CHAPTER 18: MOVING FORCES FROM WITHIN

Rain slid down the warded windows of House Valerius like melted glass, blurring the city of Luminis into trembling ribbons of firelight and shadow. The night after the Grand Hall duel felt stretched thin. The servants spoke in half-whispers and speculations of why Kaelen’s victory was not celebrated. Courtyards beamed with light at night. Even the runes along the cloisters seemed to dim their glow, as if watching, as if waiting.

Kaelen walked the colonnade that circled the west archive garden. The stone underfoot held the day’s heat, but the air was wet and sharp with rain.

The pathways felt cleaner than the incense-thick corridors of the main house. Echo padded beside him, brushing his leg from time to time, the wolf’s ear flicking toward every distant sound.

The fight kept replaying in his head for not more than ten seconds only. Lyren’s fury, all blaze and posture. Kaelen’s quiet, relentless pull threads of Aether lifted from the ambient hum, woven through muscle and breath, softening flame to light, weight to wind until Lyren’s grandstanding collapsed into the simple truth of difference. He took no pride in humiliating his brother. And yet, the look on Lord Valerius’s face when the duel ended left him more annoyed.

A ripple brushed the edge of Kaelen’s senses, like a fingertip drawn along still water. He turned. A figure detached from the arch’s shadow, hood lowered, cloak beaded with rain. The lantern at her back turned the falling water into strings of silver.

"Kaelen," Joanna said softly.

Echo did not growl. He merely stood, head canted, weighing her scent against memory.

She stepped closer, and the sigil on her shoulder caught the lantern light,three interlocked spirals, water etched into metal. It belongs to the House Marivel. Her dark hair was braided back in a practical coil; a blue stone glowed faintly at her throat. She had always carried herself like someone who had decided long ago what she could bear. Tonight, the decision had weight.

"You came alone?" Kaelen asked.

"Yes," she said. "I thought you would, too."

A beat passed. Rain gnawed at the guttering lantern. Kaelen folded his arms.

"You watched the duel," he said. "From the upper tier."

"I watched your restraint," Joanna replied. "And your control. There’s a difference between winning and choosing how to win. You understand that."

He let the words lie. "You asked to meet. Why?"

Her mouth pressed thin for an instant, then she lifted her chin and did what she always did when the conversation mattered. she told the truth, even if only a slice of it.

"I want you to hear this from me," she said. "Properly. My name is Joanna Marivel, of House Marivel, Water. I’m attached to the Conclave as an observer... and as an investigator, unofficially. I’ve been tracking anomalies along the city’s ley circuit for months."

Kaelen’s brow inched up. "Anomalies."

"Yes , Our small force tracks any illegal drops ,surges or thinning use of magic." Her gaze went past him to the darkness beyond the garden, where Luminis’s towers speared the rain like obsidian needles. "Something is drawing from our Source. Not a flood, not a rupture but a siphon. Small, constant, clever. Enough to keep the city bright while the land beyond the walls dulls."

Kaelen’s silence had edges. "You’re saying Luminis is... feeding on something it shouldn’t."

"I’m saying," she answered, "someone is helping it do so."

He tasted ash. The Marches had taught him the sound of a world starving. The same hum...too quiet...hid under the wards here if he listened.

"You said you were investigating anomalies," he said. "Why bring me into it?"

"Because of the beast you fought outside the eastern aqueduct three nights ago." Her voice dropped, quick and controlled. "We gathered residue from the scene. It wasn’t born of blight alone; it was engineered. It was stitched with binding runes that rechanneled what it absorbed into a pattern the Conclave monitors wouldn’t flag. It wasn’t meant to kill you, Kaelen. It was meant to distract everyone long enough for a siphon to open deeper under the city."

A cold line slid down his back. He thought of the way that creature’s light had snagged when he first touched it and how low the threads inside it resisted like netting.

"Who engineered it?" he asked.

"I don’t know," Joanna said. "Which is why I’m here."

Kaelen stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head once. "How can I trust you?"

"You don’t need to," Joanna said without flinching. "But understand this: you can’t do it all alone. I tried once... and I failed."

At that moment, she looked deeply hurt. Her silent grief became visible. He didn’t push at it. Instead, he cut toward the center that mattered.

"What else?" he asked.

She took a breath that trembled at the end, then leveled. .It’s still under investigation, nothing I can prove outright, but together we could unlock this secret. There have been emergency allocations of power to the Basilica’s lower vaults without corresponding ritual logs. Sanctum seals duplicated under Conclave rite have the same hands, different stamps. Minor blights left untreated near the outer wards... as if to justify pulling more power inward. There is a loop here, Kaelen. Someone is feeding the blight to keep Luminis standing as it is."

He could feel it now that she’d named it the faint wrongness beneath the rain, the way the gardens’ Aether ran too obediently toward the drains instead of up through leaf and root.

He shook his head once, half in refusal, half to keep from leaning into the truth too quickly. "Why do you care?" he asked, voice flat to hide a tightening behind his ribs. "You can go on living your perfect life. House Marivel has influence. The Conclave listens when you whisper. Why risk that for me...for this?"

Her eyes went darker, as if a storm moved behind them. When she answered, the words were ground down to something bitter and exact.

"I don’t move for your sake, I move because my elder brother...unlike you...didn’t make it back."

The garden seemed to draw in around the sentence. Joanna looked away, jaw set, not trusting her voice until she did.

"He went north with a small team to track a blight bloom near the old canals. He was the fastest reader of current lines we had. He sent three reports. Then nothing. The Conclave said the Marches took him. The Sanctum said his duty was complete." She looked at Kaelen again, steadier now. "And the ledger said his name was kept, which I suppose is meant to comfort me. It doesn’t."

"I’m sorry," Kaelen said quietly.

Joanna accepted the condolence with a brief nod, like a coin she had no use for but recognized as currency.

"I needed you to know my stake," she said. "And to say this plainly: when you arrived, rumors started moving like fish under black water. Your duel tonight will turn them into currents. If we’re right, whoever is draining the Source can’t risk you seeing the lattice beneath the city. They’ll try to kill you in ways that look like accidents, then in ways that don’t."

"I’ve already survived two," he said.

"Then expect a third," she replied. "Soon."

Echo huffed, as if to agree. Kaelen glanced at the faint traceries of wardlight along the colonnade. Lord Valerius’s safety, hard and conditional. He turned back to Joanna.

"You’ve given me reasons," he said. "You’ve given me a theory. Give me a name."

"If I had one," she said, "I would be in that person’s throat, not in this garden." A thin line of anger edged her voice now. "But I have a trail. It begins under the Basilica’s fifth vault. I can’t get there alone. If you want to see what the Conclave hides, come when the third bell rings tomorrow. Come quietly."

"And if I don’t?"

"Then you’ll keep winning fights while the floor under you turns to water." She stepped back, rain beading at her lashes. "Decide quickly."

She drew her hood up and pulled away into the arch’s darkness, her footfalls swallowed by rain. Echo followed her with his eyes until the sound was gone. Kaelen looked out over Luminis. Through the rain-blurred veil, the city seemed to breathe. He could almost feel the slow, deliberate pulse of something old in the bones below.

"You are not alone," Tiara had said a hundred times. Tonight, another voice joined hers.

He turned, and the garden held its breath again.

Far from where Kaelen stood , in the east side of the house. Lyren sat in his room still fuming in anger , not yet over his loss. A sudden wind came from his window. He stood to shut it down.

On the table lay a parchment sealed in black wax. No crest. No sign. No scent, even. He had found the letter the moment he sat down. He slipped beneath the strap of his bracer with a delicacy that made his skin crawl.

He broke the seal with his thumbnail. The paper unfurled like something that represents death.

Four words, written in a hand that was too careful to be careless and too plain to be common:

Kill Kaelen of Luminis.