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Chapter 76: Barbed Diplomacy
🕑 Added 2025-06-22 01:20:02 +0000 UTCThe Hazy Mountain loomed quiet beneath its mist-veiled sky, stone and snow clinging to silence like a second skin. The path from Ragescar twisted upward with a trail of scuffed boots, echoing wheels, and breathless pace. Shela led them, armor dulled by frost, expression unreadable.
Behind her, Nini walked steadily, her mana field flickering with the last sputtering remnants of her strain. Mirro lay wrapped in cloth, secured on a stretcher drawn by acolytes who did not speak.
At the gates, no heralds stood to greet them. No flags. Only the folding of bodies moving out of the way. The guards, sensing something strange in Shela’s presence, lowered their heads, not in respect, but instinct. She didn’t return their glances.
She walked past them like a blade pressed flat.
Inside the inner fortress, in the war hall layered with smooth parchment and velvet-draped maps, Hannya sat cross-legged before a shallow table. The crest of the Dreamveil Compact pulsed faintly beside her, embroidered in ghost-thread and ink.
When Shela entered, she said nothing. She dropped two items onto the table:
Norm’s badge, silver and scarred.
Showeuff’s signet ring, cracked down the side.
“Secured.” Shela said, voice low.
Hannya didn’t look up from the map. “And Salitha?” already knowing the answer.
“She’s gone,” Shela replied. “She left the night after the fight. Alone.”
Baku, seated nearby, lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.
Hannya’s fingers stopped tracing lines. “Did she say why?”
“She didn’t speak to anyone. Didn’t wait for me.”
A pause.
Then Hannya asked, “And that hurt?”
Shela didn’t answer. Not right away. “It surprised me.”
Hannya smiled. A small and strange smile. “You mistake affection for loyalty.”
“She was my sister.” Shela said. “She believed in me. In what we were doing.”
“No,” Hannya said softly. “She believed in an ideal that comforted her. And when that ideal bent, she folded with it.”
Shela’s jaw twitched. “You think that’s all love is? Convenience?”
“I think love,” Hannya murmured, “is when someone stays because they no longer know how to leave.”
Shela looked at her.
It was said plainly.
But something behind the veil, some tension in her voice, made the words tilt sideways.
It sounded like faith… But it felt like fixation.
“You still want her to come back?” Hannya added.
“No…” Shela said, though it wasn’t all true.
“Then stop grieving. She didn’t die. She just chose someone else’s story.”
“She wanted peace.”
“She wanted safety,” Hannya corrected. “But the world doesn’t reward peace. It devours it. If you loved her, you’d drag her back and beat some sense into her.”
Shela blinked. “Is that what love means to you?”
Hannya’s eyes darkened, but she didn’t lash out. Instead, she turned away, quiet again.
“Shela,” she said, “you think love is what binds. But sometimes… it’s what breaks everything else and still remains.”
The silence that followed felt too long.
Shela stared at her.
And finally said, “Who are you talking about?”
Hannya smiled behind the veil, letting out a refreshing sigh. “Someone who will be everything they were meant to be. Once they’re back.”
Later, as the sun slipped lower behind misted peaks, the meeting hall opened. Lanterns in rose-glass cast soft color across black hellwood, and faint music spilled from somewhere behind a silk divider.
Lord Vequess arrived in person, the envoy of the Pleasure faction, clad in a multi-layered ensemble of coral and pearl-thread robes, his perfume trailing the scent of crushed lilies and spiced plum.
He bowed with smooth grace, ruby-pink eyes measuring every detail, especially the veiled girl sitting at the head of the table.
Hannya did not rise.
She simply turned her head.
He could feel it, the subtle aura of charm that emanated from her was not targeted. Not refined. But it pulsed with a natural compulsion, the kind that bypassed words and laws.
Vequess hesitated mid-motion. Not because he was charmed. Because he recognized the threshold.
She wasn’t a trained dominator.
She was becoming one.
‘They said she had no known lineage,’ Vequess thought. ‘And yet here she stands, projecting like the Silk Divide herself.’
He bowed slightly deeper.
Not from defeat.
But consideration.
He would not say it. Not aloud.
But his reason for being here was not purely diplomatic. Behind closed curtains, the flowers of the Pleasure faction, the young master and mistress siblings, had begun whispering of future bonds.
Hannya wasn’t just a leader now.
She was a prospect.
‘And if she could be married into…’
The idea stayed tucked behind his fan as he smiled.
From the edge of the chamber, Baku watched, a flicker of amusement pulling at his mouth.
Not every alliance began with war.
Some began with stares held too long.
He glanced at the small devil. The one he knew wouldn’t appreciate this type of maneuver.
Unfortunately… Those same stares shatter good will if focused in the wrong direction.
~~~
Twilight drew long shadows across the mountain, stretching the paths into jagged veins of dark and gold. From the moon bridge, Shela stood alone with the chill brushing her cheeks. Below, the fortress glowed faintly, small lights nestled like hearths in the rising stone.
In her gloved hand, she held a sealed scroll, thicker than most, covered with layered runes.
Not the Compact scroll.
This one bore the seal of the Love faction.
She turned it in her fingers.
Salitha’s letter.
She’d given it to Shela the day they first approached Hazy Mountain, after much pleading and political maneuvering. “If I’m ever captured… if I ever betray you… or if I make a deal behind your back, open this.”
Shela hadn’t.
Not when Salitha left.
Not after their argument.
Not even now, with her name whispered in faction meetings and her path sliding further and further from everything she once stood for.
She slipped the letter back into her cloak.
She would wait.
She always waited.
That afternoon, in the summit chamber lined in mistglass and velvet-dyed banners, Hannya sat at the center with a calm that bordered on stillness. Vequess of the Pleasure faction stood opposite her, watching both host and hall with lazy precision.
Baku leaned nearby with arms folded, eyes half closed.
Shela entered a few paces behind them, her long coat drawn close, her expression unreadable.
“The Capital needs an answer,” Hannya said without preamble. “And it should come from someone they’d rather not hear it from.”
“You want to send me?” Shela asked flatly.
“I want you to remind them what they threw away.” Hannya replied with a small grin.
Shela didn’t flinch, but her jaw set.
“You think they’ll listen to an imp?”
Vequess chuckled lightly, folding his fan. “The word traveling isn’t about your blood. It’s about your law. A strange one, I hear. Not elegant, but inevitable.”
“Unique.” Hannya corrected.
Vequess tilted his head.
“She walks like she already knows the room is cold,” he mused. “The Love faction tried to prune her down, didn’t they? Too mixed. Too raw. A hybrid pretending to be pure.”
Shela shot him a sharp look. “Is that how your faction sees me?”
Vequess smiled, noncommittal. “Pleasure and Love have always disagreed on what purity means.”
Baku grunted. “They fought over which color of lust should fly higher.”
Hannya’s voice cut through. “Shela doesn’t represent them anymore. She represents me.”
There it was.
That tone again.
Ownership not by title, but by certainty.
Shela looked away, jaw clenched. “And what do I represent exactly?”
“You’re the answer to every faction’s fear,” Hannya said. “That someone they discarded might return with teeth.”
“Am I a blade, then?”
“No,” Hannya said, standing. “You’re the sheath that lets them believe they’re safe.”
Vequess watched the exchange carefully, folding his fan twice before tucking it away. He could sense the tension, it was not resentment, not exactly. There was affection, but not comfort.
Hannya didn’t command through love.
She didn’t beg loyalty.
She compelled it. Radiated it.
And Shela, imp blood or not, was holding up well. In the Pleasure faction’s tangled web of political unions and power marriages, this was exactly the kind of person the siblings back home might be drawn to.
The older sister, elegant and ruthless, who ruled through layered oaths and discipline.
The younger brother, wild and drifting, whose beauty alone swayed nobles at galas.
Neither would approach blindly.
But both would be interested.
‘They’ll ask me soon,’ Vequess thought. ‘About the girl. About the mountain devil.’
He turned back to Hannya.
“And what of you?” he asked. “Your name wasn’t in any census a decade ago.”
Hannya’s eyes narrowed slightly behind her veil. “Some of us don’t need records. We’re born from necessities and desire.”
Vequess tapped his chin. “Then you must have evolved quickly. Your aura suggests... early adolescence.”
“She’s ten,” Baku lied smoothly.
“She moves like she’s older…” Vequess murmured.
“She was born whole,” Baku added. “Some devils are.”
Hannya said nothing.
Because the truth?
She wasn’t ten.
She wasn’t even one.
Seven months.
That’s all.
And no one here, not Vequess, not even Shela, knew it.
Only Baku, Gula, Noh, and Hans knew her nature. A devil born of nothing. No union. No Ritual. Just the platforms desire, intent and a bit of ruin condensed in the Temple of Gula.
And she had not even evolved once.
As the wind curled through the lattice windows, Shela tucked the Compact scroll against her hip.
“Who will I speak to?”
“The Pride representative,” Hannya said. “And whoever the Capital Council throws at you after they read the terms.”
Shela raised an eyebrow. “Terms?”
“You’ll see,” Hannya replied. “It’s polite. But they’ll hate it.”
“And if they try to use me?”
“Then let them,” she said. “Just long enough for them to realize they can’t.”
~~~
Four days later.
The towers of the Capital rose like pillars of ivory through the clouded afternoon sky, their marble etched with symbols of pride, hierarchy, and divine inheritance. Within the highest court of the Superbia estate, three nobles sat across from one another in tense silence, waiting for the imp girl to speak.
Shela stood at the center of the room, cloaked in grey-and-white robes lined with snow-thread. The insignia of the Dreamveil Compact shimmered across her sash, subtle but visible. She did not kneel.
And they noticed that.
“Your name is Shela?” asked a thin-lipped woman seated at the left. Her white hair was tightly coiled, her robes high-collared and lined with imperial red.
“It is.” Shela said.
“You’re… not of the Noble factions. Nor a warlord.”
“I represent Lady Hannya,” Shela said, her tone steady, “as envoy of the Compact.”
Across from her, seated at the far end of the table, Eronius Superbia, uncle to Showeuff and current mouthpiece of the Pride faction, leaned forward, resting his long fingers together.
“We know who she is,” he said slowly. “Or we’re beginning to.”
“She sent terms,” Shela said, producing a scroll from a lavish case and placing it on the table.
“A pact of mutual oversight between regional factions to regulate fissure activity and neutral dream law and Haze disturbances. A stabilization initiative.”
He tapped the table. “The… Dreamveil Compact.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t pick up the scroll. Not yet. “And your mountain devil expects us to trust her? After humiliating Showeuff and consuming Suziana? After seizing territory and capturing a council enforcer?”
“She expects nothing,” Shela replied. “But she anticipates.”
A faint silence fell between the words. Eronius’s expression didn’t shift, but his gaze deepened.
“She’s bold,” he muttered. “Too bold for someone her age.”
Shela said nothing.
Eronius tapped the table twice. Then, with slow ceremony, he unsealed the scroll and let it unfold.
As his eyes scanned the terms, largely fair, legalistic, and procedural, his posture relaxed.
Until he reached the bottom.
He blinked.
Then blinked again.
“…This has to be a joke.”
The two other Pride nobles leaned in.
At the very bottom of the terms, written in smaller but unmistakably formal text, was a final clause:
[
In the spirit of cooperation and inter-factional respect, the Dreamveil Compact requests the ceremonial release of the ancestral weapon ‘Vanity’ currently held in the Superbia vaults, to serve as a token of goodwill.
]
Eronius stood slowly. “That sword is not even wieldable. It's a bloodline artifact.”
“Ceremonial.” Shela replied smoothly.
“It was forged for the Vainglory line!” he snapped. “The vault only keeps it because it’s too precious to melt down.”
“And no one can use it,” she added evenly. “So there’s no harm in offering it.”
Eronius stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “Is this meant to insult us?”
Shela didn’t answer.
Because it was. So it seemed to her.
She could feel it in the phrasing, Hannya’s language had been sharp, deliberate. The kind of sharp that cut a throat and left no blood.
Eronius turned to the other nobles, voice lower now. “She wants us to give up the one thing that binds us to the old bloodlines. A useless relic, yes. But a symbolic one.”
“That’s why she wants it.” muttered the older woman, assuming Hannya’s intent.
“She's mocking our history.”
‘Or testing it.’ Shela thought.
But she kept that to herself.
~~~
Back in the Hazy Mountain fortress, Hannya stood before a mirror of tinted silver, watching the reflection of her own veil. She adjusted it slightly, then placed a carved obsidian rose in her sash.
Behind her, Noh entered silently.
“They received it.” she said.
“And?”
“They’re angry. Confused. But they won’t reject it outright. Not with Shela as the messenger.”
“Good,” Hannya whispered. “Let them turn the pages twice and still not understand why they’re bleeding.”
“You didn’t tell her why you want it.”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
Noh tilted her head. “Not even Baku?”
Hannya turned.
“Especially not Baku.”
Noh didn’t press. She knew better.
But in the quiet that followed, she realized something unsettling:
Hannya didn’t just want that sword as a slap.
She wanted it for someone.
And the idea of who that could be made Noh’s skin prickle.
~~~
The council chamber was round, sunlit, and deliberately intimidating. Polished obsidian tile stretched from wall to wall, inlaid with emblems from every sanctioned Luxuria lineage. The Love faction’s crest of entwined roses gleamed opposite the Pride crest’s infernal lion. Dream’s floating hourglass shimmered faintly above them all.
Shela stood alone in the center ring, veiled by neither faction nor family. The scroll of the Dreamveil Compact had already been read, twice. Now, silence filled the space like a fog.
“Let me speak plainly,” said Councilor Deris, Dream faction elder. “This is not just a proposal. It’s a challenge. This… ‘Compact’ positions itself as neutral, but it’s anchored in a rising military faction with no oversight.”
“It’s anchored in a mountain that held against two noble strikes and walked away with prisoners,” Shela replied pointedly, voice calm but sharp. “That’s not aggression. That’s stability.”
“You call Hannya stable?” snapped a representative from Pride. “She commands demons, devils, even monsters from the fissure like toys. She’s a threat dressed in tradition and kin like supper.”
“She hasn’t threatened the Council,” Shela countered. “She offered terms. And they are cleaner and more reasonable than anything your factions have proposed in decades.”
An old woman in purple and rose robes from the Love faction clicked her tongue softly. “And you? What are you now? You once stood in our ranks, Shela. But you speak as a stranger. What happened to the love that tempered your rage?”
“I outgrew being tempered.” Shela said quietly.
There was a pause. It wasn’t silence, it was judgment.
“She’s an imp,” someone whispered. Not loudly, but not low enough.
Shela didn’t react.
She didn’t need to.
Let them say it. Let them taste it.
‘They think the word will shrink me. They don’t know how many bones I’ve buried with it.’
Councilor Deris leaned back. “Then answer the final clause. The sword. Vanity. You knew it would provoke us.”
“I didn’t write the terms,” Shela replied. “But I support them.”
“Why ask for something useless?”
Shela met his gaze, unwavering. “Because it’s only useless to those who’ve already forgotten what it meant.”
“And what does it mean to your mistress?” Deris pressed.
Shela hesitated.
Not out of doubt.
But because she didn’t know.
Not truly.
The sword wasn’t for Hannya to wield, and the words she spoke had come from her.
But after she said those words, she could feel it now. It was for someone else.
But who?
Why?
She had no answer.
And that silence said enough.
~~~
Far away, in the marble corridors of the Pleasure faction’s winter estate, Vequess walked down a sun-dappled hall lined with arched curtains and embroidered paper walls. A breeze carried the scent of peach wine and incense. Two shadows waited at the far end.
One was a woman, seated on a silk bench, her fingers dipped in a shallow bowl of pale gold liquid, swirling delicately.
The other was a man, standing with arms folded, hair tied in a loose silver knot, shirt only halfway buttoned.
“Vequess,” the woman said without looking up, “You’ve been away.”
“I brought something worth the silence.” he replied.
He knelt and placed two sealed vials on the silver tray between them.
One shimmered with a cold, magical script, Shela’s aura imprint.
The other was faint but more volatile and violent, Hannya’s aura residue, caught in a magic linen wrap during the summit.
The brother’s smile faltered.
The sister raised her eyes.
“She’s unclaimed,” Vequess said softly. “Powerful. Unpolished. Unafraid. And she’s not evolved yet. They think she has, but she hasn’t.”
The sister narrowed her gaze. “So what is she?”
“Ambition,” Vequess said. “Born from nothing. I believe she’s around eight months old.”
The brother let out a low whistle. “You’re joking.”
“I never do.”
“And the imp?”
“Loyal, scarred, fascinating. She has a law I’ve never seen. Not frost. Not wrath. Something colder. She held off Norm and knelt to no one. The mountain’s not just Hannya, it’s what she’s collecting.”
The sister leaned back, brushing her hand dry with gold-threaded cloth. “Prepare an invitation. Quietly.”
“To which one?” Vequess asked.
The woman didn’t hesitate. “Both.”
~~~
In an inn, night stretched its veil across clouded skies.
Shela sat on a balcony alone, cooling breath visible in the air. She held Salitha’s letter again, turning it over.
‘If I ever betray you. If I’m captured. If I make a deal behind your back…’
She hadn’t opened it.
Not yet.
But today, she’d seen the way the Love faction looked at her.
And the way they said nothing when she was called Imp.
‘What else had Salitha done in her name? What secret forgiveness was she being dared to swallow?’
She hadn't truly noticed until now. The callousness beneath the surface of the ‘Love’ faction, shielded by her sister.
She looked out at the peaks beyond the clouds.
The sword.
The Compact.
The invitation that hadn’t been extended to her yet but already loomed.
It was all growing. Rising.
And for the first time in her life, Shela was rising with it.
Comments
Aura
You spoil us! In the best way of course lol. Loved this chap, thanks ! ^.^
ShadowTycho
This is so good. I wonder how hard hannya is going to have to tell these pleasure faction clowns that she is taken and also not interested. Love the use of the scroll to show the strained trust between shela and salitha. Salitha don't fuck this up! Sela deserves better then that.
Get In The Batvan
First this sword, then the real one >:)
Sanetless
FIRST, MFERS
