Garrick had only ridden for mere minutes when a group of riders raced toward him. He reined in his horse and raised one hand as he hailed for them to halt, but they continued onward with hardly a glance in his direction, as they raced onward with the wildness of fear in their eyes. It was only after they'd passed that Garrick noticed the drying blood that was splattered across the flanks of the horses who had taken up the rear. Garrick took in a sharp breath and urged his horse onward down the road the riders had come, the same road that he had been told led to the city that housed the pegasus farmers who had claimed Conrad as a lucky name.
His horse in a dead run, Garrick made it the rest of the way to the next town over in less than half an hour of hard riding. He halted his horse at the edge of town and somberly surveyed the damage.
It was just as he had feared
The dead and dying lay out in the streets, their bodies strewn broken as their loved ones sobbed nearby. It was as though pillagers had come through to rob the inhabitants of their riches, except that the buildings were largely untouched. However, as Garrick slowly travelled deeper into the town, he realized there was one building that had suffered the brunt of the damage closer to the center of the town.
The doors of this large home had been torn from the walls, and all of the windows shattered. Glass lay strewn about the ground, glimmering dangerously in the morning light. As he drew closer, Garrick saw that the inside walls were coated in arterial sprays of red. He felt safe to say that this had once been the home of the Pegasus farmers, and that none lived.
He rode behind the house, where there stood a pasture and a barn.
The yard was coated in a fine spray of blood, like vermillion dew upon the grass. Bodies littered the yard, belonging both to humans and pegasi. None stirred. The blood had even begun to clot at the gashes in their throats. There was no way Garrick could have made it here in time to save any of them.
The barn was no better. Every last pegasus and caregiver had been slain, and the eggs had been shattered, the broken yolks mingling with the blood of their parents.
Garrick took a slow breath in through his nose as he surveyed the damage. His heart ached in his chest, but he kept his face stony. This could have been a clue for him to find his missing brother, but instead, it was a massacre of the last of Conrad's bloodline.
Or maybe not. If what Tobias had said was true, then Dante also had a sliver of Conrad's blood inside of him. It would explain why the Chimera had led Garrick to the boy instead of here, where nothing but corpses remained.
Garrick dismounted and tied his horse to the fence surrounding the Pegasus farmers' fields. These relatives of his deserved a proper burial, but there was nothing he could do for them now. He needed to return to the Nascent immediately and alert his relatives to this new threat.
But before he left, Garrick tied his coin purse to the saddle and hoped that the proximity of both horse and money would imply to whoever found them that the wealth was intended for the Conrads. But even if that wasn't what it was used for, anything to help this town in this trying time would do honor to Conrad's name.
Summoning his Chimera to his palm, Garrick somberly typed into his keyboard, and initiated a call.
Shandrin answered, appearing inside of Garrick's mind's eye as a projection of her true self. He immediately noticed that her lips were pinched tightly together. "Hello, Father," she greeted, her voice a little too fast and high for normal. She smiled, but it didn't quite seem right. It was almost as though it were an act, that she wanted her father to question what had her seeming so off.
Garrick followed her subtle prompt. "Is something wrong?" he asked.
Shandrin sighed. "I can't hide anything from you, can I?" she said in a tone that suggested there were many things Garrick had somehow missed in the past. "Dante ran away."
"What?" It wasn't enough to make Garrick forget the horrors he'd witnessed, but there was a pit of dread in his gut as the worry that Dante might be Olivier's child rose back up from where he'd buried it.
"I've been trying to calculate out the numbers I'd need to try to call him," she continued. "Needless to say, I did try to follow him, but the tunnel broke after I'd only made it through a couple worlds. I was hoping to contact him and bring him back before you returned."
Garrick sighed and ran his free hand down his face. "We need to get him back," he said. Whether Dante was Blaine's or Olivier's child didn't matter as much as the fact that he was a descendant of Conrad's, and it was clear that the blood of Conrad was currently a target of some sort of attack. The fact that the tunnel broke when Shandrin was following him suggested that it might be too late, and one of those dog-headed monsters had gotten to him. They had already proven they could travel through other people's tunnels. "Where are you?"
"My room," Shandrin answered. "Were you planning to send a request to sync?"
"If you'd please. It would be faster." Garrick pressed a button with his thumb.
A few moments later and he found himself in his daughter's room. Though it was almost ominously dark, it was a welcome change from the gore-splattered fields he'd left.
Shandrin sat in a chair by the fire, where the dying embers flickered bursts of light across her still form. In her lap was a book where she had written an array of complicated mathematical equations that Garrick had never bothered to sit down and study and had no clue how Shandrin kept track of while blind.
"It would take me at least two more hours to figure out his numbers," Shandrin stated in an apologetic tone in response to Garrick's unasked question. She set aside her work and stood, Chimera in one hand. "Are we heading to the library now?"
Garrick couldn't help but chuckle. "One step ahead of me, as always," he remarked. "If you could, please call-"
"I know," Shandrin said, already typing into her Chimera. "I'll call the members of my generation while you call yours."
There was something about his daughter that always made Garrick smile, even when he was in the deepest depths of despair.
Together, father and daughter left the room and made their way toward the library, both preoccupied by their Chimeras as they walked.
Garrick made sure his expression was appropriately sober, when he attempted to contact his various siblings, working through them all from eldest to youngest. To each, he spoke a simple message: "meet me in the library. It's urgent."
Thistle, Tristan, Mattis, and Dominic all answered, their gazes turning solemn when they heard the king's words and nodding that they would be there.
Cerulie, Blaine, and Avaline didn't respond. Then again, he hadn't expected any of them to answer his call. Cerulie and Blaine spent their lives in the old worlds, traveling from place to place and living carefree lives. And Avaline was a nervous mess who refused to speak to anyone but her older full brother, Mattis. Garrick wasn't sure why he'd even bothered trying to reach her in the first place.
On a whim, he typed in the information for one last member of the family: Conrad. He hesitated a moment, thumb hovering over the final button. In the end, he confirmed his selection. He waited, eager, hopeful, but all that greeted him was a heavy and empty feeling of pure silence, the same feeling that filled him whenever he waited at a funeral for the body to be brought out.
He ended the call before the feeling could permeate him any further. He dismissed his Chimera and lifted his head. Shandrin already had finished and had taken the lead, walking through the halls with an assurance most of their sighted relatives didn't even have. When she reached the library, she pulled open the doors and strolled through, making her way to the table.
"Is this meeting about Dante?" she asked as she took a seat at the circular table in the center of the room, its only decoration a deck of cards backed with the same unicorn design as their Chimeras.
"Yes and no," Garrick replied as he sat beside her.
She raised a quizzical brow.
"I'll tell you what it's all about when everyone else gets here," Garrick replied. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. "This has been a long day, and I feel like it's just the beginning to something sinister."
"Now you have me even more curious," Shandrin said. "Don't tell me that Dante really was Olivier's child."
"I don't want to think about that possibility," Garrick replied, "but that's not the worst of my fears."
Shandrin sat there, staring at Garrick with a curious and prompting expression on her face, but then she finally seemed to accept that she'd get no further answers and looked away, busying herself with the deck of cards, which she shuffled and then arrayed in front of herself in a solitary game. Her fingers ran along the surface of each face-up card, feeling out the raised marks that allowed her to know which card was which value.
Garrick watched her for a moment and then closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. The day had started so innocently, and now everything was going wrong. A part of him regretted his impromptu curiosity. He had discovered things that now weighed upon him. There was someone, something, looming over the Nascent ominously, and he had no clue what or who was behind it all.
But on the other hand, he was grateful that he'd decided to spend the day looking for his brother. Because if he hadn't discovered this plot now, who knew how long it would've lurked in the shadows before striking them, undetected…