The Sovereign-V1: C18: The Storm Watches

The Sovereign-V1: C18: The Storm Watches

“Prepare the pyres,” Gin ordered the guards, his voice a ragged scrape, yet vibrating with terrible conviction. “Tonight! Burn the heresy festering in these walls! Cleanse it with holy fire! Burn every crow nesting in the city spires! Purge the sky of their filthy eyes! And bring me Shiro Artatani! His own eyes, wide and bloodshot, fixed with fanatical intensity on the spot where Shiro had stood moments before, as if he could summon him back by will alone. “Alive! I’ll peel his skin into parchment for the Temple’s records! I’ll preserve his eyes in lenses of crystal, so he may watch as his demon queen falls before the might of Astralon! BRING ME HIS EYES!”
Behind a pillar draped in shadows as thick and velvety as a funeral pall, Kuro mimed vomiting silently, his face contorted in disgust. “Dramatic and delusional,” he breathed, the sound barely stirring the air. “Gin’s truly outdone himself. A fucking poet laureate of pyres. Someone get this man a thesaurus and a straitjacket.”
Shiro snorted, a short, humourless sound, but his gaze stayed fixed on the frost near Gin’s boots. It curled toward the priest, tendrils of white, crystalline malice extending across the flagstones, the deep, bone aching cold radiating from it palpable even at their distance, a separate, living entity from the winter air. It seemed to pulse faintly, in time with the pendant’s dying sputters. “He knows,” Shiro murmured, his voice low and flat. “He’s terrified. Nyxara isn’t just a fireside story to him. It’s a nightmare walking.”
“So? Knowing’s half the battle,” Kuro whispered back, his storm grey eyes hard. “The other half’s not being a spineless zealot waving a glorified glow worm and screaming for eyeballs.” He flicked a remaining fig pit with deadly accuracy. It struck Koji’s already tender ear with a sharp tock, prompting a high pitched, girlish yelp of pain and surprise.
“DEMON!” Koji screeched, instinctively scrambling behind the still wheezing Takeo, pointing frantically towards their shadowed pillar. “HE’S HERE! THE GHOST IS HERE! IN THE SHADOWS! HE STRIKES FROM THE DARK!”
Shiro stepped into the flickering torchlight from their hiding place, arms crossed over his chest, a silhouette carved from pure defiance and shadow given solid form. “You called?” His voice was calm, dangerously calm, a flat lake over hidden depths. The torchlight caught the amber of his eyes, igniting them with that unnerving, predatory glow Koji had shrieked about.
The nobles recoiled as one organism, a chorus of gasps rising like a startled flock of crows. Lady Yumi let out a tiny whimper and fainted dead away into a startled guard’s unprepared arms. Torchlight flared and guttered wildly in the sudden movement and rush of displaced air.
Gin spun, his pendant flaring with a final, painful, sputtering intensity, casting one last sickly green pulse over the scene. “SEIZE HIM!” he bellowed, his voice cracking. “IN THE NAME OF THE TEMPLE! PEEL THE HERETICAL MARK FROM HIS FLESH! TAKE HIS EYES!”
Shiro smirked, a cold, sharp expression that held no mirth, only challenge. The feral light in his eyes seemed to deepen. “Careful, priest. Nyxara likes her prey petrified. Frozen solid from the inside out. Saves her the trouble. More… efficient.” He took a deliberate step forward, not back.
Kuro materialized beside him like smoke coalescing in the disturbed air, tossing the frozen fig stem he’d retrieved earlier onto the frost spreading flagstones at Gin’s feet. It landed with a brittle, final tink, like a tiny bell tolling doom. “Happy hunting, heretic,” Kuro said, his voice dripping with icy contempt. “Mind the frost. It bites harder than your piety.” He gave a mock salute.
As guards surged forward, swords scraping from scabbards with a chorus of metallic shrieks, Shiro and Kuro didn’t run. They flowed, vanishing into the narrow, dripping maw of a servant’s passage hidden behind a tapestry depicting some forgotten battle. Their laughter echoed down the dank, dripping stone corridor, a sound colder, sharper, and far more unsettling than the encroaching winter night outside. It was the sound of chaos embracing its name.
Gin stared at the fig stem. Before his eyes, frost already spreading from it in jagged, aggressive tendrils across the flagstones, forming Nyxara’s unmistakable, fractured eight pointed sigil before shattering and reforming, crawling towards his boots. His pendant guttered violently one last time, then died, plunging the hallway into deeper, more ominous shadows thick with the scent of fear and failure. Above, the crow let out a single, resonant caw, a sound like ancient ice cracking over a bottomless crevasse, before diving. It snatched a torn scrap of parchment that had fluttered from Gin’s discarded satchel during the commotion. The fragment spiralled down, a pale leaf in the gloom, landing in a congealing puddle of gravy and melted snow where Shiro had stood moments before.
Kuro, already moving swiftly down the dark passage, snatched it up without breaking stride, squinting at the spidery, faded script in the dim, greenish light filtering from a distant grille. "...the Sovereign’s crown smudged… Nyxara’s frost smudged…twin stars torn…" He looked up, his storm grey eyes locking onto Shiro’s scarred palm in the gloom, then down at his own matching mark. The throbbing seemed to intensify. "Twin stars bleed," he read aloud, the words hanging in the damp, frigid air of the passage, cold and stark as a headstone inscription. A confirmation that resonated deep in their throbbing scars, in the marrow of their bones. The prophecy wasn't abstract scripture; it was them. Their blood on the ice. Their path written in pain and frost.
The crow swooped low, a shadow with intent, passing just overhead as Kuro read. When he spoke "twin stars," it let out a soft, guttural croak that sounded disturbingly, unmistakably, like... acknowledgment. Understanding. Recognition. Then it darted, a black blur against the passage's mossy stones, snatching the scrap from Kuro’s fingers with surprising gentleness. For a split second, caught in a stray beam of eerie, phosphorescent fungus light, the smudged words "Nyxara’s frost" glowed with a faint, ethereal blue luminescence before the bird swallowed it whole, the light extinguished down its gullet like a snuffed candle.
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“Hilarious,” Kuro deadpanned, staring at the empty space where the scrap had been, a shiver that had nothing to do with the passage’s chill tracing his spine. “Even the damn crows are dramatic. And literate. Possessed of truly terrible taste in reading material. Adds a whole new layer of existential inconvenience.” He rubbed his star scarred palm absently.
They emerged moments later into an empty storeroom reeking of pickled turnips, damp rot, and the sour tang of long neglected vinegar barrels. Shiro leaned against a mouldering, damp slicked barrel, catching his breath, the sharp scent of vinegar cutting through the adrenaline haze in his nostrils. “Those nobles… they truly believe I’m a demon now. Koji pissed himself. Literally.” He flexed his hand, the scar pulling tight.
“You are,” Kuro stated matter of fact, tossing him another fig, this one slightly warm from his pocket. “A demon of profoundly terrible life choices, spectacularly bad timing, and undeniably effective public relations.” He pointed the half eaten fig in his own hand at Shiro’s face. “But Koji’s right about one thing…” He paused, his gaze intent. “…your eyes do glow. When you’re pissed. Amber, like banked coals in a forge or a feral cat caught in a hunter’s torch beam. It’s deeply unsettling. Borderline unnatural.” A flicker of something like grudging admiration touched his smirk in the gloom. “I love it. Utterly perfect for haunting jade clad idiots and sending priests into apocalyptic frenzies. Keep it.”
“Whatever you say, Princeling,” Shiro retorted, biting into the fig, the sweetness a fleeting distraction. But his mind snagged not on the glow, but on the frost moving like a living thing, the crow’s knowing, almost intelligent gaze, the janitor’s raw, animal terror echoing in the dripping halls, Gin’s pendant burning at the sigils mere touch. Not paranoia. Not just winter’s bite. The cold had intent. It had hunger. A sentient frost, spreading from the myth shrouded north, and it was watching them, studying them, through prismatic crow eyes and the falling ice crystals that stung their cheeks. Its mark was already etched onto their palms, a brand and a compass. The star scar throbbed, a needle vibrating with urgent, icy warning, unerringly fixed north, towards the source of the frost... and the true storm gathering beyond the monstrous lie of the Ice Wall. The crow’s flight path was their map.
High above the slums, the crow banked on silent wings, a stitch of living darkness weaving across Higaru’s fractured, obsidian shrouded sky. Below, the city sprawled, a tapestry of fear and flickering hearths struggling against the unnatural cold leaching the warmth from the world. Its prismatic gaze reflected frozen canals like veins of ice, the shattered skylight of the archives where a corpse gleamed under the indifferent moon like a fallen star, and finally, the obsidian fangs of the palace spires clawing at the starless void. It circled once, twice, over a high, narrow window where torchlight bled onto snow dusted battlements, a grim lighthouse in an ocean of gathering, hungry night.
Beyond that window lay a mouth of darkness.
The King's war room wasn't a chamber; it was a wound in the world. Dread, thick as congealed blood, choked the air, heavy with the metallic sting of a cold that burned the lungs with each breath. Frost, white and jagged as shattered teeth, gnawed at the seamless basalt walls, devouring the feeble light of guttering torches, their flames struggling valiantly against the encroaching void. The massive obsidian table drank the illumination like a black hole, its surface scarred by maps pinned under paperweights of petrified traitor hands, their final agonies frozen in stone. At its centre lay a vellum, ink blurred by what looked like frost blood: "Frozen Villages devoid of any warmth frozen solid."
King Ryo stood silhouetted against a dying hearth, his scarred plate armour swallowing the light, making him a silhouette of pure, impenetrable shadow. Blackened obsidian gauntlets were clenched behind his back, knuckles bone white against the dark metal. He didn’t turn as the colossal, rune carved doors groaned open, a sound like a glacier tearing itself apart, stone grinding on stone, echoing in the vast, oppressive silence.
Silence answered him. Not quiet. The silence of a tomb breathing. The silence of a predator waiting in the utter dark.
A shape coalesced from the gloom near the door, resolving with the grim finality of an avalanche given form.
General Ryota "Polaris" Veyne
moved with lethal, economical grace. Midnight blue armour, tarnished silver filigree hinting at forgotten glory, and eyes like the north star in a face carved by decades of northern winds and harder choices. The star metal sigil on his wrist gleamed dully, a mark of supreme, bloody loyalty.He radiated an aura of absolute cold that had nothing to do with winter; it was the cold of the grave, of duty executed without remorse.
From the deepest shadow, where frost actively licked the stone around a narrow arrow slit, another figure crystallized like hoarfrost on a windowpane.
Haruto Isamu
, twenty winters old and Head of his ancient, serpentine House, was a spectre of gilded decay. Liquid indigo silk, darker than midnight, drank the dying light, seeming to flow like poisoned water around his slender frame. Hair like spun moon ice fell in a perfect cascade around a face of sculpted, imperious beauty that held no warmth, only calculating intelligence. Eyes of polished obsidian reflected the guttering flames, holding depths that promised only schemes and winter. He smelled faintly of frost killed orchids and the old, dry blood of political sacrifices.
Seven other shapes
bled from the surrounding darkness, hints of rich, sombre fabric rustling like dead leaves in a crypt, the feral gleam of eyes from within the depths of high backed chairs carved from blackened bone wood, the faint, dry creak of ancient leather grown stiff with cold and disuse. Watchers. Judges. Carrion birds perched on the edges, waiting for the kill, their identities swallowed by the gloom, their presence a suffocating pressure.
The hearth gasped, a death rattle. Embers died, winking out like snuffed stars. The torches drowned in their own wax with soft, hissing sighs.
Darkness, absolute and suffocating, swallowed the room whole.
No light. No warmth. No sound but the relentless, crunching advance of frost spreading across the table like a living map of conquest, the phantom pressure of unseen, judging eyes, and the hungry, infinite void where a kingdom's fate was slowly, silently strangled in the frozen dark. The game had moved beyond the academy. The true players, cloaked in shadow and ice, had taken the stage. And the twin stars, marked in blood, were hurtling towards the storm's eye.

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V1: C18: The Storm Watches