Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Coming Doom
There was a silence for a while, as Cathe and Arina blinked once and then twice. The air held the echo of something larger than them—the weight of an appeal, the aftertaste of a voice that had just announced calamity. Aiden’s aura had not merely dispersed; it had landed on them, like a small, precise storm.
Such an aura and such skills, either one alone, needed lineage: a bloodline of history and lineage like Cathe’s, or a life scarred by a thousand fights like Arina’s. Both of them felt the wrongness of it at a physical level—like a foot in a room that shouldn’t be there.
Both of them knew he was neither, and yet that was not the point. The point was the words. He hadn’t written them. He hadn’t signed the letter with this prophecy. The words should not have been in his mouth.
"What do... you mean, we all will die?" Cathe asked. Her voice trembled not from the cold but from a memory dug up and shoved into the light.
"...And even if it was going to happen... how did yooouuu know that?" Arina pushed back. The syllables came hard, the rolling emphasis like a blade seeking purchase. Finally, she was serious—no more jesting slurs, no more ribbing. The red of her eyes sharpened until it could cut glass.
Aiden watched both of them, feeling the careful architecture of his own confidence begin to creak. He had rehearsed every line of the letter, the small lies and veils meant to lure, to test. This declaration was not in the draft; it had not been planned. Still, it felt necessary—raw and urgent.
"...what I say is true, Arina," he said. "When the Empire falls, only the small kingdoms will remain, and the catastrophe of the century—a catastrophe that will dwarf the tragedies that came before—will occur."
His voice had a strange quality: confident and deliberate, beneath it a tremor of worry. It was the first time he had spoken a whole truth from the chest rather than manufactured charm. It rested on him like a real thing—heavy, combustible.
Arina’s mind clicked. A seer? A fraud? The practical part of her—clad in silver and iron, used to weighing advantage—wanted proof. But a different, older part of her, forged by dungeons and nights of rain and blood, understood the shape of certain truths. She’d seen warnings before: burnt villages, survivors with too few teeth, the smell of fear in the air when monsters multiplied. If the boy spoke prophecy, it came from a source of hunger and insight she did not yet understand.
Cathe did not ask for proof. Her body answered differently: she shivered, not a polite tick but deep to the bones, something in her memory catching like cold steel. She folded inward, as if a ghost she’d fought years ago had just walked in the room beside Aiden.
Aiden noticed, and his hand went to place itself on her shoulder—not theatrical, not with the practiced ease of a courtier—but simply because she had become small in that moment. Her face pressed into his chest; silk met cotton; the scent of her perfume was sharp and faintly metallic, a scent that had once kept soldiers awake on watch.
"Cathe... what happened? Are you okay?" he asked, and the words were softer than the ones he used to charm a ballroom.
She shuddered against him, shaking as if some internal engine had seized. There were things he didn’t know about the nights she had spent with her father, the dungeons they had held open with blood and iron, the faces she’d carried in her mind to sleep. He hugged her back because the gesture was honest: he could be the only steady thing in that room, for a second.
Arina watched the exchange, eyes narrowed but not without a softening edge. She said, "I don’t blame her. She was at the forefront with her father, facing those nightmares." Her voice contained both admiration and grief. Even warriors wore scars; some were not on their skin.
"And yet," she added, leaning forward in that way that made her armor creak, "let’s say I believed you—why send me that letter? Why call me here? Why tell me now something you didn’t even tell your own woman?"
The question cut the room into two halves. In the space beneath the question, Aiden’s mind scrolled to a list of ugly truths and strategic needs. Because I want your skill. The thought was brutal, naked. Because my ’Skill Absorption’ needs a seed that’s already been forged in blood. Because you carry a sword-stance that can become a weapon in my hands. He had not planned this. He had planned more elegant manipulations, not a raw bargain of life and gift.
He could not say that aloud. Desire and calculation should be crusted over with something dearer when spoken. So he reached for a different truth. "Because I know, Arina," he said, laying a hand over Cathe’s back as if to steady both himself and the viscountess. "I know you don’t have much time."
His gaze flicked to her gauntleted hand—subtle, bone-knuckled twitching beneath the steel, something she had learned to hide. The irony that a warrior hides a weakness under armor amused him in a cold way. She gripped her gauntlet and then her own fingers, as if to hold the tremor still.
Arina’s eyes widened. The gauntlet had been her symbol—her shield. To see its fracture exposed was to see a mortal thing under the metals. She thought, briefly, of the nights she’d spent bleeding out beside comrades; she thought of a cough that simply didn’t go away, of the way the sun looked different the last year of a life. She bristled.
"How did—" she started.
"Arina, I can help you," Aiden cut in. His words moved like water. He meant them in a dozen different ways—physical, political, arcane—and each shade of meaning was a net. "What I want is... you." He paused; his golden eyes held hers. He let that simple statement sit like a warming cloth on a wound. It was a small audacity: to strip a plan down to want and present it with faith.
She smiled, reflexive, the grin of someone who had faced worse and thus could not quite be shocked. "All that... all that gibberish, so that you could fuck me? This is the most roundabout way I’ve ever seen to ask out a woman—an old woman at that."
The laugh that followed was jagged, bright. She used the word—old—like a weapon. Aiden returned a grin that was sharpened by amusement and something else: affinity for broken things. "I like old women," he muttered, voice a conspirator. "Mostly the ones draped in mystery and hidden darkness—like you."
It was the oddest compliment, and it landed with a curious tenderness. Cathe, still held against him, let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. The tremor in her shoulders eased a fraction. In the warped mirror of court life and blood, that small softening felt like a victory.
"Aiden... why do you need her? Am I not enough?" Cathe’s question curled around his chest. The words were not jealousy but strategy; a calculation dressed in pleading. "Isn’t Sabrina enough? Our houses are plenty strong."
"Yes, she is right," Arina replied, stepping back, tone more measured now. "I don’t know how you learned about the secret of the dungeon break—no noble should have that knowledge. But I hear you. I will check. If this is true, we will know soon enough." Her gauntlet scraped a line on the chair; something like a promise, or a warning, vibrated with it.
He watched her move toward the window, the night outside opening like a throat. She paused on the sill, muscular, shadow-cut and lit. "Three days," he called after her—an impulsive lie, a tool slipped into a lock. The moment she turned, the muscles in her jaw tightened as though the words were a blade.
She did not accept them with blind faith. "After that, the pain in your chest will only increase," he went on, voice low and intimate. "You can manage it now, but it will become something that eats at you every day." He painted his lie with the cadence of truth; she had watched men die in slow ways and recognized the tone.
Silence waited. It seemed to stretch longer than the silence before the conversation; the room itself tightened. Finally, she nodded. "Thank you, Aiden. It was a pleasure to see your... sword at least." She allowed a small, private smile—one like the one of a warrior who had tasted beauty in the midst of battle.
She vaulted toward the eaves with the ease of someone who frequented rooftops and danger. "And viscountess," she added from the frame, voice bright with mortal indifference, "your secret is safe with me. I don’t want the headache of dealing with noble scandals." The last line might have sounded like disdain; the truth was simpler: indifference clothed as courtesy.
When she was gone, the chamber felt smaller, like the exhale after a storm. Aiden turned back to Cathe. She was still trembling but steadier now. Her leg, elegant and deliberate, crossed at the knee. She looked up at him in a way that said she wanted the earth to open and reveal answers—and if it wouldn’t, she would take what comfort she could find.
"So, about the civil war..." she asked.
"Spread those legs, and I’ll tell you everything, Cathe."
Her smile was slow, sin-laced. She lowered her leg, opening herself, as though presenting both question and answer.
"...Tell me everything you know. I will help you. I’ll help so much you’ll forget that silver cunt-bitch ever existed."
His eyes caught the shimmer of her damp silk beneath the dress.
He unbuttoned slowly, golden gaze devouring her.
The air smelled of wax, silk, and sex. The candle flame flickered, a single witness to a pact forged in flesh.
And as he stepped toward her, their shadows merged on the wall—two bodies, one sin, beneath the looming shadow of war.