Chapter 76 76: The Storm Is Brewing
Ascending the golden spiral staircase and passing through a tall, wide archway, Lucia stepped out onto the open stone terrace at the very apex of the Erdtree Cathedral.
Looking around the vast stone expanse, a sudden wave of deep familiarity washed over him. He realized why the architecture along the way had felt so recognizable—this was the very sanctuary where, in a past life behind the screen, he had faced the grand phantom of the First Elden Lord, Godfrey.
The real Erdtree Cathedral was obviously many times larger and more imposing than its digital counterpart, and the terrace outside was vastly different from the Queen's private bedchambers in the royal palace. Still, as the highest point of the entire cathedral complex, it offered an un-rivaled view of the imperial seat.
Ranni was sitting quietly on the stone railing at the absolute edge of the terrace. Her blue eyes were slightly narrowed, looking up at the night sky beyond the massive, glowing branches of the Erdtree. Her long legs dangled off the edge, swinging gently over the brilliant, sprawling sea of lights defining the capital city below.
"Have you noticed?" she spoke softly, her voice carrying over the wind as she heard his footsteps approaching from behind. "There are no stars in the night sky over Leyndell. Even the full moon and the black moon are completely choked out by the light."
Lucia deftly stepped over the stone barrier, settling down on the ledge beside her to gaze into the vast heavens. It was exactly as Ranni had said. The shimmering, colossal branches of the Erdtree stretched completely across the celestial dome, obscuring the stars beneath a magnificent, suffocating golden glaze. The two moons hanging high above the Lands Between appeared incredibly pale and dim, as if they might dissolve into the light at any moment.
In the quiet of the watch, his mind drifted back to the morning he had cleared his home gates, remembering how he had wanted to look back at the untamed sky of the Sky Temple a final time. He couldn't help but murmur, "The dome of Farum Azula is the closest place to the true stars in this world. If the tides permit in the future, I can escort your mantle there just to watch the sky."
Ranni paused, her swinging legs going still. She turned her head to look at the silver-haired youth, her brow lifting slightly. "I assumed your heart had completely settled into the comfort of this capital, and that your thoughts lacked any longing for your home."
Lucia was briefly puzzled by her words, but quickly caught her drift—she was referencing his close, protective relationship with Miquella and Malenia. He offered a soft, relaxed smile, shaking his head. "Those are two entirely separate matters. In the final accounting, we are all merely travelers drifting across this specific soil. Our boots are conformed to return to our own paths sooner or later."
Ranni turned her face back toward the golden branches, her tone noncommittal. "On the road to the capital, the court pages claimed that Her Majesty Queen Marika had formally invited Priestess Lansseax to Leyndell, yet your silver hair took her place at the sovereign table. Was your intent truly just to cross blades with Knight Moongrum to freeze our dynamic, keeping our house anchored to the court?"
She fixed him with a calm, searching stare. "Originally, none of this multi-factional friction had anything to do with your lineage, yet your steel risked everything to lunge into the center of the storm. Of course... in the end, your gamble succeeded, didn't it?"
Lucia looked back into Ranni's clear, piercingly cold blue eyes. He understood perfectly well that standing before this exceptionally wise, perceptive Moon Princess, any decorative courtly pretense would be utterly futile.
He slowly exhaled a long plume of white mist into the chilly night air, his shoulders relaxing. "At the absolute opening of the watch, my purpose in clearing the carriage was indeed to suppress any potential diplomatic disputes at the banquet. If your house understands your father and his unyielding Fundamentalism well enough, you will comprehend that after his ascension as a God by the decree of the Greater Will, my situation in this capital will only score worse than yours. Consequently, you can evaluate my gamble as a piece of calculation—strictly to force his hand to owe my lineage a massive debt."
"He is not my father—" Ranni cut through the line, her voice dropping into a sharp, defensive edge.
"Whatever his title is, the man remains an absolute bastard regardless," Lucia shrugged carelessly. "Following the events of this night, my heart is even more convinced of that reality. Give my steel another ten winters, and my tongue will articulate that exact sentence directly to his face."
Ranni stared blankly at the un-bound youth sitting beside her, completely at a loss for words. At the very roots of the Erdtree, within the absolute heart of the holy capital, this boy had casually cursed the reigning Elden Lord as a bastard. Across the entire thousand-winter history of the Lands Between, there had likely never been a single madman of his caliber drawing breath.
Before she could fully process the shock, Lucia continued, his tone shifting into a quieter frequency. "As for what your lips cited regarding risking my life... the exact watch I discovered Radahn's blades were targeting Miquella's frame, all of those initial political calculations became entirely irrelevant."
"Miquella and Malenia are people my heart cares for deeply," he said matter-of-factly, his silver eyes completely steady. "When their lives are balancing over a precipice, regardless of who commands the opposing line, my shield possesses zero reasons to execute a retreat."
"But your lineage barely even knows their names," Ranni began, the words clearing her lips before her memory suddenly replayed the reality that although this dragon prince had incubated within a sovereign egg for thousands of winters, his physical form had only walked the earth for a handful of months. She re-aligned her phrasing, "But in the final accounting, you do not belong to the same kind. They are the true heirs of the Golden Dynasty, while your scales belong to the ancient spires of Farum Azula. One sun..."
"What of it?" Lucia interrupted with a soft, amused smile. "The watch Malenia's rot disease was fracturing her veins today, did your own hands not extend their frost to rescue a 'stranger' you claim shares zero common ground with your house?"
"I—" Ranni's jaw opened to mount a sharp counter-argument, but locking eyes with Lucia's warm, knowing smile, she suddenly realized she had walked straight into her own trap. Who would have guessed she would get herself thoroughly gridlocked by this dragon youth? Her face instantly hardened into a stern, defensive expression, a small snort escaping her nose as she snapped her gaze away, refusing to utter another syllable.
Lucia chuckled silently to himself. Deleting the terrifying, infamous witch of the future legends, the Moon Princess sitting beside him across this winter night—an entity who had not yet truly grown into her full sovereign height—actually concealed an exceptionally kind, fiercely protective soul beneath her cold, un-bending exterior. She simply refused to allow the outside world to read that warmth.
The two demigods sat side by side in a long, unbroken silence, watching the lights of the lower wards flicker through the golden leaves, until Ranni suddenly spoke up, her voice quiet. "You truly are a strange person."
Lucia faintly smiled, accepting the baseline evaluation without a single drop of protest.
"By the way... how do the archives read your elder brother's condition?"
"Sir Ordovis dispatched the premier apothecaries of the capital ministries to treat Radahn's flesh the exact watch our boat touched the pebbles," Ranni replied, her posture relaxing slightly. "When my boots cleared his chambers to come here, his lacerations had already wove a near-complete recovery. All that remains is for his muscles to slowly reclaim their baseline strength. His vitals should achieve a stable footing by dawn."
She cast a strange, deeply analytical look at his profile. "To be entirely honest, my intellect genuinely fails to comprehend how your own frame executed a hundred percent physical recovery within a handful of minutes. Across the libraries of Liurnia, even the grand records of Priestess Lansseax and Fortissax contain zero precedents for a regenerative velocity of that tier."
"Well... my own vanguard will ask my father regarding that biological mystery if the tides grant my return down the line," Lucia said hastily, throwing out a casual courtly shield while his mind secretly marveled at the sheer, law-breaking power of the Cradle Blessing.
The absolute majority of the world's most potent healing incantations originated from the high Erdtree liturgies. Yet, even the demigod heirs who carried the un-diluted bloodline of Queen Marika within their veins scored vastly inferior to the old Godskin Nobles when evaluating pure somatic reconstruction.
Lucia recalled that terrifying, near-immortal regenerative frequency he had witnessed during the assassination attempt, his thoughts involuntarily tracking the colossal, world-shaking will that had forcefully descended to possess Samuel's flesh on that bloody afternoon. What specific tier of entity was the legendary Gloam-Eyed Queen... the ancient sovereign who was recorded to have systematically slaughtered the gods of the old world, matching Queen Marika blade for blade for the seat of the solitary True God?
Turning over the dark historical threads, his eyes suddenly locked back onto Ranni's profile. "The watch my carriage initial cleared the outer capital gates, the pages rumored that your retinue had encountered a serious accident through the mountain passes, delaying your arrival before the court. Did that specific 'accident' define a coordinated ambush launched by the Godskin Apostles?"
Ranni's expression suffered a subtle, sharp stillness. She gave him a long, incredibly weighted look before answering. "There exists zero reason to withhold the dataset from your house. Our vanguard intersected the Godskin Apostles deep within the Varian Valley, right at the jagged geographic seam where the wetlands of Liurnia meet the ascent of the Altus Plateau. Two high-ranking Godskin Nobles commanded the execution line. My brother Radahn managed to hold the vanguard back for a handful of watches, enabling Knight Moongrum's steel to rapidly close the distance to liquidate their formation. Regrettably, the moment their perimeter fractured, the two nobles choosing to immolate their own flesh with the black flame, leaving zero survivors to undergo interrogation."
Hearing the tactical report, Lucia drew a slow, heavy breath.
Both his own carriage and the three demigod heirs of Caria had been dispatched to this capital to execute the role of high-tier political hostages. Both of their columns had been systematically targeted for absolute liquidation the exact watch their wheels neared the borders of the Altus Plateau. If either of those high-stakes assassination scripts had completed their tracking loops—or if even a single royal child had suffered a terminal injury under the black flame—the fragile equilibrium binding the Three Great Dynasties would have suffered a catastrophic rupture, detonating the largest, most brutal continent-wide war logged across a decade.
Those haunting, bottomless, amber eyes from his training logs continuously flashed through Lucia's mind as his intellect cross-referenced every scrap of intelligence his networks had gathered across the capital—the sudden, synchronized re-awakening of the Godskin Apostles after centuries of absolute dormancy; the eerie, razor-thin structural balance dividing the wills of Marika and Radagon; and the parasitic, lurking curse festering inside little Malenia's flesh.
Although the Golden Dynasty still presented an outward image of un-rivaled prosperity and un-broken military dominance to the lower realms, his instincts keenly sensed that the ancient, terrifying forces that had spent centuries hiding within the dark historical shadows of the continent had aggressively initiated their movements. All manner of high-stakes conspiracies, driven by entirely un-aligned stances and deep cosmic purposes, were silently, invisibly brewing beneath the surface—quietly awaiting the terminal hour to unleash a new era of absolute turmoil and endless strife.
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