The exhibition was supposed to be Seraphina's grand political debut- a demonstration that the House of Kaelen nurtured not just finance, but culture. Instead, it became the dynasty's second catastrophic public failure.
The event was held in the Kaelen family's private gallery, a gleaming vault where the city's elite gathered, sipping expensive champagne and discussing the merits of abstract chaos.
Seraphina's centerpiece was a triptych, three massive panels meant to represent the spiritual wealth of the capital. She stood before it, slender and elegant in a white silk gown, her face carefully composed. But Elara, watching the remote feed from her hidden base, knew the ADO was working, turning the act of viewing her own creation into an agony of the mind.
As the curator began his laudatory speech, praising Seraphina's "visionary purity," the artist's facade began to crack.
Her eyes fixed on the central panel. To everyone else, it was a masterpiece of controlled chaos; to Seraphina, the ADO had warped the image into a canvas of rot, pollution, and unspeakable moral contamination. The colors she had carefully blended now looked like open wounds.
She trembled violently, raising a hand to her mouth, the nausea overwhelming her.
"It's unclean," she whispered, her voice barely audible.
The curator paused, smiling nervously. "Forgive the artist's humility! She is too close to the work—"
Seraphina shrieked, a high, raw sound that cut through the polite chatter. "Impure! Unclean! All of it is lies! The color is toxic; the form is diseased!"
She lunged forward, grabbing a heavy silver letter opener from the curator's podium. With a terrifying, desperate frenzy, she began slashing at the triptych. Silk and canvas ripped with sickening sounds. Reds and golds bled onto the white marble floor.
"I can't see it! I can't breathe it!" she screamed, tearing at the painting, trying to destroy the mental horror that only she could perceive.
The guests scattered in pandemonium. Valen Kaelen, standing near the back, did not rush forward. He watched the destruction of his daughter's mind with the same cold, calculating horror he had shown for Cassian's financial collapse. This was weakness, exposed, public, and irrecoverable.
Within hours, before the sun rose, Lady Anya Kaelen enacted the contingency plan.
Commander Joric Tahl was given a new, crucial security directive: discreetly escorting Lady Isolde Kaelen from the outlying estates back to the capital manor. Isolde was Seraphina's younger cousin, quiet, studious, and entirely overlooked until now.
Joric met Isolde at the private train station. She was a pale, frightened girl of twenty, looking utterly out of place in the capital's high-stakes environment.
"They're forcing me to take her place, aren't they, Commander?" Isolde asked, her voice trembling as they walked the empty platform. "The marriage, the visibility. I am the clean canvas."
"You are the family's choice for stability, Lady Isolde," Joric said, offering the only professional comfort he could.
Anya Kaelen was waiting in the manor's receiving hall, dressed in black, her face a rigid mask of fury and control.
"Seraphina has been archived," Anya announced, her words brutally efficient. "She will reside quietly in the country estates under medical supervision. The bloodline is unstable. Isolde, you are now the primary heir. You will marry Lord Eamon's son. You will restore the Kaelen name's political purity. Do you understand your duty?"
Isolde, tiny and overwhelmed, nodded mutely.
The Kaelen machine had performed an emergency limb replacement. The new heir was in place, securing the alliance marriage and replacing the vulnerability with control.
Valen and Anya had acted with terrifying speed. Elara, watching the reports trickle in through her network, felt a chill. Her sabotage was successful, but the dynasty's will to survive was absolute. The shield had proven stronger than she anticipated. She had ruined two children, and Valen Kaelen remained untouched, simply adjusting his architecture.