Helio slowly pulled back, stepping back to place a proper distance between them.
"Haven't you ever wondered, Your Highness?" He asked, tilting his head slightly as he put the sword back into its scabbard. "That a person like Aefia—who is so smart as that it is the sole reason she got adopted—would opt for someone who is completely the opposite of her? Doesn't it hit your head that she who looks like she has high standards... Would prefer to be with someone like me?"
George stared in silence. "I... I am not certain of what it means."
"Haven't it occured to you that Aefia only ever properly befriends a person who is as witty as she is? Hasn't it ever come to your mind that I, who is very naive, is her fiancé?"
He couldn't even answer this time. But still, he lowered his head while bitting his bottom lip.
"Think about it, Your Highness. I know I am being a bit too arrogant and boastful about this—but Aefia only ever chooses someone who has something special in them." Helio turned his back at him, walking towards a small bookshelve that originally belonged to when she would be bored and stressed, but needed something to calm her mind too.
Then, a few seconds of silence went by. Until a bulb clicked in George's mind.
"Are you saying... That all this time, you have been acting to deceive others into thinking they can mess with you?" His voice trembled.
Helio looked over his shoulder. A wicked smile took over his lips as he let out a soft chuckle.
"Took you long to realize, Your Highness. Though I suggest that you also do your part of the explaining too."
"What...?"
"I have said the reason I had summoned you so quickly. And you have quite the lot of things you are hiding from Aefia that is going to be something to depend on for her survival too."
George felt a sudden, suffocating tightness in his chest, as if the oxygen in the room had abruptly turned to lead. The silence between them stretched, thick and toxic, unbroken save for the faint, steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.
He stared at the back of Helio's head—at the relaxed, posture-perfect stance of a man who had just casually dismantled years of carefully constructed royal deception with a single, offhand comment.
"Explain what?" George asked, though his voice lacked its former sharp, imperious authority. It sounded hollow, raspy around the edges. "I have nothing to explain to a commoner knight, regardless of what games you claim to play."
Helio didn't turn around immediately. He reached out, his long fingers trailing lightly along the spine of a leather-bound history ledger on Aefia's shelf—one of the very books she used to read when the politics of the capital became too tedious to endure.
"A commoner knight," Helio retorted softly, letting out another low, amused huff. "You see, that is where everyone makes their first mistake. They look at the title, they look at the background, and they assume Aefia took pity on a clever stray. They forget that Aefia doesn't keep anything around her that isn't either exceptionally useful or exceedingly dangerous."
He finally turned, resting his lower back against the mahogany shelf, crossing his arms over his chest. His green eyes—usually so bright and unassuming—were completely devoid of warmth.
"She hears a voice, George. A specific, distorted frequency that creeps into her mind whenever she enters a state of deep, absolute isolation. And three years ago, during the autumn banquet in the capital, she didn't just hear it. She saw a shadow standing at the edge of the glass garden. A silhouette wearing the exact same signet ring you currently have tucked into your inner coat pocket."
It was a half-lie deemed to work well.
George's hand instinctively twitched toward his chest, freezing halfway before he forced his arm back down to his side. His jaw clenched so hard the joint throbbed.
"You are making wild assumptions," George spat out, though the cold sweat pooling at the nape of his neck betrayed him. "Aefia was exhausted during the banquet. She was hallucinating from the sheer strain of managing the Empress's council affairs—"
Maybe a little too well...
"She doesn't hallucinate," Helio interrupted flatly, his tone dropping all hint of playfulness. "And neither do I. You are the shadow she has been trying to trace for four years. The unseen anchor tied directly to the imperial line's lineage. The one who ensures that no matter what political storm hits the palace, the Empress remains untouched on the throne."
Helio took two unhurried steps forward, stopping just out of striking distance.
"Aefia went to Mides knowing she was walking into a trap," Helio continued, his voice dropping into a razor-thin whisper. "She knew Kazimir was unstable. She knew the ministers were corrupt. But she went anyway because she believed that if things went completely under, you would be the one to handle the aftermath from the dark. She trusted you, George. Even if she never said it out loud."
George closed his eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath through his nose. The pristine, heroic facade of the dutiful First Prince cracked, leaving behind a cold, exhaustion-worn reality. When he opened his eyes again, the purple hue seemed darker, heavier—devoid of any royal pretense.
"If she knew..." George murmured, his voice barely audible, "...then she is an even bigger fool than I thought."
"She is pragmatic," Helio corrected smoothly. "And right now, her pragmatism is relying on the fact that her brother isn't just going to sit in the palace sipping tea while Kazimir plays with fire across the border. I don't need your permission to manage Trinvina, George. But if you want your sister to come back alive, you will hand over that imperial military faction—and you will use that name of yours to clear the path for me."
George stared at him for a long, agonizing moment before reaching slowly into his coat. He didn't pull out a weapon. Instead, he drew a small, heavy iron token stamped with an unbranded, jagged crest and threw it onto the table between them. It landed with a loud, metallic clink.
"That gives you command of the third border unit," George said, his tone devoid of all emotion. "They answer only to that seal. No banners. No imperial records."
Helio looked down at the token. Slowly, he reached down and picked it up, turning it between his fingers as rays of light deflected directly back to his face. It hit his eyes at an angle that his green iries seemed to glow softly, the corners of his lips curving back up into that quiet, terrifying smile. "A pleasure doing business with you, Your Highness."
"If you fail, Helio," George added, his dark purple eyes fixing on the Archduke with lethal intensity, "if you bring war to our gates and fail to pull her out of whatever she is doing... I will make sure the shadow she saw is the last thing you ever see."
"Don't mind me. I am just as determined in things as she is." He answered back while pocketing the token. "Hope we do not meet again, Your Highness." He bowed his head down, just enough to make it seem respectable and threathening at the same time.
"Same goes for you, Your Grace." George shot back, slamming the door behind him as he walked out.
"Hm... How disrespectful." Helio whispered, straightening back up, then stretching his arms high over his head.
"It did take me long enough to realize Aefia's plan. Though I am not certain why she would go to such lengths." He sighed to himself. "Idiot. You really meant you might die when you said it."
He looked down at his engagement ring, rubbing his thumb over it before dropping his hands back down to his side. Then walked back up to the office, and threw his coat over the back of a chair before flopping down onto the sofa with his forearms covering his eyes.
"Cindy... I need to check up with Cindy."
The words escaped his lips with a soft, vulnerable edge to it.
Not even three seconds later, a small plan sized chimera dragon popped out of the air. He opened one eye, then smiled.
"I see you have news?" He sat up, reaching his fingers over to take the tiny piece of paper that it was having a difficult time holding between its jaws.
Slowly, his eyes scanned across the words.
"Hey. So Kazimir is currently doing something similar to when we were still at the facility. And I was wondering if you have the back-up? If so, can you urgently send it over? My headaches are killing me."
"...Something similar to when we were still at the facility..." He repeated the words to himself while tapping his chin. Then got off the sofa to looked out the window.
George was riding away already. So there was nothing to say about this.
Even if...
George didn't know what the facility was or what happened there. If anything, he would be even more confused and start to see Helio with suspicion.
"I get it. This is the experiment, but the opposite positions."
His hands clenched into a fist as he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and pulled out the token. From one perspective, it would be better to just start a war.
On the other, Kazimir was probably slowly getting more and more powerful.
Which only means... The next place was the Guardian Realm.
The duchy was settled, everything was already ready before anyone even anticipated, and the chessboard was well positioned.
The only thing left was that thing.
But before he could leave, he suddenly felt interested to first check her drawers. There were mostly papers and all.
Flap! Flap! Flap!
The chimera dragon started to vigorously flap its wings, as it landed right onto Helio's palm and started to open and shut its jaw.
"Are you... Trying to say something?" He looked curiously at the little pet. His eyes twitching as Cindy shot a glare at him.
Then, Cindy flew up and sat at the edge of the drawer. Then slowly started to throw everything to the ground.
The paper sheets fluttered through the air like winter snow, scattering indiscriminately across the polished hardwood floor.
"Hey! Stop—what are you doing?!" Helio hissed, lunging forward with his arms spread to catch the falling documents. "Aefia is going to skin me alive if she sees her ledgers like this! Cindy!"
The tiny chimera dragon ignored his frantic reprimands entirely. Perched precariously on the empty wooden lip of the top drawer, Cindy let out a sharp, high-pitched click of its jaw. It extended one scaly, translucent wing and tapped the bottom board of the drawer with its claw.
Thump. Thump.
Helio froze mid-crouch, three official financial reports clutched loosely in his hand. His gaze shifted from the mess on the floor to the interior of the desk.
"A false bottom?" he murmured, his former annoyance vanishing into a quiet, focused stillness. "Right... I should have thought about that. She had always been doing this."
He reached inside, his long fingers feeling along the rear seam of the wooden compartment until his nail caught the subtle, flush edge of a hidden brass latch. With a soft, mechanical click, the bottom section yielded, springing upward a fraction of an inch.
Helio carefully lifted the thin panel of oak.
Resting in the dusty, velvet-lined hollow beneath was a single, unlabeled glass vial, its deep violet liquid sloshing sluggishly against the crystal walls. Beside it lay a small, yellowed piece of parchment—its edges frayed, creased, and worn soft from years of being folded and unfolded.
Helio's breath hitched slightly in his throat.
He didn't need to read the note to recognize the shaky, unrefined handwriting etched onto the paper. It was from six years ago.
Her fifteenth year—the time she had been struggling the most.
It was the night she had chugged down a vial of lethal nightshade extract in her own room, consumed by the crushing weight of her own mind, trying to quietly erase her existence from the world.
He still remembered the frantic, terrifying blur of that night. That was the only time in all of their rivalry, that she had spught out his help in the dead middle of the night.
Helio picked up the old note, unfolding it slowly.
Written in the frantic, desperate script of a fifteen-year-old Aefia were just a few words: 'I am tired of playing a game I never asked to join.'
And beneath it, written in her current, sharp, elegant hand—added much later—was a single fresh line:
'If the parasite consumes the vessel, use the violet. It doesn't kill the Guardian. It kills the blood.'
A cold, sharp realization washed over Helio, settling deep in his chest.
The glass vial wasn't a suicide attempt. It was a failsafe. A specialized, self-synthesized poison designed to destroy the magic bound within her blood pathways the moment it was extracted into an foreign host.
"You insane, brilliant idiot..." Helio whispered, a breathless, humorless laugh escaping his lips as he held the violet liquid up to the dim afternoon light.
Aefia hadn't just walked into Mides to let Kazimir dig his own grave. She had left the weapon right here, knowing that when Kazimir inevitably tried to drain her power, the true countermeasure would be delivered not from inside the cell, but from the outside.
Cindy chirped softly, landing on Helio's shoulder and rubbing its scaled snout against his cheek.
Helio closed his fingers tightly around the vial, slipping it into his inner coat pocket alongside George's imperial military token.
"The duchy is secure," Helio murmured, looking out the window toward the western horizon where the Mides border lay hidden beyond the mountains. "The shadow is moving. And the poison is in hand."
He reached down, gently patting Cindy's tiny head.
"Come on, Cindy. Let's go give Kazimir exact details of what happens when you drink from a cup that was never meant for you."
Cindy let out a soft roar of excitement. A declaration that something none had expected was about to happen.
On the way out, the butler handed Helio the keys to the vault in the second floor. He took it and headed straight to it. The old man followed after.
"Your Grace," he spoke. "Is it even alright that we interrupt what the Archduchess is planning to do?"
Helio came to a stop. He turned around to face the man.
"I am not certain myself, that if she truely wants me to interrupt. But I am prepared to hear scoldings if only I can buy a tiny bit of serenity after having the head of the current Mides King on a silver platter."