Amidst the deafening roar of the hurricane, a heavy, serene baritone voice somehow managed to pierce the reinforced glass and the howling gale, greeting Ellios’s ears with terrifying clarity.

  "I harbor no anxiety regarding a young Randar actively challenging Porto Royale."

  Ellios flinched slightly. The drag of smoke that had just escaped his lips was instantaneously snatched away by the tempest.

  He snapped his head back. Through the glass doors separating this freezing balcony from the ambient warmth of the chamber, he beheld Arka’s silhouette. His "newfound ally" had evidently risen from the mattress. Arka stood bare-chested in the dead center of the room, executing a series of languid, deeply relaxed stretches. His wiry, heavily scarred musculature pulled taut; his joints popped with dull, heavy cracks, mimicking an apex predator freshly roused from a prolonged hibernation.

  "Because Mount Rhagas stands infinitely taller and broader," Arka continued. He did not yell, yet the vibration of his words seemingly rattled the marrow within Ellios’s bones. "Merely excising a spoiled, pampered manservant playing at absolute power... that is trivial labor for the denizens residing upon Mount Rhagas."

  A spoiled manservant.

  Arka’s designated moniker for Louis Ferdinand—the Prince of the North, who commanded absolute terror across the entirety of the capital—caused the corner of Ellios’s lip to twitch, desperately fighting back a deeply cynical sneer. Through the lens of a Sagara, the vaunted military supremacy of Porto Royale was apparently nothing more than infantile playthings.

  Ellios pivoted his body entirely to face the chamber. He leaned heavily against the stone parapet, cupping one hand to aggressively shield the burning cherry of his cigarette from the wrath of the wind. His hooded gaze narrowed, piercing the glass to definitively lock onto Arka’s wolf-like eyes.

  Within this volatile, life-or-death crucible, Ellios required absolute certainty. If Louis had indeed survived the inferno, Ellios required another monster to slaughter him.

  "Will House Sagara..." Ellios pitched his voice slightly higher to ensure it carried, wagering his very life upon the brutal honesty of the youth standing inside, "...actively obstruct my execution of the Prince of Porto Royale?"

  Ellios pressed the filter to his parched lips. He inhaled a deep, ragged drag. The tip flared a blinding, incandescent red, burning ravenously against the suffocating dark of the night and the biting frost of the storm.

  Within the chamber, Arka’s stretching ceased entirely.

  The feral youth slowly lowered his arms. He bowed his head a fraction, his disheveled bangs obscuring the upper half of his face. Yet, the moment Arka tilted his head back up, the ambient temperature surrounding the balcony seemed to plummet to absolute zero. The jovial, teasing smirk that had adorned Arka’s face moments prior had been violently erased, usurped by a deeply darkened expression that radiated lethal, unadulterated malice.

  Arka took slow, measured steps toward the glass partition. Every footfall leaked an aura of primordial bloodlust that made Ellios’s survival instincts shriek in blind terror.

  "Why in the hell would I obstruct you?" Arka replied, his voice dropping into a guttural, vibrating growl echoing from the abyssal depths.

  Arka stood flush against the glass pane, his gaze drilling straight through Ellios’s flesh and into his naked soul.

  "You know exactly why my bloodline has been decimated in this era," Arka whispered, yet every syllable struck Ellios’s sternum with the concussive force of a sledgehammer. "The Sagara lineage has been nearly excised from the face of Carta."

  Arka tilted his head, his eyes burning with millennia of unquenched, blood-soaked vengeance.

  "Take a wild guess, Ell..." Arka’s voice mutated into a venomous hiss, viciously lacerating the silence within Ellios’s skull. "...Exactly who engineered this slaughter?"

  KRAAAASSSHHH!

  The oceanic gale abruptly howled with terrifying ferocity, seemingly rising to meet the apocalyptic wrath radiating from the Sagara Heir. The hurricane above Dum-Shadd rampaged without a shred of mercy.

  THOOM!

  The gargantuan waves below escalated their madness, pulverizing the granite cliff face with brutal, unforgiving violence. Explosions of white sea-foam vaulted high into the ether, violently misting Ellios’s face, which had now drained to the pallor of a fresh corpse.

  The answer to Arka’s inquiry suddenly detonated within Ellios’s brain, violently stitching together the fragmented, blood-soaked puzzle of Carta’s history that had been buried beneath centuries of manufactured lies. Porto Royale. The Regional Sovereigns. The Dukes.

  Ellios’s fingers went numb, allowing the cigarette to slip from his grasp, immediately swallowed by the churning, abyssal dark of the ocean below.

  Arka took a final step forward. His massive, calloused hand slammed against the glass door, shoving it violently wide open.

  The hurricane instantly breached the chamber with catastrophic force, whipping the heavy velvet drapes into a chaotic frenzy and causing the hearth fire to violently thrash in panic. Yet, the Sagara youth did not so much as blink. He strode out into the freezing void, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ellios upon the balcony, fully exposing his scarred, naked chest to the brutal lashing of the salt gale.

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

  Ellios stared at the rugged profile of Arka’s face, which appeared chiseled from raw, unyielding bedrock. The paralyzing terror that had briefly ambushed him slowly began to sublimate, settling to the floor of his psyche, gradually usurped by the razor-sharp analytical instincts of his bloodline. The Fox of Mount Rhagas was slowly regaining his logical footing.

  "Your grandfather..." Ellios’s voice finally cleaved through the roaring wind, preternaturally calm and as precise as a surgeon's scalpel. "...Rajendra Sagara. He actively chose absolute silence."

  Ellios stared down at the violently churning sea-foam below, visualizing the crushing, blood-soaked weight of history that had forced a dynasty of apex predators to bow their heads.

  "He adopted extreme passivity. Remaining entirely static, refusing to claim any role upon the capital's stage. The world genuinely believes he has been defanged, but I know the truth..." Ellios turned his head, staring at the rigid line of Arka’s jaw. "...He executed that maneuver strictly to project docility and feign absolute weakness, solely to avoid triggering an incident that would definitively exterminate the final dregs of your blood."

  Arka did not interrupt. His obsidian eyes stared dead ahead into the teeth of the storm, permitting Ellios to verbally dissect his family's tragedy.

  "And then there is your father," Ellios continued, his tone now a volatile cocktail of profound reverence and the sheer frustration of a master spy. "Anagata Sagara. He simply vanished into thin air following the massacre. Do you possess any concept of how statistically impossible that feat is, Arka? Even the sprawling, tentacled intelligence network of House Randar, and the omniscient 'Hawk's Eye' belonging to House Blackmere—which monitors every single grain of soil across Carta... not a single operative among us could locate him. He evaporated as if swallowed by the earth itself."

  The gale howled a long, mournful note, delivering a fresh volley of freezing brine against Ellios’s face. Yet, the impeccably groomed youth did not retreat a single inch.

  "And then... there is you." Ellios allowed a heavy pause to hang suspended in the violently tense air. "...Right now, the world perceives an anomaly. They behold a newly hatched drake."

  Ellios pivoted his body, leaning back against the stone parapet, squaring his shoulders entirely toward Arka.

  "They are profoundly wary of you, Arka. Those arrogant Dukes, Porto Royale, perhaps even the Crown itself. They know exactly what breed of blood pumps through your veins, but they have not yet ascertained the true length of the talons you conceal."

  Ellios’s hooded eyes flashed with brilliant, calculating intellect beneath the strobing, fractured moonlight.

  "Whatever countermeasures they ultimately decide to deploy against you—whether they dispatch death squads, offer poisoned alliances, or attempt to put a collar around your neck—none of that is dictated by them." Ellios thrust a slender index finger directly at Arka’s sternum. "That outcome rests entirely upon your posture and the actions you choose to execute from this exact second forward."

  Ellios lowered his hand, holding Arka’s gaze with the challenging, unyielding stare of an equal ally.

  "If you roar too early, Porto Royale and the rest of the vultures will hunt you down before your scales have fully hardened. But if you continue to cower in silence like your grandfather... they will eventually feel secure enough to place their boots upon your throat."

  Far below them, the Southern Sea detonated against the reef once more (KRAAAASSSHHH!), as if the cosmos itself were aggressively underlining the lethal warning delivered by the Randar heir. Ellios fell silent, awaiting the young drake’s counter-move upon the political chessboard he had just unfurled.

  Ellios had just concluded the delivery of his brilliantly synthesized political analysis. He stood with an aggressively challenging posture, fully convinced he had seized absolute control of the discourse, actively attempting to herd this young drake onto his designated squares of the board. He reached into his coat pocket anew, extracting a second cigarette to pacify the raw, jangling nerves lingering after his extensive monologue.

  However, Arka appeared entirely unimpressed. The Sagara youth betrayed not a single fraction of anxiety regarding the impending maneuvers of Porto Royale or the collective threat of the Dukes.

  Arka merely stared at Ellios with a pair of hawk-like eyes that were as glacial and dead as the abyssal trenches.

  "There is zero necessity to wait for them, Ell," Arka replied. His voice was entirely flat, stripped of all emotion, yet it cleaved through the howling hurricane with a lethal, terrifying clarity.

  Arka raised his right hand, tracing a finger along the elongated laceration marring his bare chest—the very wound he had dismissively classified as the 'scratch of a feral dog' mere minutes ago.

  "Rahessa has already driven the first blade into me."

  Time seemingly ceased its forward march upon the balcony of Dum-Shadd.

  Ellios’s index and middle fingers abruptly suffered a total loss of motor function. His nerve endings went entirely numb. The pristine white cylinder of tobacco he had just pinched and was preparing to ignite simply slipped through his paralyzed grip.

  Fwip.

  The cigarette fell. It was instantly snatched by the ravenous vortex of the hurricane, tumbling helplessly over the stone parapet before being swallowed whole by the raging, pitch-black maw of the Southern Sea far below.

  Yet, Ellios did not so much as blink at the loss of the smoke.

  The physique of the Randar heir flash-froze entirely. His jaw slacked open; his mandible dropped as if the connective tendons had just been violently severed. His hooded eyes were now dilated in sheer, unadulterated horror, locked dead upon Arka’s lacerated chest.

  Ellios’s universe violently inverted upon its axis for the dozenth time this evening.

  Rahessa.

  That absolute taboo. The dynasty of monstrous, occult temple guardians who demanded "flesh" as their currency. The bloodline whose mere invocation caused even Duke Gauss Renville—the warlord who brazenly claimed himself to be the Absolute Law—to issue dire warnings to Ellios with genuine, undisguised terror in his eyes.

  And Arka had just casually revealed that the lacerations upon his flesh... were the physical byproduct of their blades?

  Ellios felt the marrow in his knees completely liquefy. His breath violently snagged in his throat, choking him on the salt air that suddenly smelled overwhelmingly of fresh, hot blood and burning frankincense. The youth standing before him had not merely survived the lethal political ambitions of the Dukes; he had literally just crawled out from the jaws of the most terrifying, mythical phantoms upon the entire continent of Carta.

  "Rahessa..." Ellios mumbled weakly.

  His voice shuddered violently, sounding akin to a pathetic, desperate whimper that was instantaneously devoured by the roaring thunder and the explosive crashing of the waves. The meticulously crafted mask of the 'Cunning Fox of Mount Rhagas' shattered into irreversible dust that night, leaving behind nothing more than a terrified young man who had just horrifyingly realized exactly how microscopically insignificant he truly was when forced to stand before the genuine monsters of the world.