Chapter 55: A Natural Passing
There was a silent tension smothering the Gilded Dominion.
It seeped into stone walls, crept beneath the hems of velvet cloaks, and clung to every polished corner of Goldhaven’s opulence. Whispers roamed the marbled halls like ghosts. never loud, never confirmed, but always present. Servants moved faster. Doors were closed more gently. Eyes watched the shadows now, longer than they watched the throne.
It had been days since Corvin Blackmoor was named Duke of Raven’s Nest. With the lands surrounding it folded into his fief, the elevation had already caused unease. But unease turned to something colder when the news of Count Emual’s death swept through the court.
Not merely dead, erased.
His estate, once bustling with generations of relatives and of minor nobility, servants, scribes, and guards, had become a graveyard of silence. There were no survivors. Not one soul.
No screams had pierced the night. No fires. No clash of steel. The gates remained locked. The patrols had seen nothing. And yet, by dawn, it was done.
The Count himself was found in his study.
Seated, as though reading. Still dressed in his house colors, though his robes were wrinkled from the collapse of his spine. His face, twisted in absolute terror, had frozen into a grotesque mask. His eyes had been gouged, the sockets caked in dried blood. Three ravens perched silently nearby, on shelves, on the desk. Their beaks glistened. They had eaten. One stood atop the Count’s own signet ring, unmoving.
And still, not a single wound upon his flesh explained how he died.
No trace of poison. No burn of glyphs. No whispered spells lingering in the aether. Corvin had ended Emual and all his kin and left behind no trace save dread.
The recordkeepers of the Dominion, when called, did not ask questions. They did not summon mages. They did not write hypotheses. They scribbled the event down as a "natural passing" of the Emual bloodline.