The summons felt like a death knell echoing through the keep. Rina delivered it with a pale face and trembling hands, her fear a palpable thing.

“Your father requests your presence in the great hall, young master.”

“He… he says to come at once.”

Ray took a single, deep breath, the air in his lungs feeling as cold and sharp as glass. He stood up from the book he had been pretending to read. In his pocket, his fingers closed around the smooth, cool surface of the black warding amulet he had created. It was a solid, comforting weight, a physical anchor for the grand lie he was about to tell. This was it. The culmination of weeks of secret training, research, and forgery. The show was about to begin. He walked from the library, his small footsteps making no sound on the worn stone floors. He was Ray Croft, nine years old, small for his age, dressed in a simple tunic. He was a picture of harmless innocence. But in his mind, he was a legion. He had already decided against any active immersion. He couldn’t afford the cognitive strain, the tell-tale headache, or the risk of a time limit. For this performance, he would have to rely on the Ambient Presence of his inner committee and his own core talent as an actor. He was Alex Chen, and he was walking onto the most important stage of his life.

The great hall had been transformed into an arena. The long dining table had been pushed to the side. A single, high-backed chair, his father’s throne-like seat from the head of the table, had been placed in the center of the room. In it sat the visitor, the man who had been introduced as Malachi. He was tall and severe, dressed in the dark, immaculate robes of a high-ranking scholar or magistrate. His face was sharp and intelligent, his grey-streaked hair perfectly combed. He radiated an aura of cold, intellectual authority. Where Silas had been a ghost, this man was a judge, jury, and potential executioner. His father, Lord Alistair, stood beside the chair like a defendant in the dock, his face slick with sweat, his hands twisting the fabric of his tunic. He looked broken.

Ray entered the hall and walked calmly to the center of the vast, empty space, stopping a respectful ten feet from the seated man. He executed a flawless, formal bow, just as the Scheming Courtier’s voice advised in the quiet of his mind. Malachi looked down at him, his eyes as grey and cold as a winter sea. He did not return the greeting.

“So,”

He said, his voice crisp and devoid of emotion.

“This is the child.”

He gestured to a small table beside his chair. On it, displayed like evidence in a trial, were two items: the pale, silvery-gold electrum coin and the scrap of ancient silk, which, even in the daylight, seemed to absorb the light around it.

“For weeks,”

Malachi began, his gaze boring into Lord Alistair,

“we have been aware of certain… anomalies… originating from this fiefdom.”

“An untraceable coin of an unknown alloy, a fragment of fabric that appears to be woven with a form of light-infusion magic not seen on this continent for five hundred years.”

He steepled his fingers, his expression unchanging.

“These items appeared shortly after an agent of my associates visited this keep.”

“They appeared in a house that is on the verge of defaulting on a significant and long-standing financial obligation.”

“I am here, Lord Croft, for an explanation.”

Lord Alistair opened his mouth, but only a dry, croaking sound came out. He looked from Malachi’s unforgiving face to the strange artifacts on the table, and his composure finally shattered. He was a man out of his depth, drowning in a sea of secrets he couldn’t comprehend. It was in that moment of his father’s utter collapse that Ray intervened.

“My father cannot answer you,”

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Ray said. His voice was a child’s, clear and high, yet it cut through the tense silence of the hall with an unnerving authority. Malachi’s gaze shifted to him, his eyes narrowing slightly.

“And why is that?”

“Because the explanation you seek does not concern the affairs of House Croft,”

Ray said, taking a half-step forward.

“It concerns the affairs of our new patron, I am here to speak on his behalf.”

“I am his Herald.”

He reached into his pocket and slowly, deliberately, placed the black warding amulet on the table next to the coin and the silk. The three artifacts, the three acts of his play, were now assembled. A flicker of something, surprise? Annoyance? crossed Malachi’s face before being suppressed.

“A patron?”

He asked, his tone laced with a dangerous skepticism.

“Your house is insolvent, what lord would take on such a liability?”

“Our patron is not a lord,”

Ray said, his voice steady. He began to recite the script he had memorized, the words flowing from him with a chilling, preternatural calm. He was no longer just Ray. He was the vessel, the empty stage upon which the character of the Herald now walked.

“My patron is the last scion of a House that predates the very Compacts your Argent Hand holds so dear.”

“He is the Magus of House Lumina.”

The name fell into the room and landed with no weight at all. It was a name Malachi had never heard. This was by design.

“I have never heard of this… House Lumina,”

Malachi said, his voice flat. It was the first test.

“Of course you have not,”

Ray replied, his tone not one of defiance, but of simple fact, as if explaining the sky was blue. He channeled the Eccentric Scholar’s vast repository of knowledge.

“House Lumina withdrew from the world during the Unification Wars, refusing to bend the knee to a throne they viewed as a temporary political convenience.”

“Their legacy is not written in the common histories of kings and merchants, it is etched in the esoteric archives of Aethelgard itself.”

He then launched into the heart of his performance, a flawless recitation of the fictional legal and arcane framework he had constructed.

[SKILLED APPLICATION DETECTED]

[EVENT: THE GRAND DECEPTION]

[PERFORMANCE EVALUATION: IN PROGRESS…]

“My patron’s rights to this land and all that is on it,”

Ray continued, his voice resonating with the Courtier’s archaic cadence,

“are established by the pre-Unification tenets of the ‘Aetherial Compact,’ which holds that any claim based on the flow of mere currency is subordinate to a claim based on the flow of ley-line energy.”

“As this keeps sits upon a locus of significant power, a fact your organization seems to have missed in its purely financial assessment, my patron has chosen to exercise his ancestral claim.”

Malachi stared at him, his face a mask of stone. He was a man used to dealing with frightened lords and desperate merchants. He was not used to being lectured on arcane legal theory by a nine-year-old.

“This is… an elaborate fiction,”

Malachi said slowly.

“Words and theories are meaningless.”

“The Argent Hand deals in tangible assets and demonstrable power.”

“As does my patron,”

Ray countered smoothly. He gestured to the table.

“The coin you hold is forged of Lumina Electrum, an alloy whose composition is a secret of our House.”

“The silk is woven with pure moonlight, a craft long thought lost to the world.”

“And this…”

He said, tapping the black warding amulet,

“is a ward of passage.”

“My patron offers it as a gesture of… professional courtesy.”

“He has no quarrel with the Argent Hand, so long as the Hand recognizes his sovereign domain.”

He then delivered the masterstroke, a piece of information so specific, so impossible for a child to know, that it was designed to shatter the agent’s composure. He looked directly at Malachi, the Gritty Detective’s perception sharpening his gaze.

“For instance,”

Ray said, his voice dropping to a confidential whisper.

“My patron is aware of the Hand’s recent difficulties with the Red Lily Trading Company in the southern marches.”

“He knows of the three shipments of Valorian steel that went ‘missing’ from your warehouse at Saltwind Dock last month.”

He recited the exact address he had memorized from the deed in his father’s study.

“He understands that the loss of such assets puts a strain on your organization.”

“He has no desire to add to your troubles, he asks only that you extend House Croft the same courtesy.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Malachi’s composure finally broke. A muscle in his jaw twitched. His eyes, for the first time, lost their cold, analytical focus and widened with genuine, unadulterated shock. Ray saw it clearly. He had hit a nerve. The information was not just accurate; it was a closely-guarded secret, a failure the Hand would never want exposed. How could this child know this? How could a reclusive, unknown "Magus" possibly have intelligence on their most secure, internal operations? The question hung in the air between them, a chasm of doubt that had opened beneath Malachi’s feet. Ray had done more than just tell a convincing lie. He had presented his opponent with a mystery so profound, so inexplicable, that to deny it would be a greater risk than to believe it.

He stood his ground, a small boy in the center of the vast hall, his face calm, his eyes ancient. He had delivered the performance of a lifetime. The agent of the Argent Hand was, for the first time since he had entered their lives, completely and utterly speechless.