The hour was a little past midnight on the day following their first successful infiltration into the heart of the Chamber of Stillness. Outside, the city of Seiron, capital of the Western Province, was drowning in an impenetrable darkness, broken only by the torches of mercenary patrols roaming the streets with unease. It appeared as though nature itself had decided to participate in the dark political drama fermenting behind the towering gray walls of Williams Palace.
The winds had begun blowing with unaccustomed force, cold and harsh northern winds descending from the frozen peaks of the Dragon Mountains. These were no ordinary late-autumn storms; they carried within their folds a portent, a strange heaviness that made dogs howl in the alleyways and horses grow restless in their stables. The wind whistled and wailed between the narrow streets and ancient stone buildings like the tortured souls of soldiers who had fallen through treachery, demanding retribution and knocking on the doors of traitors. In the novel Dex knew, this storm was called the "Orphan's Gale", a magical meteorological phenomenon that always preceded the bloody coups in the Western Province's history.
In the city's poor quarters, far from the palace spies' eyes, Dex and Lumia were hiding in a dilapidated upper room inside a modest inn that reeked of damp wood and cheap ale. The room barely accommodated a bed, two chairs, and a rotting wooden table, but it was a perfect blind spot that the palace's mana radars could not detect.
Dex stood beside the tightly shut window, observing through a small gap in the tattered curtains the movement of the patrols in the street below. Meanwhile, Lumia sat quietly on the peeling wooden floor, eyes closed, performing mana purification on the room. She used no loud incantations, she breathed in a steady cosmic rhythm. With each exhalation, the corrupted and turbulent mana particles in the room's air, produced by the fear and anger saturating the city, dissolved, replaced by a clean and cold void that prevented any tracking mage from sensing their presence. The faint, flickering light of the single oil lamp placed on the table cast long, wavering, desolate shadows on the room's walls and across the complex, scattered maps Dex had drawn from memory of the palace's corridors and guard barracks.
Dex moved away from the window and headed toward the table. His fingers reached for the small crystal vial containing what remained of the World Tree's Nectar. He raised it to eye level, contemplating it in the lamp's weak light. The liquid within it swirled and shimmered with golden and silver brilliance, as though it possessed its own consciousness, as though it understood completely that the fate of the venerable Williams family, and perhaps the balance of power across the entire Western Region, depended on these few remaining drops. The Nectar pulsed with a life that stood in stark contrast to the death enveloping the city.
"Lumia," Dex began, his low voice carrying a new weight, the weight of a military commander measuring the lives of men and the fates of nations on a scale of gold and blood. "The first drop performed its function successfully. It built the protective wall around my father's core and halted the curse's expansion. But the true battle inside his body has not yet begun."
Lumia opened her silver eyes and looked at him with quiet attention, waiting for the rest of his conclusions.
Dex set the vial on the table with extreme care, over the palace map, and continued, passing his finger across the location of the Chamber of Stillness: "We will pour the remaining two drops over the coming days, spaced well apart. We cannot rush and risk everything. We must be patient as hunters on ice. Drop by drop, to let his body grow accustomed to life again. By Coronation Day, exactly ten days from now, my father will have fully rebuilt his core and reclaimed his true power, the power that makes kingdoms tremble."
Dex fell silent briefly, then turned to look at the inn window shuddering under the fierce winds. His eyes gleamed with a cold and terrifying blue brilliance, the glow of phoenix fire awaiting the moment of release.
"Ten days..." Dex whispered, a harsh smile entirely devoid of mercy forming on his lips. "Sylvester is sitting now in his lavish wing, looking at this storm and believing himself safe. He believes he is playing chess with a limp corpse incapable of responding, that he has already won the board. But he will discover very soon that he is not playing chess at all, he is trifling with a destructive hurricane. On that appointed day, when he dons the Duke's mantle and raises his jeweled golden cup before the crowd of hypocritical nobles and terrified commoners to declare himself the absolute and legitimate master of the Williams family..."
Dex's words stopped, and he clenched his fist until his nails nearly broke through his skin. "In that precise moment, at the peak of his euphoria and arrogance, we will appear. We will not be mere ghosts from the past returning to demand a stolen right, and we will not be mere rebels seeking a fight. We will be the storm that tears out his roots. We will be the judges of the execution platform. I will be the magistrate who reads out his crimes, and the executioner who carries out the sentence, and my father will be the living witness to his betrayal."
Ten days remained until the Coronation. Ten days, all that separated the darkness of injustice from the light of bloody justice, the poison's surrender from the miracle of healing. Dex had begun weaving the threads of the final trap for his uncle in his mind. He did not want to infiltrate and kill Sylvester in his bed at night, a quick and easy death was a mercy the treacherous man did not deserve, and would make a martyr of him in the eyes of certain nobles. Dex, driven by his blazing fury and his deep knowledge of the novel's events, wanted to destroy Sylvester's legacy entirely. He wanted to expose his betrayal and strip it bare before the entire world, to strip him of his pride, to make him watch with his own eyes the collapse of everything he had built from lies and filthy alliances, before sending him with his own hands into the dark abyss.
"The next ten days will be the longest days of our lives, Dex," Lumia whispered in her pure, crystal-ringing voice, placing her slender hand over the map, specifically over the city's main square where the Coronation would be held.
Lumia looked directly into his eyes and said, analyzing the situation with the wisdom of a cosmic being watching the struggles of men: "The city is boiling beneath the surface, and the people in the streets are frightened and lost. The taxes have multiplied to cover the costs of the Coronation ceremony and the mercenary hordes. These mercenaries Sylvester hired from the black guilds have begun losing their patience and clashing with the remaining regular guard loyal to your father's memory. Sylvester senses this tension, so he is pressing relentlessly and without mercy on every noble and knight to guarantee their absolute loyalty through threat and bribery. But he is forgetting a simple law of physics: continuous and intense pressure in a sealed vessel does not always produce submission. It produces the greatest explosion."