The remaining hours inside the small inn room passed like an entire age of psychological torment. Dex and Lumia waited in absolute, taut silence broken only by the ticking of the old wall clock in the outer corridor, which sounded like the slow drumbeat of an execution, until midnight arrived. By then, the lights of Seiron had dimmed and nearly vanished, the taverns had closed their doors and expelled their drunks, and the patrol activity in the streets had thinned, leaving the stage to the cold night shadows and the fierce winds howling between the stone buildings like tortured souls.
Dex sat in the dark corner, wringing his memory dry, searching for a gap in the wall of death that Sylvester had constructed. Though the mercenary guard appeared flawless on the surface, covering every known entrance, Dex turned once more to his memory as a reader of the novel. He recalled a precise, pivotal detail from the peripheral, overlooked chapters of the original story, a full chapter once dismissed as dramatic padding, devoted to the historical architecture of Seiron's fortress.
That detail, which so few had paid any mind to, was now the sole difference between life and death.
He recalled a description of the existence of an extremely old secret passage, a tunnel carved by hand into the heart of the mountain rock, used in past decades as a hidden cellar for storing the family's aged wines, and as a concealed route for transporting smuggled goods or emergency supplies during long periods of siege. Most critically, this passage did not open onto the main courtyard, it emerged at the base of the harsh rocky cliff overlooking the dense wild forest that wrapped around the palace's rear. This historical passage had been sealed and forgotten for long decades after the family's rule stabilized, to the point that most of the servants had been unaware of its existence. It was the one and only unguarded blind spot in Sylvester's defensive plan.
"It's time," Dex whispered, and rose with a smooth and steady motion, shedding the tension of waiting.
The two of them slipped out of the inn through the back room window to avoid passing through the main hall and encountering the innkeeper. Under the cover of pitch darkness, they moved through Seiron's alleyways like two ghosts.
Here was where Lumia came into her own. She deployed her celestial ability in its most terrifying form, this was no mere illusion-concealment enchantment of the kind elves used to bend light around themselves. Lumia was literally folding the dimensions around them, merging their physical bodies with the very fabric of cosmic void. In this state, their sound, their body heat, and even their physical mass were isolated from Seiron's surroundings. To any guard looking in their direction, all that was visible was the continuation of an empty alley, light bending around the spatial pocket they had placed themselves within, casting no shadow.
Using this supreme technique, they managed to pass two external mercenary checkpoints in the main plaza, and walk within steps of heavily armed guards without even triggering the sharp-sensed guard dogs.
They circled the outer city walls with precision and descended with difficulty, slipping along a treacherous muddy track down toward the base of the rocky cliff on which the enormous palace stood. The roar of the furious mountain river that ran below the cliff masked any rustling sound they might produce. They finally reached the designated area at the cliff's base and began searching in the dense darkness. After minutes of feeling their way through the absolute dark, Dex found the entrance, concealed with great skill behind a natural wall of dense thorny shrubs and accumulated rocks that looked like a natural landslide from centuries past.
Dex moved the heavy rocks with considerable physical effort, ignoring the harsh thorns that tore through his leather gloves and scratched his hands, until he uncovered an arched, thick iron gateway whose edges rust had eaten until they were fused literally to the stone frame around it. There was no key for the door, and the lock was an enormous mass of calcified iron that could not be broken by ordinary weapons.
"Step back one pace," Dex whispered to Lumia.
He removed his torn right glove and placed his bare palm directly onto the cold, rusted lock. With high concentration, and a precise, controlled application of the Molten Touch technique, directing intensely focused heat that produced no visible light that might betray their position, the cold iron at the point of contact shifted to a glowing orange within seconds, then melted like cheap wax and scattered onto the wet floor with a faint hiss. He drove the iron gate open with his shoulder at full force, and it surrendered with a single low creak and sharp scrape of metal on stone. They entered.
The moment they crossed the passage's threshold and pulled the door shut behind them, heavy, stagnant, suffocatingly damp air struck them, heavy enough to cause immediate choking. The smell inside was not the pleasant aroma of aged fermenting grapes or the scent of seasoned oak Dex had expected from historic wine cellars based on the novel's descriptions. Instead it was a smell simultaneously sweet and nauseating, bitter mold, deep moisture, and decomposing human death.
The rough stone walls of the tunnel dripped stagnant water like black tears of grief, and the floor was slick with black, viscous algae. Dex advanced with caution, igniting a very small and steady flame in his left palm, barely enough to illuminate a circle of two meters around them, to avoid drawing attention if anyone was observing from deep within the palace.
"Only 11 days remain until the poison completes its cycle in my father's body," Dex murmured to himself, as though reminding himself of the reason that had driven him down into this cold hell. Every step they took produced a muffled echo in the long passage that seemed to slope ever deeper toward the earth's bowels.
Suddenly, Lumia stopped sharply and seized Dex's arm with a grip that clamped like a vice onto his sleeve. Her celestial awareness and her connection to the surrounding spatial fabric allowed her to sense a disturbance in the spatial void ahead, there was an intense concentration of negative energy and accumulated death.
"Dex, stop." Lumia said, her silver voice trembling slightly from a shock that ill-suited her normally calm nature. "Look at the ground ahead of us. The space here is warped by death."
Dex directed the flame in his palm downward. And when the light illuminated a wider section of the floor before them, Dex gasped sharply and the blood froze in his veins at the horrifying sight.
The stone floor was not covered in accumulated dust or broken wine barrels as he had imagined. It was littered with layers of bones. Human skeletal remains, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, scattered everywhere along the passage in horrifying disarray. Some of the skeletons were relatively old and whitened, but most were recent and hideous, with remnants of dried flesh and torn fragments of cloth still clinging to broken bones.
Dex crouched slowly, his eyes widening in disbelieving horror, his stomach clenching at the sight. He examined the clothing remnants covering one of the nearby skulls. They were not the clothes of thieves who had tried to rob the palace, or enemy soldiers who had perished in a trap. They were blue and white livery, distinguished by meticulous tailoring despite being torn and stained with old blood. This was the formal attire of Williams Palace servants. Cooks, chambermaids, young stable boys judging by their small proportions, and lower-ranking personal guards.
Dex approached a skeleton that appeared to belong to someone who had tried to crawl desperately toward the iron gate before being finished off, and saw something gleaming beneath the flame's faint light among the broken ribs. He extended his trembling hand and pulled out a small silver pin still fastened firmly to the chest of the torn, blood-stiffened jacket. The pin bore the crest of a roaring golden lion.
"Even the head of servants was killed," Dex murmured.
"These, these are not strangers, and not infiltrators," Dex muttered, his voice trembling not from fear but from a volcanic fury that had begun to boil in his chest, the fury of a person who suddenly understood that the world's brutality was a bloody, merciless, unsparing reality.
Dex grasped the full terrible truth with its entire weight. "These are the loyal servants. Sylvester, that sadistic wretch, did not merely dismiss them from service or deport them. He lured them here in the dead of night and killed every single one of them."
Dex looked at the heaped remains scattered in the darkness, dozens of lives erased from existence in the most hideous manner. "He used this secret, forgotten passage as a human slaughterhouse. A filthy, swift way of disposing of every person, whether a head of household staff or an innocent child working in the kitchen, who refused to comply with his new orders, or who dared to question the true nature of the 'sudden illness' that had befallen my father. He cleansed the palace in blood to guarantee eternal silence."
The air surrounding Dex changed suddenly and radically. The temperature in the passage dropped despite the presence of the flame. The orange flame in his hand, which had been illuminating the space with warmth, suddenly blazed with a burning, radiant, frightening blue light that lit the entire passage. This was a physical reflection of his absolute internal fury, the mana fire had lost its natural color and reached its most extreme destructive temperature from the sheer intensity of his concentration and emotion.
This situation was no longer for Dex a political power struggle or a cold effort to reclaim a throne. Before this mass grave in the darkness and this flagrant injustice, it had transformed into something personal and profound. Sylvester had crossed every red line of evil, had abandoned his humanity entirely, and had to be destroyed.
"I swear on my blood, Sylvester," Dex snarled in a voice resembling the growl of a wounded, furious lion, his two blue eyes gleaming with savage, predatory light in the darkness, reflecting the blue flame that threw terrifying shadows across the walls. "I will make you pay for every drop of blood spilled in this dark tunnel. I will not be content merely with toppling you from your phantom throne or exposing you to the nobles. Your death will not be swift, and it will not be merciful as other villains' deaths have been. I will make you wish with every breath you draw in your final moments that you had died long before."
Dex straightened, his face cold as death, stepped past the bodies with great care and deep respect for their extinguished souls, and directed the blue flame toward the depths of the dark passage, which led directly into the heart of the palace, descending toward the Chamber of Stillness.