Brute 266

Posted by ADMINMMADMIN, ? Views, Released on January 28, 2026

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TASHA’S POV

“So you mean he was a remnant of the Shadows,” I said again. I kept my gaze fixed on Lady Kenneth, waiting for the part where she admitted this was a story meant to calm me down, or a tale meant to steer me away from the King’s door.

Lady Kenneth’s expression did not change. “A remnant, yes, we can call it… a remnant of an experiment,” she repeated. “And like every experiment ever attempted, there are failures as well as successes.”

My fingers tightened around the teacup until the porcelain warmed under my grip. The word failure sat wrong in my chest, because I was not thinking about a broken object on a table. I was thinking about that hooded man’s laughter, the way the ground split open, the way the spell held even after his head hit the mud. I was thinking about the man in the cave, the one Cassian killed, the one who had looked at me as if I was proof that something older was still moving behind our world.

I drew in a careful breath. “You said the Shadows are believed to be extinct,” I said. “If that is true, then are you telling me that witch was created long ago, and he simply survived until now?”

Lady Kenneth shook her head slowly. “No, Your Highness, because that would have been easier to understand,” she said. “We have reason to believe that the experiments did not die with them, not entirely.”.

“Explain.”

Lady Kenneth lowered her gaze toward the tea as if the surface of it might hide the worst parts of the truth. “We recently discovered signs that Demon Fangs have been attempting to recreate the experiments,” she said. “We do not yet know whether they found a method hidden in an old ruin, stole fragments of knowledge from forbidden archives, or were given instruction by something that still remembers, but the results have been appearing in places that should never produce them.”

“The witch,” I frowned. “Was not a relic that wandered out of history.”

Lady Kenneth’s gaze lifted back to mine. “No,” she answered. “He was not ancient in the way you are thinking.”

My jaw clenched hard enough that my teeth ached. “Then Cassian killing him ruined our only chance to learn what he was.”

Lady Kenneth did not look offended by the accusation, and she did not pretend the truth was soft. “It removed a source of information, yes,” she admitted. “However, it also removed an active threat that had already completed the ritual he intended to complete. Even if you had questioned him, you would have been negotiating with a man who walked into Nightfall intending to die once he had finished what he started.”

I hated how much sense that made, because it meant the witch had never come to win a fight. He had come to set something in motion and leave a corpse behind as the final stone in the foundation.

“So you still do not know why he caused all of this,” I said. “You still do not know what his purpose was.”

Lady Kenneth’s mouth tightened. “Not fully,” she replied. “We are trying to locate what ties him to the larger pattern, but Demon Fangs is not a single creature with one mind. They are traitorous by nature, and the group is fractured into factions that loathe one another as much as they hate the kingdom. There are those who serve power, those who serve fear, those who serve madness, and those who serve something they refuse to name.”

“Infiltration is difficult even in ordinary times,” she continued. “Trying to dig for remnants of forbidden knowledge while the group is splintering and moving like a swarm is even worse. Information disappears, witnesses vanish, and every lead becomes a trap meant to lure us into wasting soldiers we cannot spare.”

“Then… does that mean remnants, or the ones created through these experiments, become witches,” I asked. “Or does it mean Demon Fangs are learning how to turn them into witches?”

Lady Kenneth’s expression softened into something that was not reassurance, not kindness, but a restrained sort of

14:24 Wed, Jan 28 MR

Chapter 266

recognition, as if she had been waiting for me to ask the correct question.

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She did not answer immediately. Instead, she allowed a small smile to touch her mouth, and the silence itself felt like an admission.

“That is exactly the question,” she said at last, her voice calm enough to be dangerous. “And it is the reason the King has not slept in days, and it is the reason Lord Cassian is locked in a room with him rather than standing at your side.”

Lady Kenneth held my gaze for another heartbeat, then let out a slow breath that sounded more like restraint than relief.

“I must apologize in advance if it feels as though I am avoiding your questions,” she said, and for the first time, her tone carried something close to sincerity. “There are pieces I cannot give you, not because I wish to keep you in the dark, but because I do not possess them myself. The King keeps certain knowledge close, and some knowledge has not been uncovered yet, no matter how many doors we have forced open.”

Lady Kenneth continued. “However, there is one thing I do know with certainty,” she said. “Nightfall did not simply collapse into ruin, and it was not merely a beast tide unleashed in an uncontrolled frenzy. What formed there behaved like a passage, as if the land had been torn into an opening and something on the other side had begun sending its creatures through.”

My brows drew together sharply. “A passage,” I repeated, and the word felt wrong against my tongue. It sounded too clean for what I remembered, for the way the earth folded and the beasts crawled out as if they had been waiting beneath it for years.

Lady Kenneth nodded once. “Some have called it a gate,” she said. “Some have called it a wound in the world. The name does not matter as much as the result. The beasts did not merely rise from tunnels or burrows. They arrived with volume, as though they were pouring through a point that did not exist until the ritual forced it into existence.”

I shifted slightly in my seat, my fingers tightening against the edge of the table. Grace had said something similar earlier, that the land had behaved strangely after the packhouse fell, that the ruins did not look like ordinary destruction. I had heard it, but I had been too tangled in guilt and fury to ask for details, too focused on the idea that Cassian killing the witch had sealed the ritual, and that I had been standing there when it happened.

Now the pieces aligned in a way I did not like.

“You are saying the beasts did not simply come from within our territory but some place else?”

“That is what we believe,” Lady Kenneth replied. “And it is supported by what the soldiers reported after the first wave, and by what the King’s scholars recognized from older accounts that were never meant to be anything more than warnings.”

My stomach tightened. “Older accounts,” I echoed.

Lady Kenneth’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Stories that were dismissed as superstition,” she said. “Reports that were sealed because they were too dangerous to spread among the common packs, because fear makes people reckless. The details vary, but the pattern remains. A ritual is completed. The land becomes unstable. Then something that should not have a path into our world finds one.”

Lady Kenneth’s gaze did not waver as she added.”From what I understand, they attempted something similar in the North.” she said. “They were not able to finish it there. We do not know if their sacrifices were insufficient, if the ground did not respond, or if something disrupted them before completion, but the result was failure.”

Her voice lowered slightly. “So they changed their approach,” she said. “They moved south, where the territory is more populated, where chaos has been easier to provoke, where disappearances can be hidden under politics and infighting, and where the land around Nightfall could be used as a focal point without drawing the same immediate scrutiny.”