The silence that followed my question was the loudest sound I had ever heard. It was a perfect, crystalline stillness, in which the only movement was the frantic, confused thoughts of my father and brother as they looked from my face to Valerius's, trying to decipher the meaning of my strange, poetic phrase. The crackling of the fire in the hearth seemed to have frozen mid-crackle.
Lord Valerius, to his credit, was a master of his craft. For the space of a single, agonizing heartbeat, his mask held. The warm, fatherly concern in his eyes didn't waver. A soft, indulgent chuckle left his lips.
"My boy," he said, his voice a smooth, comforting baritone that almost made me doubt myself. "What an interesting turn of phrase. From some old border legend, perhaps? I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage. It means nothing to me."
He was trying to dismiss it, to paint me as a fanciful boy who had stumbled upon some archaic nonsense in a book. My father's expression was beginning to shift from tense suspicion to paternal annoyance. Damian's gaze sharpened on me, a silent warning: This had better lead somewhere.
I held Valerius's gaze, my own smile never faltering. "No? A shame. Because the dead scout's journal was quite specific. He wrote about his superior, an influential lord in the West, known for his wisdom and his proximity to a great house." I took a deliberate step forward, the floorboards creaking in the suffocating silence. "He didn't just write down the password. He also wrote down his master's code name."
I let the pause stretch, twisting the knife. I leaned in, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, for Valerius's ears only, yet loud enough for the others to hear.
"He called him 'the Shepherd'."
That was the final blow. The mask didn't just crack; it vaporized. The warmth in his eyes vanished, replaced by a chilling, reptilian stillness, the color of a winter corpse. The polite posture was gone, replaced by the poised tension of a viper coiled to strike. In that instant, the man my father and brother knew was gone, and in his place stood a stranger, a predator looking at me with pure, unadulterated killing intent.
"What," my father said, his voice a low growl as the atmosphere in the room turned murderous, "is the meaning of this, Valerius?"
Valerius didn't look at him. His eyes were locked on me, burning with a cold, black fire. He knew. He didn't know how I knew, but he knew that I did. He knew I saw him not as a lord of the house, but as a priest of the Void.
"Where," Valerius hissed, his voice no longer a smooth baritone but a dry, venomous whisper that seemed to suck the warmth from the air, "did you hear those words?"
"From a dead man," I said, my heart hammering its powerful, steady cadence, a war drum in the sudden quiet. "A subject you'll be intimately familiar with very soon."
That was all it took. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he made his calculation. He was exposed. He was in a locked room with a Grandmaster and a Master. There was no escape. Interrogation was inevitable. And for a fanatic, interrogation was a fate worse than death—it meant the potential exposure of the entire Cult. His only option was to eliminate the source of the problem. Me.
With a snarl that was utterly inhuman, he lunged.
The movement was a blur of terrifying speed. The air around his hand tore open, shimmering with the nauseating, purple-black energy of the Void Arts. It was a power that felt fundamentally wrong, a cancer in the fabric of reality that drank the light and screamed of negation. It felt like a shard of the absolute nothingness from the Voidstone Chamber had been given a hungry, malevolent will. He wasn't aiming to wound or disable; he was aiming to annihilate my head from my shoulders, to erase me from existence before I could speak another word.
My life, both of them, flashed before my eyes—a sad, beige office, a brilliant, dead dragon, a girl with worried eyes, all of it about to be wiped away by a tide of living darkness.
But he never reached me.
A figure moved with a speed that defied reality. My father, a Grandmaster in his own domain, was a blur of motion. An aura of pure, clean, golden Aether erupted from him like a miniature sun, a wave of pure, life-affirming power that clashed violently with the Void's negation. The sound was a deafening CRACK, not of impact, but of two opposing realities tearing at each other. The books on the shelves rattled, and a wine glass on the desk shattered from the sheer pressure. My father's hand shot out and clamped around Valerius's throat, stopping him dead in his tracks, mere inches from my face. The Void energy around Valerius's hand sputtered and died, utterly suppressed and outclassed by my father's overwhelming power.
The battle, if it could be called that, was over in less than a second.
"You dare," my father snarled, his voice a low, guttural roar of pure fury and betrayal. The realization of what Valerius truly was—a practitioner of some dark, forbidden art—had hit him with the force of a physical blow. "You bring that filth into my house? You raise your hand against my son?" He lifted Valerius off the floor with one hand, the older man choking and clawing at the iron grip.
"Father, capture him!" Damian shouted, his own spear materializing in his hand, its tip glowing with the potent energy of a Master, his face a mask of cold fury. "He must be interrogated! What is this power?!"
My father's intent was the same. He began to constrict his power, his golden aura tightening around Valerius, aiming to crush his Aether flow and render him unconscious for questioning.
But in that split second, Valerius acted. He stopped struggling. He looked past my father's enraged face, his eyes locking with mine one last time. I saw no fear. I saw no regret. Only the cold, absolute resolve of a fanatic who had seen his path to martyrdom.
A final, defiant, bloody smile touched his lips.
And then, with a final, convulsive effort, he threw his entire body forward. It was a weak, pathetic motion, but my father's grip was like iron, a fixed point in space. Valerius deliberately impaled his own throat on the sharp, decorative point of my father's gauntlet.
It was a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage.
Valerius's eyes went wide for a moment in a flash of agony, then glazed over with the emptiness of death. His body went limp, his last breath a rattling sigh.
My father, in his rage, had inadvertently become the executioner.
The silence that descended on the room was absolute, broken only by the sound of Valerius's body slumping to the floor as my father released him, staring at his own hand in horror and disbelief. Damian stood frozen, his spear still held at the ready, his eyes wide as he stared at the corpse, then at the lingering, foul traces of the Void energy in the air.
"He… moved into it," Damian whispered, his voice thick with shock. "He killed himself."
My father stared at the body of the man who had been his oldest friend, his breath ragged. He looked at me, his eyes filled with a storm of confusion, grief, and a thousand unanswered questions. "That phrase… that power… Lancelot, what have you brought into my house?"
The question hung in the air, heavy and unanswered. Valerius had succeeded. He had died without revealing a single detail about the Void Cult, without even giving them a name. He had left behind only a dead body, a web of questions, and the chilling, undeniable certainty that we were fighting a war we didn't even know existed.