Chương 97: Dawn

Darius didn't resist when they put him in custody. Two of the Count's knights hauled him to his feet, securing his wrists behind his back with iron chains. The last of his personal guard had surrendered, disarmed and lined up against the Tower's outer wall with their heads down in shame. The Count stood before his nephew with the Tidemark Trident in his hand, the arcane glow now completely muted.

Blood ran from the cut above his eye, tracing a line down his cheek and dripping from his jaw, but he didn't wipe it away. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. I lowered my bow, watching from the edge of the plaza with some of the arriving adventurers and a handful of knights. None of us wanted to go up there and interrupt. This moment belonged to the family it had nearly destroyed.

"Why?" the Count asked. A simple question. A singular word with the weight of years of trust and a lifetime spent together. A life that had been shattered in mere weeks. Darius stared at the ground. When he finally spoke, his voice was stripped of the pride and contempt he'd worn like armor minutes ago, replaced by the emptiness of complete defeat.

"You want a reason, Robert?" He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

"You want me to tell you it was about the county? About the throne? About power?"

"I want the truth." Darius raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot, but even from this distance, I could see his desperation, and for the first time since I'd laid eyes on him, he looked like what he was: a young man who'd gambled everything and lost.

"Calian told me. About what you did to my father so you could sit on the throne in his place. As the elder brother, he was supposed to rule, not you." His voice cracked.

"For years, you have kept me in the shadows, pretending to love me. But Calian opened my eyes." The Count absorbed the words with disbelief.

"Your father was my brother," he said quietly.

"I loved him. I would have never put him in harm's way."

"Liar!" Darius spat the word.

"What did Calian tell you?" the Count asked.

"And why didn't you confront me about it?"

"Oh, I wanted to! I wanted to expose your crime to the whole Kingdom!" His eyes were turning angrier by the second.

"He told me to wait, to hold the Trident to show everyone my legitimacy. He even gave me the documents that were proof of my lineage!"

"You could have come to me! Why didn't you?" Darius contemplated for a while before answering.

"He didn't want you to move against me first. To have me killed, like you had my father." My heart sank. Calian's hand was much deeper in all of this than I thought at first. He didn't betray the Count to join Darius. He orchestrated the whole thing. The Count went very still. Not like a child would when getting caught in a lie. It was the stillness of someone who'd just been stabbed in a place where armor couldn't protect him.

"Murdered," he repeated, still not believing they were actually talking about it.

"Calian told you I had your father murdered." Darius's jaw tightened.

"He didn't just tell me. He showed me proof. Documents. Witnesses. People who said you hired them to—""Darius." The Count's voice was quiet, but something in it made his nephew stop immediately.

"Your father died of the Grey Fever. In this palace. In the room three doors down from mine. I sat beside his bed for eleven days. I held his hand when he passed."

"That's what you wanted everyone to believe."

"That is what happened." The Count lowered the Trident to his side, not as a gesture of surrender, but as a man who didn't need a weapon for this fight.

"You were two years old, Darius. You don't remember it. But Father Aldric administered the last rites. Elindra spent three days trying to find a magical cure to an illness that had none. Every healer in the county was brought to his bedside." He paused.

"Half the city mourned in the streets."

"The documents—""What documents?" the Count asked.

"Who wrote them? Where are they now?" Darius opened his mouth, then closed it without saying a word.

"Calian kept them," he said, and even as the words left his mouth, I could see the realization begin to form as his eyes shifted. The way his certainty, which had been crumbling since the Count disarmed him, began to shatter into pieces periodically.

"And the witnesses," the Count pressed, his voice gentle now, the way one would talk to their child when they acted out.

"The ones he let you speak to. Where did you meet them? Did you know their names? Had you ever seen them before Calian brought them to you?" Silence. Darius's breathing changed; it became shallow and uneven. His eyes moved rapidly as he surely replayed the conversations in his head, thinking about the evidence, pulling at the threads that were suddenly unraveling in his hands.

"No," he whispered. It was not an answer to the Count's question. It was a deep, desperate 'no', a word coming out of the mouth of someone watching the world around him crumble. The sound of a man watching the foundation of everything he'd done collapse beneath him.

"He made it all up," the Count said. There was no triumph in his voice, not an ounce of satisfaction; just grief so deep even I felt the hurt in his voice.

"Calian fabricated documents. He found people willing to say what he needed them to say. He took a two-year-old's grief and a young man's love for a father he barely remembered, and he came up with a lie built on those emotions so well you never thought to question it."

"Stop."

"Because if you had questioned it, Darius, if you had come to me, or to anyone who was there when your father died—" Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Stop!" The scream echoed off the plaza walls. The knights, men from both sides, looked around uncomfortably, and even Captain Vern turned away. Darius was shaking with the full, crippling weight of what he'd done and why he'd done it, realizing it was all for nothing. He'd opened the gates to dark mages, he helped them take control of the Church Square, and he put a city to sleep with no regard for the people's safety. He'd raised arms against the only family he had left, and it was for a lie.

The Count watched his nephew for a long time, then closed his eyes. After reopening them, they were wet. He turned to Captain Vern.

"Take him to the Lord's Hall. Secure quarters, not a cell. Post guards. He will answer for what he's done, but he will answer before a proper tribunal, not a mob." Vern hesitated for a fraction of a second, his jaw tight with things he wanted to say, but he kept it to himself and saluted.

"As you command, my lord." They lifted Darius to his feet. He didn't resist, nor did he look up. They led him away, and the sound of his chains faded into the noise of a city slowly coming back to life. The Count stood tall in the plaza, the Trident resting at his side, its glow now completely dark. He looked twenty years older than he had that morning. Way older than someone should be after winning a battle. Because this victory was not something he could celebrate easily.

He might have won, but the real enemy was still loose. And Calian was already gone. The dark seal on the Knight's Tower gates disappeared mere minutes after Calian vanished. Ser Syrak tested the gates first, pressing his shoulder against the wood. They opened without resistance. The Tower was dark inside; none of the torches were lit, and all windows were shuttered. A squad of the Count's knights entered first, with shields raised, clearing each room as they advanced.

I followed with Ser Syrak, my bow drawn, Lune padding beside me with her Foxfire casting some much-needed light into the shadows. The Tower's lower floors were empty. The dining hall, the armory, the barracks, all abandoned. Whatever forces Calian and the robed figure had kept here were gone, vanished through dark magic, probably. We found signs of the enemy host as we climbed the stairs. Dark scorch marks on the walls, residue of magic that made Lune's fur stand, as my little companion looked around with unease.

We also saw a shattered table in what had been Calian's personal quarters, the only sign that the Captain had taken anything with him before leaving. But there were no bodies, no prisoners. Nothing. At least until the fourth floor. Syrak stopped abruptly.

"In here." The room had been a command post. A large table dominated the center, covered in maps and documents that had been swept aside. Chairs were overturned, and the stone floor was dark with blood. What we saw there turned the taste of victory in my mouth to ashes. Three knights lay there, or whatever was left of them. I recognized all of them by face. The knights who were accompanying Ser Erdin in the old quarters.

One of them, who left the scene of battle, carrying Erdin's message, and the other two, the ones who held Erdin's flanks as he was about to fight Calian. These were the three men whom he'd trusted the most. And beyond them, in the far corner of the room, propped against the wall beneath a window that overlooked the city, we saw someone else. Erdin. My blood turned to ice for a moment, but Syrak moved. Cathe just got up the stairs and turned to join us when she saw him.

Thinking back to this day, to this event, Cathe's scream was the lowest point. In that moment, Godsrealm wasn't a simple game. We rushed to the knight. He was alive, thankfully, but barely. His armor was battered and broken. Blood covered him, his own and others, drying in dark layers across his body. His sword lay beside him, just out of reach, the blade notched in a dozen places. But his eyes were open.

And when Syrak rushed to his side, Erdin's hand found the knight's arm with a grip that still had some strength in it.

"The Count," he rasped.

"Is the Count—""Alive," Syrak said, his voice unsteady.

"Tidemark is ours. Darius is captured. It's over, Erdin. It's over." Erdin closed his eyes. A breath left him that sounded like it had been held for hours.

"Calian," he managed.

"He came through here moments ago. Didn't fight. Walked right past me. He took something then… Then he went up."

"Did he kill our brothers?"

"They captured all four of us, back in the old quarter," he said, nodding at me.

"Imprisoned us in this room. The mages… They sacrificed Arlan and Leopold. A… ritual of sorts. Finn died of his wounds." Syrak was shaking with rage.

"You're alive," I said, kneeling beside him.

"And you saved us. You saved the city." He smiled.

"Good job, adventurers." Syrak was already calling for healers. Two knights ran for the stairs while Cathe began basic field treatment, pressing cloth against the worst of Erdin's wounds. She was out of breath, her face flushed, and her expression bore a mixture of relief and anger. She didn't speak at first, or rather, she couldn't. The sound that came out of her was something between a laugh and a sob, a sign of relief, relief that the worst thing she'd imagined didn't come true.

"I told you," Erdin whispered, his voice barely audible.

"I told you I'd come back." Cathe pressed her forehead against his. Tears ran down her cheeks and fell onto his ruined armor.

"You're an idiot," she whispered.

"I know."

"You're such an idiot."

"I know." She kissed him, and this time it wasn't a goodbye. I looked away; It felt wrong to watch, like opening a letter addressed to someone else. Syrak had turned away, too, but I caught him smiling. The healers arrived moments later: a priest from the temple and a field medic from the Count's retinue. They worked quickly, golden light washing over Erdin's wounds, stabilizing the worst of the damage. Cathe didn't let go of his hand the entire time.

I stepped out of the room and leaned against the wall in the corridor, the stone cold against my back. The sounds of healing and quiet conversation filtered through the open door. Elsewhere in the Tower, knights were securing rooms, cataloging what Calian had left behind, and beginning the slow work of reclaiming the building. I was still in a party with my three friends. Orion: It's over. Darius is captured, but Calian escaped. Erdin's alive. Tidemark is ours. A long pause. Then: Lothras: On my way to the Tower.

Athos: We respawned in Maelridge, but we're at the Salt Plains now. Man, what a carnage! Kara: Is everyone okay? I looked through the door at Erdin, at Cathe's hand wrapped around his, at the three covered bodies that loyal knights were now carefully lifting onto stretchers. I thought of Count Vizgrad, betrayed by a friend and having to imprison family. Of Darius, misguided and cheated, used for a goal that still wasn't clear to any of us.

I thought of all the soldiers and civilians who had lost their lives despite all the effort to keep the bloodshed to a minimum. Orion: No. But they'll get there. I closed the interface and stood in the corridor for a while, alone. What was Calian's reason? I kept trying to pick up the pieces, but it still made no sense to me. He went through all this trouble, orchestrated a coup, manipulated multiple people for years, and yet, when it seemed his plan was crumbling, he simply smiled and left. What was he after?

Church bells were still ringing. Through a narrow window, I could see torches moving in the streets below as patrols shifted from combat to recovery. Civilians were being guided to shelters, and wounded soldiers were being carried to the temple. The brainwashed troops, freed from the enchantment, were helping clear rubble from the gate. Tidemark was battered. It was scarred, beaten, and tired. But it was standing. After a while, footsteps echoed in the stairwell. The Count appeared on the stairs, alone.

He had already removed his helmet, and the blood on his face had been wiped clean, though the cut above his eye was still nasty. He paused when he saw me.

"Orion."

"My lord." He walked past me to the doorway and looked inside. He saw Erdin and Cathe, and the covered bodies of three knights who'd given their lives for his throne. He stood there for a long time before placing one hand on my shoulder with a firm grip.

"Without you," he said quietly, "The ending would have been far more grim."

"I just did what needed to be done."

"It was more than that." He released my shoulder and turned toward the room.

"Far more." He entered, and I heard Erdin's voice, weak but steady, begin to report. The Count listened, as good rulers do, and Cathe finally allowed herself to sit back, the tension leaving her body. I remained in the corridor. It was past midnight, and I have been playing for over 16 hours. I knew I needed to log out, but for one last moment, I looked out the window. Today, we did all we could do. And when dawn comes, I thought, a new day will also come to Tidemark.