The news hit the grand bedchamber like a physical blow, snapping the fragile, hopeful quiet that had filled the room only moments before.
The maidservants near the door were the first to break.
A young girl dropped a brass tray, the heavy metal clattering loudly against the floorboards before rolling into a corner.
No one picked it up.
Wailing broke out—ragged, uncontrolled crying from the handmaidens and footmen who had lived their entire lives under the protection of Dan Falcon’s vast wealth.
To them, the Lord of the Falcon Estate was not merely a master; he was the sun around which their small, predictable worlds revolved.
With two-thirds of the guard slaughtered in the cold mud of a foreign duchy, the sun had been violently snatched from the sky.
Luna crumbled completely.
Despite her twenty-one years, despite the fine silks she wore and her position as a daughter of the most affluent household in the region, all her composure evaporated.
She dropped to her knees beside Julian’s bed, burying her wet face directly into the thick, down-filled blankets.
She sobbed with the desperate, raw abandonment of a helpless child, her shoulders heaving violently under her crushed velvet dress.
“Father…” she choked out between ragged gasps, her knuckles turning white as she clutched at the bedsheets.
“Not Father… Gaia, please… not him…”
Julian sat frozen on the edge of the carved oak bed, his hand resting inches from his sister’s dark red hair.
Then, something shifted deep within his chest.
He was an adult from the modern world, a transmigrator carrying the immense, cold repository of a global Technology Tree locked inside his brain.
He was supposed to be logical.
He was supposed to process this like a set of variables—logistics, troop counts, supply lines, political backstabbing.
But as he looked at Luna’s trembling form, a wave of dark, suffocating sorrow welled up from the very marrow of his bones.
It was the lingering ghost of the original Julian Falcon, rising up to merge seamlessly with his own raw human heart.
The original Julian had never known the woman who gave him life.
His birth mother had bled out on a snow-covered night fifteen years ago, dying in the very bed Julian now sat upon, leaving behind a frail, sickly infant who had spent his entire life staring at high ceilings and listening to the soft footfalls of doctors.
For five long, cold years, the boy had lived in a gilded vacuum, raised by a grieving father who could barely bear to look at his fragile son without seeing the ghost of his lost wife.
Then Pulchra had arrived.
She had walked into the dreary estate with her vibrant copper hair and her twin daughters, bringing warmth, life, and fierce, protective love into the cold stone halls. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
She had held Julian when his fevers spiked, wiped the cold sweat from his brow, and made sure he never felt the crushing weight of being an unwanted, broken heir.
And Dan—though quiet and often away building his astronomical trade empire—had built a fortress of gold and silk around Julian to keep the harsh world from ever touching his fragile breath.
Now, at fifteen, looking at the bloodied messenger and the weeping women around him, Julian faced a brutal, terrifying reality: he was on the precipice of becoming an orphan.
A tear slipped down Julian’s pale cheek, burning hot against his translucent skin.
Then another followed.
Before he could stop it, a low, miserable sob tore from his throat—a sound so filled with grief and helplessness that even Pulchra turned toward him in shock.
He pulled his knees up to his chest, burying his face in his thin hands.
He wept not as a modern soul armed with advanced sciences, but as a terrified, frail boy whose sanctuary was burning down around him.
His entire frame shook with violent tremors, his breath coming in ragged, painful hitches that rattled his weak lungs.
Pulchra dropped to her knees between her two children.
Her face was deathly pale, but she did not cry.
She couldn’t afford to.
She wrapped her long arms around both Julian and Luna, pulling them tight into her chest, burying her face into the crown of Julian’s dark hair.
She held them with a fierce, suffocating grip, as if her own physical strength alone could keep the cruel world from ripping her family apart.
“Hush… hush, my sweet heart,” Pulchra whispered into Julian’s hair, her voice trembling slightly despite her best efforts.
“We do not mourn a living man. Do you hear me? Your father is alive. Dan Falcon does not fall to common sellswords in a muddy ditch.”
Across the chamber, Father Luik stood motionless, framed by the arched window.
To the servants, the priest looked like an unyielding statue of dark green velvet and carved jade—a stoic servant of Gaia unaffected by the worldly panic consuming the room.
But beneath the wide sleeves of his clerical robes, Luik’s fingers were trembling uncontrollably.
His hands, usually so steady when holding sacred relics or measuring pulse diagnostics, gripped the heavy jade stone at his chest so tightly that the silver chain strained against his neck.
Luik closed his eyes for a single, brief second, forcing his mind to quiet the ringing in his ears.
He had served the Falcon family for over a decade.
He had watched Dan Falcon build an unprecedented fortune, turning raw Venetian technique and fine glass imports into a financial power that made kings uncomfortable.
He knew Dan better than most—knew the sharp, terrifying mind that hid beneath the merchant’s easy smile.
A man who outmaneuvered the grand guilds of the South does not die in a nameless mountain pass.
He is breathing.
He is hiding.
He is waiting.
Luik took a deep, steadying breath, forced his shaking hands to loosen their grip on the jade emblem, and folded them neatly inside his deep sleeves.
He turned toward the room, his dark eyes sweeping over the weeping maidens, the broken messenger, and the grieving family huddled at the bedside.
“Silence!” Luik’s voice rang out, sharp and commanding as a struck gong.
The wailing in the room cut off sharply.
The servant girls shrank back against the tapestries, swallowing their sobs, while Luna lifted her tear-streaked face from the bedsheets to look at the priest.
Luik stepped forward, his boots clicking softly on the stone floor until he stood over the kneeling messenger.
“We stand in the house of Dan Falcon,” Luik declared, his tone cold, clear, and absolute.
“We do not sing dirges for a man whose body has not been laid before the Earth Mother. Lady Pulchra speaks the truth. Lord Dan is alive, shielded by the remaining third of his guard in the thick of the borderlands.”
Luik turned his gaze directly onto Julian.
He saw the wet tears on the boy’s pale face, the trembling shoulders, and the deep misery in his violet eyes.
But behind that raw, youthful grief, Luik also saw something else—a sudden, intense clarity returning to Julian’s eyes as the young master fought to regain control of his breathing.
“We have no time for tears,” Luik said softly, lowering his voice so only the family could hear.
“If the Duchy of Vane let those mercenaries pass, they are waiting to see how this estate reacts. If we show weakness now, the vultures will not wait for winter to strip this house to the bone.”
Julian wiped the back of his hand across his nose, breathing heavily.
The cold logic of his modern mind was slowly reasserting itself over the raw emotional storm of his physical body.
He looked at Pulchra, whose eyes were fierce with maternal protectiveness; at Luna, who was wiping her eyes with her silk sleeves; and finally at Luik, whose calculating stare offered a razor-thin ledge of hope.
Dan was out there, alive in the dark woods of a hostile duchy.
And if Julian wanted to keep his new family from being destroyed, he had to stop weeping and start using the blueprint of the world locked inside his head.