Desmira Lockwood had never been a timid woman, yet now her hands would not stop trembling.
The cabin lanterns swung on their chains, painting manic shadows across the lacquered walls while the pleasure boat rocked beneath them.
Moments earlier, her dear brother's grim confession had laid bare the depth of their ruin.
Riven Ashvale, that mild-voiced scholar they had once dismissed as harmless, had quietly arranged every piece on the board—and they, oblivious, had drifted into checkmate.
She dared a glance across the cabin.
Her life was over. There was no more 'Lady Ashvale'. Her brain stopped trying to comprehend what was happening.
She powerlessly gazed at the floor.
She had agreed to follow his orders willingly without struggling. She could only let down her pride and suffer humiliation if she wanted her and her son to live.
Unfortunately, the woman severely underestimated Riven's hatred towards them.
Riven sat in an armchair facing the Lockwoods, his elbows idle on the armrests, his gaze fixed on Desmira as though she were a curiosity under glass.
He neither blinked nor showed any emotion on his face. Simply stared at them. His increasingly twisting insanity was such.
Four endless hours of thick silence stretched like a hangman's rope between them.
Desmira could hear the frantic tattoo of her own pulse, each beat a new verdict: guilty, guilty, guilty.
The last of the silence snapped without sound.
Riven stood—one fluid motion, light as a cat—and vanished.
The next moment found him directly before the Lockwoods. Steel-strong fingers closed around two throats.
"Wha-!!" Desmira's eyes bulged.
Desmira tried to scream, but her breath caught halfway, her vision already fogging.
Darkness rolled over her mind like a storm cloud, and the last thing she saw was the reflected lantern light dancing in Riven's steady eyes.
Riven looked towards the cabin windows. A burst of energy blew away a large hole there with a loud boom.
Two limp bodies shot through the shattered panes, flung into the night. They were so fast, no one even realized.
A white flash swept from the clouds, talons outstretched, and bore the two humans away from the dark waters.
The city-lord's guards and Lady Ashvale's bodyguards burst into the cabin moments later, swords drawn.
All they found were wet floorboards smelling of blood and lake brine, and the city lord crumpled in a heap, a single bruise blooming at his temple.
Panic spread across the pleasure boat like wildfire; by dawn, every vessel on the nearby waters was whispering the same dread litany:
Lady Ashvale vanished, Patriarch Lockwood vanished, and the city lord was assaulted.
Minus the Greenwoods, Sundawn's ruling circle had been beheaded in a single night.
........
Far from the uproar, an unnamed island lay adrift on the Great Lake, its beaches choked with reeds and its interior riddled with limestone caverns. Nothing else.
Inside one such cave, torchlight flickered over damp walls, and the rhythmic drip of water drops from the upside-down stalagmites echoed like a slow heartbeat.
A mildly enchanting symphony.
Patriarch Lockwood hung from shackles bolted into the rock, ankles submerged in a shallow pool. Across the cave, Desmira and her son lay unconscious upon a threadbare pallet.
Riven sat on a small wooden stool, rolling a jagged knife between gloved fingers.
Blood, still warm, splattered onto the stone, joining older stains that veined the floor in rusty maps.
He gazed at the man who had just died from… something.
He was certain he hadn't died from the torture. The blows hadn't targeted any vital areas - just the nerves.
He'd also made sure the pain didn't overwhelm his brain.
Yet, just as he was about to reveal the identity of the 'black masked' man, he convulsed twice and his head slumped forward, his body going limp.
It was clear: this was instant death.
Riven crouched, index finger glowing as he channeled a searching thread of inner energy through the corpse.
The blade wounds he had inflicted were shallow, chosen with surgical indifference to avoid anything life-threatening: pain sharp enough to shatter resolve, yet not to kill.
And still the man's heart had stopped as though struck by lightning.
"Not poison," Riven muttered. His energy mapped every organ, every vein, and found no crystalline residue, no sticky clot. "So who the fuck killed you before you could talk?"
If the plan to kill him was suspicious before, now he was sure there was more to this story.
"Remote assassination?" He, of course, was familiar with this concept. His organization in his past life had used the same things when mercenaries went rogue.
"But it is not technology. I can't find any heart implants, nothing in his blood either. The brain has nothing."
Suddenly, he straightened, nostrils flaring.
A foul chemical stench cut through the damp air—the reek of gutter-grade narcotics peddled in the lowest rungs of society.
Moving to Lockwood, he raised the patriarch's arm and sliced a neat line across the wrist. The blood that welled out was dark, viscous, tainted by the same cheap but overdosed devil's brew.
"A perfect 'suicide'.... heh," Riven sneered, yet his voice flat. "One corpse. No culprit."
Anyone sane who would find this dead body would instantly disregard the death as an addicted junkie overdosing themselves.
"Haahh… back to square one. Shit." He tilted his head back slightly, rubbing his temples.
He flicked his fingers; cleansing energy hissed across Lockwood's wound, burning away every trace of himself without so much as blistering the skin.
A decade of battle experience taught him more than just about fighting. Covering tracks was an art of its own.
"Solwing." The crane peeked inside the cave. "Throw this man near the shore. Let him be washed ashore. The patrols will find a desperate man who couldn't keep his addictions in check."
The crane cooed its beak once in acknowledgment, seized Cloudren with surprising delicacy, and swept into the night.
When the echo of its wingbeats died, Riven finally turned toward the pallet.
Desmira Lockwood looked heartbreakingly composed in sleep, a strand of dark hair resting against her cheek.
Beside her, the boy, twenty years old, fat, curled like a question mark, was unaware of the nightmare sharpening its claws around him.
'Disgusting rat,' the mere sight of him repulsed Riven.
He quickly averted his gaze towards the mother.
Riven's breathing quickened. Eyes darkened in extreme insanity. He licked his lips and looked at the woman who still kept herself a prime milf.
He looked to the side where there was a bed. On the bed was a pink elixir bottle.
Looking back at Desmira Lockwood, his 'big brother' was flung away towards the stone cell he had arranged.
Inside here, he can watch. But she wouldn't know.
The thought of breaking her excited him to no end.
He had promised himself he would break Desmira's spirit, make her feel every ounce of the humiliation she had let blossom inside his childhood home.
Yet a colder voice whispered that revenge, like wine, soured when left uncorked too long. Which would be sweeter—her screams, or her despair, when her willingness to trade dignity for her son's safety was found out?
He would make this bitch mourn for him in front of her own 'sweet son'.
After all, he wouldn't be forcing her. She would do it herself, of her own accord. That was the deal.
"Ahh… I wonder what kind of face you make when you realize your son was watching you bounce on me all day long." He crouched in front of the unconscious woman, grabbing her hair.
"After all that is done, I will make you watch me peel off his skin…. Mother~~~"
Reaching out, he brushed a line of energy across her forehead.
Desmira's eyelids fluttered; awareness crept back in. When her gaze found Riven's, confusion bloomed into terror. The cave answered with thunderous silence.
"How long can a mother endure?" Riven chuckled softly. "Let's find out."
......
Half a continent away, beneath the vaulted roofs of the Divine Capital, Lady Rosalind Ashvale set down her quill and flexed ink-stained fingers.
Ceiling lights cast a dim yellow glow, and her desk light stood pooled around the parchments scattered over her desk—military rosters, grain-levy schedules, letters sealed with the crests of half a dozen duchies.
In the hush of her personal office, the chaos of politics was her art, a noise she had long since learned to ignore.
Rosalind was four hundred years old, though her proud physique and beautiful, bright eyes made that number absurd.
A mid-branch born of House Ashvale, she was one of the only two children of her parents. Who had now passed on. May the mother bless their souls.
She married into a powerful Ashvale lineage in the Divine Capital when she was merely a hundred. Already Innate, she was a powerful seed.
Now, at the Spirit Harmonizing and Energy Channeling stage of the Innate Life phase, she sat on the High Table itself, an elder with enough sway to unseat governors—if she so wished.
Much to the glory of her brother.
Yet power had never quieted the echo of her brother's laughter in the corridors of her memory.
He had been the hero, the genius, the kind soul who dragged her onto training yards so she might learn courage by his side.
Fifty years ago, he fell into an ambush no one had been brave enough to solve. The loss had carved out a hollow in her heart that time refused to fill.
Those were the days.
When lesser relatives circled like vultures after his funeral, Rosalind did what they had not expected: she unveiled the power she had already consolidated.
Unfortunately for them, her brother had already taught her what was necessary in politics and power play.
Alliances forged in that season of glory still held firm today, rooting her influence so deeply that even the most spiteful branch families dared not tug at it.
All their efforts fell in vain, and some with their master minds. Allegedly, of course.
Her eyes strayed to a wax-sealed dossier stamped with the crest of Sundawn Duchy.
Inside lay the deed of ennoblement granting her nephew—grandson authority over lands beside the Great Lake.
The boy named Riveron Ashvale carried the spark of valor her brother once embodied. The very thought lifted the iron weight from her chest.
Her kids were grown and married, and now they were gone. After all, she had married into an Ashvale family, so she wouldn't have much influence over her children's marital rights.
Of course, her children were not ungrateful bastards. They still stayed in touch with her.
What hurt her the most were her nephews. Those selfish and greedy pigs. They split up her brother's inheritance and then ran off to live on his decaying wealth.
Her sister-in-law, a mortal, suffered the most.
She still recalled the 18-year-old girl, who looked up to her with respect and asked for her blessing. Who was she to refuse?
She was glad she did not. As this mortal woman had invoked a sense of inferiority in her, the way she kept the broken family afloat with sheer will.
It was this woman, now elderly, who had shared her vision of a duchy. And she was overjoyed beyond belief.
Her brother's bloodline still lived on!
Her brother's grandchild carried the same valor. And so she did what every good sister would do.
Helped him.
With her power and influence, she had more than enough momentum. Once the plan was in motion, she also ensured that an elite army of a hundred was sent to Sundawn.
Rosalind tapped the dossier. "One hundred elite lancers," she murmured, "and two surgeons who know when to keep their tongues tied."
The exile's garden outside Sundawn City would house them discreetly; Lavinia Ashvale, Riveron's grandmother, would see to their pay and discipline.
They will solely fall under the jurisdiction of Riveron Ashvale and Lavinia Ashvale.
Wealth was no longer a concern—Rosalind had already redirected three merchant caravans' profits into coffers bearing the new Sun Dawn duchy's sigil.
The only thing left to do is to pick up her goddaughter and send her off to Sundawn.
She just wanted her to spend one last moment with her childhood sweetheart. Whatever happened after that didn't matter to her.
At her age… if she didn't like some drama, life would be too dull. Right?
Her brother's line would rise again; she would make certain of it. And if the path demanded a few bold strokes, well—boldness was the family virtue.
Smiling, Rosalind lifted her quill after drafting the orders.
...…
Divine Capital. Another noble mansion.
Two men looked at each other. One seated, clearly the lord, and one standing with a report in hand.
"My lord, the Sundawn land acquisition plan has failed."