with Arthur...
Everything had been nothing but an immense, sadistic masquerade. The golden tree, a symbol of justice under which he had sworn to serve, became the executioner of his lineage. The cold of the Royal Archives seeped beneath his skin, freezing his tears before they could even fall. In his chest, the immense void left by grief was instantaneously filled by a new darkness, heavy and implacable. His world had just collapsed, and upon the ruins of his innocence, a dull, monumental rage began to beat to the rhythm of his heart.
The following day, the sky over Britannia was heavy, laden with leaden-grey clouds. The entire capital was in a panic. King Richard had just been officially declared "missing" during a mysterious military campaign, leaving the kingdom on the brink of the abyss. This was also the exact period when Damian had discovered the official truth: King Richard had personally signed the edict of extermination for the Emberfall lineage because irrefutable evidence of conspiracy and high treason against the crown had been uncovered against Lord Astrea. Damian found Arthur sitting alone by the edge of a marble basin, his gaze blank, already wearing the heavy black cloak of the regent. The rage accumulated over the years exploded within Damian.
"Arthur!" Damian screamed, his fists clenched, tears of anger streaming down his cheeks. "Tell me it's a lie! Your father... your father gave the order to kill my mother?! She had done nothing! She wasn't a traitor! Why didn't you tell me anything?!"
Arthur did not move. He did not even blink. His blue eyes, once so bright, now seemed made of royal ice.
"You cannot understand, Damian," Arthur replied in a flat, almost robotic voice. "My father acted for the survival of the kingdom. The Emberfalls were preparing a coup d'état."
Damian gripped the collar of Arthur's tunic, his fingers trembling as much from rage as from despair. The royal fabric crumpled beneath his grasp, a pathetic symbol of an authority he refused to respect.
"Look at me, Arthur!" Damian yelled, his voice breaking into sobs. "Don't give me your grand regent words! 'The survival of the kingdom'? My mother was gunned down by royal guards! What danger did she pose to your throne? Tell me!"
Arthur did not flinch immediately. His blue eyes, usually so warm when they studied together in the library, had hardened into two blocks of ice. Yet, deep within his pupils, a flicker of pure distress wavered.
"Let go of me, Damian," Arthur commanded, his voice dropping to a flat, mechanical whisper. "You are making a scene. The guards are watching."
"I don't give a damn about the guards! I don't give a damn about Britannia!" Damian tightened his grip, pulling Arthur closer to his face. "You knew. From the very beginning, you knew what your father had done. And you let me cry on your shoulder, pretending to be ignorant of the truth! You are a monster, Arthur. Just like him."
It was too much. Something shattered the armor of stoicism Arthur was fighting so hard to wear. With a swift movement and a strength unexpected for a twelve-year-old boy, he shoved Damian's hands away. His features twisted, finally revealing the storm that was ravaging his mind.
"You talk about your loss, Damian?!" Arthur shouted, his voice vibrating with a contained anger that echoed against the marble walls. "You have no idea what I am feeling! You have no conception of the pressure weighing on me! The entire kingdom is on the brink of civil war, my father has vanished, my mother is dead, and if he isn't found, I will have to ascend the throne at twelve years old! Do you really think I have time to listen to you whine?!"
Arthur stood up, towering over Damian with all his nascent imperial stature.
"The loss of my father... the man who ordered that... you think that means nothing to me?! Losing both my father and my mother at the same time is an agony you cannot even conceive! And yet, I was always there to support you, Damian. I dragged you out of your hell, I gave you a roof, I protected you! And today, of all days... the single day of my life where I desperately need someone to rely on, someone to carry a bit of this burden with me... there is no one. Because you are focused entirely on your own goddamn self, incapable of putting what happened behind you. You are boundlessly selfish, Damian! You resent me for a judicial decision that concerned the entire territory! And to tell you the truth, no, I didn't know from the start I found out 3 months ago! Because despite the fact that we were distant, I too was researching what happened to your family. Then I discovered everything... I demanded explanations from my father, and he explained it all to me."
Arthur turned his back, his shoulders trembling slightly beneath the weight of his cloak.
"My father would never have done such a thing without a valid reason. And you know it deep down inside. You know very well what kind of monster your father was. But it's easier to shift the blame onto others than to face your own family's sins."
The very evening this terrible truth shattered their friendship, the capital erupted into a thousand lights to celebrate the news that had just broken: the King was officially dead, and Arthur was to be crowned. The bells of the great cathedral rang out across all of Britannia, announcing his coronation as Prince Regent. For the people, it was the dawn of a new era; for Damian, it was the death knell of his innocence. This was the exact day the curtain fell. Between the two boys, a heavy, definitive silence settled, sharper than an undertow. Not another word, not another glance. Nothing but the echo of past laughter, now poisoned.
Unable to breathe the corrupt air of the palace any longer, suffocated by the weight of state secrets and the hypocritical smiles of the court, Damian made a radical decision. At twelve years old, with a worn suitcase in hand and rage in his heart, he turned his back on the capital to exile himself to the edges of the kingdom, at the prestigious but austere academy of Etheria.
As the sole surviving heir of the Emberfall line, Damian was nothing more than a ghost. The Crown had seized everything: the lands of his ancestors, the family fortune, and even their dignity. The name Emberfall, once synonymous with courage and devotion, had just been extinguished in the infamy of treason. He left empty-handed, stripped of his past, deciding to go to Etheria simply to get away from it all.
To be continued…..