Lord Summoner's Freedom Philosophy: Grimoire of Love-Chapter 503: The Siege Begins (End)

The palace was still. Not silent—too many cracked windows let the wind moan through arrow-slits, too many guttering lamps hissed as the last of their oil fought the night—but motionless, the way a felled stag still twitches though its heart has stopped. Gold-leaf cornices dulled under smoke film; frescos of serpent-crowned kings peered through grime like ghosts ashamed to be seen. The once-polished floor, a mosaic of lapis and ivory swirls, lay under a skin of fine ash, the pattern visible only where boot soles had recently disturbed it.

Lyan advanced down the royal wing’s gallery, the soles of his boots whispering over tile. He moved without escort, without the comfortable hum of Belle’s illusions or Wilhelmina’s watchful bark. Surena’s vanguard held the outer courtyard; Josephine’s riders had fanned into the merchant district. But the royal family—those who had ordered every ambush, every burned village—were somewhere ahead, and he did not intend to share that meeting. This knot he would cut with his own hand.

(You should’ve brought them. A good net catches more than one fish)

Lilith’s purr slid behind his eyes, velvet edged with amusement.

(If they’re too far gone, end it cleanly)

Cynthia again—the conscience that never slept, even when his did.

(Enough chatter. If they’re the last obstacle, burn through them. Lightning doesn’t wait)

Griselda, crackling impatience into the back of his skull.

Lyan let their words settle like dust on a table—noticed, catalogued, but not brushed away. He pressed palm to the haft of his glaive and resumed his slow sweep, eyes taking in everything.

First clue: the carpet. A crimson runner marched the length of the corridor, its velvet pile crushed over decades by ceremonial struts. Tonight one oval of fibers lay flattened in a fresh direction, half a pace off the runner’s centerline. Someone had stood there recently—someone heavier than a maid, lighter than a man in full plate. Lyan knelt, fingertips skimming. Heat still lingered, the faint warmth of a single body trapped in the dense weave.

He rose, gaze hopping forward. Two paces ahead, a droplet of wax clung to a marble skirting. It had run while liquid, meaning a torch or candle had been moved in haste. Yet all sconces here were fixed, and none were missing candles. Curious.

He slid nearer the brass wall sconce in question. Beneath the candle cup, a hair-thin seam peeped where the fitting met the pillar. He pressed lightly; the whole bracket rocked. Soot smudged beneath his glove—fresh soot, not the days-old greasy grime covering the rest of the corridor. Someone had twisted this torch recently, most likely triggering a mechanism.

He left it untouched for the moment. Across from the sconce, a long cedarwood credenza held a porcelain tray of fruit—grapes sugared, pears carefully peeled, figs arrayed around a silver knife. Except one fig was absent, and the blossom end of the fruit beside it sagged inward where heat had left too fast. Lyan touched it: still warm, as if bitten within the last quarter hour. A telltale fleck of purple skin lay behind a jade vase, alongside a smear of sticky pulp hardly bigger than a thumbnail.

He drew in a slow breath. Footprint. Trigger torch. Warm fruit. Someone had paused here—nervous, hungry, hurried. The King’s youngest, perhaps. His lips tightened. He pictured servants ferrying jewels and heirlooms, court mages chanting muffling wards, all beneath the main floors where battle still raged minutes ago.

A flash of memory stabbed him: a girl in another palace, wide-eyed, begging him to spare her brother’s library. He had. They’d burned it anyway after he left. He shook the ghost off.

"They’re hiding in the under-throne sanctum," he murmured, conviction settling like a stone in water. Of course the Serpent Kings would keep a bolt-hole beneath their seat of power—every tyrant feared enemies at the gates, and his plan mirrored a lineage of paranoia.

He strode on, cloak brushing a bronze brazier whose coals had long gone out. The vast double doors of the throne room yawned ahead, hinges sprung by Surena’s battering crew earlier. Inside, the Serpent Throne dominated—a monolith of black obsidian veined with green glass, scales carved so finely they seemed to ripple in torchlight. Lyan’s eyes skipped past its grandeur to the dais lip: dust, dust, and then faint half-moon scrapes on polished basalt, exactly where a platform would split if someone recently stepped on a hidden seam.

He climbed the three steps, kneeling before the throne as though paying homage. No one alive was there to care. His thumb found a near-invisible depression shaped like a serpent fang. Instead of pressing, he slid his glaive’s blade into the niche beneath the seat, feeling for the secondary latch older palatial designs favored—redundancy against clumsy heirs.

Click.

Ancient gears groaned, echoing down stone channels. The entire throne shuddered, grinding apart. Two halves of the dais glided sideways, revealing a spiral staircase descending into breath-chilled dark. As the slabs parted, a gust of air rose—stale, dry, tinged with ozone and something sweeter, like perfumed oil gone rancid.

(See? Fish in a barrel)

Lilith sounded delighted.

Lyan drew the hood of his cloak closer, more to hide the prickle of anticipation on his neck than for warmth. He stepped onto the first stair, boots finding shallow grooves carved for traction centuries ago. The steps tightened as they descended; walls pressed in so narrow his shoulders brushed silk-draped stone. Somewhere ahead, enchantments sensed living presence and whispered to life: sconces bloomed with lambent gold, light blooming outward like morning glories in slow motion.

At the stair’s base sprawled a domed refuge. Marble pillars ringed a circular hall, each sculpted as a serpent swallowing its own tail—ouroboros guardians staring down with gemstone eyes. The mosaic floor depicted history: victories over neighboring tribes, coronations, a dragon-slaying that likely never happened. In the center rose a stone dais half the height of a man, and upon it stood the last sovereign of Varzadia.

The stairwell belched him into the subterranean throne-vault like a blast from a furnace, hot with torchlight and the unsteady shimmer of raw magic. Lyan stopped on the final step, boots planted wide on age-polished stone, and let the scene settle inside his skull before he even blinked.

The King of Varzadia waited at the chamber’s heart, a red-steel cuirass moulded to his chest like a snake’s rib cage. Each inlaid opal—thirty? thirty-two, Lyan counted in one sweep—glittered with captive sparks that pulsed in time with the monarch’s heartbeat, siphoning micro currents of mana from the crown perched above. That crown looked delicate from a balcony, but up close it was a brutal sunburst: sixteen knife-long spokes of gilded aurichalcum, each buzzing with static like a swarm of hornets. The arcs crawled across the king’s temples, occasionally grounding into the steel gorget and spitting amber light along the seams.

Not tall, no, Lyan amended, yet the armor lent him breadth; arrogance did the rest.

Two young women flanked him, not princes but princesses—though nothing in their stance suggested courtly grace. The first, narrow-waisted and wiry, balanced on the balls of her feet the way duelists did when expecting a sudden bell. A gauntlet of mirror-silver swallowed her left arm to the elbow, etched with spirals that wriggled like living things. Every finger twitch stitched pale after-images through the air: her own ghost-hands, offset half a heartbeat, showing where she might be next. Lyan noted that the echoes lasted exactly three eye blinks before collapsing—longer than he’d like.

Her sister, broader across the shoulders, wore a half-helm circlet—no visor, just a ridge of meteoric iron studs set above a face that might have been carved from onyx. Across one muscled shoulder she rested a sword as wide as a lumber plank. Its surface wasn’t merely polished; it was liquid glass, perfect enough that torchlight entered, refracted, and spat back phantom flames that writhed over the ceiling. When she shifted her grip the blade threw twin images of Lyan—one upright, one inverted—both distorted at the edges. Imperfect refraction, he logged automatically: the mirror warped anything that wasn’t head-on.

Just behind them, a lanky mage in midnight robes cradled a fist-sized crystal orb that bent the stone pillars around him. The granite seemed to curve inward, as though the orb devoured reality and replaced it with its own geometry. Stars glittered inside the sphere: no reflection, actual constellations trapped like beetles in amber. The mage’s pupils had the same star-pinpoints—sympathetic resonance, Lyan guessed. A wave of spatial distortion hissed across the floor whenever the man adjusted his grip, warping stone tiles into rubbery ripples before they snapped back.

To the right lounged a knight in armor the color of clotted blood, the plating fused to the leather under-concern with melted sigils. He breathed like a dying bull, each exhale fogging the eye slits. Sigils crawled when he moved, lighting dimly, then fading—blood-bound runes keyed to his pulse. Heavy, Lyan judged by the man’s stance: center of mass low, but every step slow to recover. No grounding rivets along the greaves, either. A walking lightning rod.

Closest to the throne itself stood the Queen, draped in a gown of winter-white silk that might once have dazzled. Now it seemed funereal. Her silver eyes churned behind half-lidded lashes, tracing lines only she could see. A coronet of ivory runes floated a finger-width above dark hair, rotating with lazy inevitability. Each rune flared, faded, flared—a metronome marking futures. Her fingertips ticked along her skirt seams, plucking invisible harp strings of possibility.

Six of them. All artifact-armed. All unwilling to flee.

(You look pleased,) Lilith purred, the silk of her laughter brushing his mind. (So many toys in one room.)

(A single bolt ends half of them,) Griselda crackled.

Cynthia’s thought came softer, troubled. (These are rulers, once entrusted to protect their people. End it quickly if you must, but with dignity.)

Lyan let the spirits’ chorus drift through him, a cold wind threading the ribs, and outwardly showed nothing. His right palm loosened, tightened on the middle grip of the glaive. Arturia’s white mana stirred in the alloy veins, faint as milk under skin. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

The King stepped forward, crimson armor hissing where metal kissed metal. "So," he said, voice smooth as spiced wine poured over broken glass. "The mongrel commander arrives. Where are your dogs? Did they whimper at the threshold of true nobility?"

The princess with the silver gauntlet smirked, flexing fingers to paint a fanning halo of after-images. The other twirled her mirror blade, and the doubled flames in its surface made it look like she wielded fire captured in glass.

Lyan answered the insult with a glance that filed details like a mortician tallying bones. The gauntlet princess shifted weight onto her back foot too often—artifact stress, perhaps, burning stamina. Tiny tremor in the elbow joint each time the after-images renewed. She’d tire quickly.

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