Corvis Eralith
"You are an idiot, Corvis!" The declaration burst from Tessia with the full, unshackled force of her conviction as she bounded onto my bed, making the frame creak.
She landed in a crouch, her teal eyes blazing with a mixture of triumph and genuine irritation.
"What were you even trying to do? You know Mom and Dad don't want us to lock our doors!" Her words were a perfectly mimicked recital of parental doctrine, delivered with the absolute certainty of a four-year-old high priestess of household rules.
A knot twisted deep in my stomach, complex and sickening. Part of it was simple, childish guilt—I had broken a known rule, and the shame of disappointing my mother still buzzed in my veins.
But the larger, more corrosive part of the knot was watching Tessia's fierce, protective love for our parents. The novel had told me about it in clinical terms: her escape from the Sanctuary in Darv, the horrific sight of Mom and Dad's bodies in Etistin.
But words on a page were a ghost of this living, breathing reality. Her love wasn't a plot point here; it was a radiant, tangible force in the room, a love so pure it made my own fraudulent existence feel like a desecration.
She loved them with the uncomplicated totality of a child who has never known loss. And I, who knew the exact dimensions and date of that future loss, could only stand there, poisoning the air with my silence.
"I said I am sorry…" I repeated, but my voice was thin, weak. It wasn't an actor's ploy this time, but the sound of a soul fraying under a weight it was never meant to carry.
She wasn't listening, already pivoting to her next point of attack, her energy boundless. She spun on my bed, taking in the stark, almost barren state of my room.
"What are you even doing in here all alone? It's so boring! You have nothing in here!" Her gesture encompassed the lack of toys, the absence of childish treasures, the neatly made bed that looked more like a hotel room than a den.
"I am…" I floundered, my mind scrabbling for a lie that wouldn't sound insane. "I, I like minimalism."
The word felt absurd as it left my lips, a pretentious concept grafted onto a toddler's life. But the truth was worse. The room was empty because I felt like a ghost.
Nothing here belonged to me because I didn't belong here. Every possession would have been a lie, a claim on a space in a family I was secretly infiltrating. The emptiness was my penance.
"Minima—what?" Tessia's nose scrunched up in adorable, genuine confusion.
"Nothing," I sighed, surrendering. "Anyway… why were you in front of my room before?"
Her face instantly lit up, the scolding forgotten, replaced by conspiratorial glee. She leaned forward, lowering her voice dramatically. "I was waiting for you to come back! Grandpa has a guest. I wanted to spy on him with you!"
"Spy?" I echoed, the cognitive whiplash leaving me dizzy. She had just orchestrated a maternal intervention over a locked door, and now she was proposing espionage against our grandfather, a national hero.
"Don't you see the… hypocrisy of the act?" Another adult word slipped out, a relic of a different mind.
"Stop using those hard words!" she huffed, waving a dismissive hand. "And Grandpa is Grandpa! He's not Mom or Dad!"
Her logic was impeccable in its childish simplicity. Different authorities, different rules. Grandpa was an ally in adventure, not a warden of order.
"And who is this guest?" I asked, a flicker of real curiosity cutting through my gloom.
"Here's the fun part," she whispered, her eyes sparkling. "He's a dwarf! I've never seen a dwarf before!" The excitement was anthropological, pure and untainted.
My mind immediately supplied a name: Buhndemog Lonuid? Grandpa's earthy, steadfast friend. But...
"And how are we even supposed to do that?" I asked, frowning. I wasn't enthused, but engaging with her nonsense felt infinitely preferable to drowning in my own. A part of me, a small, withered part, wanted to just be her brother for a few minutes.
"That's your part to think about!" she declared, appointing me chief strategist of her frivolous mission with imperial certainty.
I shook my head. "Can't we just go there and talk like normal people?" The suggestion felt bizarre coming from me, the least normal person in the kingdom. "If it's just a guest of Grandpa's, then it's nothing serious or official."
"But that would be boring," she groaned, flopping backward onto my bed. The genius leader, the future commander, was still, at her core, a four-year-old girl easily bored by mundane social protocols.
"Do you at least know who this guest of Grandpa is?" I pressed, trying to claw back some semblance of control.
"He's a dwarf, so he's bald," Tessia explained, as if this were the defining, universal characteristic of an entire race.
I froze. "Tessia… that's racist."
The word felt too heavy, too modern, but the principle was eternal. Prejudice was a crack in the foundation, and I'd seen in the novel how Agrona's agents, like Draneeve, would happily pour poison into such cracks to make entire cities collapse.
It started here, with innocent, ignorant generalizations.
"Really…?" Her voice softened, a flicker of shame crossing her face. Good. A small victory, a tiny inoculation against a future plague.
A bald dwarf. The description was uselessly broad. But combined with the timing, the secrecy, the fact he was meeting Grandpa privately…
"Tessia," I said, my voice dropping, urgency bleeding into it. "Was this dwarf… accompanied by anyone else?"
She shook her head, her braids swishing. No entourage. Of course not. Bodyguards, diplomats... a
or a Lance in dusguise—they'd draw attention.
"He was also taller than I expected a dwarf to be," she added, a final piece of trivia offered to lure me into her game.
But it wasn't trivia. It was the last piece of the puzzle clicking into place with a sound like a tomb sealing shut. Tall for a dwarf. Bald. Meeting Grandpa alone, discreetly.
Rahdeas Warend.
The name detonated in my mind, a living, breathing threat now sitting a few corridors away. Olfred, his Lance foster-son, wasn't here. For the same reason Alea couldn't leave Elenoir—Lances were bound.
Rahdeas had come alone.
Vulnerable.
Isolated.
In a heartbeat, the fog of despair and childish frustration vaporized. Every ounce of my being snapped into a hyper-focused, crystalline clarity. The playroom dilemmas, the locked doors, the guilt—they were dust motes in a sunbeam.
"Let's go," I said, my voice utterly changed. It was flat, calm, devoid of its earlier weakness.
Tessia, misinterpreting the shift as eager complicity, let out a happy hum and sprang from the bed. But my mind was already leagues ahead, cold and calculating.
As we slipped out into the hallway, my small hand in hers, I was no longer a reluctant brother on a spy mission. I was a general who had just found the enemy commander separated from his army.
An unthinkable plan born out of sheer, desperate nihilism, blossomed in the frozen soil of my soul. This was it. The only opportunity that might ever present itself.
Rahdeas Warend, future architect of betrayal, sat unaware in my grandfather's study. Without Olfred's terrifying power to shield him. Here, in the heart of the Eralith power, surrounded by elven guards who owed me allegiance...
I couldn't reach a Phoenix Wyrm. Maybe I couldn't even save Sylvia. I couldn't unite a continent. But perhaps, just perhaps, I could remove a cancer before it metastasized. I could sever one thread of the future's tapestry right here, right now.
I could remove the first threat to Dicathen.
But no, I needed Rahdeas for now. He was an useful asset that only later I would get rid of.
Virion Eralith
"My thanks, Rahdeas. Truly appreciated." The words left my lips with a genuine warmth as I accepted the heavy, wax-sealed bottle the dwarven elder extended across my desk.
It was a fine, aged dwarven ale, the glass dark and promising, its journey from the deep breweries of Darv to this sunlit elven study no small feat.
A peace offering, or perhaps the grease for the wheels of commerce—either way, it was a thoughtful gesture in the careful dance we had been engaged in for months now.
Our correspondence, flowing in Rahdeas's curiously poetic, circumspect style, had painted a picture of a mind both shrewd and strangely lyrical, a merchant who wielded words like another might wield a balance scale.
"The pleasure is mine, Eralith," Rahdeas replied, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that suited his stature.
He was tall for a dwarf, and bald, his head gleaming under the study's soft light. He wore rich, practical merchant's clothes of deep burgundy and brown, quality without ostentation.
Despite the months of letters and the positive reports I'd discreetly solicited from my old friend Buhnd—who spoke of Rahdeas's respectability, his prestige even among Darv's famously stubborn nobility—a kernel of warrior's caution remained lodged in my gut.
"Oh, I do have a gift for you as well," I said, turning to retrieve a volume from the shelf behind my desk.
It was a celebrated novel in Elenoir, a tapestry of elven folklore and philosophical wanderings that had never found its way across the mountains. The exchange of such things felt pleasantly civilised, a layer of normalcy over the tectonic plates we were discussing.
Rahdeas accepted the book with surprisingly delicate hands for one of his race, his fingers—one adorned with a heavy, business-like signet ring—trailing over the embossed leather cover.
His one good eye, a sharp, intelligent brown, narrowed slightly as he assessed it before a slow nod of appreciation graced his features. "You truly have a good eye, Eralith."
"It wasn't hard to understand your taste for literature, Rahdeas," I countered, settling back into my chair. "And do call me Virion. I am neither king nor general here. Just an old elf with too much time and too many worries."
"As you wish, Virion," he conceded, a thick finger stroking his short, well-groomed beard. The pleasantry faded from his expression, replaced by a focused intensity as his gaze fixed on me.
The blind, milky-white orb of his other eye seemed to stare at nothing, yet it somehow heightened the penetration of the first. "But for as much as exchanging gifts is pleasant, we are here for affairs of a more serious nature."
"That's true," I acknowledged, leaning forward, my elbows on the polished mahogany. I had to give him credit; the man understood pacing. He built rapport like a mason laying a foundation—steady, patient, ensuring the structure could bear weight.
"Like all good friendships," he began, gesturing between the bottle on my desk and the book in his hand, "like what we have just done here, commerce is the perfect starting thread. It binds, it benefits, it builds familiarity where there was none."
"Darv and Elenoir already trade with one another," I observed, though I knew my tone lacked conviction. I was playing the part he expected, the blunt soldier needing everything spelled out.
"Yes," he agreed, his voice taking on a lecturing quality that was not unkind. "But said commerce is a narrow bridge, is it not? A privileged pathway between House Greysunder and House Eralith."
He paused, letting the truth of it hang in the air. We both knew it. Trade was an elite transaction, not a people's movement.
"I am a merchant, Virion. In fact, I am the richest dwarf after the Greysunders themselves, surpassing even ancient noble houses like the Earthborns." He stated it not as a boast, but as a credential, a statement of his capacity to act.
"Get to the point, Rahdeas," I said, a flicker of my old impatience surfacing. The pleasantries were a necessary veil, but the battlefield commander in me chafed at prolonged manoeuvring.
Months of letters, Buhnd's assurances—they formed a dossier, but they didn't quiet the instinct that had kept me alive through the war. "You know we don't have the luxury of wasting time."
"I am speaking precisely to the point," he replied, unruffled. "Opening the markets—truly opening them, from my warehouses in Darv to your artisans in Zestier, from your forest harvests to my distribution networks in Sapin—will be the first, tangible step toward our shared goal. A united Dicathen cannot be built on treaties and hopes alone. It needs roots. It needs gold, and goods, and a thousand daily reasons for an elf, a dwarf, and a human to see mutual benefit, not mutual suspicion."
I hummed, a non-committal sound, as I turned his words over. He was right, of course. As a king, my expertise had been the sword. I had led Elenoir through war by means of war.
Strategy, terrain, the morale of troops, the breaking of lines—that was my language. Rahdeas spoke the language of supply lines, of incentives, of soft power.
A warrior and a merchant. Perhaps it was the combination this fractured continent needed. Yet, even in this quiet study, surrounded by books and the scent of old paper and fine ale, my mind refused to leave the battlefield.
"We ca—"
The word died in my throat. A sound, faint but unmistakable, sliced through my concentration. Not a threat from the window or the door, but a familiar, light-footed patter in the corridor outside.
A lifetime of vigilance, of sleeping with one ear tuned to the sounds of camp and court, had honed my senses to a razor's edge. It was a habit I couldn't shake, even here, in the heart of my own palace, speaking with a supposed ally.
My right hand, resting on my knee, tensed instinctively, a phantom impulse to summon the shadowy power of my Beast Will. On my left ring finger, the plain silver band of a storage ring felt suddenly heavy, a weapons cache a thought away. Paranoia? Perhaps.
I saw Rahdeas note my abrupt silence, his good eye following my gaze to the door. He turned his head slightly, listening.
Then, the whisper. "Tessia!" Hissed, urgent, young. Corvis's voice. A second later, a small, booted foot—undoubtedly Tessia's—appeared in the sliver of space beneath the study door, hastily pulled back but not before being spotted.
A sigh, this one born of pure, exasperated affection, escaped me. The coiled tension of a moment before dissolved, replaced by the mundane reality of grandfatherhood. The high-stakes diplomatic battle was now a comedy of errors starring my two mischievous descendants.
"You must apologize for my grandchildren, Rahdeas," I said, pushing my chair back, the legs scraping softly against the floor.
Rahdeas's response was a rich, genuine laugh that seemed to start deep in his barrel chest. "No problem at all, Virion. The youth are the future we are arguing over, are they not? It is only fitting they take an interest."
"I'll be back immediately," I said, already striding toward the door, my warrior's alertness seamlessly transforming into a grandfather's determined march.