Chapter 696: Chapter 696: The Eight Towers
Alfons did not move.
Her words hung between them, heavier than the pale light bleeding through the windows.
A vision. And he was in it.
It was the last thing a sane man wanted to hear from a Nocthar heir standing in his bedroom, least of all one who had just laid out how her sight fed on mana, blood, and futures that had yet not arrived.
He lowered his hand from the door, slow. "Then tell me what that means. You saw me somewhere ahead of now, and I would rather you tell me whether I should be worried than try to soften it for me."
Selendra watched him, her crimson eyes giving back nothing he could use. "Good or bad, I cannot promise you either. I do not see verdicts. But I can give you one thing with no dressing on it. In the vision, you were alive."
He held her gaze. "And that is supposed to settle me. That I had a pulse."
"It is the only comfort I can offer that is not a lie."
She did not smile when she said it, and that stripped the irritation out of the words and left something heavier in its place.
He moved off the door, deeper into the room, and did not sit. It was his house, his room, and somehow she had arranged things so that he felt like the guest. "Start at the beginning. When did you see this."
"The first time was two months ago." She let it rest before finishing. "There have been two."
Two. He set it beside the rest of the night’s gifts. "Go on."
"In that first vision I could not name the figure. A mage on a field tells me nothing by itself. The world is drowning in mages, and one more on a battlefield means little." Her gaze cut to the window and back. "What I could make out was a man pulling on many elements at once. Fire, ice, wind, lightning, shadow, perhaps more. The whole of it was crowded, hard to separate."
That reached him before he could stop it. Many elements. He disliked the direction it pointed.
"There were two sides," she went on. "No banners I could read, only movement, mana, bodies, spells breaking against other spells. A battlefield. I am as certain of that as I am of anything I see."
"A battlefield full of mages hurling elements at each other." He kept his voice level, though something beneath it had pulled taut. "That describes half the wars the Great Families have ever started. By itself it tells me nothing."
"By itself, no. Which is why I did not come to you after the first." A pause. "The second one is why I am here."
The air in the room went thin. His fingers pressed once to his sleeve. "What changed."
"Two weeks ago the same field returned, or a future grown out of the first, and the noise had cleared. The figure stood near the center of it, drawing on the same elements, mana stacked around him in layers. His face stayed dark to me. His eyes did not."
His voice fell. "What color were they."
"Red."
He said nothing. Red eyes. Many elements. A battlefield. None of it proved one thing, and all of it pressed in on him together.
"And behind him," she said, "eight towers."
Everything in Alfons stopped. Eight towers. The thought arrived before he could close the door on it. ’Like the ones standing over this house.’
The Eightfold Hold. Eight towers ringed the central keep, the same eight that every Vaelion child was raised beneath. He turned toward the window, where they cut up into the dark like a row of pale teeth.
"Eight towers," he said, low.
"Yes."
He brought his eyes back to her. "You are telling me a battle reaches this house."
"I am telling you what the vision showed, and not one step past it. A possibility. Not a contract signed with the future."
"A graceful way of admitting you cannot actually say."
"I know enough to be standing in your room."
He drew a breath through his nose and forced the pace down. "Even if a battle reaches the heart of our territory, that figure does not have to be me. Half my family fits it. Adrien has red eyes. So does Elysette. Lucard, Elowen, Noelia. My father." His jaw set. "You see the problem."
"I do."
"And you came to me regardless. Why me, instead of any of them."
Selendra folded her hands, and the motion held less polish this time, more weight. "Because the figure carried many elements at once, and you are the one heir your age who can do that without your casting tearing apart."
"That alone is thin."
"I know it is. There is more. The mana around him did not read as red blood, or noble blood in general. It read as Vaelion. And in the clearer sight, the eight towers stood at his back." Her eyes did not leave him. "At yours, I think."
"You think."
"I read what the future offers. It does not offer proof."
He let it go and turned, pacing once to the desk and stopping there, because holding still under all of it felt like wearing a target someone had pinned to his spine and asked him to admire. "So what are you actually telling me."
"That there is a road where you are standing in a battle bound to House Vaelion."
"Fought against whom."
"That I could not see."
No humor touched her face now. "Futures fork more ways than anyone can hold in their head. But a handful keep folding back toward the same end, whoever walks them."
"And you are convinced this one folds toward me."
"Convinced enough to spend days waiting in a room that is not mine."
"Which is madness, for what it is worth."
"I am aware of how it looks."
He faced her fully. "So that is all of it. You walk into my home to warn me a battle may swallow it, that I may be at its center, and you leave it there."
"No."
His eyes narrowed. "No?"
Selendra took a single step away from the window.
"If you want to see more than I can put into words," she said, "we use my class."
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