The Conquerors Path Chapter 1058 - 1056- Touring the Ducal Gardens

The transition from the chaotic, grease-stained lower tiers of the Dry Wards to the upper echelons of the capital was as abrupt as walking through a solid wall. The ambient noise of shouting merchants and drunken brawls simply died away, swallowed by a secondary tier of localised sound-dampening arrays.

"The architecture here is so terribly pretentious. They try so hard to emulate the surface elves, but they fundamentally misunderstand gravity."

Krave announced, tossing her newly acquired pouch of platinum coins into the air and catching it without looking.

She wasn’t wrong. As we drifted deeper into the noble district, the heavy stone buildings of the commercial sectors gave way to sweeping, spiralling estates constructed from pale moon-coral and deep-sea pearl. The structures were designed to look light, airy, and delicate—which was entirely absurd considering the millions of tons of ocean water pressing down on the golden dome directly above our heads.

Krave was leading the way with a buoyant, skipping step that seemed entirely out of place for an ancient terror of the deep. She didn’t need a map. Even trapped inside this artificial bubble of air, she possessed an ancient, intuitive understanding of the ocean’s underlying currents. She could feel the subtle shifts in the mana flowing through the city’s drainage wards, using the magical pressure gradients to effortlessly navigate us away from the crowded tourist traps and toward the absolute centre of political power.

"Where exactly are we going?"

I asked, my hands resting casually in my coat pockets.

I had adjusted my perceptual filter to match the environment. We were no longer completely erased from existence. Instead, I wove a subtle, continuous suggestion into the minds of everyone we passed. To the armoured triton guards and the sneering, silk-draped nobility, we simply registered as wealthy, wandering scholars from the surface—eccentric enough to ignore, but clearly rich enough to belong.

"The Ducal Gardens, you can’t come to the capital without seeing the Duke’s private backyard. It’s the ultimate flex of unnecessary wealth."

Krave replied, pointing toward a massive set of wrought-iron gates looming at the end of the promenade.

"It sounds exhausting."

Luna muttered. The silver wolf had maintained her precarious perch draped across my shoulders, refusing to let her paws touch the dry, unnatural cobblestones of the ward.

"It’s educational. Besides, the security is so tight that ordinary tourists aren’t allowed within three blocks. It’ll be quiet."

Krave shot back brightly.

Luna’s ears twitched slightly at the word ’quiet’, though she stubbornly refused to look impressed.

"Fine. But if a bard starts playing one of those screaming coral flutes, I am eating him. I do not care about your disguises."

"Noted."

I said mildly. We approached the massive gates of the Duke’s estate. The security was genuinely formidable, at least by the standards of this world. A dozen elite royal guards, clad in shifting, liquid-metal armour, stood at attention. Behind them, a shimmering, multi-layered ward pulsed with a deeply violent indigo light, designed to instantly incinerate anything that tried to pass without the proper royal signet.

"Ready?"

Krave asked, glancing back at me with a mischievous grin.

"Walk."

I told her.

I didn’t bother breaking the ward. That would trigger alarms and ruin the peaceful afternoon. Instead, I simply grasped the physical laws governing the indigo barrier and temporarily convinced them that we were made of light.

We strolled right through the centre of the heavy iron gates. The royal guards continued staring straight ahead, completely oblivious to the three anomalies casually bypassing the most secure perimeter in the Dukedom. The magical barrier washed over us like a warm breeze, finding nothing to incinerate.

The moment we crossed the threshold, the environment shifted dramatically.

The Ducal Gardens were a staggering display of forced nature. The ruling family had essentially commanded their supreme mages to recreate a surface-level botanical sanctuary at the bottom of the ocean. Massive, artificially heated terrariums housed sprawling willow trees, blooming rose bushes, and thick patches of emerald grass. These terrestrial plants were seamlessly interwoven with glowing, bioluminescent deep-sea flora. Vines of neon-blue star-kelp wrapped around the trunks of ancient oaks, and clusters of glowing sea anemones bloomed alongside heavily manicured hedges.

"Incredible."

I murmured, actually impressed by the sheer volume of mana required to keep the competing ecosystems from instantly killing each other.

"It’s a complete waste of resources, is what it is. Do you have any idea how much it costs to import authentic sunlight down here? They have an entire division of light-weavers working in shifts just to keep that willow tree from dying of depression."

Krave laughed, strolling down a crushed-pearl pathway.

We moved leisurely through the twisting garden paths. Thanks to the perceptual filter, the handful of aristocratic courtiers and diplomats conducting hushed, political meetings in the shadows of the glowing gazebos barely registered our presence. We were just background scenery to their machinations.

Krave took immense delight in playing the role of our tour guide, her commentary a brutal, hilarious teardown of the local nobility.

"See that incredibly pompous man over there by the fountain? That’s Lord Vane. His family controls the southern abyssal trade routes. He thinks he’s untouchable because his great-grandfather supposedly slew a trench-wyrm with his bare hands."

Krave pointed a perfectly manicured finger at a heavily decorated triton lord who was currently sipping wine from a crystal flute.

"I assume he didn’t,"

I said, following her gaze.

"Oh, absolutely not, the wyrm choked to death on a merchant vessel filled with cheap iron pots. The great-grandfather just happened to find the carcass two weeks later and claimed the glory. The entire Vane family legacy is built on a digestive accident."

Krave scoffed. I let out a soft breath of amusement. It was surreal, wandering through the meticulously maintained centre of political power while listening to an immortal entity casually dismantle centuries of carefully constructed aristocratic mythology.

"And her?"

I asked, nodding toward a severe-looking mer-woman wearing a gown woven from black pearls, surrounded by a small entourage of terrified-looking scribes.

"Duchess Morwen, she’s currently trying to assassinate her third husband. She uses a very specific type of powdered ghost-crab shell. It mimics the symptoms of the deep-tide fever. Very clever, honestly. But she’s sloppy with her accounting. She pays the assassins out of her primary treasury fund instead of laundering it through the coral guilds."

Krave grinned.

"You seem very invested in their drama."

Luna observed, her tone dripping with dry judgment of her old friend.

"When you sleep for three centuries at a time, you have to catch up on the gossip when you wake up. It’s like a theatrical play, except everyone is entirely serious and the props are highly venomous."

Krave defended herself. We rounded a wide corner, stepping into a massive, open-air pavilion. The centre of the space was dominated by something completely out of place for an underwater city, even in the Dry Wards.

It was a colossal tapestry, easily thirty feet long, draped carefully over a raised, slanted viewing dais. The fabric was incredibly ancient, depicting a sprawling, sun-drenched surface forest filled with mythical land-beasts. The entire piece was encased in a localised, stasis-preservation ward to prevent the humid, salty air of the district from rotting the delicate threads.

"Ah, the Crown Jewel of the collection, the Aethelgard family paid a small kingdom’s worth of gold for this. It’s supposedly from the First Era, woven by the high elves of the deep woods before the continents shifted. The preservation magic alone drains a quarter of the garden’s daily mana supply."

Krave gestured grandly. Luna stared at the tapestry. Her silver eyes narrowed, assessing the soft, ancient fabric and the perfect, slightly warmed temperature of the preservation ward.

"I am tired of walking."

Luna announced, even though she isn’t walking at all.

Before I could stop her, the silver wolf hopped gracefully down from my shoulders. She trotted directly past a velvet rope, bypassed the heavily enchanted alarm arrays without triggering a single one, and hopped onto the priceless historical artefact.

"Luna."

I called softly. She ignored me. Luna walked in a tight circle right in the middle of a beautifully woven elven hunter, let out a long, dramatic sigh, and collapsed onto the fabric. She stretched her front paws out, completely flattening a section of the ancient forest scene, and rested her chin on her paws.

"The texture is acceptable. I will be napping here for the next hour. Do not disturb me unless the city is exploding."

She declared, closing her eyes. Krave stared at the wolf, then burst into a fit of bright, ringing laughter.

"She just claimed a three-thousand-year-old national treasure as a dog bed. I love her so much."

"She is doing it deliberately to be difficult."

I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose.

I extended a thread of intent, stretching the boundaries of my perceptual filter to encompass the dais. A pair of royal guards patrolled past the pavilion a moment later. Their eyes swept over the priceless tapestry, their minds completely failing to process the sight of a large silver wolf currently shedding on the ancient elven silk.

"Let her rest. It gives me more time to explain the sheer incompetence of the Duke’s taxation policies."

Krave smiled, leaning against the marble railing of the pavilion. As Krave launched into a surprisingly detailed critique of local tariffs, the sound of heavy, self-important footsteps echoed down the pathway.

A tall, elderly triton dressed in the heavy, sweeping robes of a royal historian entered the pavilion. He was leading a small group of younger, desperately attentive noble students. He paused near the edge of the dais, oblivious to the wolf sleeping five feet away from him, and pointed a long, wooden cane at the tapestry.

"And here, my students, we see the remnants of the savage surface lands. Notice the crude stitching. It is a stark reminder that true culture, true refinement, was only born when our great ancestors, the First Lords of the Deep, conquered the abyssal trenches and brought order to the ocean."

The historian droned, his voice thick with unearned authority,

I saw Krave physically twitch.

The casual, enthusiastic tourist vanished. Her dark eyes snapped toward the historian, narrowing into predatory slits. It was one thing for her to mock the nobility; it was entirely another for a mortal to confidently spout historical inaccuracies about an era she had personally lived through.

"Oh, no,"

I murmured.

"Excuse me."

Krave said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the ambient noise of the garden like a sharpened blade. The historian paused, blinking in confusion as he noticed us standing in the shadows of the pavilion. Because of my filter, he simply saw a beautiful, wealthy surface scholar.

"Yes? May I help you, madam?"

The historian asked, looking mildly annoyed by the interruption.

"I couldn’t help but overhear your lecture; you mentioned the First Lords of the Deep bringing order to the trenches."

Krave said, stepping forward with a wide, terrifyingly polite smile.

"Indeed, Lord Aethelgard the First, the great conqueror. He drove the mindless beasts of the dark waters back and forged this very capital with the strength of his will and the edge of his spear."

The historian puffed out his chest. Krave tilted her head.

"Is that the official record? Because, from an academic standpoint, that sounds like complete and utter fiction."

The students gasped. The historian’s face flushed a deep, angry purple.

"I beg your pardon? Are you questioning the royal archives?"

He sputtered.

"I am questioning your basic comprehension of reality. Lord Aethelgard the First didn’t conquer anything. He was a terrified little bureaucrat who paid an extortion fee to the actual rulers of the deep so they wouldn’t crush his fragile little coral spires into dust. He didn’t drive back the beasts; he asked them very nicely not to eat him, and he offered them a tribute of three thousand tons of refined silver a year for the privilege of existing."

Krave replied pleasantly, though the temperature in the pavilion inexplicably dropped a few degrees.

"This is treasonous slander! Lord Aethelgard defeated the great Kraken of the Northern Trench in single combat!"

The historian shouted, his grip tightening on his cane.

Krave actually scoffed.

"He threw a spear at the Kraken from three miles away, missed by a laughable margin, and then hid inside a volcanic cave for two weeks while the Kraken ignored him because he was too small to be considered a proper snack. The only thing he defeated was his own dignity."

The historian was vibrating with rage. He looked frantically around the pavilion, clearly searching for a guard to arrest this blasphemous surface scholar. The situation was escalating rapidly. If the historian called the guards, my disguise would hold, but Krave was currently a hairsbreadth away from dropping her human form and casually eating the man just to prove a point.

I stepped smoothly out of the shadows, inserting myself directly between Krave and the furious triton.

"My deepest apologies, Master Historian."

I said, my voice entirely calm, resonating with a subtle, soothing frequency that commanded immediate attention. I let a fraction of my aura bleed into the air. It wasn’t a threat. It was a gentle, overwhelming wave of absolute authority. The historian froze, the anger draining from his face as his primitive instincts suddenly screamed at him that he was standing in front of something completely incomprehensible.

"My colleague is a fanatic regarding fringe historical theories. We are from a highly isolated area. They teach a very... alternative version of deep-sea events. She often gets overly passionate in her academic debates. Please, forgive the intrusion on your excellent lecture."

I spoke, offering a polite, aristocratic bow. The historian swallowed hard. The absolute certainty of my tone, combined with the subtle pressure of my aura, completely derailed his anger.

"I... see, well. Unorthodox theories are... common among those without access to the royal archives. See that she keeps her fringe opinions to herself, sir."

He stammered, taking a small step back.

"I will ensure she behaves."

I promised smoothly. I turned back to the dais, effortlessly scooping up the sleeping silver wolf. Luna let out a grumble of protest as I draped her over my shoulders, but she didn’t bite me. I placed a hand firmly on the centre of Krave’s back, silently demanding she move.

"Come along, scholar."

I said lightly. Krave glared at the historian for one final, terrifying second before breaking into a bright, innocent smile.

"Thank you for the history lesson! It was incredibly illuminating!"

I guided her out of the pavilion and back onto the crushed-pearl pathway, maintaining a brisk pace until we were well out of earshot of the lecture.

"You ruined my fun. I was going to ask him to describe the exact colour of the Kraken’s scales. I guarantee you they got it wrong in the archives."

Krave complained, though she didn’t pull away from my hand.

"We are supposed to be tourists, Krave; tourists do not historically devastate the local academics."

I reminded her, keeping my tone perfectly mild.

"They do if the academics are lying."

Krave huffed.

"Now, where is the nearest place in this garden to get something to eat? Preferably somewhere without historical significance."

Krave’s pout instantly vanished, replaced by that dangerous, manic energy.

"Oh, I know exactly the place. They serve slow-roasted trench-boar, and the chef has anger issues. It’ll be fantastic."