The Conquerors Path Chapter 1062 - 1060 — The Glass-Tide Conservatory

We moved from the roaring, hydro-magical violence of the Obsidian Cascades to the absolute tranquillity of the Glass-Tide Conservatory.

"Acoustic dampening wards, extremely aggressive ones. They are entirely neutralising kinetic vibrations within a localised half-mile radius."

I noted, my voice sounding flat and strangely isolated in the deadened air. I analysed the runework crawling up the polished white marble columns ahead of us.

"They have to, if a triton sneezed too loudly in this district, a hundred million platinum coins worth of royal botany would instantly shatter into dust."

Krave whispered, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial, hushed tone that completely contradicted the manic energy she had been displaying just moments prior. She pointed a pale finger toward the sprawling, heavily enclosed park looming before us.

We stepped through a sweeping archway of pure, unblemished quartz and entered the Glass-Tide Conservatory.

Even for a world built on magic, the visual impact of the sanctuary was staggering. The park was essentially a massive, enclosed terrarium, sealed beneath a secondary, perfectly transparent dome that rested inside the primary golden ward of the city.

The flora here was not green, and it was not alive in the traditional, biological sense. It was ancient, deep-sea coral that had been coaxed over thousands of years to calcify into pure, flawless crystal. Under the intensely focused, manipulated beams of magical light pouring down from the ceiling arrays, the coral bloomed like massive, fragile glass flowers.

There were towering willow trees whose weeping branches were constructed entirely from spun-glass strands of bioluminescent cyan. Patches of crystalline sea anemones covered the ground, their razor-thin, transparent petals reflecting a prism of blinding, shifting colours.

"Adjust your steps, Austin, the gravity in here is broken."

Krave warned lightly, her dark eyes scanning the pristine, white marble pathways winding through the glittering foliage. I didn’t need the warning; I could already feel the spatial distortion pressing against my passive barriers.

To protect the impossibly fragile glass flora from collapsing under its own weight, the Aethelgard mages had essentially nullified gravity within the Conservatory. The moment my boot crossed onto the white marble path, the heavy, oppressive pull of the earth vanished.

I didn’t float away—the runework was calibrated to anchor anything with a heartbeat to the floor—but my body weight effectively dropped by ninety per cent. Every step required only a fraction of the usual muscular exertion. It felt like walking on the moon, suspended in a frictionless dream.

"Oh."

Luna projected directly into my mind.

The silver wolf, who had spent the last three hours draped across my shoulders aggressively complaining about the dry air and the heavy gravity, suddenly shifted. She stood up on my collarbone.

With a small, experimental hop, Luna stepped completely off my shoulder.

She didn’t fall. The anti-gravity array caught her instantly. Luna drifted in the empty air, hovering perfectly at eye level beside me. Her silver fur, free from the pull of gravity, fanned out around her body in a glorious, shifting halo, making her look exactly like she was swimming through the water she so desperately missed, despite the environment being completely dry.

Luna slowly extended her front paws, stretching her spine out to its absolute maximum length, and let out a long, deeply satisfied breath of hot air.

"This is nice."

Luna declared, her voice radiating pure, arrogant satisfaction.

"So easy to please."

Krave grinned, reaching over to lightly poke the wolf in the ribs. The impact sent Luna slowly drifting a few inches to the left. She didn’t panic. She simply rotated her body with a lazy flick of her tail, curling into a perfectly spherical, floating ball of silver fur.

"Do not push me, kraken, I will be taking a nap now. Austin, you may act as my tether. Pull me along."

Luna warned, though she sounded entirely too comfortable to be genuinely threatening. She closed her eyes, tucking her snout beneath her paws.

I let out a soft breath of amusement. I reached out and gently grasped the thick scruff of fur on the back of her neck. As we walked down the marble path, I simply towed the sleeping, weightless wolf through the air beside me like a highly lethal, silver balloon.

"She is entirely ridiculous."

Krave laughed quietly, falling into step beside me.

"That she is."

I adjusted my perceptual filter, tightening the weave of my intent.

The Conservatory was not empty. While the lower markets were packed with screaming merchants, the pathways here were occupied by the absolute apex of Aethelgard high society. Elven aristocrats in dresses made of woven starlight and human nobles draped in heavy, enchanted velvet strolled through the crystalline gardens. They spoke in hushed, pretentious whispers, pointing ivory canes at the glittering glass displays.

I ensured none of them looked at us. I projected an aura of profound, crushing boredom. To the passing nobles, my face was entirely unmemorable, Krave’s striking beauty was muted into grey background noise, and the floating silver wolf currently snoring beside my head simply failed to register in their conscious minds.

We drifted deeper into the park, surrounded by the quiet, musical chiming of the glass flowers shifting against each other in the heavily filtered air currents.

"See that cluster of red over there? That is a Blood-Reef Rose. The House of Vane claims they spent four centuries crossbreeding it with a surface-dwelling volcano orchid."

Krave pointed a delicate finger toward a patch of jagged, crimson crystal that looked like a blooming lotus made of frozen blood.

"I assume that is a lie?"

I asked, admiring the flawless, violent red light it cast onto the white marble.

"A complete fabrication, they didn’t breed anything. The current Lord Vane’s great-grandmother hired a squad of abyssal mercenaries to steal it from the private garden of a trench-hag. The hag was furious. She cursed the Vane family’s primary water supply with a localised parasite that causes extreme, uncontrollable itching."

Krave scoffed softly.

Krave smiled, a wicked, ancient gleam in her eyes. "

The Vanes spent fifty years furiously scratching themselves in public before they finally managed to hire a supreme cleric to cleanse the curse. And they still claim the rose was a botanical triumph."

I steered Luna around a group of swooning elven diplomats who were weeping openly at the sight of a massive, transparent willow tree.

"The politics of botany seem surprisingly cutthroat."

I observed.

"Oh, it is a bloodbath, you see, because the Aethelgard Dukedom is so heavily warded, the nobility cannot go to war with each other using armies. The Duke would instantly execute them for damaging the city’s infrastructure. So, they wage war through extreme, petty aesthetics."

Krave said, her eyes sweeping over the immaculate gardens with heavy judgment. She gestured toward an empty, scorched patch of dirt resting inside a heavily warded crystal display case.

"Last month, that was the prized Void-Orchid of the House of Morwen; it absorbed all ambient light and cast a perimeter of absolute, freezing darkness. It was gorgeous. Then, the night before the annual botanical judging, someone from the House of Caelum slipped a single drop of highly concentrated sun-fire into the soil."

Krave explained happily.

"I imagine a deep-sea plant that thrives on absolute darkness did not react well to liquid sunlight."

I said.

"It detonated, it blew a hole straight through the display case and vaporised the entire eastern wing of the Morwen estate. Of course, the Caelums denied everything. But everyone knows they did it because the Caelum matriarch wore a gown the exact colour of sun-fire to the judging the next day. The sheer disrespect."

Krave whispered excitedly.

We reached the absolute centre of the Conservatory.

The pathway opened up into a massive, circular plaza of polished obsidian, perfectly mirroring the complex light arrays above. In the centre of the plaza stood the crown jewel of the exhibition.

It wasn’t a flower; it was a tree. It stood fifty feet tall, its trunk and branches formed entirely from a single, unbroken piece of flawless, glowing opal. The leaves were razor-thin sheets of diamond that caught the magical light and refracted it across the plaza in a breathtaking, blinding kaleidoscope of thousands of different colours.

A crowd of several dozen aristocrats was gathered around the base of the tree, listening with rapt attention as a severely dressed triton botanist delivered a hushed, reverent lecture.

Because my perceptual filter was active, we drifted right up to the edge of the crowd without causing a single ripple of disturbance. Luna, still floating weightlessly in my grip, let out a soft snore that I expertly muffled with a localised sound barrier.

"And so, we see the ultimate triumph of the Aethelgard spirit. This Prismatic Elder-Oak was forged entirely through the sheer willpower and magical supremacy of our current Duke. He poured his own vital essence into the soil, forcing the dead coral to remember the light of the surface. It is a testament to his divine right to rule."

The Triton botanist droned on, gesturing to the massive opal tree with a silver pointer,

I felt Krave’s posture completely lock up.

The manic, gossiping tourist vanished in a fraction of a second. She stared up at the massive opal tree, her dark eyes narrowing into terrifying, abyssal slits. The ambient mana in the room didn’t stutter this time; it froze.

"That is a lie,"

Krave breathed. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried the crushing weight of the deep ocean.

I glanced at her.

"Historical inaccuracy again?"

"That is an Opaline Spine; it is not a tree. It is the calcified dorsal fin of an ancient, prehistoric deep-tide serpent. They don’t grow. They are formed over tens of thousands of years when the beast dies, and its bones absorb the ambient magic of the trench."

Krave said, her hands slowly curling into tight fists at her sides.

She looked at the triton botanist, who was currently taking a bow as the sycophantic nobles clapped politely.

"The Duke didn’t forge it; he harvested it from a graveyard. He desecrated the resting place of a beast that predates his entire miserable bloodline, and now he is passing it off as a gardening project."

Krave snarled softly, the whites of her eyes momentarily flashing to pure black.

She took a single, deliberate step forward.

I knew exactly what was about to happen. She was going to drop her human disguise, casually shatter the acoustic dampening wards, and inform the terrified nobility exactly what they were looking at before physically reducing the triton botanist to a fine paste.

"Krave."

I murmured, smoothly stepping into her path and blocking her line of sight to the botanist.

"Move, Austin, I am going to provide another educational correction."

She said the air around her was literally freezing from the drop in temperature.

"You are going to trigger a city-wide lockdown."

I countered perfectly calmly.

I didn’t try to physically restrain her—that would be an exercise in futility against a divine kraken—but I didn’t back down either. I held her furious gaze, maintaining an aura of absolute, unshakeable tranquillity.

"They are looking at a corpse and calling it art."

Krave hissed.

"They are mortals, they are entirely ignorant, and their lifespans are too short to understand the history of the world they inhabit. Breaking that man’s bones will not teach him reverence; it will only cause a panic that ruins our afternoon."

I replied softly, my voice carrying a soothing, resonant frequency designed to bypass her anger and speak directly to her ancient logic.

Krave stared at me, her chest heaving slightly. The abyssal black slowly receded from her eyes.

"Watch."

I told her.

I turned my head slightly toward the lecturing botanist. I didn’t cast a violent spell. I simply reached out with my intent, grabbed hold of the localised acoustic arrays surrounding the man’s podium, and gently folded the soundwaves in half.

The botanist opened his mouth to continue his grand speech about the Duke’s willpower.

Instead of words, a sound remarkably similar to the screeching, dying-seagull noise of a misaligned coral-flute blasted out of his mouth.

The aristocratic crowd flinched violently, covering their ears. The botanist blinked in horror, grabbing his own throat. He tried to apologise, but as he spoke, the folded acoustic waves transformed his voice into a series of incredibly loud, wet, flatulent noises.

The elven diplomats gasped in sheer scandal. The human nobles covered their mouths, their faces turning red from the supreme, undeniable breach of high-society decorum.

The botanist panicked. He waved his arms frantically, trying to explain, but every syllable he pushed out of his mouth echoed across the pristine plaza as a highly amplified, embarrassing bodily function. Thoroughly humiliated and utterly confused, the man dropped his silver pointer and sprinted out of the plaza, his face buried in his hands.

The crowd of nobles quickly dispersed, furiously whispering about the man’s severe lack of manners, leaving the base of the opal tree empty.

I turned back to Krave, slipping my hands casually into my coat pockets.

"Educational correction applied. No casualties required."

Krave stared at the empty podium. A slow, wicked grin spread across her face, completely shattering the lingering anger. She let out a soft snort of laughter, shaking her head.

"You are incredibly petty when you want to be, Austin."

She beamed.

"I prefer the term ’efficient’."

I corrected mildly.

[Damn....no guilt?]

[Yuck.....pedo!]

[I am calling Dexter]

I guided us away from the central plaza, towing the still-sleeping, floating silver wolf behind me. We drifted toward the outer edges of the Conservatory, far from the curated displays and the squabbling nobles.

Here, near the heavy quartz walls of the dome, the Aethelgard mages had simply given up trying to control the flora. The coral grew wild and untampered, forming natural, arching alcoves of pale, glowing white crystal. The focused magical light from the ceiling was softer here, casting long, peaceful shadows across the marble floor.

We found a smooth, curved bench carved from a single piece of moonstone. I sat down, releasing my grip on Luna’s scruff.

The silver wolf simply bobbed in the air beside me, her body slowly rotating in the zero-gravity field until she was entirely upside down, her paws pointing toward the ceiling. She didn’t wake up. She just let out a soft sigh, entirely at peace in her suspended slumber.

Krave sat down next to me, leaning her head back against the cool quartz wall. She looked out over the glittering, silent expanse of the glass forest. The manic energy had finally bled out, leaving behind a comfortable, serene stillness.

For a long time, we didn’t speak. We simply sat there, perfectly veiled from the world, watching the light refract through millions of crystalline petals. It was a rare, profound moment of absolute quiet at the bottom of the ocean.

Above us, the golden light of the primary dome suddenly began to dim, shifting from its artificial sunset into a deep, heavy twilight blue.

"They are turning the sun off. Night cycle."

Krave murmured, a genuine, warm smile touching her lips.

"Is there something we need to see?"

I asked, watching the shadows lengthen across the Conservatory.

"Oh, absolutely, the Abyssal Starfall is next."

Krave whispered, her eyes reflecting the incoming darkness.