“How long do you intend to keep the High Priest within the Grand Ducal castle?”
At that moment, Grey—who had seamlessly transformed back into a state of absolute, pristine composure—asked as he methodically fastened the cufflinks of his pristine shirt.
“What do you mean, ‘how long’?” Teore shot back.
“As you are well aware, the healing capabilities of your close companion, Edrion, have completely vanished. With the singular exception of Blizan, not a single one of the masters has received stabilization from him.”
Grey leveled a cool gaze at the grand duke.
“Therefore, you cannot permit the High Priest to remain confined here any longer.”
“It’s a temporary issue, so it will inevitably be resolved shortly,” Teore replied, gently lowering Raha’s hand from his cheek before weaving their fingers together and squeezing firmly.
“Until it is resolved, the High Priest simply needs to perform the treatments for the others here.”
“They can easily journey to this location just as I have, so his presence here presents no issue.”
“I was informed that Edrion is currently residing within this castle as well,” Grey pressed, his voice narrowing.
“What exactly is your objective in keeping both High Priests locked inside the Grand Ducal castle? Are you, perhaps…”
“Locked inside?! Why on earth would I confine Edrion?!”
Teore fiercely cut him off, his face hardening as he snapped that Edrion had ventured to the estate entirely of his own volition, driven by a desire to examine a selection of ancient texts preserved within the grand ducal archives.
Watching Teore systematically clarify the parameters of Edrion’s temporary stay while pointedly omitting any justification for his own presence, Raha was struck by a fresh wave of realization.
Given that Teore hadn’t even attempted to deny the underlying accusation of captivity, it was clear that he was, indeed, currently being held as a prisoner of sorts—though he remained highly skeptical as to whether a dynamic this loose and interactive could truly be classified as true confinement.
“Regardless, permitting both High Priests to reside within the Grand Ducal castle simultaneously is entirely out of the question. One must be dispatched back to the High Temple—or sent directly to my estate.”
Grey paused mid-sentence, his gaze sliding over to settle directly on Raha.
The underlying desire to physically uproot the priest and carry him off to the safety of his own duchy was written clearly across his features.
“Then I shall simply send Edrion back to the High Temple.”
Without a single fraction of a second’s hesitation, Teore delivered the counter-proposal straight to Grey’s face.
The sheer bluntness of the statement caused Grey’s eyes to snap wide open, nearly bulging out of his head.
“What?”
“Or would you prefer I dispatch him directly to your ducal palace?”
Teore tacked on the addendum with an utterly detached, indifferent shrug, leaving Raha to blink rapidly in sheer bewilderment as he tried to decipher the bizarre trajectory of the conversation.
“Are you genuinely suggesting that you will send your lifelong companion to my estate… right now?”
“If that is what you desire, I will gladly facilitate it. Edrion would undoubtedly find the accommodations of a ducal palace far more hospitable than the spartan quarters of the High Temple anyway. If I tell him to go, he will not offer a refusal.”
Despite having absolutely no concrete gauge on whether Edrion would actually favor such an arrangement, Teore confidently asserted that his friend would vastly prefer a luxurious stay at Grey’s estate over a return to the temple.
As Raha pulled the blanket all the way up to his neck and turned his gaze toward the window, he couldn’t help but think that if Edrion were to catch wind of this conversation, he would feel an immense, crushing wave of betrayal toward his oldest friend.
And unbeknownst to the occupants of the room, Edrion was already standing directly outside the bedroom doors, having overheard every single word of the exchange.
He had originally sought Teore out to inquire if he could obtain direct gubernatorial permission to access a restricted tier of ancient texts that even the head librarian was forbidden from touching.
Yet, here was Teore, casually offering to discard his lifelong companion and ship him off to Duke Grey’s estate, all for the singular purpose of keeping Raha anchored within the walls of the Grand Ducal castle.
Edrion’s fingers slowly curled into white-knuckled fists as he glared fiercely at the heavy wooden frame of the door.
He couldn’t fathom exactly where the trajectory of his life had derailed so catastrophically, but one reality remained absolute: Raha was the undeniable epicenter of this entire, maddening upheaval.
And the single most terrifying variable in this equation was the fact that the elemental masters—the very men who had once looked upon Raha with absolute, unadulterated contempt and hatred—no longer harbored a shred of that malice.
‘Why…? How can this be?’
No matter how extensively he racked his brain, the catalyst remained entirely elusive.
Raha had once been an individual so thoroughly deranged by his obsession with Blizan that he had driven himself to relentlessly torment Edrion.
Because of those severe transgressions, Teore had nearly choked the life out of him—all to avenge the mistreatment Edrion had suffered.
‘For their attitudes to completely shift like this in the span of a mere few days… the divine influence of the light attribute must be the root cause.’
Edrion pivoted sharply on his heel, executing a swift retreat away from the threshold of the bedroom.
Given that Raha—a man who had once earned the universal hatred of the elite through his vile behavior—had somehow managed to seamlessly entangle himself with Duke Grey immediately following his encounters with Teore, the mechanics of the light attribute were the only logical explanation.
‘Could the sudden evaporation of the light attribute within my own vessel… also be the handiwork of that High Priest?’
The suspicion bloomed violently within his mind, morphing into a firm conviction that Raha was the architect behind the sudden, catastrophic suppression of his own divine capabilities.
‘I must unearth the underlying mechanism immediately. If things continue at this rate, the remaining elemental masters will inevitably fall prey to his machinations and transform into mindless puppets, just like Teore.’
The only reason Edrion hadn’t succumbed to envy or resentment regarding Raha’s innate, birth-given light attribute—as opposed to his own artificially engineered divine vessel—was because the elemental masters had universally despised the priest.
Raha had once conducted himself as though Blizan were the sole entity under the heavens, organizing the entirety of his existence around him and devolving into a violent, screaming lunatic the second anything threatened that connection.
Because he had been intimately acquainted with Raha’s volatile, unhinged temperament, Edrion had occasionally engineered calculated encounters with Blizan precisely when he knew the priest was watching, purely to needle him and bait a reaction.
Of course, those interactions had been executed under the careful guise of mere coincidence, ensuring that no one could ever peer into the dark, calculated depths of his true nature.
Not even his closest, oldest friend, Teore.
‘Back then, ensuring Teore was present before deliberately baiting Raha into grabbing me by the collar was a masterful stroke.’
Having witnessed that exact display of apparent aggression, Teore had subsequently hunted Raha down and used his shadow attribute to violently constrict his throat.
For a very brief, fleeting moment following that incident, Edrion had actually experienced a faint twinge of guilt.
He had reasoned that even if Raha’s torment had been severe, deliberately provoking him with full knowledge that Teore was watching meant the ensuing violence was entirely his own fault.
But now, staring down the terrifying probability that Raha had actively stripped him of his light attribute, that momentary shred of remorse vanished into absolute nothingness.
As he marched back toward his designated quarters to initiate immediate contact with his father, Edrion solidified his resolve: removing Raha from their field of vision entirely was the single best, most absolute offering he could make to repay his father’s expectations as a newly minted High Priest.
This warped, deeply defensive calculation marked the definitive entry point onto a dark and ruinous path—the catalyst that would ultimately transform Edrion into the true villainous archetype originally occupied by Raha within the novel’s framework.
Yet, as he walked down the echoing corridor, the current Edrion remained entirely, blissfully blind to the tragic nature of his own descent.
