Chapter 56: Behind the Sealed Door

Jeanne’s grip closed around Lucian’s wrist before he’d even finished turning toward her voice, and then she was already moving, already three steps ahead of him before his mind caught up to his feet.

She hadn’t asked if he was ready. She hadn’t waited for an answer.

The guests gathered near the far end of the hall barely registered her passing, a few heads turning, a murmur or two rising and dying just as quickly, and though Jeanne offered the briefest incline of her head toward the ones who caught her eye, not once did she slow her stride long enough to greet them properly.

It should have looked rude. Somehow, in her hands, it only looked urgent, the kind of urgency that excused itself.

Lucian stumbled to match her pace, one hand still caught in hers, the other trailing along the wall to keep himself steady.

"Sister Jeanne, where are we"

"Not now."

Two words, clipped short, said without looking back.

He’d expected the corridor leading toward the main hall, the wide one packed with imperial guests and Sarnel staff weaving trays of wine between silk sleeves and gilded collars. That corridor pulled left. Jeanne pulled him right instead, down a passage he didn’t recognize by the shape of its air alone.

The noise fell away first. The clink of glass, the overlapping threads of polite conversation, the distant strain of a string quartet, all of it thinned with every step until it vanished behind them entirely, replaced by the hollow echo of their own footsteps against stone.

Lucian’s fingers brushed the wall as they walked, cataloguing what his eyes still couldn’t fully resolve. Old and new sight worked together and against each other, silhouette lines sharpening into something closer to real shapes, then blurring again at the edges whenever he tried to look too directly.

The carpet beneath his boots had changed too, thicker here, richer, black threaded through with veins of gold that seemed to catch light even in a corridor lit by nothing but a handful of wall sconces spaced too far apart to banish the shadows between them.

He’d never walked this hallway before. He was almost certain of that.

And yet every few meters, a guard stood at attention along the wall, straight-backed, unmoving, eyes forward, positioned with a precision that felt less like habit and more like design.

That many guards for a corridor this quiet.

Something important lives down here.

A storage vault, maybe. House Sarnel kept more than a few relics tucked away in chambers built specifically to hold them apart from the rest, sealed rooms with their own wards and their own silence. It wouldn’t have been the strangest explanation.

Then Jeanne stopped.

The corridor ended in a door too large for an ordinary bedroom, its surface carved with the Sarnel crest in relief, the lighthouse and its crowned flame catching what little light reached this deep into the house. Four guards flanked it. Two wore the plain, unmarked black of the Phantom unit, the kind of uniform that told Lucian exactly how much this door mattered without a single word being spoken.

Someone’s waiting on the other side of that.

Jeanne’s hand tightened around his, just slightly, just enough for him to feel it, and she drew in a slow breath before turning to face him fully.

She didn’t say anything yet. She only looked at him, and even through the haze of his half-restored sight, Lucian could tell that whatever she meant to say next, the answer to why she’d dragged him halfway across the estate was waiting behind that door, not in her mouth.

His stomach dropped at the thought. An interrogation room. That was the shape his mind reached for first, old instinct dressed up as certainty.

Then Jeanne’s lips parted, and the voice that came out wasn’t the one he knew.

Gone was the crisp, no-argument edge she used on him in the training yard. What replaced it was softer, thinner around the corners, almost fragile in a way he’d never once heard from her.

"Lucian. Can you help me?"

Help?

The word rearranged everything he’d been bracing for.

He looked back at her properly then, really looked, and found an expression on her face that didn’t belong there, didn’t belong on Jeanne Sarnel of all people. Worry sat openly across her features, unguarded, unpolished, nothing like the composed swordmaster who never let her face slip in front of anyone.

He couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked him for anything. Couldn’t remember if she ever had, honestly, not once, not in all the years he’d spent shuffled off to the edges of this family’s attention.

"If it’s something I can handle," Lucian said, "then I’ll help."

No hesitation colored his voice. If he could do something, he would, and that was the whole of it, no need to weigh the offer twice.

Because whatever sharp edges Jeanne carried around him, however little warmth she spared in her tone, she had never once made him feel smaller for what he lacked. Not the way some of his other siblings had, back when he was young enough that their cruelty still had room to land.

Jeanne released his hand and turned toward the guards with a single sharp gesture.

They responded instantly, pulling the heavy door open in one smooth motion.

"Lucian, keep your breathing shallow. Don’t take in more of this air than you have to."

The warning came half a second too late to matter, because the moment the door swung wide, black smoke rolled out from the room beyond it in a thick, rolling wave, spilling into the corridor like something that had been waiting behind that door for exactly this chance.

Jeanne pressed a cloth to her nose and mouth. Even the guards standing closest to the doorway doubled over, coughing hard into their sleeves.

The whole room beyond seemed swallowed by that black haze, and the smell that came with it was foul enough to sting the back of Lucian’s throat.

But this wasn’t Miasma.

He knew that almost the instant the smoke reached him, some sense underneath his sense telling him plainly what his nose alone couldn’t.

This is Dark Mana.

And it wasn’t only the smoke he could see now. Threaded through it, faint as a hairline crack in glass, ran a single line, one continuous thread connecting the whole roiling cloud back to a single point somewhere deeper in the room, as though every wisp of black smoke in the air answered to that one source and nowhere else.

The vague shapes of furniture resolved slowly around him. A private chamber, by the look of it, someone’s bedroom, judging from what little his eyes could piece together through the haze.

And the line, when he finally traced it to its end, led straight to a bed pushed against the far wall.

"Sister Jeanne, who’s lying there?"

His voice cut through the smoke louder than he meant it to. But whatever answer Jeanne might have given him drowned beneath a fresh wave of Dark Mana surging up from the source, stronger than she’d apparently expected it to be.

She never got the chance to answer him at all.

Instead she grabbed for his shoulder, urging him back, telling him this wasn’t safe, that whatever she’d meant to ask of him a moment ago could wait, should wait, needed to wait.

But her face told a different story than her words did. Whatever help she’d wanted from him, Lucian understood now, wasn’t about the smoke itself. It was about whoever lay buried beneath it.

Sonata trembled against his hip.