Chapter 1315: The Price—WitchBourne Engagement

Another refused to leave seclusion at all, yet his voice passed through the entire ancestral mountain and ordered every younger member of his bloodline to stay away from Paradise until the storm around the Heavenchilds had finished deciding what it wanted to destroy while they also try to know as much as they can about Phei.

A third ancestor laughed when he heard Danton had vanished.

He found the entire thing amusing right up until his senses stretched beyond his estate and brushed against what remained in the world.

Whatever he felt there killed the laughter immediately.

Perhaps that reaction explained the mood spreading through the ancient families better than anything else could; for generations, the strongest bloodlines on Earth had understood one another through strength.

They hated each other, fought, stole, married, betrayed, allied and occasionally buried one another beneath mountains, but there had always been an old understanding beneath the violence:

Every family knew the weight of the monsters standing behind the others.

They knew which grudges could be settled with blood, which required compensation and which names were better left untouched unless someone was prepared to lose half a bloodline proving a point.

There were rules because everyone understood what happened when those rules broke.

Now something had changed.

Something had entered their world that did not fit comfortably inside the old measure of strength. And it felt less like another player joining the board and more like someone had driven an enormous blade into the earth between them.

The blade had no name anyone could prove.

But they could still feel its edge and how deep it had gone.

They simply did not know whose hand rested upon the hilt.

The Price Family, naturally, decided this was the perfect time to hold a celebration.

There was almost something impressive about it.

While ancestral mountains awakened, old monsters extended their senses across continents and several families quietly pulled their younger blood back behind protective formations of their Ancestral Mansions, the Price estate was drowning beneath flowers, wine, silk, music and enough food to feed a small city.

Servants were already being assigned to the enormous halls beneath floating chandeliers, while gardeners and craftsmen prepared to remake paths, terraces and courtyards before the first important guests ever set foot on the estate.

Apparently the hidden world could be creeping toward another blood feud and someone would still be losing sleep over whether a ballroom looked slightly too dim.

Perhaps that was simply how families this old survived.

If the heavens intended to fall, one might as well make certain the tables were set before they did.

And this celebration was important enough to justify the madness.

Even Price was preparing to marry.

His bride was British.

More importantly, she belonged to the WitchBourne Family.

To most of the world, the WitchBournes were simply old British money.

Very old British money in hotels, resorts, private estates and hospitality stretched beneath their name across Britain and far beyond it whose wealth had existed long enough that nobody seemed entirely certain where the first fortune had actually come from.

Even among wealthy families, their history was unusually difficult to follow.

Eventually, the WitchBourne roots simply dissolved into centuries where surviving records became too thin to follow with confidence.

So to the mortal world, the WitchBournes were simply one of those impossibly wealthy British families and the Legacy Families regarded them much the same way.

Unusual, perhaps.

Old enough to be interesting and rich enough to matter.

But still mortal in origin as far as anyone knew.

Their history became difficult to follow the farther backward one searched; records thinned and names changed spelling between centuries and eventually the family line disappeared into that unpleasant part of European history where fires, wars, collapsed houses, lost church records and people apparently deciding nobody several hundred years later would need accurate paperwork combined to make ancestry irritatingly vague.

Nobody found that particularly supernatural.

Old families lost records.

Europe had been exceptionally enthusiastic about burning things.

The WitchBournes were hardly unique in that regard.

There were, of course, older stories:

Long before the Legacy Families arrived on Earth; fragments of witches before the word carried its modern meaning

Among the oldest of those stories and the legend of a woman later remembered simply as the First Witch.

Whether she had truly existed was another matter.

Some ancient beings believed she had truly existed:

Witches, after all, were hardly the only ancient beings and creatures to have survived the march of ages and endured long enough to still lurk beneath the dark skin of the modern Earth. Others dismissed her as little more than ancient lore, a name carried forward for so long that nobody could say with certainty where history had ended and legend had begun.

Whatever descendants she might once have possessed had disappeared so completely that nobody had seriously connected a living family to her in ages.

Certainly nobody looked at the elegant British owners of luxury hotels and imagined that particular legend had anything to do with them.

The legend themselves were older than the arrival of the Legacy Families themselves.

By the time these ancient exiles reached Earth, the First Witch was already exactly that.

A legend!

The Price Family knew otherwise.

And the Price Family had been very careful about remaining the only ones who did.

To everyone else, the coming marriage was simply an alliance between one of the Legacy Families and a wealthy old British house.

More than a few assumed the Prices were simply trying to marry off their troublesome, infamously foolish son before he found some new way to embarrass the family, while the WitchBournes had agreed because the match offered something their money alone could not easily buy: the Price Family’s influence, protection and connections throughout the entire world. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The WitchBournes were already enormously wealthy, and their hotels and resorts had made them one of the great names of British hospitality. What they wanted from the Price marriage was reach.

With that connection behind them, the WitchBournes could push much farther outward, plant their name in the richest cities and most coveted destinations across the world, and turn an old British hospitality empire into one of the truly dominant names in hotels and luxury hospitality internationally.

That part, at least, was completely true.

As explanations went, it was convincing enough that nobody felt particularly compelled to search for another one.

Only the Prices understood exactly what blood was about to enter their family.

And now the WitchBourne only daughter was preparing to marry Even Price.

The engagement celebration would take place in a week and few days from now.

The wedding itself would follow later, though close enough afterward that preparations for one were already beginning to overlap with preparations for the other.

Even Price was preparing to marry.

The invitations had travelled everywhere worth noticing.

Old monarch Royal families, old houses, powerful business dynasties and of course cultivation families (not connected to the legacies) whose public identities looked considerably less interesting than what lived beneath them.

And naturally, every Legacy Family had been invited.

The Prices were preparing to place families currently glaring at one another across generations of grudges beneath the same roof and provide them with expensive food and even more expensive alcohol.

A magnificent idea.

Yet among all those names, one invitation had attracted considerably more attention than most.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat.

The Young Dragon had not appeared publicly for one week and three days.

For almost anyone else, that would have meant absolutely nothing.

Phei disappearing was different.

Trouble followed him too faithfully.

Between the women surrounding him, the Ryujin Tiamat bloodline, Infinity Chaos, the Legacy Families, old grudges and whatever catastrophe happened to be occurring that particular week, somebody usually knew where he had been seen.

This time, almost nobody did.

His family had withdrawn with him.

Several familiar faces normally seen around Infinity Chaos had become equally scarce.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat had simply slipped away from the world’s immediate attention during the exact period in which Danton, the Coffer and multiple World Transcendents had vanished.

Naturally, nobody found that suspicious at all.

The Price invitation nevertheless included him.

And not merely him:

His entire family; Melissa, her daughters, his women who were not part of the legacy families and all other people now gathering beneath the increasingly complicated banner surrounding the Ryujin Tiamats.

Perhaps the Prices simply wanted every important family represented.

Perhaps their coming union with the WitchBournes made them comfortable enough to believe nobody would be foolish enough to spill blood during the celebration.

—whatever the reasoning, the invitation had already been sent.

Which created a rather charming image of a sheep opening its own gate and politely inviting a lion inside.

The unfortunate part was that the sheep did not know there was a lion.

Well, how could it?

A shepherd might spend every night worrying about predators prowling around his flock; build fences, count his sheep twice before sleeping, hire guards, sharpen blades and teach his children to recognize the prints of wolves and lions beneath the morning mud.

None of that would help much if the handsome young man arriving at the front gate with a gilded invitation happened to share the same appetite.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat was not a lion.

The metaphor honestly became rather insulting once one thought about it too long.

Lions merely ate sheep.

The Young Dragon had a considerably richer palate.