Chapter 120 Xavier- POV
Chapter 120 Xavier- POV
The rain didn't just fall; it punished the earth. Standing on the high parapet, the downpour soaked through my heavy leather mantle, the water running cold down the back of my neck and mixing with the mud on my boots.
Below, in the grand courtyard, the horses of the Black-Iron Ravens whinnied in panic, their hooves churning the ground into a thick, black mire of dirt and water.
I looked down at the palm of my hand. The skin was split from where I had gripped the granite battlements, the blood a stark, bright crimson before the rain washed it over the edge into the dark.
The emptiness inside me was a physical ache, a gaping wound where the golden light of the Celestial Tether used to live.
When Livia had poisoned the camp, my heart had been in chaos. But this? This was different. This was a clinical, suffocating despair.
Elena had walked into that dark abyss because she thought my crown couldn't survive the scandal of her past, or because she thought she could shield me from the five thousand spears of the south.
Foolish, beautiful woman, I thought, my jaw clenching so hard the bone ached. You taught me how to rebuild a kingdom, but you forgot to check if I could survive it without you.
I strode back inside the war room, my wet boots leaving dark, heavy tracks across the ancient tapestries.
General Kaelen stood by the tactical table, his face drawn and pale under the flickering torchlight. The map of Drakmor was spread out between us, but the entire southern sector—the Whispering Ridge and the valleys beyond—was now completely obscured by the reports of my scouts.
"The boundary is absolute, Your Majesty," Kaelen said, his voice dropping into a low, cautious register as he watched the unstable blue sparks jumping across my knuckles.
"The southern lords have mobilized under the banner of House Heart’s vanguard, but the magic... our scholars have never seen anything like it. It’s an inversion of the natural grid. If you march the main army into that liquid midnight, the soldiers' own internal mana will suffocate them before they even sight the enemy's pikes."
"They are using Titan cores, Kaelen," I said, my voice dropping to a dark, gravelly whisper that made the torches flinch.
"Jarek... whoever he is... he isn't just fighting a civil war. He's harvesting the remnants of the Abyssal Rift. He’s building an empire out of the very poison we just bled to destroy."
I leaned over the table, my fists slamming into the wood right where the southern passes were drawn. The ache of her absence was a physical fire, burning through my veins, pushing my royal plasma to the absolute brink of control.
I couldn't feel her. The tether was completely dead, a severed rope swinging in the dark. If Jarek was using Titan cores, he was likely using Elena's own Void-Anchor ring as the focus to stabilize the energy. He was turning my ghost into his ultimate battery.
The political stakes were suffocating. If I ordered a full military assault, the northern houses would see it as a desperate, unhinged King wasting the kingdom's remaining strength on a common assassin. If I stayed here, the southern lords would slowly choke our trade routes until the capital starved in the mud.
We were completely out of time, and the chess board was covered in blood.
The water dripping from my heavy leather mantle sounded like a ticking clock against the stone floor of the war room. I didn't look back at General Kaelen as I turned away from the tactical table.
The maps, the little wooden blocks representing infantry lines, the panicked missives from the border lords—it was all a meaningless charade. You cannot fight a war of logistics against a man who is harvesting the hearts of gods.
I left the war room through the rear servant's door, avoiding the grand galleries where the court politicians were currently gathering like vultures.
The Celestial Tether in my chest was an agonizing, hollow cavity, cold as winter dirt. Elena’s fear—that brief, staggering transmission of vulnerability before her signal was brutally snuffed out—was burned into my brain. Jarek had her. He was using her. And the thought of his hands on my ghost made the plasma in my veins surge so violently that blue static arcs scorched the ancient stonework as I walked.
My destination lay beneath the very spine of the palace.
I descended the spiral stairs of the central tower, bypassing the living quarters, the dungeons, and the lower wine cellars until the stone turned from smooth, quarried marble to rough, ancient bedrock.
The humidity here was suffocating, the air tasting of sulfur, saltpeter, and centuries of stagnation. This was the entrance to the Subterranean Vaults of the First Sovereign—a forbidden network of tunnels buried leagues beneath the capital, where the foundations of Drakmor were first anchored to the planet's core.
The iron door guarding the threshold was twelve feet high, green with centuries of oxidized copper mold. It had no keyhole. It required the raw, unadulterated blood of the Titan line.
I drew my ancestral broadsword, the steel singing a low, mournful note in the damp dark. With a flick of my wrist, I drew the blade across my left palm. The crimson blood welled up, bright and hot, and I pressed my wounded hand directly against the freezing iron seal.
The ancient runes carved into the metal flared to life, not with the clean, sea-foam light of Elena’s ring, but with a violent, blinding gold that mirrored the oldest, most chaotic frequencies of my royal bloodline.
The heavy doors groaned, the sound like grinding mountains, and slowly swung inward to reveal a gaping maw of absolute blackness.
The tunnels beneath the palace were not built for men; they were carved by the primitive, titanic entities that ruled Drakmor before the First Sovereign erected the grid.
The walls were jagged, crystalline obsidian, sweating with dark water that dripped into deep, subterranean fissures below.
The further I walked, the more the silence pressed against my eardrums, interrupted only by the distant, rhythmic thrumming of the planet's core.
Suddenly, the Celestial Tether twitched. It wasn't Elena. It was the ancestral feedback loop of the vaults.