Spectacle was, without a shadow of doubt, the clan's greatest indulgence.
Eighteen blades. Two banners. One Lawkeeper.
Marching through the Inner Vale like a circus of shame dressed in ceremony.
Halls usually plagued by silence roared to life as the procession passed. Sealed windows were flung open as the convoy of twenty advanced.
The Walk of Judgment had begun.
Murmurs cut through the morning haze. Vassals, high dignitaries, and other attendants of the Inner Vale suddenly found urgent matters elsewhere whenever the procession drew too close to where they whispered. Private training sessions between the Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth lost all urgency. Mentors and protégés abandoned drills mid-sequence, flooding balconies and corridors like carrion birds circling a battlefield.
Their gazes were not the same.
Some were sharpened by envy. Others dulled by fear. Many gleamed with a sick satisfaction.
The Devil was about.
Too cowardly, or too bound, to strike themselves, they were more than willing to watch as the wolves of the law arrived.
One might have thought the spectacle had reached its climax.
No.
Not until the entirety of the Vale whispered.
Perhaps that was why their path led outward, away from the Inner Moon confinements where, by law, he should have been charged.
How amusing, Chion thought as the gates to the Outer Vale came into view.
His trajectory was obvious.
The Third Outer Moon Confinement.
A long, winding march through the vast Outer Vale, every step meant to ensure the full weight of Chion Nyxvalis's alleged crimes echoed through the clan before the day was done.
The procession moved through it all like a blade through water, parting everything, disturbing nothing permanently. Chion felt the weight of it settle across his shoulders like a second cloak. Not from shame. From the particular pressure of being watched by people who had already decided what they were seeing.
Servants froze mid-step as the procession passed. Vassals leaned from pillared archways, their pale faces half-hidden in shadow. Aspirant knights and young, unmantled Hollow-Bloods, those not yet inducted into the Blood Corpse Valley, paused their drills. The rhythmic clash of steel faltered into silence.
Most of them knew little of the Inner Vale's politics.
But the moment the Hand appeared, ignorance ceased to matter.
The whispers began.
Soft at first. Then multiplying. Drifting through the air like poison-laced smoke.
Is that…
The silver-eyed one.
He's just a child —
No. That's the one who —
They say he slaughtered hundreds in the Valley.
Forgot the Valley? Did you hear what he did in the Chambers of Night?
A devil wearing a boy's face.
Do you think they finally found proof?
None of it touched him. That was the part they never understood. The words landed and found nothing to stick to.
He dismissed the entire spectacle with a single, private word.
Pathetic.
What was judgment, after all, if it came from beings whose worth he measured against the dirt clinging to the soles of his boots?
No one welcomed a visit from the Hand.
Not even the innocent.
They were executioners wrapped in ceremony. They did not escort. They delivered. And the places they delivered people to rarely released them unchanged.
His pace was steady. His posture relaxed. His silver eyes forward.
That calm did not quiet the whispers.
It sharpened them.
High above, within one of the obsidian towers nesting the Inner Sanctum, Violet leaned against a narrow window ledge.
Her eyes followed the procession below. Her face revealed nothing. But her grip on the stone sill tightened enough to crack the mortar.
For a long moment she simply watched.
Then, almost against her will, a faint smirk ghosted across her lips. Sharp. Brief.
"You really are insane," she murmured to the empty chamber.
"Well then," she whispered. "Let's see if you can breathe underwater."
Below, the procession continued.
The path curved deeper into the outer districts, passing flame-washed columns and ancient monuments carved in honor of Nyxvalis legends. Stone heroes watched in eternal silence.
The convoy pressed onward until the walls of the Third Outer Moon came into view.
The Red Keep.
Tall. Crimson threaded through obsidian. Seven serpents encircling a blade carved across its face, the scale of judgment rendered in stone.
It did not look like a place of law.
It looked like a place of conclusions.
The Lawkeeper approached the sealed gates. He raised his gloved hand once and closed it into a fist.
An invisible pressure surged outward.
The serpents awakened, slowly, as though something ancient and reluctant was being roused from sleep. Three crimson eyes opened first. Then three violet. Then one blue.
The massive gates groaned open.
Inviting Chion into the serpents' maw.