"When days thin like sand, the bold do not count hours they count the teeth of their enemies' swords."
Two weeks had passed since Crystal had returned to waking life two weeks in which the city of Asterion seemed to hold its breath and only one thing broke the silence: the banquet.
From market lanes to jade-paved courtyards, every conversation folded itself around the same bright, dangerous phrase: the Grand Banquet of Heirs. A festival to display youth and power, to weave alliances with smiles and silk. In five days' time the capital would brim with nobles, with heirs and favored disciples, with sect apprentices and merchant princes — everyone hunting advantage beneath polite laughter.
They called it celebration. Everyone who understood politics called it war under crystal chandeliers.
At the Valen estate the morning light fell politely over trimmed hedges and stone koi ponds, but it could not warm the air inside the great hall. The house moved like a living thing with a frost in its breath. Lord Valen walked the corridor with practiced patience — his posture diplomatic, his voice threaded with compromise — while his first wife presided in satin and smiled like a blade coated in lacquer.
Lyra had begged him — quietly, trembling at first, then with the small, steady courage of someone who has learned to live with a permanent emptiness in the chest. She had knelt, had spoken of honor and danger, had tried to make him see what a forced marriage might mean: an alliance built on the idea that she would be "pitied into compliance" and the faction's power gently nudged into another man's hands.
Her father had listened. He had always been a man who measured storms and tried to negotiate with winds. He shifted among courtiers and petitions, he weighed the factions' needs with the cool arithmetic of an official, and he wanted, desperately, to keep his house whole.
But the first wife — Lady Lysandra — would not be negotiated with. She polished her smile and tightened her grip on influence, and in the quiet places where nobility plots, politeness is a tyrant. She had insisted; she had selected. To her daughter it was mercy. To Lyra it felt like punishment.
"Please, father," Lyra had said, voice pulled thin with pleading. "Do not have me traded for comfort. I… I do not want this."
Lord Valen had folded his hands and sighed the sigh of a tired man. "Lyra," he said, the politeness of a man who wants to heal two wounds at once, "this will secure stability — for you and for the house. Miralyn will be happy, Lysandra will be settled, and the South Faction will support us through the banquet and after. We must think of the clan, not only the daughter."
Lyra remembered those words like a ledger — reason balancing cost. She had not faulted him for trying to save them all; she had faulted him for counting people like measures of grain. Her refusal had been gentle because that was the only language he would understand: a calm voice against a louder duty. He had tried. Peace, he told her, was not always the noblest path but the necessary one.
The morning she left the garden for the corridor she had seen Miralyn's smile — just small, the ghost of a smile that watched red run under her palm and called it nothing. The smile had meant agreement and appetite both. Lyra had walked past it and felt the ancient frost settle deeper.
—
In the high corridors of the royal district the Crown Prince Kaen inspected silk and lilies that would decorate the Grand Hall. Five days until the banquet; five days until every noble child who mattered would stand under the same ceiling. He watched the placement of banners and the angle of light as if aesthetic and strategy were one thing. For him the banquet was theater and assertion: an orderly reminder of who was king in name and who could be king in will.
He watched courtiers rehearse bows and servitors rehearse explanations. He listened to whispers: the Third Prince's alliance had begun to shift resources, moving secret boxes of favor to sympathetic houses; Noah's agents were polishing connections in the north and south and calling in debts. The whole capital smelled like preparation: incense, lacquer, and steel — the unscented season of politics.
Kaen nodded at the placements and answered questions with the economy of a man planning a siege. He would make the banquet grand, he said. He would make it glorious. He did not, in the quiet hours, believe it would remain only a feast.
—
At the Aserra mansion the mirror reflected a different kind of clock — one that counted off breaths and knife-edges. Crystal stood before it with her hair wild around her face, the sheen of sleepless nights under her eyes, a small stack of used vials and half-crushed root-pouches on the dressing table. She had spent coin until it hurt: soul herbs from the black market, pills forged by dubious apothecaries, aches that promised openings and produced only nausea. Each attempt to coax the Soul Sea — or even a crack in the meridian frost — had cost more than coin. It cost blood, appetite, sleep. It cost hope.
A dozen techniques had been tried. A few nights she lay screaming under the moon because certain cultivations required her to trade pain for passage, and the poison in her veins — Noah's hidden legacy — turned that path into a crucible. Once, years ago, she had accepted that crucible for love. The memory made the modern woman in her chest harden.
Twenty days had been the ledger at the start. Now there were seven — seven days of living that the oracle-scarred system told her she had left — seven ticks in which she had to force an impossible ocean into her soul or invent salvation in some other form. The banquet arrived in five. The end had a name, a time, a pattern she had already watched play out once.
So she stopped counting in hours. She started counting in advantages.
If she could not open the meridian rivers and drink heaven through her bones, she could use the banquet itself — the predictable collision of youth and ambition — to make a blade fall where it would split history. She could let the banquet be blood again, but this time the first cut could be Noah.
A devil's smile touched her lips. Small. Precise. Made of stone and amusement. Mari caught it and shivered; people who loved Crystal had a slow, sinking way of watching their mistress grow dangerous. Mari had seen the queen laugh in other lives and now she saw something colder — a woman who had decided the rules of a game must change.
Crystal rolled her shoulders. Her reflection in the glass was a child and a sovereign at once: fifteen years old in skin and manner, thirty-five in scars and memory. She straightened her posture, gathered the last of the herbs into a small satchel, and set the house in motion: subtle orders, quiet calls, arrangements that would look like ordinary preparation but were not. There was a precision in her movements now — a general mapping fields and armies in the curve of a sleeve.
Outside, the courtyard hummed with a life she had once commanded. Inside, the hourglass ran.
—
The city had nothing else to speak of. Nobles rehearsed their smiles. Merchants adjusted prices for lamps and gowns. Sect delegates whispered about lineages and favors. Preparations had a fevered energy, and rumor fed rumor, looping into strength. Two weeks had folded into a single focused heat. Everyone spoke of fate as if it were a commodity you could book: someone would appear with an alliance, another would be seen to favor a prince, the third would choose a side and anchor fate like an oar. The banquet was the day when public faces would decide private wars.
Yet nobody suspected the woman who already remembered the pattern. Nobody believed that the girl with the fresh face and old eyes had walked to the edge of death and returned with an agenda that could sever alliances. They only saw the hair mess, the odd purchases, the strange pale joking that sometimes slipped across her lips.
Crystal watched the city from her window and thought of Noah's steps — the long, quiet work he had performed to place spies inside the Asura fold, to keep the clan's pulse within whispered reach. She had once been a tool and a blade in his hands. She had been useful until she was disposable. Now the plan could be turned back upon him.
She folded the sheet of maps and scrolls, a slow smile resting in the corner of her mouth. The banquet would be a blade in a bowl of silk. She would choose when it cut.
Mari, returning with a tray, glimpsed the smile and did not ask. Some things were better taken as given, as terrible currency. As the maid placed the tray down she found her hands slightly shaky; the air around Crystal was different tonight — it was the weight of an intent that had stopped being private.
Crystal tucked the satchel under her garments and turned toward the window for one last look at the city. Lantern fires winked across the avenue like so many eyes. A week remained. Five days until the Grand Banquet. The rest of the hours she would spend shaping edges.
She whispered to the empty room, to the trace of the system still tucked under her ribs, to the green thread that for now held her off:
"You wanted a game of impossible tasks. Fine. Let us play the last hand."
Outside the mansion the sun rolled over the capital tiles and set the world afire in the late-young warmth of afternoon. Inside, Crystal's devilish smile hardened into a plan.
"A mind that remembers the last death is a mind that will not be surprised at the next."