C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 175 - Attack
🕑 Added 2025-06-04 18:02:02 +0000 UTCThe walls surrounding the palatial estate of Duke Mari maintain a constant vigil. Guards patrol the perimeter at all hours of the day and night, a small barracks just inside the gate is always manned by three men, and at all times, at least three dozen of the duke’s elite soldiers reside within the complex itself on week-long rotations. However, on this particular night, Ferro finds the lack of greeting at the gate a bit odd. Standing in the full-moon light, looking up at the perimeter wall of sleek, dark brick, there is a sense of something–disappointment perhaps.
He picks at the dark coat he wears, the same dark coat that they all wear just now, sourced from one of the Ca’Mari warehouses before it could be raided. The material is incredible, durable and supple, and there is a faint buzz of magic beneath his fingertips as he runs them over its surface. The mirror lied to him just before he left the estate the coven has been squatting in for the past two weeks, showing him a different man, a smiling man dressed in fine clothing, not some commoner from the far-flung reaches of the empire. It made him uncomfortable, made his skin crawl, but he couldn’t deny the power he felt coursing through his veins, each item he threw on pushing magical prowess into his body.
Which is why, as he stands now in front of the closed gate, he and three other members of the coven dressed in their spiffy and stylish outfits, there is a certain degree of disappointment that comes with no one being there to greet them. Ferro turns, seeing Tanalious standing to his right, the semi-comatose Dal strapped to his back.
“We were always going to let ourselves in,” Ferro says. “Just reckoned that someone would try to stop us first.”
“There’s something going on inside,” Lumina says, stepping up to the gate, her head causing the metal to vibrate dully as she brings her face into contact with it. She stares out, peering through the square gaps in the gate, eyes focusing on the courtyard beyond the gate. “Some kind of fighting going on inside, or maybe it’s a celebration of some sort.”
Ferro clicks his tongue, gently grabbing Lumina by her shoulders and moving her away from the gate. “Well, we did get all dressed up. Maybe we should join them.”
He grabs hold of the bars on the gate, watching as the metal creaks and warps beneath his hand. The groan of the steel gate as the bars begin to bend, melding together in places and ripping apart in others, echoes across the littered courtyards, ruined gardens, and shoddily-built wooden platforms stretching out before him. A hush falls, distant conversation pausing as the scream of the rending metal whines through the air. Then, with a last gasp, the gate collapses, a chorus of echoing metallic clanging ringing out as a few dozen dagger-length iron blades fall to the ground where the gate had once stood.
Ferro kicks the small blades out of his path as he strolls through. In the dead of night, with the moon shining overhead from a sky of that mysterious, almost-red color, Ferro sees everything in the courtyard stand out. Already, muscled and armored men move through the throng of nobility, shoving heedless onlookers aside as they make for the hole where the gate used to be.
Among the sea of faces, one stands out to him, an elven woman whose cosmetics are applied so liberally that she could be mistaken for a performer from one of the carriage-stages spread across the lawn. Her mouth hangs open, uncomprehending. The two look at each other for a moment, Ferro trying to puzzle out how anyone let her walk about like that, her scanning the clothing he wears. He sees the exact moment in her eyes, the way they light up upon realizing that he is far too well-dressed to be one of the refugees; the nightmare she fears seeing, a mob of angry men and women drugged with righteous indignation, come to break into the palace and issue justice onto those assembled there. Ferro smiles back at her, and for some reason, that turns her moment of relief into something dark, something afraid.
She should be afraid, he thinks. The coven doesn’t come with righteousness, but they should be feared more for that.
“Raise your hands and kneel!” one of the approaching guards yells, waving his spear around. “Surrender peacefully or forfeit your lives!” The other guards form a semi-circle with him, eight of them in total, with more on the way.
Next to Ferro, Lumina steps forward, heedless of the two nocked crossbows that swivel to point at her. Ferro sees a disturbance in the air, a slight warping that he has never experienced before. A change comes over the guardsmen’s eyes, the focused awareness replaced by a film of swirling darkness that moves over their eyes like a dark lid. The two guards with the crossbows release their bolts as the world vanishes from their gaze, one flying wildly off the mark while Ferro snatches the other from the air inches before it can thud into Lumina’s chest. Then all the guards begin to panic, yelling, as they are stricken blind by Lumina’s power, the dark covering over their eyes casting them into the dark.
Ferro can’t help but chuckle to himself, watching as the men in uniform stumble about, their hands outstretched. The wave of blindness continues past them, the nearest onlookers stricken by the same curse, tripping over themselves and others as they scramble to get away. One man among the guards proves to keep their head, pulling a handbound journal off their belt, running their fingers over the cover as they start a chant. The guard’s movement as he flips the pages of the journal, being careful to keep count as he looks blindly for the correct page, takes some time. Ferro gives it to the man, scooping up a handful of gravel in his hand pulled from the path just inside the gate. Even the stones that serve no purpose other than to be tread upon are high-quality here at the palatial manor of the duke, small black rocks, some with veins of interesting color running through them.
The guard manages to pull a spell out of his grimoire as Ferro stands once more, the whole coven watching as a fiery circle begins to glow on the ground in front of the man. An odd creature, something that looks like a red-haired monkey with four tusks, crawls out of the ground from inside the circle of fiery, three sets of eyes looking around as the control of the blind guardsman settles over it.
“So, they really can summon demons,” Ferro says, looking at Tal, but finding little humor in the man’s face. He sighs, turning back to the line of men enclosing them. In the distance, more are on the way, a lot more, but the stampede of panicked noblemen and servants keeps them at bay for the time being. “Best get done with it.”
Ferro’s hand flicks forward, a blast of stones sailing through the air, their form shifting and changing in mid-flight to become a wall of deadly blades. The blind men and women never know what hit them as a hail of swords skewers them. Most don’t die easy, lingering and moaning on the ground. It is a pretty gruesome sight, but then, making a gruesome scene was exactly what Sigrid had told him to do.
Jor’Mari struggles, inhaling the fumes of the blackroot emanating from the small glass vial in his hand. At once, the heady rush hits him; had he not already been sitting on the bench in the hallway, it might have dropped him. He sets his head back against the wall with a dull click, the mauve ceiling spinning overhead, tributaries of color pulsing like blood through stone for a moment before the world begins to settle once more. Absently, he recaps the vial, putting it back into his pocket as vision returns to normal. His exhaustion is gone, banished by the rush of the root, but he knows that it will be back.
Lingering, he watches the color begin to recede from the pastel overhead. Only in the last few days has he been able to catch it, been able to recognize the moments the world loses its color. After a while, not even gray is safe, all but the most stubborn of that particular shade being forced to choose a side, white or black. The world loses its texture, contrast abandoning him, until only stark black and white remain.
He levers himself from the bench, stumbling on his first step, grabbing a stone pillar to steady himself as his gaze passes beyond the window in front of him and toward the open space before the palace. Jor’Mari can’t help but sneer at the squatters lingering on the front lawn of his father’s estate. There are more of them now: entertainers, musicians, and caterers moving amongst those privileged few of the high society, lilypads of white light out in the lake of ink.
A grinding noise pulls his attention away from the near-festival out on the grass. Jor’Mari turns, finding his nails cutting grooves into the stone pillar. He pulls his hand away. Even something as simple as his hand is cast in such a strange form in his new reality, white-featureless skin with nails of obsidian. He knows that if he tells someone about his recent affliction, they likely would have him cured of it by the next morning, but for the past week and a half, he has kept it to himself. Something in his blood warns him against it, some piece of him that he rarely has any cause to listen to.
Footsteps from the end of the hall pull his attention back up. Fas approaches, his steel-toed boots clicking against the dark marble. The man pauses, finding Jor there next to the window. A whisper passes in the glance the two brothers share, their thoughts turning as one toward the next few hours.
Fas approaches, his form reduced in its dimension inside the world of black and white, rid of its depth and rendered flat. The uniformed man stops in front of Jor, sniffing the air and shaking his head at his brother. “You know what I am going to say already, so I won’t repeat myself.”
Jor waves off the barely-veiled rebuke. “News?”
“Last word I received from the 4th was this morning. They appear to be approaching Black Rock without running into much trouble,” Fas says. “It isn’t too late to go with them. We could scrounge up a ship to take you if you want.”
Jor’Mari fixes his brother with a glare, letting words pass unspoken. “What about the third raid team? You told me they would be ready by today.”
“Tomorrow was what I said,” Fas replies.
Pointing out the window, to the full disk of the moon making its final ascent, Jor’Mari says, “Is it not tomorrow now?”
“Less than an hour,” Fas agrees. “But you know as well as I do that there will not be any raiding done on this night, the men wouldn’t stand for it, at least not enough of them to make a proper party out of. Take the night, enjoy the moon’s ascent, or maybe find some sleep. It wouldn’t kill you to get a few hours of sleep.”
“But it might stop someone else from dying,” Jor almost growls.
The pettiness in his gut makes him want to ask his brother how he could sleep when those people were still out there somewhere, when she was still out there somewhere. He wanted to rage at the man, ask him how he could have professed to love that woman if he wasn’t devoting every single hour of his life to finding her killer. But he holds himself back, stuffs down the childish outburst into the dark recesses of his heart.
“If there will be any more raids on the Ca’Maris is still in the air. Everything will come down to father’s decision tonight.”
“Don’t tell me that.” Jor turns his attention to the window once more, looking down on the bored revelry below. He feels Fas’ hand settle on his shoulder as his brother steps in beside him.
“We will find them, Jor.”
“We’d better.”
Less than an hour later and both men stood in the grand throne room of the duke’s palace. An octagonal chamber of immense size, its glass, domed ceiling is supported by four grand pillars of black and gold. Black marble, and incredible expense in the empire, reflects the gray moonlight filtering in from the windowed dome, the sole source of illumination throughout the chamber. The duke himself, Regulus Cla’Mari, sits imperious on a throne of thorned obsidian, swathed in layers of silk every color of the rainbow. To the onlookers in the chamber, standing or sitting on the three tiers of balcony arranged around the throne room, Regulus Cla’Mari appears disinterested, his eyes constantly moving to a book sitting on the arm of his throne.
Jor sees something else when he looks down at his father. The man’s face is made of harsh white shades, the black silks wrapping around him like a death shroud. The sweat on the man’s face stands out, tiny black specks on the otherwise blemish-free face. By tradition, the only ones allowed on the bottom floor of the room are the duke or his castellan, their guard, and the partitioner who comes to seek an audience. Tonight, however, there would be no supplicant come asking for a boon. The iron claw of Cla’Mari sat next to Regulus, the curve-tipped trident a white outline to Jor’Mari’s sight. Tonight was to be a trial and its subsequent sentencing.
Finally, the light of the moon falls perfectly into alignment with the patterns running through the floor. Some force far more subtle and powerful than magic settles over the crowd, tension or maybe anticipation, a primal expectation that turns all of their eyes to face the large doors at the front of the room. As if the looks of the onlookers carried enough power to move the oaken panels, the left door cracks open, artificial light from the hallway beyond spilling into the room.
Heavy steel footfalls against the hard stone echo into the chamber, each step followed close after by the sound of dragging chain scratching the floor. A shadow stretches across the floor, reaching almost to the duke himself, shrinking with every step. The figures move into view in the chamber, two men and a bound woman wearing white robes. The men are recognizable immediately, their hose Mari uniforms casting them into the same mold as all the other guards around the room. Now that Jor’Mari thinks about it, there are a lot more guards here than he might have expected for a simple trial, far more, and with more than a few captains among them.
The woman stares down at her naked feet, the ankles bound together by a long chain that drags, a completely ornamental restraint. The cuffs around her wrists, however, are enchanted moonsilver designed to stop all mana flow; those carry their purpose well, the faintly glowing runes over their surface telling of just how much magic they are holding back. The two guardsmen step away, leaving the woman to stare down from inside the depths of her hood.
Jor believes he sees Evilynn Ca’Mari’s gambit at once; her choice to wear a nun’s habit to this trial would be ludicrous if it didn’t carry such clear symbolism. Well, if she wanted to project innocence, deny her family’s involvement, he wouldn’t expect anything less.
“Evilynn Ca’Mari,” Duke Mari says, pulling himself to his feet. He stands, elevated at the top of his throne, his right hand running over the shaft of the Mari family’s ancestral weapon. “You have been brought before me today on charges of treason, of murder, and of smuggling illicit weapons into Danfalla. Have you anything to say to these charges before we move toward reviewing the evidence?”
“I’m afraid,” a strange voice says from within the shadow of the hood, “that you don’t have the right woman.” The woman in white at last raises her head, letting the hood fall away as a train of silver hair spills down her shoulders. A spot of light, the woman’s red eyes, stand out to Jor’Mari, the only color in the room. “My name is Sigrid Astrella, and I have come to kill every person in this room.”
