Chapter 58: We Meet Again

He glanced down at himself, and that was when he saw it, a thread of light, faint as a hair pulled taut, running from somewhere inside his own chest straight to the sword still resting against his palm. No one else in the room could have seen it. He was almost certain of that.

Following instinct more than any plan, Lucian let that current flow down toward his fingertips, and white light bloomed there almost immediately, the unmistakable glow of Sacred Mana given physical form.

He was doing it. Actually producing Sacred Mana on his own, something he’d never once managed before tonight, and it seemed the thread of light he’d just glimpsed had everything to do with why.

His focus narrowed to the wound itself as that light poured into the corroded flesh, chasing down every last trace of Dark Mana still buried there.

Slowly, the wound began to shrink. The blackened veins running beneath Sophia’s skin faded, one after another, until nothing remained but clean, healed flesh where corruption had sat for over a decade.

The effect moved faster than Lucian expected. Sophia’s complexion, pale and grey only moments earlier, warmed back into something closer to living color.

Her fingers twitched against the sheet the instant Jeanne took her hand, a small motion that meant everything, proof that her body had finally started working the way it should again, needing only time now before she opened her eyes.

Relief broke across Jeanne’s face all at once.

She turned and pulled Lucian into a tight embrace, thanking him again and again.

Lucian finally let himself breathe. Sophia hadn’t woken yet, but the crisis itself had passed, and all that remained now was waiting.

The staff Jeanne had sent for arrived not long after, filing into the room in a rush. Sebast came with them, and the sight that greeted him, Sophia’s condition visibly improved, stopped him cold in the doorway. What threw him even harder was finding Lucian standing there at all, since he’d apparently been looking for him.

"Lord Lucian, so this is where you were."

"Yes. Is something wrong?"

"Ah, no, nothing’s wrong. I only came to tell you that a guest has been asking after you."

A guest, asking for him?

As far as Lucian knew, he had no important connections out there, no nobility who’d ever bothered learning his name, save for Lumina, and he’d already spotted the Augusta crest arriving earlier tonight.

"Is it Lumina?"

Sebast shook his head.

If not Lumina, then who?

Lucian rose to his feet. His work here was finished for now, and the rest of it, the Necromancer, the white-haired woman, the truth behind the Kirana crystal, all of it would have to wait until Sophia woke and could answer for herself.

Jeanne caught the edge of his sleeve before he could take another step.

"You really don’t need to go back to that event, Lucian. Part of why I pulled you away in the first place was to keep you from running into too many people out there who don’t exactly wish you well."

Lucian told her it was fine. He’d already gone through the trouble of putting on these clothes, clothes it had taken real effort to get his hands on, and it seemed a waste not to actually wear them somewhere.

That was the reason he gave her, at least. Privately, he was curious, genuinely curious, about whatever had drawn all those important figures here tonight in the first place.

Jeanne relented, arranging for a few guards to escort him back through the corridor, promising she’d follow once she could, and warning him, half-serious, not to cause any trouble before she got there.

Lucian agreed and let the guards lead him back the way they’d come.

Once he’d gone far enough that his footsteps faded, Sebast finally asked how Sophia had recovered at all.

"Didn’t you already speak with the one who healed her, Sebast?"

Sebast clearly hadn’t put it together, not until Jeanne laid out everything that had happened, including the full truth of Lucian’s Awakening, leaving him even more stunned than before.

Back in the main hall, the noise of the party rose to meet Lucian the moment he stepped through the doors, nobles trading conversation in loose clusters beneath chandeliers heavy with candlelight. He’d missed the greetings from the Seven Pillar families entirely, arriving too late to catch whatever opening ceremony had already passed.

If he wanted to know who exactly had come tonight, he’d have to walk the floor himself and look, though doing that too openly would draw exactly the kind of attention he didn’t want.

Sebast said someone was looking for me. Where would they even be? I should have asked who it was before I left.

Lucian drifted further into the crowd.

Several nobles had already begun tracking his movement with quiet, curious glances, clearly unable to place who he was. Most seemed to have settled on the assumption that he was simply a stranger to the estate.

That assumption didn’t bother him. If anything, it suited him better than the alternative, the one where someone recognized him as a Sarnel and, worse, as the particular Sarnel the family preferred to pretend didn’t exist.

His steps slowed near the center of the hall as his attention drifted upward, toward the balcony overlooking the second floor.

That was where the Seven Pillar families sat.

His eyes found the Augusta crest first, off to the right side of the balcony. A broad-shouldered man dressed almost entirely in red drummed his fingers idly against the balustrade, red mustache, red hair bright as flame, his gaze sweeping the hall below with the kind of ease that came from long practice holding a room’s attention without asking for it.

That has to be Irvine Augusta. The current Patriarch.

Only one seat sat beside his.

A young woman occupied it, her hair the same shade of red, her features close enough to Lumina’s to leave no doubt about the resemblance, though she carried herself with a maturity Lumina hadn’t grown into yet. Claudia Augusta. Lumina’s older sister.

One chair. That likely meant Irvine and Claudia had come alone tonight, without Lumina at all.

Lucian couldn’t help wondering, quietly, what had happened to her since everything that unfolded inside the Chronos Domain.

Near the center of the balcony sat a row of far grander chairs, and Lucian’s gaze settled on the crest carved into them.

The Imperial seal. No surprise the chairs there outshone every other set on the floor, flanked by more guards and attendants than any of the other families had brought with them.

He couldn’t make out who sat there yet, too far away for his eyes to resolve clearly, though he could tell three young figures were seated close to the throne itself.

Then a horn sounded, sharp and sudden, and two men stepped forward toward the imperial seats, both carrying themselves with a weight that pulled every eye in the hall upward at once, an aura strong enough to silence half the room before either of them had said a word.

Applause rose to meet them, the kind reserved only for people the entire hall already understood to be untouchable.

Cassius. And the current Emperor of Bravenheart himself, Varka, two of the most respected men this empire had to offer.

Lucian still couldn’t make out their faces clearly from this distance, but even at a glance, their presence alone confirmed exactly how much this evening revolved around them.

Behind Cassius came the family’s Elders, followed by a handful of younger nobles close to Lucian’s own age.

One of them caught his attention immediately, a young man dressed entirely in black, the color that marked him unmistakably as Sarnel, walking hand in hand with a young woman.

What snagged Lucian’s attention wasn’t the young man at all. It was her. Nothing about what she wore carried a single trace of Sarnel black, no crest, no matching color, nothing that tied her to the family whose son she was holding onto so easily.

If she wasn’t Sarnel, then who was she, and why did she look that comfortable walking beside one of his own siblings?

Curiosity pulled Lucian a few steps closer, eager to get a better look.

Before he could get far, a hand landed on his shoulder from behind, and a girl’s voice reached him.

"So this is where you’ve been?"

"We meet again, Lucian."

He had no idea who stood behind him. And yet something about that voice refused to sit as unfamiliar, a texture to it that felt, impossibly, like they’d crossed paths somewhere before.

Lucian turned to find out exactly who this girl was.