Chapter 20 : The First to Fall

Both the king and the minister had stated their terms with absolute clarity. Minister Shon wanted the Supreme Dragon's movements bound away from Geirland's northern borders, while the king made equally plain his intention to uphold the treaty — yet what he truly wanted was something else entirely: he wanted the saboteur punished, whoever they might be, at whatever cost.

The king's unexpected condition had redrawn the entire contract, flipping the table over every head in the room. Gou had no intention of being the only one with his life dangling from fate's noose. He had added a counterweight to the equation — one that made the contract more balanced, and infinitely more treacherous, all at once.

The contract had become a silent race toward death.

If the Supreme Dragon flew south and crossed the land border between the two kingdoms, the contract would activate and unleash its curse — and the inevitable catastrophe would fall upon the king's body alone. But the other side was no longer safe either. If Geirland's military forces or spies dared to provoke the dragon and force it forward, the scales would tip immediately, and the punishment of annihilation would descend solely upon the soul of Minister Shon.


Both of them now stood on the same edge.


Both watching the other's every breath.Both knowing, with absolute certainty, that the first to fall... was the one who had sabotaged the treaty.

Minister Shon straightened in his seat and fixed the king with a long, sharp, deliberate look. Behind his composed exterior, the gears of his diplomatic mind were turning without pause, calculating possibilities, weighing risks.

The contract was balanced — that was beyond dispute. More than balanced, in fact; it was more than enough to silence the wary old men in the Senate and satisfy even Geirland's most hardened skeptics. But one thing remained lodged in the minister's throat like a poisoned thorn — something he could neither swallow nor spit out.

The king's confidence.

Gou was not behaving like a man gambling with his life, or like someone driven to desperation. He was behaving with an almost unsettling calm — like a man who already knew he wasn't going to lose. And that, precisely, was what had planted doubt and unease in the minister's chest.

Just minutes before Vain and the king had entered the magical interrogation room, Shon had been convinced that Gou was cornered — caught between the pressure of his royal court and the threat of an unpredictable dragon. A man in that position does not sign a blood-bound contract on his own soul with this kind of lethal composure. And yet, he had done exactly that, without a moment's hesitation.

The minister turned the matter over and over in his mind, reading the king's expression, the weight of his voice, until he landed on the one conclusion that seemed most logical among all his guesses:

The boy.

"The Guardian's Guest" — Vain — sitting in the corner of the table in strange silence, his body visibly drained since the meeting began. Without question, whatever had passed between the king and that unknown boy inside the white void was what had given Gou this ironclad certainty. Some piece of information. A buried secret. A thread the king had seized and transformed from diplomatic anxiety into an absolute conviction that the dragon would not move again.

The minister would not know what that information was — not now, at least — but it had seeded in his chest a sharp and restless curiosity, woven through with caution.

Shon closed his eyes for a single second, folding away the uncertainty, then rose to his feet in one clean motion. Every eye in the room turned to him at once, and the air in the hall coiled tight again. Before he could take a single step forward, he felt something close around his shoulder.A hand. Slight, but firm.

Shon turned his head slowly. It was his daughter, Nara — the girl who had sat beside him like a carved statue since the moment she entered the hall, not once opening her mouth through the entire political storm. She was looking at him now with eyes that were flat and utterly unreadable, but the grip of her hand on his shoulder was screaming what her lips refused to say:
Don't.

The minister raised his hand with great care and placed his aged palm over hers where it gripped his shoulder. A small, reassuring smile settled over his face."Don't worry, Nara. I may be old and grey — but I'm not a fool just yet."

Nara released him in silence and returned to her studied stillness. She knew her father was not a fool — if he were, he would never have held the position of First Minister in a kingdom as storied as Geirland for decades on end. But she had been born into the heart of political scheming, had grown up watching what the hunger for power and the grip of necessity could do to even the sharpest of minds. 


She had learned early that the moments when a ruler appeared most confident and most willing to gamble were precisely the moments he needed to be most careful. So she had broken her stillness and reached for his shoulder — not out of fear, but out of a deep and practiced knowledge of how thrones are won and lost.


The minister took a step forward, completing his stance, and raised his eyes to meet the king's directly. A small, quiet, unreadable smile rested on his lips — one that gave nothing away.

"Very well, King Gou. Despite the brevity of this meeting, and the sharp turns it took..."

He paused for a single second — a second that stretched like an age — as though weighing his words one final time, steeling himself to bind his soul to this suicidal contract."...I accept."

❖ ❖ ❖

And so the contract was sealed.King Gou exhaled — long and deep, like a man who had just ended a war before it began, sparing himself sleepless nights and thousands of soldiers an early grave.Meanwhile, Vain sat in his usual silence, watching. 


He found himself thinking that the signing of fate-altering contracts happened with a terrifying ease, far more quietly than he had ever imagined — for he himself was currently bound by a similar contract with the ancient spirit Zeel. 


What genuinely puzzled him was that something of this catastrophic magnitude carried with it no dramatic surge of magic, no blazing spectacle. It looked as though nothing had happened at all — just simple words leaving mouths and dissolving into the air, yet breaking them would end the speaker's life in the span of a heartbeat.



The moment the minister accepted the condition, the suffocating weight of tension lifted from every chest in the room.
Every chest, except one.
Syphon. 


The Head of the Sorcerers' Court looked more unsettled than anyone, as though his instincts were already telling him that this lethal race — now officially underway between the two men — would not run long before it claimed its victim.


Then, without warning, a single sharp clap rang out through the hall — loud enough to make every strained body flinch and every pair of eyes snap toward its source. It came from the center of the room, from a man who had also held his silence for quite some time: Lord Karl.


With all eyes now on him, he broke the frost with a light, easy tone:
"Well then, my lords — I think we've been tense enough for one day! It's time to eat. Let's not forget this gathering was supposed to be a dinner before it turned into a negotiation."

A simultaneous exhale escaped both Vain and the princess at the exact same moment — involuntary, unguarded, and entirely transparent in what it communicated: that both of them had reached their absolute limit and were thoroughly spent from the relentless shocks and sharp turns of the evening.Syphon moved slowly and raised his staff. 


The crystalline gem at its crown flickered with a faint white glow. The moment Vain saw it, his body went rigid — a sudden, visceral fear seizing him. The last time that orb had lit up, his consciousness had been violently dragged alongside the king's into that terrifying white room where the interrogation had taken place.


The reflex did not escape Syphon's attention. The elf turned toward the boy, and from the pallor in his face and the undisguised alarm in his eyes, he understood immediately — the boy was afraid of being pulled somewhere unknown again.

Syphon offered a small, calm smile."Don't worry, Vain. I'm only sending a telepathic message to the kitchen staff — letting them know to bring dinner."


Vain's eyes widened. It wasn't the magic itself that stunned him — it was this elf's unnerving ability to read him from nothing more than his body language. With a single quiet sentence, the boy's apprehension dissolved. And in that dissolving, he felt it again — the same unsettling realization he had encountered once before: he was completely exposed before this elf's sharp eyes. An open book, turned to the right page before he even knew it was being read.



With a heavy, measured groan, the great wooden doors of the hall swung open on both sides, and a procession of servants filed in — dressed in matching black and white — carrying platters and the finest dishes the kingdom had to offer.


They moved in smooth, soundless lines and began arranging the elaborate spread across the table. In the quiet flow of that movement, Vain's eyes snagged on a familiar face among the servants as they set down the food.

Kacey. The handmaiden who had cared for him while he was unconscious, before he woke from his stupor.

The moment he recognized her, the fog of politics lifted from his mind — and his grim reality came crashing back like a cold slap. The negotiations, the dragon, the treaty — all of it had made him forget that the moment he stepped out of this room, he would return to his own private nightmare: surviving the unknown assassins waiting for him, the ones he had found no way to escape. He hadn't come to this hall out of choice. He had come running, searching desperately for a way out of that deadly trap.


As the handmaidens were finishing and preparing to withdraw, Kacey's eyes met Vain's by chance. In that brief, unguarded moment, the girl's entire body shuddered — visibly, undeniably. Vain noticed. 



Bewilderment crossed his face; he couldn't account for a reaction that strong. But then he remembered — the same thing had happened before, when she had led him to his first meal with Lord Karl.

"Is she afraid of me? But... why?"The question beat against the walls of his mind. There was no doubt about the look she had given him — it held raw, plainly admitted fear. He kept turning it over, searching for a reason, even after the handmaidens had gone and the doors had closed behind them.


His train of thought was cut short by King Gou rising quietly from his seat, lifting an ornate goblet filled with wine. The king fixed a steady gaze on Minister Shon, who read the signal at once and stood in the same moment, raising his own glass. As though they had performed this ritual a hundred times before, both men raised their voices in perfect unison:
"To peace!"

They drank as one.

In that moment, the tension on Vain's face was plain enough to see. The princess, seated nearby, caught his distress and leaned toward him, curiosity threading her voice:
"Guardian's Guest... is something the matter?"

Nothing was the matter — not in any physical sense. The sight of those goblets had simply jolted a terrifying memory back to the surface. The first time he had died inside this palace, it had been poison — slipped into a cup exactly like the ones the king and minister were drinking from right now.

For the first time, Vain found himself trembling with fear over the death of someone else — not out of any particular love or attachment, but out of sheer dread at the catastrophe that would rain down on him, and on the entire continent, if either of these men dropped dead in front of him right now. Especially with that cursed contract freshly sealed.

The two most important people in the room drank. The first seconds crawled past Vain's eyes — slow and leaden as a death sentence. He stared without blinking, waiting for one of them to crumple to the floor, clutching his throat, clawing for air, exactly as it had happened to him.One second.

Two.
Three.
...Nothing.

Both king and minister swallowed their wine in peace.
mOnly then did Vain breathe — a long, full exhale that emptied his lungs of every knot of tension, a sigh of relief audible to everyone in the room.

The two leaders sat. The banquet finally began.

Everyone else ate and drank with the measured elegance befitting nobility. Vain ate like a man with no method at all — frantic, haphazard, utterly unceremonious. His attempts to imitate those around him were a complete and visible failure. What was strange was that no one said a word about it. No reproach, no disdainful glance at his graceless eating. Perhaps out of deference to his ambiguous status as the Guardian's Guest.


He kept eating with abandon until his pace began to slow on its own. He had already made a firm, unshakeable decision: he would not drink a single drop from any cup on this table. Solid food only. His previous experience had taught him that poison was far easier to conceal in liquid than in food.


Eventually, Vain stopped eating altogether and leaned back slowly into the cushioned chair, letting his tired back find the rest of the seat. He cast a brief glance over the table and realized he had been the first to finish — while he had eaten like a man racing the clock, the others were still moving through their meals at a slow, deliberate pace that suited kings and ministers who sat at the very top of the world.



He sat back, adrift in his own thoughts, watching in silence as the others finished one by one.

When the last of the meal was done, it was Minister Shon who rose first. He pressed a cloth napkin to his lips, then set it aside and spoke in an easy, almost amused tone:
"Well, well... genuinely fascinating negotiations. I never imagined I'd walk out of this room bound by a soul contract — hahaha! I'll be departing at first light, King Gou. For now, I think I'll go and rest. My guards have been waiting, and I suspect they'll lose their minds entirely if I keep them any longer."

Diplomatic protocol would ordinarily have required the minister to bring a full armed personal escort into the meeting hall, but given his long history and deep familiarity with King Gou — and his desire to keep the atmosphere free of military tension — he had chosen to enter this difficult negotiation almost entirely alone. He had persuaded his guards to wait at the diplomatic residence provided for them, a fine building outside the palace walls on one of the city's main thoroughfares, serving as a small consulate for the delegation.


King Gou gave a quiet nod, a slight and measured smile crossing his face. The Prime Minister turned and departed, his daughter Nara falling into step beside him, making his way toward the residence to prepare for the journey home the following day — back to Geirland, a kingdom holding its breath, desperate for good news and the announcement of safety.And so the curtain finally fell on the fierce negotiations between the kingdoms of Lyth and Geirland — with the peace treaty extended for another ten years, sealed this time... by a death contract between the leaders of both nations.