Chapter 62: Accusations
"Lorn, what is wrong with you?"
The words cut through the conference room like a blade through silk, cold and precise. Inside, a young man knelt bound beside his cronies, all of them pushed into the center of the floor where every eye in the room could find them without effort.
It was one thing to cause trouble inside White Tower. Sparring gone too far, petty rivalries, the usual noise that came with young talents crowded together under one roof. White Tower absorbed all of it without much concern.
Attacking a member was different.
That was not the kind of mistake White Tower forgot, and it was not the kind of mistake White Tower let slide quietly. The organization took the safety of its own with a seriousness that bordered on doctrine, and it had proven, time and again, willing to go to whatever length necessary to see a grievance answered.
This had happened before. To nobles who assumed their name would shield them. To military officers who assumed rank meant immunity. Even to members of the royal family, on the rare occasion one of them had been foolish enough to test the boundary.
No one crossed White Tower and walked away from it clean.
"I didn’t know!!! I saw him, he was controlling beasts, I thought he was a Demi-human!!"
Lorn’s voice cracked as he said it, his whole body twisting against the ropes, shame and panic bleeding into every motion. Only hours ago he had stood in front of his own men with his chest out, throwing his family name around like it meant something in every room he entered. Now he knelt in the middle of a conference floor, tied like a common criminal, stripped of every ounce of the posture he’d been wearing all week.
And yet, underneath the humiliation, his concern held a grain of truth.
Humans did not control flesh-and-blood beasts. Not directly. Not the way a summoner bound spirits from beyond the veil. An old curse, laid down by the beast god in an age most records barely remembered, closed that door to the entire race. It was one of the fundamental laws that separated humans from the creatures they hunted.
Which meant that anyone seen commanding beasts outright, walking them like leashed dogs, wasn’t fully human at all.
Demi-human.
"That’s a serious accusation."
Lady Arian’s frown deepened as she turned from Lorn toward Ethan, who stood off to the side with his arms loosely crossed, watching the proceedings with an expression that gave away nothing.
Ethan hadn’t known any of this when he walked in. The curse, the taboo, the weight the word Demi-human carried in a room full of White Tower’s own. To him it sounded almost laughable, a misunderstanding stretched into a crisis by people who didn’t have the full picture.
"What? My summon’s evolution requirement requires her to control a few lesser dragons," he said, shrugging as though the words carried no more weight than commenting on the weather.
"Control a few lesser dragons?"
Arian’s frown sharpened further, the casual admission sliding past her for a moment before the actual implication caught up with her. Ethan had just confirmed, without hesitation, that what Lorn described was at least partly true. But that raised a question far stranger than the one Lorn had already answered for.
What kind of evolution requirement asked a summon to control lesser dragons?
Even Demi-humans, with whatever twisted authority the old bloodlines granted them, didn’t dare something like that. The dragon race carried pride that ran bone-deep, woven into every branch of the bloodline no matter how diminished. Even their lessers were not creatures anyone treated carelessly, let alone bent to another’s will.
"I can show you."
Ethan didn’t waste time deliberating. He reached inward, calling on the bond, and Morgana began to materialize in the space beside him.
"There’s no need. I’ll verify this myself, exclusively."
Arian raised a hand, cutting the summoning short before it fully resolved. A report had crossed her desk recently, something about Ethan hauling a rock drake out of the mountains. She had assumed, reasonably, that it had been for the kill. A trophy. A component for some ritual.
Control was an entirely different matter, and not one she intended to confirm in a room full of witnesses.
The meeting was paused. Lorn and his cronies remained where they knelt, the rest of the assembled elders left murmuring among themselves, as Arian led Ethan out through a side door and down a corridor toward a more secluded chamber, one built with enough open space to accommodate whatever was about to happen.
"First things first. What is the rank of your summon?"
She pulled up a shimmering magic screen the moment the doors closed behind them, angling it toward Ethan and letting it wash a slow scanning light across his frame.
"S Rank."
Ethan said it plainly, deliberately undercutting the truth of it, though even the diminished version was enough. Arian froze mid-motion, the screen flickering uselessly in her grip for a second before she caught herself.
S-Ranked. And he’d said it the way someone might mention the weather.
Did he understand what that actually meant? Within White Tower, outside of a small handful of names spoken only in hushed tones, no one held an S-Ranked summon. Even those who did kept it buried, hidden behind lesser titles and quieter reputations, because power at that level invited exactly the kind of attention no sane person wanted.
His talent, by every measure that mattered, sat level with her own.
"Please be more reluctant to share that in the future," Arian said after a long pause, the words coming out closer to advice than reprimand.
It wasn’t greed driving the caution. She had seen S-Ranks fall before, watched talent alone prove insufficient against the wrong combination of circumstances. But if the wrong person in this Tower heard what Ethan had just said so freely, he would not hear the end of it.
That included the Grand Regent himself.
"Summon the dragons," she said finally, her gaze settling back on him, sharper now, waiting.
Moments later, one after another, a procession of massive rock drakes began to materialize across the chamber floor, each one falling into position under Morgana’s quiet, absolute control.
Arian stood completely still.
Whatever she had expected walking into this room, it hadn’t been this.
This boy was something else entirely.
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