The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort-Chapter 817: A Hall That Watches (4)
Chapter 817: A Hall That Watches (4)
"It makes it harder to call her an ’asset,’" he said. "She is still on the other side. But now I have seen the receipt for the price she already paid."
Elowen’s gaze softened for a second.
"Good," she said. "I like it when the monsters in my service remember the cost of teeth."
He smiled faintly.
"I thought you married me for my charming personality and love of insects," he said.
"A regrettable side effect," she replied dryly.
Lira’s grip on the tray eased a little.
On the pane, the hall’s etched lines pulsed again.
Somewhere deep below, beyond anyone’s eyes, Ashen River’s core turned its attention.
It now had a cleaner "profile" of two intruders.
One human vector, walking its halls with stubborn intent.
One non-human network, clinging to its bones like a new kind of parasite.
It began to adjust.
Far from Silvarion, in a dark-tiled chamber in Kharadorn, a scrying crystal chimed.
The seer sitting cross-legged in front of it jerked.
"Another inland surge," she said, breath quick.
Kael stood a few paces back, hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the map hanging on the far wall.
"Same frequency as the earlier ones?" he asked.
"Yes," the seer said. "Same signature as the second floor guardian’s death, but narrower. Focused. Like... like someone tapping the same metal bar with a smaller hammer."
"Depth?"
"Deeper."
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Aide papers rustled at the side table as someone wrote down the numbers.
"So she’s still moving," the spymaster murmured, not looking up from her notes.
There was no need to say Rhaen’s name.
Kael’s jaw tightened a fraction.
"You cannot be certain it is her," one of the other officers said. "The League could have sent their own team. Or the forest queen’s pet hero might be poking around."
"The League’s teams are loud," the spymaster said. "They leave different scars. And the forest queen’s consort is busy elsewhere for now. We would have seen other ripples."
Kael let them talk.
His thoughts ran along a different track.
He had sent Rhaen in with orders that were honest and ugly.
Mark a path. Survive if you can. Die if you must. Make the dungeon pay in information.
He had not lied to himself about the odds.
"One operative," the seer said quietly, hand resting on the crystal’s rim. "Or at most one main one. The pattern is too narrow for a full squad. The dungeon reacts as if to a single knife, not a spear wall."
Kael closed his eyes briefly.
Then opened them again.
"Draw up a contingency file," he said.
The aide looked up.
"On her?"
"Yes," he said. "If she comes back—and that is a tall ’if’—and if she brings proof of other hands inside Ashen River, I want to be ready. That kind of testimony will be useful when I sit across from League envoys or that forest queen."
"Useful how?" another officer asked.
"She will prove the board is more crowded than they admit," Kael said. "That someone else is hunting the same core. I can use that to push for joint operations or to shame them when they pretend ignorance. Either way, her words become leverage."
"And if she does not come back?" the spymaster asked.
"Then we still have the tremors," he said. "The mana spikes. Stone remembers what walked over it, even if flesh does not."
His eyes were tired, but his voice stayed matter-of-fact.
The seer looked down at the crystal.
A faint ring of light still trembled on its surface.
She wondered, very quietly, whether anyone would remember the woman under the numbers if the crystal went dark.
On the deck of the Sea-Glass Concordat’s flagship, Silver Current, the sky smelled of salt and rain.
Miren leaned over a chart table bolted to the floor and tapped a point inland, where faint lines on a crystal plate glowed.
"There," she said. "Same inland pulse as before. Deeper this time. The dungeon is being punched repeatedly along the same axis."
The captain grinned, wind tugging at the silver streaks in his hair.
"Someone’s doing us a favour," he said. "Punch a hole, and the waterfolk slip through."
"Or someone is stirring up a storm we will drown in," Miren replied. "Either way, the western access is our best chance. The earth still shivers from the last guardian’s fall. If we send a ghost unit now, they might ride the disruption before the dungeon smooths it."
"You have volunteers?" he asked.
She snorted softly.
"This crew? I have to fight them off with a stick."
"Pick me the best four," he said. "The sort who can go in, see too much, and come back without needing a song written about them."
"Ghosts, not heroes," Miren said.
"Heroes get statues," he replied. "Ghosts get the job done."
Later, as the sun bled into the sea, a small skiff slipped away from Silver Current’s shadow, oars barely touching water, carrying four cloaked figures toward a rocky, half-forgotten shore.
They would find a narrow crack in the hills, an old smuggler’s path leading to one of Ashen River’s western mouths.
Inside, if they paid attention, they might notice corridors that felt oddly cleared, as if something had already eaten the worst of the monsters.
They might feel, just for a heartbeat, the brush of tiny minds watching from the stones.
And if they were smart, they would pretend they had not.
In a candlelit cellar far from sea and forest both, a group of robed figures bent over a cracked fragment of bone.
The relic trembled faintly on the table.
"The beast below stirs," Seran murmured.
His fellow inquisitors bowed their heads.
"Not just from its own hunger," he went on, eyes half-closed. "Others scratch at its walls. Parasites on a parasite."
Hushed voices traded theories around him—League experiments, heretical mages, the forest queen’s consort with his forbidden devices.
"Whatever they are," Seran said, "their meddling is a sign. Where hunger and heresy meet, we must be the knife."
He laid his fingers lightly on the bone.
A faint pattern of light crawled across its surface.
"We will prepare a rite," he said. "Not a small cleansing. A sweeping. If the corruption spreads too far, we will scour the whole region with prayer and fire."
An older inquisitor hesitated.
"That will not only strike the dungeon," she said. "It will burn whatever else has rooted itself nearby."
"Then they should not have grown so close to rot," Seran said calmly.
The bone hummed.
Far away, deep under Silvarion, the Chimera Queen shivered briefly, though she did not yet know why.
Back in the switching hall, the air settled after the pulse.
Rhaen’s heart slowed from a hard sprint to a fast jog.
Her head still rang with ghost images of chitin tunnels and a young man’s tired eyes.
She rubbed a hand over her face, smearing dust and sweat.
"Third player," she thought, the words bitter and a little amused at the same time. "Of course. As if two monsters were not enough."
The hall did not answer.
The grooves under her boots hummed with a different rhythm now.
She moved on.
The patterns ahead grew denser.
Lines crossed more often, forming tight meshes. The air felt thicker, mana pressing against her skin like humidity before a storm.
Her body was near its limits.
Her thigh burned with every step. Her side sent sharp warnings when she twisted. Her head ached from the visions.
But her resolve had settled into something cold and thin.
She wasn’t here to win.
She was here to see.
The hall seemed to understand that.
When she kept that thought clear in her mind—witness, not conqueror—the lines under her feet smoothed a little. When her mind wavered and she thought only of reaching the core to stab it, some grooves flared in a way that promised pain.
After what felt like an hour and might have been ten minutes, the pattern shifted again.
The floor flattened.
The web of lines opened into a broader design—a circular arrangement around a slightly raised centre, where the grooves thickened and poured mana in like veins into a heart.
Rhaen stopped at the edge.
The compass at her belt went nearly wild, the needle spinning once, twice, before locking onto the circle’s centre.
Every instinct she had screamed that stepping there was a bad idea.
So was everything else.
She stepped forward.
The first footfall sent a tremor through the design.
.
!
Chapter 817: A Hall That Watches (4)
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