"I still hear their screams at night, my brothers in arms. I left them to die. And no blessing can silence that."
-----------------
But Tarkun was beyond reason now. His mind had snapped, consumed by rage and the pain from his red eyes. The careful political calculation was gone, replaced by pure animal fury. Anumi tried to reach for her hidden dagger, her hand moving slowly toward her sleeve. But suddenly, Lord Arzash moved. He leaped up from his chair and grabbed a dining fork from the table. In one fluid motion, he jumped onto the table itself and launched himself at Lord Tarkun. The makeshift weapon drove toward Tarkun's face with desperate precision.
The fork struck home, piercing deep into Tarkun's right eye. Tarkun's scream of agony filled the chamber as he clawed at his face, blood and fluid streaming down his cheeks as he cursed and roared. But before Arzash could press his advantage, the man beside Tarkun drew his sword in one smooth motion and swung. The blade took Lord Arzash's head clean from his shoulders.
Anumi's world shattered. She watched in horror as her uncle's headless body collapsed, blood pooling across the ancient stones. She tried to cry out, tried to move, but before she could react, two Urartu men seized her arms and forced her down into her chair. Her eyes were wide with terror, her entire face frozen in shock as the reality of what had just happened crashed over her. Tarkun was still screaming, pulling the fork from his ruined eye. Blood poured down his face as he turned toward his brother, his voice raw with pain and fury.
"PREPARE THE MEN!" he bellowed. "WE KILL EVERY DABRU MEMBER TONIGHT!"
His brother, clearly shaken by the violence, managed to ask,
"What about the king's blessed?"
Tarkun spat blood before answering. "He's already half dead, he won't be a threat anymore. And I already have his royal longsword. That's all that matters from him."
He gestured violently toward Anumi, his ruined face twisted with pain and rage.
"Take this bitch away! Lock her up for now!"
Still in shock, Anumi offered no resistance as the guards dragged her toward the door. Her mind couldn't process what had just happened. one moment her uncle had been alive, trying to negotiate, and the next he was dead, his blood spreading across the floor. As they hauled her from the chamber, she could still hear Tarkun's roars of pain and fury echoing behind them, promising death and destruction for every member of her family.
As they dragged her toward the door, Anumi caught one last glimpse of Arzash's body sprawled beside his chair. His remaining eye stared sightlessly at the ceiling, and his blood continued to spread across the stone floor in an ever widening pool. The old scholar was dead. The man who had guided their family through decades of political upheaval, who had served kings and survived the fall of empires, had met his end in a frontier stronghold at the hands of a brutish warlord. And with his death, any hope of avoiding the coming war had died as well. As the guards hauled her from the chamber, Anumi heard Tarkun's voice echoing behind them, distorted by pain and rage but still carrying the terrible authority of absolute power.
"Let it be known throughout Baelur," he declared, "that the Urartu family will suffer no insults, tolerate no challenges, and show no mercy to those fuckers stand against us. The age of diplomacy is over. The age of strength has begun."
The great doors slammed shut behind them with the finality of a tomb sealing, and Anumi found herself being dragged through corridors that seemed to stretch on forever. Her mind kept replaying the scene in the chamber, the flash of steel, the spray of blood, the wet sound of the fork striking home. Arzash was dead. Her uncle, her mentor, the wisest man she had ever known, was gone. And with him had died any hope that wisdom and diplomacy might yet save them all from the darkness that was about to engulf Baelur. War was coming. Not the cold, calculating conflict of politics and economics, but the hot, brutal reality of steel and blood and screaming in the night.
And she was powerless to stop it