Chapter 25: [Ducyh of Inferna][16] Bloody Festival [1]
With an icy feeling of emptiness filling my lungs, I shot up as if an invisible hand had ripped me from the bed.
For a moment, I couldn’t grasp where I was as the familiar, dim twilight of the room filled my eyes.
My heart thundered like a war drum beating against my ribcage, and the nightshirt clinging to my skin was so drenched it felt as if I had fallen into a river. My eyes desperately searched the room for an anchor, and I noticed a dark figure in the wooden chair placed right beside my bed.
It was Iris.
She had fallen asleep with her head tilted to the side, her long eyelashes casting shadows on her cheeks. Her chest rose and fell in a gentle rhythm, a peaceful cadence that was a stark contrast to the chaos raging within me.
It was clear that while I was drowning in that hellish sea of dreams, she had faithfully kept watch over me. A sharp pang of guilt mixed with gratitude surged inside me for her.
Just then, the memories burst forth from the dark corridors of my mind, flooding my consciousness like a torrent.
The joyful laughter of the festival gave way to bitter screams torn from throats.
Colorful ribbons and silk fabrics were stained crimson in the pools of blood on the ground.
The warmth of the flames, the coldness of the dead...
Crushed under the weight of these memories, my body, already slick with cold sweat, began to perspire even more as if reliving that very moment. That massacre... it was vividly alive before my eyes.
No, this couldn’t be a dream.
It was a prophecy.
I didn’t have a second to lose. I threw the bedcovers aside, and ignoring the sting as my bare feet hit the cold stone floor, I bolted from the room.
The corridors seemed to stretch on forever along with the panic in my mind.
I ran towards the Duke’s study, ignoring the startled gazes of the guards. My heart was pounding in my throat, and with every step, the same whisper echoed in my brain: "Don’t be late, don’t be late!"
I didn’t even pause before the massive oak door of the study. The thought of knocking or asking for permission to enter never crossed my mind.
I threw the door open with all my strength and burst inside.
"WE CANNOT HOLD THE FESTIVAL!"
The cry, erupting from my breathless lungs, cut through the heavy, silent air of the room like a knife.
At his desk, buried among stacks of parchment, Duke Veynar shot his head up. The tired, focused expression in his eyes gave way to astonishment. Seated in a chair beside him, his elegant wife, Duchess Seraphina, nearly dropped the porcelain cup in her hand.
They were both frozen in shock at my sudden intrusion and wild appearance.
Duchess Seraphina, with her usual motherly compassion, was the first to recover. Looking at my pale face, my tangled hair, and my sweat-sheened body, she called out in a worried voice:
"Cassian! For heaven’s sake, when did you wake up? Are you alright? What is the meaning of this?"
Her concern was genuine, but it wasn’t what I needed to hear right now. On the Duke’s face, the astonishment was slowly being replaced by an authoritative annoyance. It was the first time I had ever caught him so off-guard, and it was clear he was not pleased.
They were seeing me—the calm, distant boy who always hid his emotions behind a wall of ice—like this for the first time. The pure terror and untamable panic in my eyes did not belong to the Cassian they knew.
"You must cancel the festival immediately," I repeated, trying to stop my voice from trembling.
This time, it was the Duke who spoke, his composure regained. His tone carried the weary patience of a ruler about to lose it.
"Child, what nonsense are you spouting? What do you mean, cancel a festival that has been announced empire-wide and has taken months to prepare?"
I took a deep, shaky breath. I had to calm down. I had to convince them.
"I saw a dream," I began. "But this wasn’t an ordinary dream. The duchy was turned into a lake of blood. At the festival’s peak, men dressed entirely in black with no faces appeared. First the guards, then the people... they were slaughtering everyone mercilessly."
The Duke sighed with a mix of anger and exasperation at my words. He waved his hand impatiently in the air.
"So all this uproar is because of a nightmare you had? Cassian, listen. I understand you’ve had a difficult life, that you have traumas. But it’s normal for children to have nightmares. Now go back to your room and rest."
"N-no!" I blurted out desperately. "It wasn’t a nightmare, you don’t understand! Everything was so real... The smell of the blood, the sound of steel, the screams of the people... I felt it all. I swear, the Duchy is in grave danger. You have to believe me!"
Duchess Seraphina gently stood up, came to my side, and placed a hand on my sweaty hair. "Calm down, Cassian," she whispered softly. "Look, everything is fine. Security is at its highest level, we have guards on every corner. The festival will proceed as planned tomorrow, and there won’t be any problems. You just had a bad dream."
"B-but..." I couldn’t finish. The words were caught in my throat. In their eyes, I was nothing more than a pitiful child who couldn’t shake off a nightmare. All my hopes were dissolving, one by one, against the Duchess’s gentle touch and the Duke’s rigid logic.
Just then, at the deepest point of my despair, something within me awakened.
The ancient power sleeping in the center of my chest, the ’Dragon’s Heart’, seemed to sense my frustration and anger and activated. A sudden, ice-cold energy spread through my body, sweeping away my panic. My spine straightened, my jaw tensed.
The trembling child from moments ago was gone, replaced by someone else entirely.
My voice came out as cold and sharp as a winter wind.
"Tell me," I said, locking my eyes onto the Duke’s. "Do I look like a teary-eyed brat making a fuss over a simple nightmare?"
The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. The Duke and Duchess were stunned by this sudden, absolute transformation. The steel in my voice and the unshakable resolve in my eyes had sown doubt in their minds.
"I am speaking to you here," I continued, emphasizing every word. "Because tomorrow, you will lose your lives to shadows of unknown origin. I am trying to warn you, but you choose to console me with children’s tales instead of listening?"
With every word, my inner rage was being channeled into controlled power. The Duke and Duchess were frozen. The Cassian before them was serious, and he believed every word he spoke with every fiber of his soul.
In that tense moment of silence, a deep, aged voice echoed into the room from behind me.
"Calm yourself and tell us everything you saw in your dream, down to the last detail, brat."
The person who appeared in the doorway was Duke Veynar’s father, the former ruler of the Duchy, Aron Inferna. The deep lines on his face were like a map of countless battles and intrigues. His eyes were as sharp as those of an all-seeing eagle.
Finally, someone had decided to take me seriously.
Aron slowly entered and sat in a chair next to the Duke’s desk. Without taking his eyes off me for a second, he said, "We’re listening."
I took a deep breath and organized the images in my mind. "The festival was at its most jubilant. Music and laughter filled the air.
Then suddenly, men in black cloaks appeared as if seeping from the shadows. Their faces were completely covered with dark cloths.
On the backs of their cloaks, there was an emblem resembling four intertwined black suns. Their first targets were the guards.
They attacked from the rooftops, from within the crowd, simultaneously and with a deadly silence.
The vast majority of the soldiers were assassinated before they knew what was happening. Then, hell began. They started slaughtering the people. The entire place was filled with blood and fire."
I paused, preparing myself to tell the hardest part. "In another scene I saw, you two..." I said, looking at the Duke and Duchess. "You were cornered in the middle of the courtyard by the leader of those black-cloaked men.
The fight was fierce, Your Grace. But that man... he was different. He held a pitch-black dagger covered in strange writing.
He took advantage of a momentary opening and plunged that dagger into Lord Aron’s chest."
Aron weighed every word I spoke, piecing them together in his mind. A thoughtful expression was on his face. Finally, a whisper escaped his lips:
"The Obsidian Dawn Cult... It must be them."
Hearing this name, the Duke turned to his father. "Obsidian Dawn? Are you talking about that dark cult causing trouble in the North? But what business would they have with us? Are we their target now?"
"There’s no doubt," Aron said with conviction. "The emblem and assassination tactics Cassian described are their signature. They match the reports perfectly."
A heavy silence fell over the room. The Duke slumped at his desk. "So what do we do now? Do we really cancel the festival? That would cause empire-wide panic and shatter our reputation."
A cunning smile, like that of a predator, appeared on Aron’s face.
"Of course, we won’t cancel it," he said, his eyes gleaming. "We will give them what they want. We just won’t be as defenseless as they expect. We will set a trap for them. We will hide our most elite knights among the crowd. We will place hidden units at every exit point. The moment those assassins reveal themselves, the festival grounds will turn into a giant steel cage. We will seal the entire area and let no one escape."
He stood up and looked out the window at the courtyard, decorated for tomorrow’s festival.
"We will show them what it means to be the hunted while thinking you are the hunter."