“It’s a passive process, I’ve found,” Zel chuckled. She nearly walked off towards her Sturmgandr, but caught herself just in time to glance back at the two other captives who very clearly weren’t nearly as eager as Victor to go and butcher a gang of traffickers. Sheathing her blade, she grinned at the two, tiny and confused and cowering as they looked amidst the corpses. There were embers in those boys. Even if they weren’t quite the primordial furnaces of violence present inside Victor, she could feel flames there; they just needed a bit of stoking, was all. Letting the grin work its way back onto her face, Zel approached them, squatting down in front of the two.

“The town might not be safe right now so we’ll take you to the same person we took the others who weren’t so fortunate as you two, alright? You’ll just have to sit tight in a safehouse while we exterminate the scum behind all this,” she said to them, hoping that they would understand the venom and violence in her words wasn’t directed at them.

“B-but who would-” one of the boys began.

“Von Wickten,” Vic interrupted. The sound of him spitting off to the side came after. She couldn’t help chuckling in pride at that; such righteous fury filled his voice that Zelsys could scarcely have imagined herself saying it with more gusto.

“Yes, just the same. Well, he’s likely not behind the human trafficking ring, but he’s the one letting them operate without reproach in Arches, seeing as he’s their biggest customer. If they’re to stay gone, we’ll have to… Kill him and put his head on a fuckin’ pike, really. Once that’s done, we’ll- Well, that’s not important. What’s important is that you two will be safe to return to your lives once the knight captain is made an example of. Now! To actually get you to that safehouse… My machine can carry four people tops, so-”

Zel pointed at one of the boys as well as at Victor.

“-You two will ride with Zef and I, and you-”

She pointed at the other boy.

“Will ride with him,” she finished, flicking her finger to Jorfr. “There’s still what, an hour and a half before the auction’s supposed to start? Plenty of time.”

Some time earlier…

Among the upsides of residing in the duke’s ancestral manor was the fact that one could get a perfect view of the demesne in its entirety from the Panopticon, a spire in the manor’s center with an observatory at the very top.

Red enjoyed watching the duchy from up here, despite not being able to doff her disguise. It was calm up here, she got a good view of what could more or less be considered hers, and most importantly, she didn’t get any of those pesky reminders of the accursed dungeon. Stuffy writing-rooms, doubly so those without windows, had a habit of dredging up bad memories for her… As did full submersion in water. And insects. And sometimes the gigantic, matte-black ribs that gave Arches its name, when she glimpsed them at an angle that approximated those horrific tendrils that had burrowed into her flesh and scoured everything that had once made her what she was, from parasites to mental conditioning.

Nevertheless, this was preferable.

She swirled bright-blue liquid about in a glass, taking a sip. Lukewarm. A breath, a gesture, and a pulse of resonant ringing through her skull were all it took to form ice in the liquid. Another sip. The mintiness of Viriditas, the vaguely citrusy flavor of Daytime Dust, complimented by the semi-illusory taste that Viriditas induced, drawing on the consumer’s favorite flavors; though it had once been green tea or, at times, sweet rice cakes, Red’s time working to take control of minor holdings in Ikesia had changed that. Now, it was the cloying sweetness of a Winter Peach. This small, tiny detail of flavor elicited feelings of treason in the good Lady Karmesin. A shard of glass leftover from her otherwise shattered past self.

As the name suggested, it was a fruit that could only grow in rare circumstances such as those of Willowdale’s soil, fertile yearlong for some mysterious reason. Pateiria, too, had fruits like this, grown in the imperial gardens and within the grounds of major sects, but they were ever out of reach for a person as unimportant as her. Yet here, these fruits were sold freely, expensive though they were.

For all the hate she held for the dungeon, for Zelsys, that snow devil lover of hers, and the two others who had put a stop to the Emperor’s plan to harness a Dungeon Core’s death as the means to bypass the Blackwall… Red preferred what she was - who she was - now.

To her relief, her second downward spiral into inner conflict this week was smothered by the sound of someone ascending an upward spiral; this being the Panopticon’s exorbitantly long staircase. A series of knocks on the door. It was Meng.

“Enter!” she beckoned, turning a tired gaze towards the broker. “Something truly important, I presume. Has Newman been spotted? Did the Duke finally decide to deal with those Occupationist fools?”

With a sharp nod, the broker confirmed her first guess: “One of our agents spotted Newman at the northern gate, alongside her partner and the Borean. Soon afterward they headed to one of the residential areas, where they split up. Approximately fifteen minutes later, one of our plants in Von Wickten’s guard contingent reported Zelsys causing commotion in front of the Von Wickten familial estate, while the two others were nowhere to be seen. I personally spotted them heading north-eastward some a short while later.”

“Down the old road to what’s left of the local Temple of the Second King?” Red asked, smiling under her mask, and Meng must’ve caught the subtle excitement in her body language, as he continued:

“Yes. However… There is one other thing. It’s the duke. From his demeanor, he appears to have suffered a mental breakdown of some sort…”

Retrieving a sealed missive from his pocket, the broker further added: “He demanded that I deliver this.”

Opening the missive, Red found herself torn. Its contents, distilled down into their true meaning, were effectively a statement of trust and an urgent request for her presence.

The grave nature of recent events compels me to entrust the secret of my line to a trusted other. Please contact me as soon as you are able, time is short. I shall await you in my writing-room.

Forced to choose between pursuing revenge and possibly securing her hold on the duchy, Red chose the latter; instead of scaling the Panopticon’s staircase, she simply opened the window, intending to jump and slow her own fall. Before she did so, however, she turned to Meng: “Prepare the Dragonfly, please.”

The broker nodded in affirmation, and Red leapt head-first out of the window, rolling forward and springing up to her feet upon landing. Her impact carved a shallow gash into the soil, but fixing that was the groundskeepers’ job. Making her way through the manor, she passed a maid and informed her of her “unfortunate fall”, reassuring her that she was fine before she moved on. Upon knocking at the door to the duke’s writing-room, she instantly got a response: “COME IN!”

It was the duke, no doubt, but there was a cocktail of intense emotion in his voice; stress, anger, sorrow, fear. Just what had happened?

Wild-eyed, his face distorted by tear-smudged makeup, his normally proper suit messy and half-undone, Alberich Von Hoedorff leapt from his chair at the sight of her. He ran to her with all the authority and stateliness of a young boy, ranting and raving: “L-Lady Karmesin, I must apologize for calling you over on such short notice, I… Oh, it is just terrible! A true catastrophe! My- No, our whole duchy shall be ruined if this ever comes to light, an-and with Adalbert gone, you were the only one who came to mind…”

Red let out a sigh under her mask and grabbed him by the shoulders, dragging the broken-down duke to an upright stance against his will, staring up into his bloodshot eyes.

“What a fucking ruler, you are,” she thought. Even after she’d rebuilt herself, after she’d given herself an extra head’s worth of height, Red was still shorter than the average Ikesian man, and Alberich was a good bit above average in height, standing head and shoulders over her… Yet he felt so small. His sense of presence, his aura so to speak, had all but gone.

“What happened?” she questioned. “I have other urgent matters to attend to, so let us handle this crisis as quickly as possible, whatever it may be.”

“Oh, I cannot bring myself to speak the words…” he sighed, slouching yet again before looking up at her. A grim sort of determination flared up in the duke’s eyes, the likes of which Red had never seen in the man. “I suppose showing you is my only reproach. Come, the only path to it is in the manor’s basement.”

So she followed, keeping a cautious eye out on her surroundings, but her caution was unfounded. The duke led her two floors below the earth, through two secret doors, beyond which was an unsettling laboratory that stunk of blood and viscera, with jars of distinctly purple drake’s blood and pieces from these beasts preserved in jars. Through the laboratory still the duke rushed, reaching a short-range Fog Gate that itself led to a circular lift chamber wrought in blackstone, lit by the milky-white glow of lightgems embedded in the walls and ceiling. It was easily twenty meters across and half as tall. There was another, much larger door connected to the lift; it was almost akin to that accursed Dungeon, but not quite, with slight differences setting this architectural style apart.

The duke stepped into the center of the lift, a pedestal rising under his feet by perhaps twenty centimeters. He spoke something in what sounded vaguely like Ikesian, but the pronunciation, words, and sentence structure were so far removed from modern Ikesian that Red couldn’t make out more than “dragon” and “ancestral line”. Once he went silent, the lift came alive and began to descend at a breakneck pace, only slowing down abruptly after what must’ve been a several-hundred-meter descent, evidenced by the height of the shaft above. This was not surprising in the slightest to Red, but her lack of surprise seemed to, in turn, surprise the duke, though he did not make it heard.

A great door awaited at the bottom of the lift, which lit up with glyphs at the duke’s approach and opened by sliding into the ground with nary a sound, revealing a sprawling cavern. The stench of not-quite-rotting meat and stale air filled Red’s nostrils.

“This place is…” Alberich began, as he walked through the door. He sighed, turning around to correct himself. “This was the birthplace of the Dragon Knights. Come. It is not far, now.”

Indeed, it was not. As they entered into the cavernous space, a great deal of mining equipment came into view, alongside partial Three Kings Era architecture: Broken obelisks, other lifts whose platforms had been ripped off and embedded in the walls, great chutes leading up through upward shafts. It became clear that there was another level to the cave as they approached a cliff that overlooked it, the duke grimly remarking as they did: “You must’ve noticed the marked difference between the likes of knight-captain Adalbert and the other knights. Not merely in skill, but in the nature, extent, and potency of their mutations. Once, knights of Adalbert’s caliber were the core stock of the duchy’s forces, each having had their heart replaced with one grown from the Dragon’s undying flesh, but…”

Red didn’t entirely understand where this had come from. Alberich absolutely wasn’t the type she expected to know such things, let alone understand them, but he spoke about them as if he’d studied the Dragon all his life… Was this some form of genetic memory?