Rudaheim.
"Did you give up already?"
Silas asked with a yawn, lazily perched atop a wide branch. Standing below was Eurus, fruitlessly trying to climb up to him. His only task for the day was to reach him and tap him anywhere on his body. He has been using his ice to bridge the distance - the only challenge being that Silas proved far too agile to be caught by it.
"That festival day was the first and the last time you trapped me in your ice," he yawned again. "Just because you can use long range magic doesn't mean you slack off on your physical prowess. That's how you look to me right now. An arrogant little brat who's nothing without his ice magic."
Eurus bit his lower lip, his ice-silver eyes blazing with a red hue of determination to defeat him - only if he knew how to act on it. He unconsciously tugged at his mother's ribbon tied around his wrist, and his gaze dimmed with a longing.
Hope had filled his heart when they found her ribbon, but there had been no news since - neither did he understand why he was strictly forbidden from speaking about the underground cave.
Silas snorted, watching the kid tremble with helplessness. He reminded him of another arrogant brat - Fenrik - who had been hammering on his trinkets shop's door incessantly for the past few days now, much to his displeasure. As Eurus struggled below, Silas took out a scroll from his robes and untied it.
Zerath wasn't the only one investigating the mysterious disappearances. Silas, too, had been picking up bits and pieces of rumors floating across Casca.
Like Zerath knew him all too well - Silas had left being a soldier, but the soldier hadn't left Silas.
Then that underground cave…It's a mystery on its own.
All in all, Silas hadn't been sitting quietly. He was confident that Zerath would focus on the victims and their tracks, so he left that thread to him. He took a different angle entirely - weapons.
Track the tools, not the people.
Abducting someone was easier said than done. It required planning, and most importantly, tools to carry it out with sophistication. It was a whole system with multiple disappearances involved.
And a system needed logistics.
Shackles, restraints, gag gear, blunt weapons to knock targets out, potions to induce sleep or silence, carriages to transport the abducted and a safehouse to keep them - it was a whole nother world.
Just like how that cave was, he thought.
Which was precisely what Silas was going through at the moment - a log record one of his contacts had gathered about abnormal purchases of such things. So far, nothing had particularly stood out.
"Where's the kid?"
His chain of thought snapped. He looked down to find Gressil standing at the base of the tree.
"A Royal Army's Commander has so much free time to pick up a brat?" Silas raised his brow.
"Where is he?"
He shrugged. "Must be concocting some fruitless plan to catch me. You seriously came here to pick him up?"
"I came to talk to you actually."
His eyes narrowed. He dropped from the branch with controlled ease and landed with finesse.
"To check whether my lips have been running loose?" He sneered.
Gressil's brows twitched. "I appreciate you keeping the information about the cave to yourself, Silas."
"Then there's no reason for you to meet me."
He turned around to leave.
"Hey, your cold attitude genuinely hurts me!"
"When have I ever cared?"
"I'm serious. It's about that cave."
Silas turned, curious and interested. "I thought we weren't supposed to talk about it."
"We still aren't, but…"
He chuckled. "But it seems like Commander Gressil found something very odd to keep quiet about."
"I wasn't really looking into the cave's past or anything. Just some information about the war of five hundred years ago."
Silas tilted his head, his silence a signal for him to continue.
"I was just a little curious, that's all. I was wondering what was the scale of such slaves being illegally born and then raised to become front-line soldiers? How did they really affect our numbers, tactics and outcome? So I was looking into the past army records, though digging into so old records was a feat on its own."
"And?"
A strange look passed over Gressil's face.
"I didn't find any abnormal number of soldiers drafted into the Royal Army."
Silas leaned against the tree.
"So? It's highly possible they were deliberately kept out of the records - given where they came from."
"A demon serving in the Royal Army always carries its insignia on his shoulder. Like a mark. You know it because you have it too."
"Don't worry, I'm contemplating tearing off that part of my skin," he smiled.
"Jokes aside," he shook his head, "that ink used to imprint the insignia is very particular. Never sold in a public market because only the royal family is permitted to use it. But if so many soldiers were being drafted, then I expected to see the numbers show up. Yet I didn't find any - neither the demons being drafted nor the purchase records of that special ink."
Silas understood his drift.
The war had lasted for nearly nineteen years. Assuming that the illegal breeding had begun before the war, it was reasonable to predict a surge in the number of soldiers around the thirteenth to fourteenth year. The legal age for a demon to enter the military was sixteen, but that age limit was reduced to fourteen during the era of war to combat attrition.
On top of that, the general population had been already dwindling due to famine and sustained conflict over the years. The sudden influx of drafters would have looked mathematically strange for anyone paying close attention to it because their births were never recorded. So where did those youths suddenly come from?
"Does the Commander think that somebody very influential manipulated the army records?"
"It's impossible," he pressed his temple. "A high-ranking official from the military would never alter the records on his own…"
Silas's eyes slightly squinted. "Unless somebody from high above gives the order."
He didn't respond.
"And the only person with that kind of authority is the King. If slaves were being drafted as soldiers but not registered with the military insignia, then it goes very high up in the chain of command. I don't think even the then General of the Royal Army would've had the guts to do that. The question is - why is Commander Gressil poking his nose so deep into this?"
Gressil closed his eyes. "I know I shouldn't cross my limits. The only orders I'm supposed to follow are to ensure the details about the cave stay buried."
"So then try to keep your head attached to your body."
"But you understand the reason why I cannot leave this matter alone either. You know about the strange disappearances, right? You weren't the Captain-General for nothing. You must've caught onto the rumors, and I know you must've already started working on it in the shadows. You're just that kind of a person. Was the scroll you were reading just now related to that?"
"You and that Crown Prince of yours are very annoying."
Gressil smiled for the first time today.
"I think…you might have an inkling as to where I'm getting at."
A beat of silence hung in the air.
"You think history is going to repeat? You think these disappearances mean…a second war is in the making?" Silas asked.
Gressil drew in a sharp breath. "I think I'll go crazy, Silas. I've been feeling restless ever since Sir Malphas was murdered. The only reason why we haven't marched into Emberlain already is because my lord is containing the situation. But I'm getting a very bad feeling about this."
He raised his fingers.
"First, Princess Clairette stayed in Rudaheim. One way or the other, that caused our Blessed being exiled to Nethermoor. Then Sir Malphas died and the accusation is still on the Emberlain Princes. And now these disappearances as if…it just smells like time is ticking somewhere, and war would be at our doorstep soon. So someone is using those same tactics again. Think about it."
He continued, his heart loud in his chest.
"I don't know how Eurus's mother fits in all this, but she disappeared twenty years ago. We're assuming the cave was only used in the very distant past, but then how did we find his mother's ribbon there? Does that mean someone was still using the cave twenty years ago? That the illegal breeding is still continuing somewhere? Is that why we've been forced to be so tight-lipped about it?"
"That much poking around could really get your head rolled off from your shoulders," Silas warned.
"If you continue your investigation, your fate doesn't look to be that different from mine."
"My precious wives here are very lethal," he smiled, proudly tapping on his spear.
Gressil's expression tightened. "I don't know if there'll be another war or not or what sort of tactics were used in the past, Silas, but I wouldn't allow them to be used with MY army."
"That's why you came here all the way. You're reasonably suspecting…King Nefarion's involvement here and with Zerath being his son, you don't know how to report your suspicions to him."
Silas had struck right on the mark.
He released a sigh. "Please help me, Silas. I need something concrete before I bring this to my lord. Sir Lucian is out there investigating Drak. Until then, I thought I could learn something useful from you."
Silas's expression didn't change. Then slowly, he walked over and held the scroll out before him.
"How about we start with this?"
Gressil leaned in and squinted his eyes as he read those inked logs. "I see what you were looking for."
"Which is why I need you to find out why Fenrik's family has been needing these tools."