The road from Hafthor unspooled like a frayed ribbon, carrying them from the rarefied air of scholarly pursuit into the growing mugginess of political reality. The City of Tomes, its towers of glowing script, yielded to the brooding, sour-visaged bulk of the King's Seat, the kingdom's capital city. It was not called by a beautiful name. It was just the Seat, for that was its purpose: to be the solid, impenetrable foundation upon which power sat.Where Hafthor had been a symphony of mind, the Seat was a cacophony of ambition. The air, which had been scented with ozone and parchment, was thick with the smells of close humanity, cheap perfume over cheaper wine, roasting meat, and the underlying, ever-present tang of forge-smoke and sewage. The buildings were not tapering spires but low, heavy buildings of dark stone and timber, upper stories leaning over narrow, muddy streets like gossip sharing secrets.Felix and Liora passed beneath the huge granite gates, their Academy robes drawing a

The ripple of upheaval Felix had stirred in the Court of Quills did not die down. It spread through the Seat's gold-leafed halls and smoke-taverns with the haste of scandal. The "Academic," the "Heretic," the "Truth-Sayer"—they called him many names, but to the old blood of the court, he was an upstart, a commoner who had strayed into the halls of power and dared to point out the cracks in the wallpaper.His notoriety earned him an invitation to a soirée at Duke Valerius's mansion, cousin to the boy he had humiliated at the Academy and a man whose influence was a gilded cage around the king's own throne. It was not an invitation born of respect. It was a summons to an abattoir disguised as a ballroom.The Valerius estate was a temple of old money and still older arrogance. Marble floors shone under the light-orb chandeliers, and tapestries depicting the duke's ancestors triumph in battle (generally over poorly-armed peasants) adorned the walls. The air was thick with the sweet scent o

The lead-lined coffer lay on the rough table of their rented room, a low, ominous mass that seemed to suck the light from the air. The Ward on the ancient scroll within wasn't just a lock; it was a presence, a silent, sleeping guardian of immense power. Felix could feel it even through the lead, a low, threatening hum that resonated on the lowest levels of the Unseen Tide.He didn't attempt to open it for days. He simply sat and held it, his hands on the chill metal, his consciousness extended. He wasn't trying to break the Ward. He was trying to learn its language.Annotation: Royal Ward of Secrecy (King's Edict Variant – Lv. 99). Purpose: To protect. To conceal. To punish presumption. Mechanism: Psychometric trigger. The Ward is not activated by force or ingenious unlocking spells. It is activated by the reader's intent. To deactivate it, one must show one's intention is aligned with the Ward's innermost, truest purpose—not to discover, but to protect the truth it guards. Penalty fo

The popular applause was a crown of thorns for Felix. They offered him a weak, populist armor, but at the same time, they made him the perpetual foe of the powers that be. The nobility's first indignation had become cold, calculating anger. They could not strike him openly, not with thousands watching his every move. So they sought an instrument to strike in the darkness he had led them into.They found it in a familiar form: Kael.The Storm Blade had not left the kingdom. Embarrassed and angry at his defeat at the Academy, he had been wallowing in the Seed's worst parts, drinking his house's empty purse and faking his indignation. He was a spark over tinder, and the royal faction were all too keen to provide the kindling.He was called to not a resplendent palace, but to a modest townhouse owned by a shell company that traced back to Duke Valerius. The one who welcomed him was not a lord, but a spymaster named Vex, a man with the dead fish stare and the bearing of a statue.Your batt

The stress of maintaining the illusion of the war was a ceaseless, grinding burden to Felix's mind. Each edited report was another brick added to a psychic burden that slumped his shoulders and etched new creases of weariness into his eyes. He moved through the capital as though possessed, his focus inward, maintaining the gossamer, unseen constructs of untruths that were propping up the kingdom's spirits.It was during this exhausted vigilance that the Codex had started whispering a different, alternative truth. Initially, it had been but a faint thrum along the edge of his perception, a discord in the Unseen Tide that had no connection to the fields of war or grain tithe. It was more delicate, more intricately threaded into the power matrices of the city.He walked with Liora through a plaza ruled by a row of commanding statues—the "Hero-Kings" of the great noble houses. Valerius, Croft, Montague. Each accompanied by an ornate plaque presenting a glorious pedigree back to the First