Chapter 6 | Part 4

Time passed. He didn’t know how much.

The sounds of pursuit faded eventually. Either they’d lost him in the labyrinth of tunnels or they’d given up. Either way, Drusniel stayed in his crevice until the silence became absolute. Until his heartbeat stopped hammering. Until the blood on his face dried to a crust.

Then, slowly, he uncurled himself and began to move.

The tunnels connected to the compound’s lower levels—servant passages, storage chambers, the old routes his grandfather had built for emergencies exactly like this. Drusniel had explored them as a child, mapping the hidden ways the same way other children mapped the surface routes their parents let them use.

Always know your exits, his father had said. Always know how to escape.

He’d never asked what his father expected him to escape from. Now he knew.

The emergency routes wound through darkness. Drusniel moved by touch and memory, trailing his fingers along the stone walls, counting steps between turns. Left at thirty. Right at seventy. Through the narrow squeeze that Shyntara had found when she was twelve.

The compound above was silent now. No more screams. No more combat. Just the settling sounds of a building coming to terms with what had happened inside it.

He found the body near the wine cellar.

Old Meren. The family steward. He’d served Drusniel’s grandparents before serving his parents. Had bounced Drusniel on his knee as a child. Had snuck him sweets when his parents weren’t looking, and covered for him when he snuck books from the library, and never once betrayed a confidence.

Now he lay crumpled against the wall, blood pooling beneath him. His formal jacket—the one he wore for family dinners—was slashed in three places. But his eyes were open. Moving.

Alive. Barely.

“Meren—”

Drusniel dropped beside him. The old man’s hand caught his wrist with surprising strength. The strength of someone determined to deliver a final message.

“Young master.” The words came out wet, bubbling. A chest wound. Nothing Drusniel could help with, even if he had the tools. “Vrinn. They came from… they said…” A cough, dark with blood. “Said they wanted the whole house. No witnesses. Run. Have to… run…”

“I’m not running. Not yet.” Drusniel gripped the old man’s hand. “Who led them? Did you see—”

“Vrinn colors. Vrinn weapons.” Meren’s eyes focused on something beyond Drusniel’s shoulder. Some distant place only the dying could see. “But the way they moved… professional. Too professional. Not house fighters. Mercen—”

His grip loosened. His chest stopped moving.

His eyes fixed on that distant place, and didn’t come back.

Drusniel knelt beside him for a long moment. Another body. Another piece of his world erased. Meren, who had taught him to tie a formal knot. Meren, who had smiled at him across a hundred family dinners.

Vrinn.

His gaze fell on something near Meren’s hand. A dagger, lying on the stone floor. Its blade was clean—recently wiped, perhaps, or never used. But the hilt bore an unmistakable insignia.

Three interlocking circles over a curved blade.

House Vrinn.

Drusniel picked it up. The metal was cold against his palm.

Something was wrong.

The dagger was pristine. Perfect. In the middle of a massacre—blood on the walls, smoke in the air, bodies scattered through every corridor—this weapon looked like it had never been drawn. The insignia gleamed as if polished. The edge showed no nicks, no wear, no signs of combat.

Why is there no blood on the hilt?

The thought surfaced through his grief like a fish breaking water. His analytical mind, the part Zaelar called his greatest asset, flagged the anomaly.

Too clean. Too deliberate. Something about this didn’t match the rest of the carnage.

But why would—

His mother’s face flashed through his memory. Empty eyes. Blood spreading across stone.

His father, falling. The blade, and the second blade, and the third.

The grief slammed back, drowning the doubt like a wave erasing marks in sand.

It shouldn’t matter.

The thought was cold and hard and almost absolute. The doubt sank beneath the rage, but didn’t disappear entirely. Just went somewhere deep and quiet where he didn’t have to look at it.

They killed them. House Vrinn killed my family. The servants knew. The dying man said the name. The insignias, the planning, everything “Annariel” warned me about—

He closed his fist around the dagger.

I will kill every last one of them.

The evidence was enough. The rage was enough. The burning need for something—someone—to destroy was enough.

He tucked the dagger into his belt and kept moving.

End of Chapter 6.4 —> 6.5: Blood in the Dark: Shyntara’s Flight