Ersia: Raven Dawn

Mistus, now manifest in the colossal form of a dragon, remained motionless upon a high escarpment along the edge of Lake Sérénité. For nearly seven hours he had stood there, silent and immovable, like a dark monument etched against the sky. In that span, the surrounding lands had begun to fail in silence. Livestock and merchant horses alike had perished—not by direct violence, but by a terror so profound that it drove them into frenzied ruin, trampling stalls, breaking carts, and fleeing senselessly into the forests where they collapsed from exhaustion or fear.

Upon receiving these reports, Queen Catalina convened an emergency council with the highest authorities of the realm. The meeting was held within an unassuming inn—one of several discreet sanctuaries embedded within the kingdom’s intelligence network, designed as a first refuge for the royal family in times of grave necessity. Its exterior betrayed nothing of significance, yet within it held ample provisions and a fortified subterranean complex capable of housing multiple noble households in prolonged isolation.

The discussion that followed stretched on, dense with speculation and caution. No one, not even the most valorous and impulsive among the generals, proposed immediate confrontation. There was a shared and unspoken understanding that whatever the winged beast was, it could unmake centuries of civilization without effort.

“Is there anything we can do at all?” the queen asked at last, pressing her fingers against the bridge of her nose as though to steady a mounting headache.

“Poison the beast,” a noblewoman said at once. “Everything dies! Make it die faster!”

A noble trained in the art of medicine let out a short, humorless breath. “With what? And how much? That thing is the size of a hill.”

“Then use more!” she snapped. “Or do you propose we sit and wait to be eaten?”

“I propose you think before speaking,” he shot back. “Poison takes time.”

“How long?” someone else demanded.

“A minute, if you are blessed with the most potent poison the world has to offer,” he said. “Longer, if you are not.”

“Then we hold it for a minute.”

A laugh broke out—sharp, ugly. “Hold it?” another interjected, a thin smile breaking through. “By all means. Go ahead. Take a rope and try.”

“Better than doing nothing!”

“Better for whom? For the men you send to die first?”

Voices rose, collided, lost whatever shape they once had.

“You’re all cowards!”

“And you’re a fool!”

“At least I’m not hiding behind words while we rot—”

“Rot?!” another barked. “We’ll be ash before we rot!”

“Then say something useful!”

“I was about to—shut your mouth and listen—”

“No, you shut—”

The argument spiraled, faster and harsher, words losing their edges and turning blunt, striking wherever they could.

“Enough.”

The queen’s voice cut through them, not loud, but final. The room quieted, though the tension remained, thick and restless.

Her gaze shifted to a young man seated among them. He could not have been more than nineteen, with green eyes mirroring her own and hair cut in a neat, reddish-blond bowl.

“My nephew,” she said, her voice steady once more, “have you any counsel to offer?”

The young man inclined his head respectfully, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve before speaking.

“Your Majesty, I perceive only one viable course. Appeasement.”

A bark of laughter tore through the room. An older man leaned back, his expression steeped in contempt.

“You propose we approach that monstrosity and negotiate? With all respect, my queen! We have no time to give to this clown!” he said.

Bellero regarded him for a moment, not with anger, but with a kind of measured curiosity.

“My lord, if survival must be purchased,” he said, “then we would do well to decide what we are willing to spend—before the price is set for us.”

“Then pray tell, O deranged snake—whose death shall purchase this diplomacy? Or do you intend to persuade your aunt to present herself, that when her head is taken, you might stoop to collect the crown like the scavenger you are?!”

The speaker was Lord Marlan Masnada, head of the Masnada Trading Guild, whose influence in Rosmayne rivaled that of prominent nobility. His reputation for discourtesy had long been tolerated as the price of his power, though even by his standards, the remark cut deeply.

A knight stepped forward at once, blade drawn, his restraint abandoned.

“Watch your tongue, old dog,” he said coldly. “I care little for your wealth—such insolence warrants death.”

Behind Lord Marlan, a pair of guards rose in silent readiness, steel glinting in their hands following the threat to their lord. The air grew taut, voices and table slams tightening into something sharper, violence is but only a few steps away.

“That was unnecessary, Sir Kevin. Stand down,” the young man said, placing a gentle hand upon the knight’s arm.

“They insult you, Lord Bellero. You would have me do nothing?”

“I will not repeat myself.”

The knight’s jaw tightened, but he obeyed, sheathing his weapon without further protest.

Across the room, Lord Marlan dismissed his own guards with a curt gesture. He clenched his fist, then extended it, pointing toward Bellero with unsettling intensity.

“Observe, young snake,” he said. “This ring—an heirloom of my house, its worth beyond measure. I would relinquish it gladly to any soul who can ensure our survival.”

The ring bore a painite gem at its center, encircled by six flawless diamonds—a testament to generations of accumulated power.

“Should your venomous tongue prove useful for once,” he added, “it is yours.”

Before Bellero could respond, the chamber doors burst open. A knight stumbled inside, breathless, his armor damp with sweat.

“Urgent report—”

“Speak,” the queen commanded.

“My queen,” he said, bowing hastily, “a message from the corps under Colonel Maxence Dujardin. The creature has been identified—it is Mistus, transformed.”

The words spread through the room like a fracture. Murmurs rose again, this time less controlled—faith and doubt colliding in uneasy currents, whispers invoking the goddess Aine while others rejected such interpretations outright.

The queen signaled for silence once more.

“Is there more?” Catalina asked.

“Yes, Your Majesty. There is… another matter. Something unusual at the eastern side of the capital.”

He hesitated, as though uncertain how to give shape to what he had seen.

The knight fell silent once more, his words arrested mid-thought. The pause lingered longer than courtesy allowed, stretching thin the patience of those gathered.

“Why do you falter? Speak plainly,” a noblewoman demanded, her composure intact but her irritation unmistakable.

He drew in a breath, as though steadying himself against the weight of what he was about to say. “Y–Your Majesty… I confess, I struggle to give this report its proper form. Yet the matter admits no delay. A considerable number of citizens have begun to leave the city… and they are making their way toward Lake Sérénité.”

The revelation rippled through the chamber with a force that needed no volume to be felt. It was not merely the strangeness of it that unsettled them, but the plain impossibility. The lake lay far beyond the city walls—no less than four hours on foot—and yet it was precisely there that the dragon lingered. That alone should have rendered the notion unthinkable.

A senior officer broke the stillness, his voice sharpened by disbelief rather than panic.

“How is this to be understood? Were there not knights stationed at the gates? On what grounds were they allowed to pass?”

“We did secure the gates, Milord,” the messenger replied, his composure tightening under scrutiny. “Yet the people… they behaved as though compelled. Some claimed to hear a call, others spoke of a scent or a vision—something none could name, yet none could refuse. When restrained, they did not relent. They became unmanageable… hysterical, even violent. A number chose to throw themselves into the outer trench rather than be denied. There were casualties.”

A brief, strained pause followed before he continued, more quietly. “In light of this, Lady Yoanna, commander of the eastern gate, deemed it necessary to open passage… if only to prevent further loss of life.”

The officer’s expression hardened, not with outrage alone, but with the burden of precedent. “That decision will be accounted for. I will see to it myself.”

He inclined his head to the queen and withdrew without awaiting dismissal, his retinue falling in step behind him as the doors closed once more.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then, from among the queen's privy counsellors, a question surfaced—measured, yet edged with unease.

“Who, precisely, are these people?”

The knight did not answer at once. His hesitation proved invitation enough.

“Could they be… mistari?” one voice ventured.

Another followed, less restrained. “This is madness. They must be detained—every last one of them. If they are cult adherents of Mistus, or worse, aligned with those archivist heretics, then we stand blind to whatever design they pursue within our borders.”

The chamber stirred again, not in open discord, but in a tightening spiral of conjecture. Each voice sought to impose order upon what refused to be ordered, and in doing so only deepened the unrest.

Amid this, Queen Catalina leaned slightly toward Ellis, her lady-in-waiting, who remained at her side with quiet attentiveness.

“Tell me,” the queen murmured, her voice low enough to escape the current of debate, “these archivists they speak of—what are they?”

“ALT,” Ellis replied in a voice pitched just beneath the tide of discourse.

“An abbreviation for the Archivists of the Lost Testament. They are… difficult to define with precision. A society, perhaps—or something nearer to a clandestine sect—composed of those who hold that the world, as it is known, remains incomplete. They believe there are strata of truth concealed beneath its surface, waiting to be unearthed. To that end, they devote themselves to inquiry of a rather unorthodox kind—research entwined with ritual, and a particular talent for breaching sealed archives, forgotten manuscripts, private collections, and any document they deem to carry the scent of hidden meaning.”

Catalina’s lips curved faintly, the suggestion of amusement restrained but not entirely absent. “It sounds almost like a pastime I might have enjoyed.”

Ellis inclined her head, though her expression did not soften. “If it were merely that, Your Majesty, they would not be spoken of with such caution. Their pursuits have, on occasion, crossed into… severity."

"In the case now referred to as the Linden Tomb, they are said to have sacrificed dozens of lives to unseal a subterranean chamber—an ancient sepulchre belonging to an unnamed apothecary long since reduced to obscurity. What they sought within, or what they found, unfortunately remains unrecorded.”

The queen regarded her for a moment, the faint trace of levity dissolving into something more contemplative. Then, with a subtle motion of her hand, she drew the room back into order, the murmur of competing voices receding into a wary stillness. Her attention returned to the messenger.

“Please,” she said, her tone composed once more, “continue.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The knight straightened, though the strain in his bearing did not entirely leave him.

“Those who have departed the city… they are not of the ordinary sort. They are the afflicted—the blind, the deaf, the mute. Men and women whose bodies have been diminished or broken, those who bear the absence of limb or the burden of visible and grievous illness.” He hesitated, as though searching for words sufficient to what he had witnessed, before continuing more quietly.

“Among them, I observed one whose form was so severely bent that his spine arched into a grotesque prominence. Upon his back rose a mass—large, misshapen… like a stone lodged beneath flesh and sinew, as though he carried within him a weight not meant for any living body.”

At the head of the chamber, Queen Catalina remained still, her gaze unfixed, as though turned inward to some distant calculus. The reports had not offered clarity, only a different order of uncertainty—one that did not fracture into easy opposition, but instead gathered weight the longer it was considered.

At last, she spoke.

“Whatever calls them,” she said, her voice low but carrying, “it does so with greater authority than fear of death. That alone demands our attention.”