The High Mage Tower at the palace groaned under the weight of a magical tantrum that shook its very foundations. Inside the apex chamber, the air was thick with the ozone smell of frustrated sorcery and the metallic tang of blood.
The Queen was no longer smirking. Her face, usually a mask of aristocratic porcelain, was contorted into a snarl of pure, unadulterated fury. She paced the obsidian floor, her silken skirts hissing like a pit of vipers against the stone.
"IMPOSSIBLE!" she shrieked, her voice cracking the crystal decanters on a nearby table. "It is a masterwork! A feat of engineering that defies the heavens!"
In the center of the room, the great silver mirror—the window to her dark ambitions—flickered with nothing but static and grey smoke. The link was dead. The feed had been severed with the brutal efficiency of an executioner's axe.
She wasn't just mourning a spy; she was mourning a fortune. The raven was not a bird; it was a miracle of forbidden artifice. Its eyes were two Heartstones, gems so refined and mana-dense that they appeared to bleed light. They were the only pair in existence, worth the price of three ducal mansions and a small army. The runes etched into its synthetic marrow were the work of three generations of arch-mages, specifically designed to be invisible to the senses of even the High Elven elders.
"My Heartstones..." she hissed, her manicured nails digging into her palms until droplets of crimson bloomed. "My untraceable shadow... gone. Extinguished like a common candle in a gale! That bastard would pay! Damn it!"
Minutes ago, the bird had been dutifully transmitting. She had seen the carriage. She had seen the boy—that sickly, insignificant speck—sitting inside. She had been preparing to savor his fear as her "Hounds" closed in. Then, something had happened. Something unexpected. Something that defies logic. Defies my magic! How dare he!
The bird's connection hadn't just faded; it had been violated. A sound had erupted through the mirror—a discordant, rhythmic, and terrifyingly cheerful noise that defied all known musical theory. It was a cacophony of "Ancient High-Grade" vibrations that struck the bird's Heartstones with the force of a physical blow. The last thing she saw through the raven's eyes was the boy holding a glowing yellow oblong relic toward the sky, before the Heartstones shattered from the sheer frequency of the 'Divine Chant.'
"What was that sound?" she whispered, her anger cooling into a chilling, obsidian-sharp focus. "It wasn't magic. It was... something louder. Something that mocked the silence of the void. Filthy bastard! Where did he even get those relics?" She turned toward the shadows where her Chief Inquisitor knelt, trembling.
"The boy is not just a scholar," she breathed, the crimson glow in her eyes flickering like a dying star. "He is a disruptor. He possesses a relic that can shatter Heartstones with a melody. He is a virus in my kingdom, and he is spreading. I want him! I want his power! I want him dead!"
She stepped toward the window, looking out over the darkened spires of her city.
"He thinks he is safe in the South. He thinks he can drown out my gaze with his yellow screaming box. But he has cost me my most precious toy." Her voice dropped to a murderous silkiness. "Inform the Hounds. They are no longer to simply track him. They are to tear the air from his lungs. I want that yellow relic brought to me in pieces, and I want the boy's tongue kept in a jar so he may never 'sing' again."
The tower fell silent, save for the sound of the Queen's breathing—jagged, dark, and filled with a promise of a suffering that no divine orange relic could ever cure.
Several hours later, her anger softened.
The Queen's fury was not merely the tantrum of a spoiled tyrant; it was the cold, calculated desperation of a woman holding a crumbling empire together with blood and iron. She turned away from the dead mirror and gripped the cold stone of the balcony railing, looking out over the sprawling lights of Athens.
To the world, she was a monster. To her neighbors—the kings of the northern frost-lands and the southern desert empires—she was a "woman on a borrowed throne" whom they intended to unseat as soon as the winter snows thawed.
"They think I am weak because I do not have a crown of gold passed down by a patriarch," she hissed, her voice lost in the howling wind of the tower. "They think Athens is a plum ripe for the picking."
She reached into a small, hidden pocket of her gown and pulled out a single, jagged shard of the Divine Orange Relic. It was a tiny crumb of a Cheeto, confiscated from a noble who had tried to hide it like a sinful secret. She placed it on her tongue.
The reaction was instantaneous. Her mana didn't just move; it bloomed. It felt like a thousand tiny suns exploding in her veins, repairing the exhaustion of her long nights, sharpening her mind until she could practically hear the thoughts of the guards three floors below.
"Where did you find this, boy?" she whispered, her eyes closing in a brief moment of ecstasy. "In what forgotten corner of the world does a beggar find a substance that makes the Royal Elixirs taste like swamp water?"
She knew the geopolitical tides were turning. War wasn't just coming; it was breathing down her neck. Her father had been a "kind" king, a "good" ruler who trusted his neighbors—and he had been betrayed, poisoned, and left to watch his borders shrink until Athens was a shadow of its former glory. She had learned. She had stepped over his corpse, seized the scepter, and made every man in the council kiss her toes until their pride bled.
But pride wouldn't win the coming war. She needed weapons. She needed the Heartstones she had just lost, she needed the God-Skin Mantle that walked on the boy's back, and she needed the source of the Orange Fire that now pulsed in her blood.
"I am not doing this for vanity," she justified to the empty air, her face hardening into a mask of iron. "If I do not have his power, the kings to the East will burn Athens to the ground. They will take our women, enslave our children, and strike our name from the scrolls. I will be the villain if it means my people survive. I will be the butcher if it means my kingdom eats."
Her obsession with Arthur was no longer just about curiosity. It was about survival. If the boy could materialize these relics out of "Oxygen," he was the greatest strategic asset in the history of the realm. He was a walking armory. He was a living well of mana.
"Let them call me cruel," she breathed, watching the horizon. "When I have the boy, when my soldiers are armored in God-Skin and my mages are fueled by the Orange Relic, the world will not call me a 'woman king.' They will call me Empress. And they will tremble."
She turned to the shadows of the room, her voice a whip-crack. "Deploy the Black-Sun Assassins. If the Hounds cannot catch a carriage, then the shadows will. And tell them: if they harm the boy's hands, I will have theirs. He needs those fingers to tap the air... until I have everything I need."