The interior of the Hmagol Imperial Reserve was a single, cavernous hallway, divided into smaller, specialized chambers. Each heavy door was reinforced with iron and secured with locks that only the Imperial Key Keeper—a man who seemed as old as the stone walls themselves—had the authority to touch.
As Chinua stepped into the corridor, her eyes swept over the silent doors. She wondered what lay behind them: the kingdom's finest silks, ancient scrolls of forbidden knowledge, or the gold that fueled empires. But there was no time for curiosity. The Key Keeper stopped at the fourth door on the right.
The sound of the key turning was a heavy, mechanical clank-clank that echoed through the silence. He pushed the door open, the hinges groaning under the weight of history.
"This is the Reserve Medicine Room, Your Highness," the keeper whispered.
Inside, the air was stagnant and cold. Unlike the chaos of the public hall, everything here was arranged with surgical precision. The lead doctor moved with purpose, his finger trailing over the labels of the lacquered boxes until he reached the far-right corner. He pulled a small, ornate container from the shelf and presented it to Chinua.
"Your Highness, inside this box is the Snow Lotus," he said. "To break a fever this severe, you need only seven petals."
Chinua flipped the lid open. She reached in and carefully withdrew seven brownish, dried petals. But as she prepared to turn and run, the lead doctor's hand shot out, hovering near her wrist.
"Wait, Your Highness," he said, his voice dropping an octave.
"Is there a problem?" Chinua asked, her heart beginning to hammer against her ribs.
"Those petals... they don't look right." The doctor took the box, tilting it toward the light. He sifted through the remaining contents, his face turning a ghostly shade of grey. "These... these are common lily petals. They have been dried to look like the Lotus, but they possess no healing power."
"How could that be?" the Key Keeper stammered, his face pale.
Chinua's gaze turned into ice. The "Wolf" was back, and she smelled a rat. "Who was the last person to request the Snow Lotus?"
The Keeper fumbled for his record booklet, his shaking fingers frantically flipping through the pages of ancient text. His finger stopped near the very end of the ledger.
"It was... Concubine Erhi," his voice was a mere tremor. He realized then that as the keeper of these keys, the responsibility for this theft would fall squarely on his neck.
Chinua's hand tightened, crushing the useless lily petals into a fine dust that drifted to the floor. The realization hit her like a physical blow. Erhi and Dzhambul hadn't just fled; they had sabotaged the kingdom's survival. They had cleared the shelves of anything that could be used against them or to save their enemies. It was their contingency plan—a final, silent execution from afar.
The Key Keeper collapsed to his knees, his robes pooling around him like a shroud. The weight of the empty box felt like a death sentence. In the silent, cold air of the Reserve, he could already hear the sharpened steel of the executioner's blade. To lose an Imperial treasure was to lose one's life; there was no middle ground in the old laws of Hmagol.
"It's not your fault," Chinua said, her voice surprisingly soft. She didn't look down at him with the coldness of a judge, but with the weary understanding of someone who had seen deeper betrayals. "They planned this long ago. While you were careless, I believe His Majesty will not punish you for a trap set by a Concubine. Go. Report this to the King now and ask for leniency."
She sighed, the sound echoing in the hollow hallway. "Your life might be saved... but Möndör's—"
"Your Highness," the lead doctor interrupted, stepping forward. "We might not have the Snow Lotus, but we can use willow bark. It is a powerful remedy for reducing the heat in the blood. It may not be as swift as the Lotus, and his survival will depend entirely on his own will to live, but it is our best hope."
"There is no other option," Chinua said, already turning toward the door. "Do it."
As she stepped out of the heavy iron doors, she found Hye leaning against the stone wall, his arms crossed. He didn't need to see her face to know the outcome. The silence from the vault had told him enough.
"How was it?" he asked.
"Gone," Chinua said, her face darkening into a mask of cold fury. "Stolen by Erhi and Dzhambul. The doctor will treat him tonight with different medicine. By morning, we will know if he survives."
"Then let us oversee the departure preparations," Hye said, pushing off the wall. He offered a small, grim smile, trying to pull the tension from her shoulders. "We aren't much use in the medical field anyway."
"I am not, but you are," Chinua countered, her eyes searching his. "Do you not want to see how they treat him?"
"Nah," Hye replied, shaking his head. "Instead of the Snow Lotus, the best he can do is willow bark, and we have plenty of that back in Pojin. I would rather focus on our contingency plans. If the enemy was smart enough to steal the medicine, they are smart enough to have more surprises waiting for us on the road."
While the doctors in the capital fought for the life of a single boy, the world they were trying to save had already turned to ash.
Drystan, Khawn, Hibo, and Azad reached the outskirts of Pojin as nightfall draped the valley in long, jagged shadows. They had ridden hard since the day Möndör arrived in Ntsua-Ntu, their hearts heavy with the news of the invasion. But as they crested the final ridge, there was no smell of evening cooking fires—only the acrid, choking scent of a dead village.
Leaving Khawn and Hibo to guard the horses in the treeline, Drystan and Azad moved like ghosts, sneaking toward the first line of houses.
To their horror, the Pojin they remembered was gone. The village was a tomb of silence and soot. Some homes had been reduced to gray heaps of ash, while others were still "breathing" with a dying heat—their massive timber beams glowing like red-hot charcoal in the dark.
The usual sounds of life—the lowing of livestock, the sharp bark of village dogs, the laughter of children—had been entirely erased. In their place was only the rhythmic, indifferent chirping of night crickets and the low, wet buzzing of flies that had already found the bodies hidden in the wreckage.
Azad knelt by a blackened doorway, his hand hovering over a footprint in the soot. "This wasn't a battle," he whispered, his voice trembling. "This was a purge."
Drystan stood in the center of the one-way street, the very place where Möndör had broken his bow. He looked at the scorched walls and the empty alleyways, realizing that the "message" Möndör carried was even darker than they feared. Pojin hadn't just been attacked; it had been executed.
"Drystan," Azad whispered, his back pressed against a scorched timber. "We haven't come across a single soldier's body. The corpses on the street... they are the elders. The livestock. The dogs."
"I know," Drystan replied, his eyes scanning the flickering shadows. "Where are the warriors? Where is the resistance?"
"Maybe they aren't dead yet," Azad said, a grim realization dawning on him. "Maybe they were captured and are being kept somewhere inside the village."
"If I had to guess, they'd be in the village center," Drystan said. "Let's regroup."
The two men began to retreat toward the treeline, moving like smoke, when a piercing, ragged scream of a woman shattered the silence of the ruins. It wasn't a scream of fear; it was a scream of pure, unadulterated agony.
In the center of the square, where the villagers once gathered to trade grain and celebrate the harvest, four heavy wooden posts had been driven into the ash-covered ground.
Sarnai and three of her female soldiers were bound tightly to them. Their tunics were torn, their faces bruised, but they stood upright, their shadows cast long and jagged by the dying fires of the nearby houses. They were being displayed like trophies, or worse—like bait.
Koorush stood before Sarnai, his silhouette framed by the flickering the dying embers pulsed like a thousand tiny lanterns in the moonless night, a dagger caught the light. It shone like a diamond as it was driven deep into the right shoulder of Sarnai.
"Scream, bitch," Koorush said, his voice light, almost melodic. He leaned in, his smile widening as he watched the blood bloom across her tunic.
Sarnai bit her lip so hard it bled, her jaw locking in a jagged line of defiance. She swallowed the agony, refusing to give the Razaasia the satisfaction of her voice.
"Ah—" Koorush chuckled, stepping back. "You are a tough one, aren't you?" He suddenly lashed out, his palm cracking against Sarnai's face with a sickening force.
Sarnai spat a mouthful of blood onto the charred floor but remained silent, her eyes burning with a hatred that no fire could match.
"Well, this is no fun," Koorush sighed, his playful energy turning into something much darker. He turned toward a young teenager, bound and trembling beside Sarnai. "Let's see how much you can endure before you break."
Without warning, he plunged the dagger into the girl's abdomen. The teenager let out only a soft, muffled grunt, her eyes bulging as she fought to mimic Sarnai's strength. Koorush stared at her, unsatisfied, until a wicked giggle bubbled up from his throat.
"Ah, I remember how we treated the captured Musians back in Hosha City," he murmured. He reached for a heavy oil pot nearby. With slow, deliberate movements, he began to drench the girl in the thick, pungent liquid. When he was finished, he looked at the oil-soaked child and smiled.
"Do you know? The Musians endured three full nights of listening to their captured soldiers scream. It makes me wonder... how long can Behrouz endure before he finally leaves his post to save you?"
He picked up a small, flickering brand from the embers and tossed it.
In a heartbeat, the teenager was engulfed in a pillar of orange flame. This time, the scream was not muffled. It was a high, soul-shattering shriek that tore through the night, echoing up the mountainside where Behrouz and the remaining men of Pojin stood watch in the darkness, forced to witness the incineration of their own children.