Jai had no proof, and that was the problem.
He was afraid that if he voiced his suspicions about Rena, she'd face something worse than death from the elders. Without solid evidence, his accusation would be nothing but words — and it could condemn the one person in that house who might actually be innocent. He'd seen what the Chenwongo elders did with unproven guilt. They didn't wait for certainty. They simply removed the risk.
So he decided to wait. He would gather the truth quietly, and only speak once his suspicion had something behind it besides fear.
He tried, once, before dawn. He found himself outside her door with no plan beyond wanting to see her face when he asked. He raised his hand to knock, and stopped. What would he even say — did you give birth to something that isn't human, aunt? He let his hand fall and walked away instead, telling himself it was strategy, not cowardice. He wasn't sure that was true.
That night, Beatrice — reading the panic still on every face — ordered the family to the fortified south wing to rest. No one argued. Her word carried the weight of law, and after watching Edward's Tier 3 barrier fold like paper, even the elders who usually complained about everything found nothing left to complain about.
By morning, news of the attack had spread through the kingdom like fire through dry grass. Servants who should have known better whispered it in the market squares before the sun had fully cleared the rooftops. A power strong enough to breach the most heavily guarded estate in the capital, and to leave without a scratch, had every noble house checking their own wards twice and doubling their own guard.
The north wing was still smoking when Jai walked its perimeter that morning, boots crunching over blackened stone and the shattered remains of an ancestral portrait gallery. Workers were already clearing rubble under Edward's furious, exacting supervision, but no amount of gold could put back what had been standing there a day earlier. Jai stopped at the edge of the crater the bomb had left and thought, not for the first time, that the Chenwongo name had never actually protected anyone. It had only ever made them a bigger target.
None of the whispering nobles knew the full truth: the shadow that had carried Meilin Yue in wasn't a mount in the ordinary sense. It was a dragon — a creature out of half-forgotten legend, and proof that whatever was coming was worse than anyone in the capital understood.
When the royal family heard the unfiltered report from their spies, their faces went pale with something between anger and dread. Dragons weren't simply beasts; myth held that their existence alone was a threat to the Heavens. Their reserves of Gnosis, their cores, their hides — dense enough to shrug off a falling meteor without a mark — made them something closer to a natural disaster than an animal. No noble house kept records of the last confirmed dragon sighting because no one alive had lived through one.
In her private chambers, Beatrice settled into her high-backed chair, dressed in white, her family gathered anxiously at the foot of the stairs. Edward stood at the front of them, jaw tight, clearly wanting to argue and just as clearly knowing better.
"Set your worry aside," Beatrice said, her voice calm and absolute. "This isn't yours to carry. I'll take it to counsel with the other Sovereigns myself. Go on with your lives as though nothing has changed."
"Mother," Edward started, "if it comes back—"
"It won't," Beatrice said, and something in her tone closed the subject as surely as a door. Her gaze swept the younger faces in the room. "Those of you attending the Awakening Ceremony — don't let this shake you. You have my word."
She rose and left the room before anyone found the nerve to say anything else.
A plain white carriage waited in the courtyard, pulled by a single spirit-horse. It carried her out of the city, past the last of the noble estates and their newly doubled guards, to a bare, empty plain where the wind ran unbroken for miles. An old, weathered shack stood alone out there, the kind of structure no one would look at twice.
Inside, hidden from the world, a spatial portal of swirling arcane light pulsed quietly, waiting. A mark on her right palm glowed — the shape of an ancient man holding a sword — and when she pressed it to the portal's surface, she vanished.
She reappeared in a palace of impossible scale. Pillars of solid gold rose to ceilings crusted with glittering Gnosis crystal; the air itself hummed with pressure heavy enough to crush an untrained lung. Two guards in black — Tier 4 Ascendants, each capable of leveling a city on their own — bowed at the entrance to the Great Hall as she approached.
"Rise," she said, and walked past them into the Supreme Chamber.
Seven black crystal chairs sat in a wide half-circle. Above them, at the top of a short staircase, an eighth seat stood empty — larger than the rest, carved from something that didn't look like it belonged to the same world as the crystal beneath it.
The seven were already seated. Raphael Vennis, the Elf Queen, sat with her spine perfectly straight in a blood-red gown, her ancient bloodline written in the sharp point of her ears. King Borin Stonehand, small as a child in stature, radiated the unmistakable, bone-deep weight of the Dwarves' strength anyway. Basalt Adamantus, the Golem King, sat motionless, his body a mass of hardened volcanic rock that seemed to absorb the room's light rather than reflect it. King Solus and Queen Rhyolite, twin rulers of the Elemental Spirits, flickered at the edges between solid human shape and threads of pure elemental light, never quite settling on one form. And King Nullus, master of forbidden spatial arts, sat dressed in violet at the chair nearest the empty throne, moving with the unhurried economy of something that had stopped needing to hurry centuries ago.
Nullus rose as Beatrice entered.
"You haven't changed a bit," Beatrice said, a thin smile at her mouth.
"Thirty years is nothing to beings like us," Nullus said.
She took her seat in the seventh chair, her eyes drifting, as they always did, to the empty throne at the front of the room.
"The King isn't joining us today?"
"He isn't," Nullus said, settling back. "We'll begin without him. Tell us what happened at your estate."
Beatrice recounted the attack in full — the wall, the impossible movement inside a Tier 3 time-stop, the message left burning in the rubble. The chamber was quiet while she spoke, the kind of quiet that meant every word was being weighed. When she finished, Borin's voice rumbled through the hall, heavy enough to shake the pillars.
"You believe this Meilin Yue was a Tier 2, riding that beast?"
"That's my assessment," Beatrice said.
"An Eclipse-Borne bold enough to strike a sovereign house in the capital, and a dragon willing to carry her there," Raphael said, her voice cool and precise. "Either alone would be cause for alarm. Together, they're a declaration."
"A declaration of what, exactly?" Rhyolite asked, her form guttering briefly into flame before settling back to something like skin.
No one answered. No one had an answer.
The great doors slammed open before the silence could stretch any further.
A figure in black robes stepped into the room, unhurried, and the air changed instantly — heavier, pressing down on everyone in it like the chamber itself had taken a breath and refused to let it out. Every king and queen rose and dropped to their knees without a word, heads bowed, even Nullus, even Beatrice.
The man was strikingly, almost unnaturally handsome, and he wore a cold, faint smile as he climbed the steps to the black throne, unbothered by the weight his own presence was putting on the room. With every step, the pressure radiating from him forced even the Tier 2 monarchs' faces closer to the floor, until Borin's forehead was nearly pressed to stone.
He settled onto the throne and let the silence sit a moment before he spoke.
"Forgive my absence," he said, his voice pleasant, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "I was otherwise occupied. Do go on — I understand a dragon paid the Chenwongo estate a visit."
This was the true ruler of the world. The Tier 1 Vein Sovereign.
King Rexus. The Enlightened King.