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He glared down at the guard, who was struggling to find his voice, and pressed him hard.
“I asked what happened.”
“B-Brother…!”
A raspy, broken voice caught his ear.
Varkas whipped his head around. His expression froze into stone at the sight of Raina collapsed on the ground, covered in gray dust.
“What are you doing in a place like this?”
“T-That’s…”
His sister, her face drained of all color and eyes brimming with tears, lowered her head as if unable to speak.
He caught her by the shoulder, ready to drag the truth out of her, when a woman kneeling before the mound of rubble jerked her head up and lunged toward him.
“Y-Your Grace!”
Varkas looked down coldly at the woman’s face—a face he had seen countless times since his youth.
Her coarse features, blunt with Dwarven blood, twisted out of shape as she clawed at his blood-soaked sleeve and wailed at the top of her lungs.
“Please help! The Grand Duchess is trapped under there!”
A shrill ringing tore through his skull.
His vision narrowed to a pinprick as he stared at the mountain of stone that had once been a building. The woman’s wails reached him muffled and distant, as though he were buried deep underwater.
“Your Grace, save her! Please, I beg you!”
He shoved the woman aside and strode to the heap of wreckage.
It looked as though an entire exterior wall had sheared away. Overlapping slabs of masonry choked the entrance to the lower level, and underneath lay the shattered remains of a spiral stair that had plunged from the tower above.
He dropped to his knees and heaved up a massive stone blocking the doorway.
The muscles from his shoulders to his fingers began to cramp violently, but he ignored them. He tossed the debris aside, tearing away collapsed pillars and broken masonry with frantic, tearing hands.
Guards rushed to his side to haul away the smaller fragments, but Varkas hardly registered them.
All his senses had gone dead.
Light, sound, time itself—everything had frozen. He felt nothing.
He had no idea how long he had been clawing at the stones in that delirious daze when someone seized his arm.
“Your Grace… your shoulder is bleeding heavily. You must have the wound treated first…”
He wrenched his arm free from the grip and bent over the ruins again. He caught the base of a fallen stone column, threw his weight into lifting it, and froze as a flash of pale skin caught his eye.
Varkas stopped. He stared down at the pallid face half-buried in the crushed rock.
His thoughts cut out. Everything went black.
While he stood frozen and dazed, soldiers pushed past him into the hollow beneath the column. They pulled away the stones around her and gently lifted her limp form from the debris.
Only then did Varkas drop the pillar as if tossing it aside and stumble toward her.
A soldier knelt beside her, checking for a pulse, and murmured under his breath.
“…She isn’t breathing.”
A hollow gasp rippled through the onlookers.
The man added in a trembling voice, “She has… already passed.”
The woman weeping on the ground threw herself over the body, her wails turning to piercing screams.
Raina, who had stood watching in devastated silence, also burst into tears. It felt like watching an unnatural, grotesque play.
He stood motionless, staring down at that pale, lifeless face. His vision began to twist. It felt as if the entire world were cracking apart.
Over a world drained of color in an instant, pitch-black darkness settled.
From within that vast, bottomless void, as though the sun itself had burned out, a single thought took root:
Morning would never break again.
The day when light would return to his world would never, ever come.
The funeral for the Grand Duchess lasted three days.
Mourners filed through in an endless stream as a low dirge echoed through the cathedral, and the flowers offered by the people of Kalmor piled high across the plain wooden casket.
Every one of them truly seemed to mourn her death.
The women who had sheltered with her in Raedgo Castle through the three weeks of the siege wept openly, and the maids who had served her held one another, sobbing.
Even the guards could not hide their grief. They believed with absolute certainty that the Grand Duchess had saved Kalmor. Many had seen with their own eyes how the pack of direwolves had appeared out of nowhere to turn the enemy’s tide. The consensus among the city watch was that without those beasts intervening at every critical moment, the city could never have held out until reinforcements arrived.
Some even whispered that the Grand Duchess had been an incarnation of Tiramer, the Earth Spirit. That air of mourning, mixed with a reverence bordering on worship, spread through the city in an instant. For the duration of the rites, every tavern and shop in Kalmor shuttered its doors, and black flags hung from every corner.
Yet while the entire city was submerged in grief, the Grand Duke did not shed a single tear. He kept vigil before the altar, his face as bloodless as a corpse, looking like a man whose inside had been completely carved out.
Standing silent as a stone statue until the final day of the rites, the Grand Duke returned to his duties the moment his wife was interred behind the Raedgo Castle chapel. He threw himself into the city’s reconstruction as though nothing had happened.
As the weeks passed, Kalmor slowly regained its life. Hundreds of masons gathered from across the East set to work rebuilding the shattered walls, guardhouses, watchtowers, and spires. In the ruined outskirts, the ring of carpenters’ hammers rose as new cottages went up.
Across fields once soaked in blood and heaped with bodies, weeds and wildflowers sprouted thick and green, quietly swallowing the scars of battle.
Yet while Kalmor slowly healed, Raedgo Castle remained trapped beneath a heavy, stifling gloom.
Stepping into the unnervingly quiet hall, Edric Luvon spotted the grim-faced Head Maid and approached her cautiously.
“I’m here to see His Grace. Is he in his office?”
“Yes, His Grace is seeing to state affairs on the third floor.”
She gave him a curt reply and a brief bow, then vanished straight into the kitchens. Edric scratched the back of his neck, turned, and started up the stairs.
As he walked down the dimly lit corridor, the two guards flanking the door recognized him and stepped aside at once. Edric paused to steady his breath before knocking.
“It’s Luvon, sir. May I come in?”
“…Enter.”
At the permission, the guard pulled the door open. Stepping across the threshold, Edric stopped short the moment his eyes fell on Varkas, who sat behind the desk reviewing ledgers.
At a glance, he appeared no different from usual. But Edric had seen how he was wasting away with each passing day.
In only a few weeks, his face had grown gaunt, sharpening his features to a severe edge. His collarbones stood out starkly against his open collar, hollowed out far deeper than before.
Looking at him felt like facing a blade ground down to its thinnest, most brittle limit.
END