PRINCE ARIDEL POV
I had spent my entire life believing that the future and destiny of Konsu was set on the tip of my blade. I had bled in the sand, pushed my core until my veins hummed with terminal resonance, and endured the King's crushing weight to prove I was close the Apex. But as I stood at the edge of the newly refined arena, the world I understood—the hierarchy I sat atop—shattered into a million jagged shards of violet and silver.
It wasn't just a spar. It was an atmospheric shift.
High above, on the Royal Gallery, my mother flared. It wasn't the warm, guiding light of a Queen; it was a cold, predatory nova that sucked the very oxygen from the stadium. Beside her, Luthien looked like a ghost caught in a storm. And then, they moved.
My mother didn't descend; she plummeted like a falling star. mid-air, she reached into the vacuum of her own power and pulled a bow of black-glass from the nothingness. It didn't reflect the emerald glow of the barrier; it seemed to eat it. With a grace that made my own movements feel like the stumbling of a drunkard, she notched a bolt of pure, concentrated Star-Impulse and let fly.
"Luthien, move!" I roared, but my voice was swallowed by the scream of the arrow.
The bolt hit the center of the arena floor. There was no explosion, only a total erasure. A hundred-foot crater vanished into dust instantly, the shockwave rippling through the sand and buckling the reinforced stone.
But Luthien was already gone.
I blinked, my eyes struggling to track her. She had leaped a microsecond before the draw, her form blurring into a streak of lunar silver. In her hands, the twin Moon-Grace pistols—relics of a forbidden fusion of Elven science and Northern engineering—glowed with a lethal, pulsating light.
Luthien didn't land. She used the debris—the massive, jagged chunks of stone kicked up by Mother's opening salvo—as stepping stones. She moved with a rhythmic, terrifying speed, her boots barely touching the floating rocks before she propelled herself forward.
Bang. Bang.
Two rounds of raw Impulse energy erupted from her pistols. They weren't just bullets; they were condensed screaming stars. They whistled past Mother's head, colliding with the emerald barrier behind her. The dome, which the Elders claimed could withstand a falling star, groaned. A spiderweb of cracks appeared at the point of impact, glowing a violent neon green before the ley-lines fused them back together.
"She's... she's faster than I expected," I whispered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
I had always looked at my sister as the diplomat,the flower of Konsu who preferred books to steel. I had protected her. I had stood in front of her during the Northern Envoy's arrival. But as I watched her bank off a floating pillar, her pistols spitting rhythmic fire that forced Mother to actually raise a hand to parry, I realized Luthien hadn't been avoiding the fight.
She had been hiding the margin.
Mother was holding back—I could see the ease in her draw, the way she didn't even shift her stance—but she was smiling. A real, chillingly proud smile. She was firing arrows that could level mountains, and Luthien was dancing between them, her twin pistols creating a web of silver light that countered every violet bolt.
Zip—Crack!
An arrow sheared through the air where Luthien's head had been a heartbeat prior. She responded by diving through the wake of the heat, her pistols barking in a synchronized melody. One shot forced Mother to tilt her head; the second clipped the silver-mesh on her shoulder, sending a spray of sparks into the air.
The crowd in the stands was dead silent. The Elders were shaking, their hands pressed against the barrier to keep it from collapsing under the sheer pressure of two Royal Bloodlines colliding.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling. I had fought the Lunar Phantoms for six hours and thought I was a god. But Luthien... she was moving at a frequency I couldn't even enter. Every shot she fired was a fatal calculation; every dodge was a brush with absolute erasure.
"She never told me," I muttered, my grip tightening on Star-Sliver.
King Emrys stood beside me, his face a mask of grim realization. He didn't look proud. He looked at the Queen and the Princess, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear in my father's eyes. He realized the same thing I did: the women of our house weren't just beautiful. They were the literal men of our household.
Luthien landed in the sand, her pistols smoking, her chest heaving as she stared up at Mother, who hovered a few feet above the ground. The arena was a ruin—a landscape of scorched glass and floating stone held together by the emerald cage.
"Again," Mother commanded, her voice echoing through the dome like a thunderclap. "You are still hesitating on the reload, Luthien. If the opponent gets inside your rhythm, your speed won't save you."
Luthien didn't argue. She spun the Moon-Grace pistols, her resonance flaring until her eyes turned into liquid mercury. She surged forward again, a blur of silver light and rhythmic gunfire.
I watched them, a spectator in my own kingdom. I realized then that the duel with Kagura wasn't just a test for me. It was a test for the South. And as I watched my sister—the quiet one—nearly crack the strongest barrier in our history just to stay alive against our mother, I realized that I wasn't the protagonist of this story.
I was the one who had invited the winter in, and I was the only one who didn't know how to survive the frost.