The Pendulum was reaching the nadir of night, scattering its silvery lunar light over the jagged peaks of Auvergne. It was the kind of night that made poets sigh wistfully and thieves grin with anticipation. Guillaume Beaumont, known to a select few as the Whisper, and to others simply as ‘that sneaky bastard,’ was grinning.
He was perched on a narrow ledge overlooking the entrance to Aeloria’s lair. He was about to steal the sole egg of the former Sun Queen of Gallia, a prize beyond imagining, and deliver it to the Church of Invictus: the paragons of light, virtue, and hypocrisy. That they had sought out a thief rather than a hero was a detail he filed under ‘amusing’ rather than ‘surprising.’
He slipped from the ledge and into the shadows, each step blending with the stillness of the mountain air. The lair yawned before him, dark and unwelcoming, with no guards or traps to impede him; only the implicit warning that death by fire awaited the unwary.
He hesitated. Not from fear, from the sheer absurdity of it. The Church’s instructions had been maddeningly vague. Why they needed Aeloria’s egg was a question he was more than happy to leave unanswered, even though he had a few good working theories.
? In Guillaume’s experience, when the Church started being cryptic, it usually meant either: (a) they didn’t know themselves, or (b) they knew exactly and preferred deniability. He had built a career on not caring which.
Aeloria’s home was a magnificent marble temple perched amongst the highest peaks. He moved through vaulted chambers adorned with sun motifs that shimmered faintly, catching a golden radiance that flowed from the stone itself. The air was warm, thick with brimstone and the lingering aroma of ancient incense. The temple held its breath around him.
Aeloria herself was absent. He had seen to that, allowing a carefully fabricated piece of intelligence to fall into the hands of one of her operatives: the suggestion of a weakness in Auriliene, conjured from his own cunning, enough to draw her attention and keep her forces occupied.
Yet even empty, the place was occupied. Regal, luminous, and inescapably commanding: less a home than a statement.
Guillaume ignored the statement and kept walking.
At the heart of the temple, the egg lay nestled in a cradle of molten gold, its surface radiating a golden light that pulsed with something very like a heartbeat. The payday alone was worth the risk. Any guilt was swiftly extinguished; he had been paid handsomely not to feel such things.
? The moral compass of thieves tends to spin wildly, but it often settles when calibrated with sufficient coin.
He reached out. The egg sensed him, its pulsing shifting slightly. For a moment, he wondered if this was some sort of test or trap. But the gloves, specially commissioned from a master artificer for this very task, held against the heat.
He lifted the egg. It was lighter than he expected, and warm, the vibration beneath his fingers unmistakably alive. Whatever chaos this artefact contained, it was his now.
The journey back to Pharelle was surprisingly uneventful. He had braced for fire-breathing pursuit, or at the very least some dramatic storm, but the world seemed content to let him go. For now.
He returned by river, his ship gliding through pre-dawn mist to dock in a hidden cove, the kind of place whispered about in the same breath as old myths and contraband deals. From there, he carried the egg into the catacombs, navigating passages that wound beneath the city like ancient veins.
His route ended in a chamber directly beneath the Notre Reine, the grand cathedral that loomed above as a monument to faith and light. He allowed himself a smirk. The city’s most revered landmark bore the name of Aeloria, a goddess now unwittingly robbed beneath her own house of worship.
He deposited the egg in the concealed vault and lingered for a moment. It cast faint golden light across the stone walls, still pulsing gently in its new and considerably less hospitable accommodation. Patient and alive and profoundly unimpressed by its change of address.
Someone else’s problem now.
Guillaume climbed the stairs into the cathedral above. Dawn was just touching the stained glass, and the first priests were shuffling toward matins. He straightened his coat, smoothed his hair, and walked out into the light of Pharelle, looking for all the world like a man who had simply risen early.
1778 — 10 Years Ago
Three years had passed since the egg found its new home beneath the Notre Reine, and Guillaume had done what he did best: he had moved on.
Freight Expectations kept him busy enough to justify the forgetting. His Pharelle office had expanded twice; his Havralis office handled the international trade that kept the ledgers satisfyingly thick. Between the two, he had built a shipping empire on the principle that there was no cargo too sensitive, no route too discreet, and no question too inconvenient to be answered with a polite smile and a change of subject.
So when the letter arrived bearing the seal of Prelate Ramirez Esteban, Guillaume’s first instinct was annoyance, his second curiosity, and his third, which arrived roughly four seconds later and settled in with the comfortable permanence of an old friend, was calculation.
The Prelate’s request was elegantly indirect, couched in the kind of ecclesiastical circumlocution that turned simple propositions into theological labyrinths. But Guillaume had spent decades translating the language of powerful men into the language of profitable action, and the message, once stripped of its vestments, was straightforward.
Steal the egg again. This time, from the Church itself.
The Church, of course, maintained that the egg had never been in its possession. They held this position with the serene confidence of an institution that had spent centuries believing two contradictory things simultaneously. Which made the task of stealing it from them somewhat philosophically interesting, because one cannot, strictly speaking, steal something that doesn’t exist.
Guillaume considered this as he reviewed the vault’s security arrangements.
He decided it was someone else’s problem.
The vault beneath the Notre Reine had been designed to keep things in rather than out, a distinction that mattered rather more than its architects had appreciated. Guillaume had, after all, been the one to deposit the egg there in the first place. He knew the route. He knew the locks. He knew which guards changed at which hours and which of them could be relied upon to take their meal break seventeen minutes early on Althdays.
The second theft was, if anything, easier than the first. No dragon’s lair, no mountain peaks, no specially commissioned gloves; just a man walking through doors he had walked through before, collecting something he had put there himself.
He tried not to find this disappointing.
The egg pulsed in his hands with the same gentle, patient warmth he remembered. Three years in a stone vault beneath a cathedral, and it hadn’t dimmed at all.
Guillaume carried it through the catacombs, retracing steps that had become muscle. Up through passages that wound beneath the city, emerging not into the cathedral this time but into the grey pre-dawn air of the Bassin-de-Marne.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The basin stretched before him, vast and dark, its surface reflecting the last of the Pendulum’s lunar light. Deep enough to berth ocean-going vessels and wide enough that the far shore vanished into mist on mornings like this. The docks that lined its southern edge were a forest of masts and rigging, and somewhere among them, a ship was waiting.
Alarico Navarro stood at the gangplank of the Salvation’s Promise. Guillaume had worked with him twice before and valued the man for his single greatest professional quality: he did not talk. He answered to Ramirez, which meant he would ask no questions that Guillaume would need to avoid answering. The arrangement was, in Guillaume’s professional opinion, ideal.
The handoff was brief. Guillaume passed the egg, still wrapped in its insulated case, across the gangplank. Alarico received it without a word.
“The route is filed with my office,” Guillaume said. “Freight Expectations stationery. If anyone asks, you’re carrying Gallian porcelain bound for the southern colonies. And Alarico? The ship doesn’t come back to Gallian waters. Not for a long time.”
Alarico nodded once. The gangplank withdrew. The Salvation’s Promise slipped its moorings with the quiet efficiency of a vessel that had been ready to leave before its cargo arrived.
Guillaume watched it go until the running lights disappeared into the mist. Then he stood on the quayside for longer than necessary, looking down into water that was black and deep. The basin was deeper than most people realised, deeper than it needed to be, the kind of engineering that suggested someone, at some point in the city’s history, had planned for contingencies that polite society preferred not to contemplate.
Guillaume straightened his coat, turned from the water, and walked back toward the city.
The egg was someone else’s problem now. Again. He was getting rather good at that.
Three Months Later
Three months later, Aeloria came looking for her egg.
Guillaume stood at the quayside of the Bassin-de-Marne and watched the former Sun Queen of Gallia tear the Notre Reine apart. Her wings spanned the width of the cathedral square, their membranes translucent with inner fire. She was not attacking indiscriminately. She was searching: tearing at the cathedral’s stonework with surgical precision, ripping open walls and vaults, her claws shearing through masonry that had stood for centuries. The roof had been peeled back like the lid of a tin.
She was never going to find it, because three months ago Guillaume had put it on a ship and sent it to the other side of the world.
Then the basin moved.
It began as a tremor beneath his feet, a vibration rising through the stone of the quayside. The water’s surface shivered, then bulged, then broke as something enormous rose from beneath.
The first platform breached the surface with a groan of hydraulics and streaming water, a disc of riveted iron thirty feet across, rising on a pillar of interlocking pistons that telescoped upward with mechanical inevitability. Mounted at its centre, a cannon. Not a conventional cannon; this was something else entirely, a massive brass assembly of pipes and pressure chambers and valve wheels that looked less like a weapon and more like an organ built by someone who had fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of music.
A second platform rose. Then a third. Then a fourth, and a fifth, the basin erupting in a line of rising iron that stretched from the southern quay to the northern embankment. Water cascaded from their surfaces as they locked into position, each cannon swivelling on its mount with the ponderous precision of machinery that had spent decades rehearsing for exactly this moment.
The first cannon fired. The sound was a sustained, pressurised shriek. The weapon was screaming rather than shooting. A column of water, compressed to the density of stone, erupted from the barrel and struck Aeloria mid-wingbeat, and for one impossible moment the former Sun Queen of Gallia tumbled through the air like a bird hit by a stone.
The second cannon fired. The third. Aeloria banked south, trailing smoke and rage, and the sky over Pharelle began, slowly, to clear.
Guillaume watched from the quayside, his coat damp with spray, his ears ringing, his hands steady at his sides.
I did this.
He went back to his office, sat down at his desk, and began writing a letter to his wife.
He did not mention the dragon. He did not mention the egg. He asked after the children, enquired about the garden, and suggested they might dine together when he returned to Pharelle.
It was, he reflected, the kind of letter a good man would write.
He sealed it and set it aside.
1779 — 9 Years Ago
Pharelle was a city of a thousand stories, but this year it buzzed with only one: that the Solar Dragon egg had been in the Church’s possession all along, and more explosively, that it had gone missing. Again. The Church’s efforts to suppress the news had proven futile: the rumours tore through the city faster than a flock of unsupervised kindergarteners in a sweet shop.
Guillaume had weathered the storm with his usual composure, which is to say he had denied everything, deflected what he couldn’t deny, and maintained such serene confidence in his own innocence that even people who suspected him began to doubt their suspicions. It was, he reflected, one of his better performances.
But performances had limits. And Lambert, unfortunately, was not the sort of audience that stayed in its seat.
The boy arrived at Freight Expectations on a Ninsday afternoon, which Guillaume privately considered rather poor timing. Ninsdays were for invoices. Lambert attempted to fill the doorway, but his narrow shoulders and damp palms provided as much obstacle as a wet rag. At seventeen, he had finally grown into his clerical robes, though they hung heavier today beneath the gravity of what he carried.
? Guillaume Beaumont was renowned for accurately predicting when visiting dignitaries would run out of money. It was a skill not entirely unrelated to his talent for ensuring they did.
Guillaume knew that look. He had seen it on customs inspectors, magistrates, and one particularly tenacious harbour master who had spent three years trying to prove Freight Expectations was smuggling alchemical reagents. The harbour master was now guarding a lighthouse. Lambert, being family, would require a more delicate touch.
The conversation lasted twenty minutes. Lambert had evidence, not proof, which Guillaume assessed within the first thirty seconds: a mosaic of whispers and fragments, enough to suspect, not enough to convict. If the boy had proof, he would be at the Inquisitorial offices filing charges, not here in this study offering the courtesy of a family confrontation.
He’s so young. Lambert was standing in his office because he believed in the system that had trained him, believed that truth was something you could hold in your hands like a warrant or a seal, believed that if he just asked the right questions in the right order, justice would follow as naturally as dawn.
Guillaume had believed things like that once. Before he discovered that dawn was negotiable, if you knew the right people.
He let Lambert talk. He asked the right questions, offered the right denials, and watched the boy’s certainty erode by degrees. When Lambert finally left, his stride was the barely controlled walk of someone who had come for answers and was leaving with nothing but doubt.
Seventeen years old. Barely out of training.
Behind him, Alexisoix exhaled. The bard had been perched on the edge of Guillaume’s desk throughout, idly plucking his violin, the notes faint and dissonant. He had been like this since the dragon attack, since the comfortable fiction of ignorance had become rather harder to maintain.
“Well. That was...”
“Necessary,” Guillaume said.
“I was going to say ‘uncomfortable.’” Alexisoix’ fingers found the strings again, seeking clarity in the only language that had ever made sense to him. “He’s not wrong, you know. About the egg. About any of it.”
“No,” Guillaume agreed. “He’s not wrong. He’s just not going to win.”
The silence stretched. He had known this was coming. From the moment the dragon’s fire had painted the sky above Pharelle, he had known that someone would start asking the right questions. He had hoped for a bureaucrat, someone amenable to the strategic application of paperwork. Instead, it was Lambert. The one person in the Inquisition who would not stop because stopping was easier.
Which meant someone else would need to stop instead.
Julius.
His son. Nineteen years old. Who had nothing to do with any of this, whose only crime was being young and available and possessing a surname that made him useful.
Guillaume opened a drawer and withdrew a sheet of paper. Then another. Then a third. He arranged them on his desk with the same methodical precision he brought to shipping manifests, because if you were going to destroy your son’s life, you might as well be organised about it.
The frame would need to be elegant. Lambert was too sharp for anything crude; if the evidence felt manufactured, he would pull at the seams until the whole thing unravelled. It needed to feel discovered, not presented. Witnesses. Corroborating testimony. Something ideological to give it weight.
He thought of Lambert’s deposition before the ecclesiastical review board. The boy’s impassioned argument that the Church’s seizure of Aeloria’s egg constituted theft. His rhetoric, sharp and principled and utterly sincere.
His own words.
Guillaume sat very still.
Take Lambert’s rhetoric. Strip the attribution. Present it as Julius’s. Lambert would read the arguments and recognise the conviction without recognising the voice, because at seventeen you did not yet understand that your words could be weapons pointed back at you.
Two days. That was all it would take. Two days from filing to conviction, and Julius Beaumont would disappear into monastic confinement at a monastery sufficiently remote that he might as well have been sent to the moon.
It’s temporary, Guillaume told himself. Monasteries are not prisons. He’ll be safe. He’ll be fed. He’ll have time to read, to think, to grow. When this has blown over, when the Inquisition has moved on to its next obsession, I’ll find a way to bring him home.
He needed to believe this. The alternative, that he was about to sacrifice his youngest child to protect himself, permanently, irrevocably, with full knowledge of what he was doing, was not something he was prepared to examine directly.
So he didn’t.
He dipped his quill in ink and began to write.
Someone else’s problem now.