Private Bathing Quarters - West Wing of Ironseat Palace.

  Noel lowered his body slowly into the scalding water.

  The heat instantly assaulted his cold, rigid flesh, seeping deep into his pores, desperately attempting to melt away the muscular tension that had calcified over the past twenty-four hours.

  This bathing quarter was no mere facility for sanitation. It was a temple of purification reserved exclusively for the high aristocracy.

  The floor was paved with Nero Portoro marble—a pitch-black stone veined with rare, natural gold, excavated directly from the abyssal mines of Carta. The walls soared high, lined with ivory-white porcelain tiles hand-painted with the faint, ghostly motifs of blue lotuses.

  In the dead center of the chamber, the bathtub stood with imposing majesty. It was no factory-pressed ceramic, but a gargantuan basin meticulously carved from a single, monolithic block of raw onyx. Its supporting feet were forged of solid gold, cast in the shape of lion's claws and oxidized by the slow crawl of time, lending the fixture an aura of ancient, unyielding authority.

  In the corners of the room, ceramic braziers burned the palace's most exquisite resins.

  Thick steam plumed from the water's surface, carrying a highly specific, intoxicating aroma.

  Sandalwood.

  A heavy, masculine, and profoundly sacred scent of wood. A fragrance that evoked the stifling quiet of ancient hermitages and the sealed armoires of forgotten ancestors.

  And lingering just beneath the dominance of the sandalwood, a sharper, slightly bittersweet tang could be detected.

  Fennel.

  A spice deeply believed to hone the sixth sense and violently purge negative auras.

  Noel submerged himself up to his jawline.

  He rested the back of his head against the leather cushion affixed to the freezing rim of the onyx basin. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, which was frescoed with an intricate mural of a starry night sky.

  Slowly, his gaze dragged downward.

  Mounted upon the opposing wall hung a massive oval mirror, bound within an agonizingly intricate silver frame.

  The mirror... no longer reflected his visage with any clarity.

  The scalding vapor from the bath had suffocated its surface beneath a thick, opaque layer of condensation.

  Noel’s face within the glass was reduced to a blurred, featureless silhouette.

  His distinct features were erased. His perpetually flat expression was completely obliterated.

  The world contained within that mirror had dissolved into a realm of grays, unfocused and profoundly uncertain.

  The world becomes opaque starting today, Noel mused silently.

  The fog choking the glass served as a sickeningly apt metaphor for Carta's future after 11:00 hours today. There would no longer exist a stark, defining line between righteous and vile, between mortal and monster, between drawing breath and rotting in the earth. Everything was destined to blur into chaos.

  Noel closed his eyes.

  In the pitch-black void behind his eyelids, he did not visualize water or steam.

  He beheld the Grand Library of House Sanjaya.

  His consciousness drifted back to his youth, to the era when he was violently compelled to memorize his bloodline's history within that freezing, colossal hall.

  He visualized the towering ironwood shelves—ten meters high and stretching into infinity—choked with thousands of heavy, leather-bound tomes and rotting parchment scrolls.

  The Sanjaya Chronicles.

  A ledger of blood, penned by the hand of every successive patriarch across generations.

  Every single volume contained therein narrated one singular, inescapable truth: The Cataclysm of the Dark Gate's Breach.

  He recalled the vivid descriptions recorded during the Third Generation:

  "The firmament bled crimson for seven unbroken days. The Anukh Ramj devoured half the kingdom's populace before they were violently repelled."

  He recalled the brutal accounts of the Fifth Generation:

  "A black miasma swallowed the sun. Three Sanjaya Generals perished in a single night, succumbing to mass hysteria. We incinerated the ancient forests merely to stall their advance."

  Generation after generation.

  Every unsealing of the gate invariably demanded an astronomical blood price. There were always sacrificial lambs. There was always apocalyptic ruin.

  Yet, every single chronicle adhered to a unified pattern: The enemy could be perceived. The enemy could be butchered. And ultimately, the gate could be sealed shut once more.

  But this time...

  Noel snapped his eyes open, staring at the white vapor spiraling lazily above the water.

  This time, the atmosphere felt fundamentally altered.

  His intuition—the primordial instinct hardwired directly into his Sanjaya blood—screamed that the ancient patterns were obsolete.

  The massive, unprecedented pre-breach leakage.

  The highly coordinated, tactical behavior of the Anukh Ramj at Gate 134.

  The sudden manifestation of the "Flute Player."

  And the dual, synchronized military invasions orchestrated by mortal men.

  The variables were far too numerous. The chaos was far too immaculate.

  Noel gripped the slick rim of the onyx basin with wet, trembling hands.

  The question haunted him, colder than the mountain gale and infinitely more terrifying than Salomos’s armored divisions.

  Will the breach this time be catastrophically worse than any recorded precedent?

  Would this time... the Sanjaya Chronicles lack a final chapter?

  Would the ink run dry this time before they ever possessed the chance to pen the word "Victory"?

  Noel possessed no answers.

  He possessed only scalding, sandalwood-scented water, a blinded mirror, and the relentless march of time ticking steadily toward the eleventh hour.

  Noel stepped out of the presidential armored transport that had delivered him to the imposing gates of the palace's main wing. He had arrived early.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  He raised his left wrist, glancing at the mechanical tourbillon timepiece strapped there. The hands indicated 08:30 hours. There remained two and a half hours before the rites commenced, yet the atmosphere bleeding from this structure was already suffocatingly oppressive.

  Noel stood before a pair of massive double doors, towering ten meters high, forged from primeval teakwood plated in blackened bronze. The royal sentinels, clad in traditional plate armor draped with crimson velvet tabards, bowed profoundly before pushing the heavy doors inward in perfect, synchronized motion.

  The Ivory Bone Hall yawned open before him.

  The moment he crossed the threshold, Noel’s olfactory senses were violently assaulted by a deeply familiar scent: Frankincense. Thin, wispy white smoke hung suspended in the air, bleeding from golden censers stationed at the base of every pillar. This was King George’s favored aroma—a scent the monarch firmly believed acted as a bridge between the mortal coil and the spirit realm. Yet to Noel, it was simply the stench of a charnel house heavily masked by exotic perfume.

  The hall was a terrifying masterpiece of architectural intimidation. Its vaulted ceiling soared so impossibly high its apex was swallowed entirely by shadows, supported by gargantuan pillars paneled in genuine, highly polished mammoth ivory—pallid, smooth, and freezing to the touch. The floor was an expanse of black marble polished to such an extreme it mirrored still water, reflecting the shadow of anyone treading upon it with a haunting, flawless precision.

  Along the sprawling walls, the bloody history of Carta’s supremacy was exhibited without a shred of mercy.

  Colossal portraits of bygone Kings glared down from above, their painted eyes seemingly tracking Noel’s every step. There were brutal, unflinching depictions of warfare: heavy cavalry charging headlong into oceans of fire, sovereign cities crumbling into ash, and blood rendered in a crimson hue that felt far too visceral.

  Interspersed among the grand paintings stood statues of King George captured in various heroic tableaus, meticulously carved from white jade and jagged obsidian. Every single effigy seemed to actively radiate an aura of absolute authority designed to physically crush the lungs.

  Noel leveled his gaze straight ahead. There, twelve hundred high-backed chairs forged of black timber were arrayed with terrifying symmetry. The seats were currently vacant, yet the air felt thick, as if the phantoms of past epochs had already claimed them. The rows of chairs formed an intricate, circular pattern converging upon a singular focal point: The Wooden Throne Adorned with Ivory.

  This chamber was the very belly of the beast known as Absolute Power.

  Noel’s footfalls echoed with sharp, metronomic clicks against the marble, fracturing the suffocating silence of the grand hall. He strode down the center aisle, navigating the sea of empty chairs, feeling microscopically small yet acutely, lethally aware of his station.

  Here, in exactly three hours, the twelve hundred elites of Carta would bear witness as their ultimate destiny was hammered into stone. Beneath this nauseating fog of frankincense, and under the mute, judging glare of the stone effigies, the absolute truth regarding Mirror Canyon would finally be unveiled.

  Noel halted at the absolute vanguard row. He did not take a seat. He merely stood, allowing the crushing silence of the Ivory Bone Hall to seep into his marrow, aggressively fortifying his psyche for the cataclysm that was about to break.

  The atmosphere within the Ivory Bone Hall felt as though it were rapidly condensing. The very center of gravity seemed to violently shift, sucked directly into the heart of Ironseat, making every single one of Noel’s steps feel as though he were dragging the weight of a mountain range. The barometric pressure inside this chamber was no longer a mere meteorological phenomenon; it was the physical manifestation of tyrannical power.

  Oxygen felt dangerously scarce. The air Noel dragged into his lungs tasted gritty and abrasive, choked by the ever-thickening smoke of frankincense that coiled like pale serpents amongst the ivory pillars. His lungs were forced to labor intensely simply to maintain consciousness.

  Abruptly, Noel’s hyper-tuned hearing caught a distinct, familiar sound.

  Tweet... tweet...

  The call of an Oriole. Yet, it was no genuine avian creature perched upon a sill. It was the sharp note of a miniature wind instrument—a ceramic whistle shaped like a songbird, its rhythmic trill drawing steadily closer, slithering seamlessly through the sighs of the incense smoke.

  Noel turned his head slowly. His posture remained rigidly locked; only his neck swiveled.

  From behind the dark shadows of a gargantuan pillar emerged a girl. She was adorned in the vestments of a high-ranking ritual priestess—immaculate white silk that cascaded down to pool upon the black marble, accented by intricate silver embroidery depicting creeping, thorny roots cinching her waist.

  Noel instantly identified that facial structure. The blood of House Rahessa.

  As the girl’s steps closed the distance, a fresh aroma aggressively assaulted Noel’s senses, violently cleaving through the heavy frankincense.

  Jasmine.

  But this was no fresh jasmine plucked at morning's dew. This was the cloying stench of jasmine long past its bloom—the scent of flora actively beginning to decompose, mingled with the foul odor of stagnant, algae-choked vase water.

  The stench of rotting jasmine, Noel thought with glacial clarity.

  Noel’s eyes tracked to the jasmine crest pinned over the girl’s breast. To him, it presented a sickeningly hilarious visual irony.

  House Rahessa would be far better suited adopting the corpse flower as their sigil rather than the jasmine, he mused darkly. A dynasty that thrives upon the rotting carcass of history, gorging on the detritus of ruin just to maintain their illusion of beauty.

  The girl halted dead in front of Noel. She lowered the ceramic whistle from her lips and offered a smile so devastatingly sweet—so saccharine it felt exactly like poison heavily coated in sugar. Her eyes sparkled with manufactured warmth, radiating a faux geniality that clashed violently with the freezing ambient temperature of the hall.

  "A very good morning to you, Young Master Sanjaya," she greeted, her voice a soft, undulating melody. "You have always proven to be the most stringently disciplined among us all. Mirror Canyon is undoubtedly fortunate to boast a warden as unyielding as yourself."

  Noel did not return the pleasantry. Neither with a single syllable, nor a nod of his head.

  His visage remained an absolute poker face—flat, frozen, and as fundamentally unreadable as the fogged mirror in his bathing quarters that morning. He stared directly into the girl's eyes, yet his gaze seemed to drill straight through her skull to the masonry behind her. In his eyes, this Rahessa girl's cordiality was nothing more than a thin veneer of fresh paint slathered over a rotting coffin.

  The girl continued to prattle on, seemingly entirely unbothered by the total collapse of communication, but Noel had already bolted the iron doors of his mind shut. He merely stood perfectly still amidst the ocean of empty chairs, allowing the stench of rotting jasmine to waft into the ether, while within his head, he began a countdown to exactly how long this mask of pleasantry would hold before it shattered when the gate finally breached.

  "Do you not find the gravity in here growing increasingly oppressive, Noel?" the girl inquired anew, tilting her head with an expertly crafted air of innocence.

  Noel merely answered in his mind: It is not the gravity that is heavy, Rahessa. It is the crushing weight of the sins your bloodline drags into this hall.

  Noel remained a statue, his gaze locked dead ahead as the girl took a position beside him.

  Aira. He knew precisely who she was. The primary heir to the Rahessa bloodline, the family that had served as the clandestine "cleaners" operating behind the curtain of Ironseat for centuries. Aira possessed every hallmark of her lineage: a smile engineered with lethal precision, a voice as soft as velvet, and a fluid grace in her movements that promised sudden death.

  "Young Master, have you perchance found the time to stroll through the northern gardens of Ironseat as of late?" Aira asked, her voice lilting lightly, actively attempting to fracture the suffocating silence of the Ivory Bone Hall. "The Lumina blooms are currently in full blossom. Their luminescence in the dead of night is so utterly breathtaking, it almost makes one forget the encroaching darkness currently stalking the Iron Mountains."

  Aira continued her vivid narration. She meticulously described the silken texture of the petals, the rich scent of damp earth following a rainstorm in the northern gardens, and how the absolute tranquility found there was paramount to all else.

  Noel exhibited zero reaction. Yet, securely hidden behind his flawless mask, his soul boiled with pure, unadulterated revulsion.

  Every single word spilling from Aira’s lips felt like maggots crawling across his flesh. The northern gardens? Breathtaking? Noel knew exactly what was buried deep beneath the roots of those Lumina flowers. He knew with absolute certainty that House Rahessa utilized the residual ash from their forbidden, blood-soaked rituals as fertilizer for that soil.

  Keep running your mouth, Aira, Noel thought with absolute zero warmth. To my ears, every sentence you weave reeks fouler than the stench of mortal corpses rotting beneath the blazing sun of Mirror Canyon.

  To him, Aira’s poetic rhetoric was merely a repulsive maneuver to mask the metallic stench of blood permanently clinging to her family's history. Feigning an appreciation for beauty amidst an actively ticking doomsday countdown was a direct insult to Noel’s razor-sharp logic.

  Without offering the slightest micro-expression, without shifting the absolute deadness in his eyes, Noel abruptly pivoted on his heel.

  He offered no farewell. He executed no polite gesture of dismissal. He simply turned his broad back upon Aira, allowing the Grand Mantle of Sanjaya to sweep across the marble floor with a sharp, authoritative swish. He strode away, abandoning Aira to stand alone within the ocean of empty chairs.

  "Hold on, Noel...!"

  Aira’s voice snapped out behind him, pitching slightly higher, instantly shedding a fraction of its meticulously measured softness.

  Noel kept walking. His footfalls were heavy, consistent, and rhythmically punishing against the ivory flooring. He heard the rapid patter of smaller footsteps attempting to pursue him—the frantic rustle of silk and the sharp clack of a priestess's heels rushing across the marble.

  However, as Noel distanced himself, moving deeper into the vanguard rows beneath the imposing shadows of the Kings' statues, the pursuit behind him steadily lost momentum.

  Tap... tap... tap...

  Silence.

  The footsteps ceased. Aira had surrendered. Noel could physically feel the girl's venomous glare stabbing into his spine—a glare that had undoubtedly finally shed its mask of cloying cordiality.

  Noel did not give a single damn. He would infinitely prefer to cross blades with the genuine monsters festering in the abyss than be forced to breathe the same air as a lie that reeked of rotting jasmine.

  He now stood utterly alone in the absolute front row, mere paces from the Ivory Throne, silently awaiting the arrival of Gavin Singh.