SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The largest wound among the Great Families had opened inside House Myrrhvale, and it had opened with a death.

Lady Nyssara di Myrrhvale was gone. One of the eight strongest, most dangerous people alive, dead somewhere in the span of these two years, and the vacuum she left behind had yet to be filled by anyone.

The official word out of Myrrhvale lands called it natural causes, peaceful and unremarkable, and not a single house at the top of the world believed a word of it. People like Nyssara did not simply stop breathing in their sleep.

Morgain had put its own quiet effort into the question and come away with a different answer, or at least a likelier guess. The blow had come from inside her own house, a murder dressed up as a peaceful passing.

Whatever the truth of it, her death had lit a fire that had yet to burn out: a succession no one could agree on, branches of the family turning on branches, political knives out in the open, challenges whispered and a few of them answered in blood, names that went quiet and stayed that way, alliances a hundred years old snapping in a single season, and no hand strong enough to close its fingers around the whole and call itself the head. Myrrhvale was tearing along its own seams, and it would go on tearing for a good while yet.

Lyren di Myrrhvale stood near the center of it. Trafalgar knew the man already, which made the whole affair a great deal more interesting than a distant house’s troubles had any right to be.

Where exactly Lyren stood in the fight was not yet clear, whether as a candidate in his own right, a broker between others, or a blade sworn to one of the claimants, and his footing looked far from secure.

What was clear was that a man in that spot, with a name like Trafalgar’s within arm’s reach, tended to come asking for help sooner or later. Such a hand could pay them both well. It could also drag Morgain to the lip of another house’s civil war. Myrrhvale might walk out of this an ally, an enemy, or a corpse split three ways, and not one of those roads had closed yet.

For the present he would leave it be. A civil war was best approached once it had chosen a direction, and Myrrhvale’s had not yet chosen one. But when Lyren came knocking, and Trafalgar set the odds high that he would, the choice of whether to open the door for him would be among the heavier ones waiting in the months ahead.

House Nocthar, by contrast, had given the world nothing to read. No public tremor, no move anyone could point to. Lady Lysaria held the reins as she always had, and the house went on being what it had always been, sealed and strange, a door with no handle on the outside. Whatever stirred inside Nocthar stayed inside Nocthar.

That was the part that laid a cold finger against the back of Trafalgar’s neck. Selendra had not come to him once in two years. No new visions had reached his ears, and he had no way of knowing whether she had glimpsed something further down the road and chosen to hold it, or simply seen nothing worth the journey.

The warning she had left him, back when their paths last crossed, still hung in the air with no answer under it. A house like Nocthar tended to know far more than it ever let show, and the woman who had looked him in the eye and promised she might have need of him again had since gone perfectly, pointedly quiet.

House Zar’khael went on walking its own road, deaf to the noise. No internal rupture, no crisis worth the word. Malakar kept his grip firm and his borders quiet, and the house held itself well clear of the mess brewing between Vaelion and Morgain.

What Zar’khael would do if that mess swelled into open war between Great Families, no one could say, least of all the houses hoping to lean on them for it. Zafira remained the thread that tied Trafalgar to that corner of the board, and the thread had its uses.

Yet neutrality came with a shelf life. Sooner or later the day would arrive when standing apart stopped being a choice anyone was permitted to make. From the outside Zar’khael looked like the house that had changed least across these two years, which only meant that whatever it was doing, it was doing where no eye could follow.

And beneath all of it, under the deaths and the debts and the shifting banners of eight proud houses, ran the change that outweighed every other.

The Void Creatures were talking.

Not the mindless swarms the world had learned to put to the torch on sight. The rumors drifting in from too many directions to wave off spoke of Void that thought, that spoke, that reasoned, minds that stood shoulder to shoulder with the older races in wit, whatever else they lacked.

Trafalgar had marched to Thal’Zar and ended a war’s worth of the void-born with his own hands, and everything he now was pulled back from the mere thought of them.

If the whispers ran true, if the Void had begun to breed intelligence of its own, the board he had spent two years learning by heart was about to shift in ways not one of the Eight was ready for. A mindless enemy could be walled out and burned down. An enemy that could plan, that could lie, that could bargain and wait and pick its opening, was a different animal altogether, and the world had not fought one of those in longer than its histories ran.

711 CHAPTER 711: A SEAT NEAR THE CENTER

The doors opened onto the whole of House Morgain, and every head in the hall turned toward him.

The room had been dressed for a formal gathering, the long table laid, every place marked, the family banners hanging heavy down the walls. It was a large hall, and large halls held the cold well, but the chill in this one owed less to the stone than to the people filling it. Two years had passed since he last stood among most of them. He took the measure of the room in a single pass, and the room took the measure of him right back.

A handful of chairs stood empty.

The most obvious was Valttair’s, the high seat at the head of the table, waiting on a patriarch who had not yet come down from two years of seclusion.

Rivena’s place was empty as well.

Trafalgar had known it would be, though knowing did nothing to answer whether she would appear before the day was out. If she failed to, Valttair’s temper would be a thing worth stepping back from.

He reached the tall doors at the end of the corridor.

For a heartbeat he stood before them, two years of politics and blood and buried secrets stacked at his back, the whole weight of the family waiting on the far side of the wood.

Then he set his hand against the doors and pushed them open.