Chapter 23: Muriel’s Three Soldiers
?Before fresh blood ever stained the immaculate snow of Morgathia, and long before Captain Bistier began his silent, predatory vigil from the arched windows of the security wing, there was a night when hope was smuggled into the lightless bowels of the dungeons by hands that, by duty, were meant only to carry the cold, indifferent steel of Imperial spears.
?Morgathia had never been a place designed to harbor the laughter or the fragile innocence of children, and the Vermilion manor stood as its most frozen epicenter—a fortress of black stone that seemed to actively siphon the warmth from any soul inhabiting its halls. In those grey, leaden weeks, little Ruby’s isolation was absolute, an invisible shroud that weighed heavily upon her small, underdeveloped shoulders. With her eldest brother, Celius, having returned to the grueling, soul-crushing studies of the Imperial Institute, and young Eduard and Julius still confined to the care of wet nurses in distant, disconnected wings of the estate, three-year-old Ruby was a silent shadow. She spent her days traversing corridors far too vast for her short, hesitant steps—a tiny princess in a castle of ice where the only warmth she knew emanated from those rare, precious moments when her mother, Muriel, managed to slip away from the suffocating and theatrical obligations of the high nobility.
?It was within this landscape of profound solitude and oppressive silence that destiny, with its habitual irony, began to plot a high-stakes collision course.
?Willber, James, and Dessie were three soldiers who, despite the moral soot of their profession, still desperately searched for a cause that justified the weight of their plated armor. Young and still imbued with a flickering sense of justice that the Vermilion Empire spent every waking hour trying to crush under the heel of iron discipline, they had been deployed to Marth’s personal garrison—a place that stood as the exact antonym of everything they considered honorable. As the months bled into a succession of daily horrors, the manor’s brutality became their grim routine. They watched enslaved men and women wither under the lash and the extreme sub-zero winds, forbidden from any interference under pain of death. The only solace these wretches found was the dungeon itself, which provided just enough heat to keep them from freezing solid—not out of any shred of mercy from the Duke, but to ensure that the Empire's forced labor was not prematurely wasted.
?The three guards lived in a state of impotent rage, their knuckles white from gripping their spear shafts, until one particularly cruel winter midnight when chance forced the hand of fate.
?By a rare fluke in the duty rosters—or perhaps a cosmic alignment of intentions—all three had been assigned to the same patrol shift in the labyrinthine corridors leading to the lower holding cells. In the dead of night, when even the ice seems to crack from the cold, the sound of hesitant footsteps and the subtle rustle of heavy fabric against stone put them on high alert. Expecting to intercept a thief or a desperate prisoner in flight, they surrounded a hooded figure attempting to bypass the secondary gate, clutching heavy bundles that exhaled the residual heat of the kitchen ovens.
?"Halt! In the name of the Duke!" Willber ordered, his voice echoing with an authority that masked his own underlying nervousness as he blocked the path with the tip of his spear.
?As they cornered the intruder, James stepped forward and, with a swift, aggressive motion, pulled back the scarf obscuring the figure's face. The shock that followed was a physical blow that paralyzed the trio. The vibrant, arterial red of her hair, even under the dim, flickering torchlight, revealed the impossible identity of the woman: Duchess Muriel Vermilion.
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?"My Lady?" Dessie asked in a stunned, breathless whisper.
?The question hammered against their collective minds like a war drum: Why? Why was the Duchess herself, the most powerful woman in these lands, acting as a smuggler of charity? If we, mere common soldiers, were caught with an extra scrap of bread, we would be executed in the courtyard before dawn, they thought. Yet there she stood—the mother of Ruby, risking her station, her title, and her very life for those whom her husband treated as disposable livestock.
?Muriel did not retreat behind her aristocratic authority. She did not threaten them with the gallows or exile. Instead, she did something far more dangerous: she looked into the eyes of each of those men and pleaded for their silence. She knew that if Marth discovered her "domestic insurrection," the punishment would be implacable, final, and bloody. The soldiers, who had long nursed the same forbidden desire to act against the cruelty they served, received her plea with a mixture of profound relief and a newfound sense of purpose. They did not just offer their silence; they begged to help her. They did not want to be mere passive accomplices to her kindness; they wanted to be active agents of change.
?In the days that followed, an invisible blood-pact was sealed in the shadows. As Duchess, Muriel held nominal control over the manor’s supply orders, but she had to act with surgical, almost paranoiac caution to ensure the Duke did not notice the logistical discrepancies in the winter stockpiles. She and the three soldiers maintained constant, clandestine contact, whispering in dark alcoves and exchanging coded messages about guard rotations and mapping potential allies within the ranks. They discussed schedules with the precision of military engineers, identifying the exact locations where food was tiered and developing methods to divert rations without triggering a "red flag" in Marth’s internal inventory system.
?However, Muriel, thinking of the future of Ruby and her other children, knew that bread was merely a palliative measure—a bandage on a mortal wound. The soul of that house was rotten, and it needed to be purified through the fires of freedom. It was then that the most audacious and dangerous plan ever conceived in those lands was born: a coordinated mass escape.
?"We need to get them out of here," Muriel said during one of their midnight meetings in the lightless corners of the manor, her voice steady despite the visible tremor in her hands. "If they stay, they will die by degrees, one day at a time. If they try to run alone, the collars will hunt them down and kill them before they reach the main gate."
?As active-duty soldiers, the three had physical access to the cell block keys and knew every "blind spot" in the security geometry of the outer perimeter. Muriel, however, possessed what they could never obtain on their own: access to the Runic Master Keys—the override devices capable of disarming the magical slavery collars. Without those keys, any escape attempt would result in instantaneous death by magical strangulation or runic flux explosion.
?The plan was a masterpiece of espionage. Muriel would use her position to distract Marth during a grand winter banquet, while Willber, James, and Dessie would coordinate the opening of the cells during the early morning shift change. They mapped routes through the waste disposal trenches and hidden trails in the pine forests surrounding the manor, calculating the exact time required for the fugitives to move beyond the range of the castle’s sensors.
?And so, while little Ruby slept soundly in her oversized room, oblivious to the conspiracy simmering in the bowels and service corridors of the fortress, the pieces of a deadly game were being moved. It was the most dangerous operation ever conceived under the Vermilion roof—the genesis of what, decades later, would be whispered in the taverns of Odyssia and Eritineos as The Great Escape of the Red Snow. They were planting the seeds of rebellion directly under Marth’s hooked and vigilant nose, blissfully unaware of the terrifying fact that the shadows of that house possessed eyes that never blinked and ears that caught even the faintest sigh of betrayal.
?The fate of Muriel and her three soldiers now hung by a silken thread, while upstairs, Duke Marth reviewed his maps of conquest, unaware that his true enemy was not at the borders, but sharing his bed and wearing his uniform.
