The sun had already set by the time Machaon left his garden. He flew toward his family’s grand estate at a leisurely pace – leisurely for him, at least. Anyone below Violet would have found the rush of wind difficult to endure, yet Machaon barely registered it as it crashed against the thin film of willpower covering his body. He didn’t have to expend even a drop of mana to travel at this ridiculous speed.

Taking a few pieces of paper from his pocket, he unfolded them, examining the wanted posters for the hundredth time this week. His eyes lingered on Percy’s. ‘Why couldn’t you have been born a decade or two earlier?’ he wondered, his lips curling into a bitter frown.

Had the Aurora Dew existed before he commenced the riskiest part of his operation, all of this could have been avoided. With an alternative path to godhood, Machaon wouldn’t have needed to put his life on the line.

Officially, the Red-born’s miraculous recipe was outside the Order’s hands, but Machaon knew that was only a temporary situation. He understood the terrifying power that gods possessed better than most, having personally watched Hermes level a whole mountain a few thousand years ago – to open a more efficient route between two neighbouring provinces.

The only reason the boy was still alive and well, was because the deities willed it so. Sooner or later, they’d force the knowledge out of him or his mentor – assuming they hadn’t done that already – spreading it to the noble Houses.

Depending on the Order’s plans for Percy, that might happen next year or in a century. Either way, Machaon wasn’t in a rush. Whatever the case, his promotion was still tens of thousands of years away. Besides, the Aurora Dew would get him there even faster than his current method. The priceless elixirs would be in short supply, no doubt, but Machaon was bound to get a share, as the patriarch of a Great House.

Suffice to say, Machaon would have tossed his whole plan in the gutter had he known about Percy and his brilliant invention before commencing his operation. He might have even offered to shelter the Red-born from his short-sighted enemies and looked for an amicable solution that would please everyone. Any price would have been worth it, for a chance to break past his limits and attain divinity.

‘Such a shame… but it’s too late to change course…’

Smuggling that thing out of the Fungal Spire had been a colossal risk. Machaon had only dared to do it because he’d thought it necessary. Trying to return it would be foolish. It would be even harder this time, considering how much it had changed over the years, or how many eyes were currently watching the Guild. Besides, even if Machaon somehow managed to patch everything up, he could never erase his crime. Should anyone learn about it, the gods would have his head on a pike the very same day.

As things stood, his best bet was to keep going as he had, hoping to advance before the consequences of his reckless actions caught up to him. If he got lucky, he might even be able to stack the Aurora Dew’s benefits with his current approach, accelerating his plans several times over.

‘But that bitch is still a problem,’ he thought, flipping over to Nesha’s poster.

The girl had been a thorn in his side ever since her father sent her to the Alchemists’ Guild to protect her from their family’s destruction. Granted, none of Machaon’s subordinates knew anything incriminating, so even if a truth-seeker interrogated them, they wouldn’t learn much. That said, Machaon knew everything, and that was troublesome enough. He had to lie every other day to guard his secret – he lied about where he’d been, what he’d done, what had been gnawing at his mind, and why he’d made certain decisions.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As long as that cursed bloodline existed, it would only take a single slip-up around the wrong pair of ears to cost him everything. And tens of millennia was a long time to go without making a mistake.

Worse still, he didn’t really know that Nesha was the only one with the bloodline. On paper, she was the last surviving member of House Veritas, but it was entirely possible that one of the destroyed family’s promiscuous sons had gone around fathering nameless children in the past, spreading the Truthseeker bloodline like a disease.

Sadly, Machaon had no choice but to focus solely on the bloodline’s known bearers. This was one of the many reasons he preferred all his subordinates to have some other bloodline – it was the only way to be sure they lacked the means to see through his lies.

“I should have eradicated that House sooner,” he hissed through gritted teeth, an accidental surge of his willpower booming around him like thunder.

Knowing he was close to his House’s estate, Machaon took a deep breath to calm down.

Naturally, he’d considered finishing the job as soon as the girl made it to the Spire. Even during her stay in the Guild, he could have easily had her killed, but it would have been no less risky than letting her be.

No matter how clean he made her death, people would have wondered why she’d ended up dying so soon after her family’s destruction. They would have quickly figured out that nobody but Machaon could have facilitated both events, and they would have likely found it too coincidental that everything had transpired so soon after his brief tenure in the Guild.

After putting everything down, Machaon had ultimately decided to wait. Killing her a decade or two later would have been much safer, and it wasn’t like he’d been in a rush – the teenage girl had been too weak and too ignorant to pose a threat at the time.

But even he couldn’t have predicted that Nesha would end up collaborating with such a troublesome individual.

Having paid her close attention, Machaon had actually been the first person to learn about her involvement with the Aurora Dew. He’d been following her moves even before she reached out to his Oblivious Agents, so it hadn’t been difficult to piece everything together.

At first, he’d thought that had been his lucky break. He could have ratted her out to the Order and allowed the gods to get rid of her for him. Even now, he didn’t know whether or not it would have worked.

But what if it hadn’t?

What if the Order had struck a deal with her instead? It would have made everything a hundred times worse! The gods would have kept her forever out of Machaon’s reach. They might have even offered her the power and influence to investigate her family’s destruction and enact her revenge, sealing his fate.

Suddenly, the idea of assassinating her in secret had sounded a whole lot more appealing again!

Unfortunately, her involvement with the Aurora Dew had complicated even that. Killing her at that time would have made it even more likely for the gods to follow the breadcrumbs to Machaon. In the end, he’d settled for what he’d thought had been the safest plan: to subtly manufacture Nesha’s demise.

Machaon had allowed the girl and her – at the time unknown – accomplice to commence their shady operation and persist for a few months, incriminating themselves further. After the two had tied a noose around their own necks, Machaon had poured some oil in the conflict between Houses Talos and Antaeus, dropping the latter family an anonymous reminder that their rivals had been on the verge of producing a new Violet, thus escalating their war. In fact, he had even spotted some of House Talos’s weaknesses, leaking them to their rivals to accelerate their downfall!

It had worked like a charm!

Mere weeks after his meddling, House Antaeus had backed their enemies to a corner, forcing them to adopt desperate measures. House Talos had volunteered the Aurora Dew to the Divine Root, setting a target on Nesha’s back. Listening to Hermes’s announcement that day, Machaon had thought he had succeeded – at least, he hadn’t been able to see a safe path out of that mess for the girl. Even better, he’d accomplished his goal without anyone so much as suspecting his involvement!

It hadn’t been perfect, since his Oblivious Agents had still been implicated. Acting under divine command, Theseus had inevitably knocked on Machaon’s door, demanding the life of one of his underlings as punishment for their involvement. The audacious demand had stung Machaon’s pride more than the loss of his subordinate had, but that had ultimately been a small price to pay to protect his interests. Being painted as a negligent – or even incompetent – leader was a thousand times better than the Root learning about the worst of his sins.

Overall, Machaon had been beside himself, right until he found out that the “mysterious culprits” had escaped from the Guild!