The frigid air of Nyxarion struck Nyxara's face as she stepped from the carriage, a familiar cold that should have felt like a homecoming. Instead, it felt like a slap, the wind itself seeming to reject her. Before her, the Conclave Ground should have been a place of wary but hopeful anticipation. Instead, it was a killing field of silence, a geo metric arrangement of judgment under a sky of dying stars.

The leaders of the Starborn clans were not gathered loosely. They were formed into a rigid, semicircular tribunal, a living wall of accusation. There were no greetings, no nods of respect. Only a mosaic of stony, hostile faces, their expressions lit by the erratic, dying pulse of the Algol prisms overhead, which cast long, distorted shadows that seemed to claw at her feet. The air crackled not with the energy of her return, but with the static of an imminent storm, thick with the scents of ozone, charred sugar, and the cold sweat of fear.

Korinakos materialized at her elbow, his face not just ashen, but grey with a terror that went beyond political anxiety. "My Queen," he whispered, his voice a strained thread, "they… they have convened the Cyanelle Ecclesia."

The name hit Nyxara with the force of a physical blow to the diaphragm, driving the air from her lungs. The Cyanelle Ecclesia. An ancient, emergency session of the full Starborn council, a relic from a more brutal and bloody time in their history. It had one purpose, and one purpose only: to adjudicate the fitness of the ruling sovereign. It had not been invoked in over fifty years, not since the mad Queen Cyanelle had tried to plunge their entire civilization into a singularity in a fit of stellar grief, convinced it was the only way to achieve 'perfect unity'. Its summoning was not a meeting; it was an indictment, a prelude to execution.

"On what grounds?" Nyxara asked, her voice low, her Polaris composure a thin sheet of ice over a roiling sea of panic.

"On the grounds of your… unilateral action," Korinakos stammered, his eyes darting towards the waiting council as if expecting them to strike him down for speaking to her. "And the… nature of the terms you return with. Concerns were… raised in your absence. They festered."

Concerns. The word was a bland, pathetic euphemism for the mutiny simmering before her. She saw it now in high definition: the way Umbra'zel's faction stood slightly apart, their collective hunger a palpable heat haze that made the air waver. The way Phthoriel's Betelgeuse warriors had their massive arms crossed, their volcanic fissures flickering not with power, but with the dim, angry light of distrust. The way Lyrathiel and the Vega poets looked at her not with hope, but with a profound, betrayed sorrow, as if she had personally composed the dirge for their children.

She had walked out of one throne room and into another. The architecture was made of crystal and star flecked rock instead of obsidian, but the judgment was the same. The condemnation was colder.

Without another word, Nyxara straightened her spine, the shifting colours of her eyes hardening into chips of determined, defiant stone. She would face this as she had faced Ryo: as a Queen. She walked toward them, each step echoing with a terrible finality on the crystalline floor. The silence was a physical weight, a suffocating blanket pushing against her, trying to silence her before she spoke. She stopped before the semicircle, a solitary figure against a wall of unified opposition, and met each of their gazes in turn.

"Councillor's," she began, her voice layered with the resonances of her lineage, a final, desperate attempt to harmonize the discord. "I return from Astralon not with surrender, but with a strategic victory. I have secured a truce along the Styx, a cessation of the purges, and a framework for…"

"You return with terms," Umbra'zel's voice cut through hers, a sound of grinding glass and embers. He stepped forward, his cracked porcelain skin pulsing with a vicious, carnivorous red light. The whispers he'd heard were now his absolute truth, recited with a zealot's conviction. "You walked into the Butcher King's den, sat at his table, and you returned with a list. We are not your puppet audience, My Queen, to be soothed with pretty words. We are starving, dying, and being hunted. And we will not be sold for your 'framework'. We will not be the currency of your peace."

The accusation hung in the air, so perfectly aimed it stole her breath. Sold. Currency. They were using the exact fears Kaustirix had weaponized.

"You dishonour the immense risk she took!" Korinakos protested, finding a shred of courage, but a sharp, icy look from Statera of Polaris silenced him. The council's mood was a unified glacier, and his voice was a drop of water against its face.

"It was not a risk," Phthoriel boomed, the orange fissures in his skin flaring with a dim, angry light. The sound was like boulders grinding together deep within a mountain on the verge of collapse. "It was a delay. A catastrophic strategic error. Every moment we stand here, talking of truces, his Void Guard regroups. My people fade while you negotiate with our exterminator. This is not strength. It is a failure of will. A failure of leadership." The whisper of imminent doom had found its mark, transforming exhaustion into a militant, desperate rage.

Lyrathiel's voice was softer, but the hurt in it was a sharper, more precise weapon. "You speak of unity and shared skies, My Queen," she said, a single, perfect tear tracing her cheek before freezing there. "But what of the poets freezing in the lower sectors? What of the children who will not see the next cycle? Your peace feels like a beautiful song for a funeral. Our funeral. You conduct a symphony for ghosts while the living audience starves." The dirge Kaustirix had composed for her was now on her lips, a heartbreaking melody of abandonment.

Nyxara felt the ground crumbling beneath her feet, the fragile ice of her composure beginning to crack. They were not listening. They were reciting a script written by a ghost in the wind. She tried to grasp for a solid point, for the core of her argument in Astralon, the one thing that had felt true amidst the horror.

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"I went to Astralon to speak to the son of Shojiki Oji!" she said, her voice rising, the Vega resonance straining to break through their hostility, to make them feel the truth of it. "A man of honour, a dreamer who believed in peace above all else! I went to appeal to the ghost of that man, to find a sliver of the father in the son! It is that legacy, that beautiful, fragile dream of unity between our peoples, that is our greatest weapon against the void he has become! It is the one thing he cannot understand and therefore cannot defend against!"

The moment the words left her mouth, she knew it was a catastrophic mistake.

A dead, cold silence fell over the Conclave, so absolute that Nyxara could hear the faint, dying crackle of the Algol prisms overhead. The councillor's stared at her as if she had just spoken pure heresy, as if she had vomited on the sacred texts of their survival.

Umbra'zel seized on it, his eyes blazing with shattered star fury. "There," he hissed, pointing a trembling, cracked finger at her as if branding her with the word. "There it is. The sentimentalist's heart revealed for all to see. You honour a dead man's dream while our living people suffer and die! You speak of the 'son of Shojiki' while the Butcher King skins our scouts and hangs them from his walls! You see a ghost where we see a monster! This is your failing, Nyxara! You are not a queen of the present; you are a historian mourning a past that never was! You are a curator of a museum of dreams while the real world burns down around us!"

The condemnation was universal. Grim nods of agreement came from Phthoriel. Averted, pained glances from Lyrathiel's faction. Statera closed her eyes as if in pain. Kaustirix had twisted her deepest conviction, her faith in lineage and legacy, into proof of her naivety, her disconnect, her treasonous softness. He had made her core strength look like her greatest weakness.

"My judgment is not clouded by sentiment!" Nyxara fought back, her own temper finally fraying, a flicker of Betelgeuse heat pulsing in the veins beneath her skin. "It is strategic! I was trying to find a crack in his armour that a sword cannot breach! I was trying to save us from annihilation!"

"And what of the cracks in your own judgment?" Statera's voice, when it came, was quiet, weary, and carried the weight of impending doom. It silenced everyone. She stepped forward, her own faded Polaris markings seeming to absorb the light in her shame and sorrow. "We had you observed, Nyxara. All of you."

Nyxara froze. The fight drained out of her, replaced by a new, chilling dread. "What?" The word was a breathless puff of frost.

"During your absence," Statera continued, her gaze dropping to the floor as if she could not bear to look at her queen while delivering the killing blow. "The protocols of the Cyanelle Ecclesia permit it. We had to know. Our watchers saw… they saw your shadow. Corvin."

A cold that had nothing to do with the environment began to crawl up Nyxara's spine, a sense of vertigo, as if the very floor beneath her was turning to smoke.

"We saw him not in the shadows where a spymaster belongs, but in the light," Statera said, her voice gaining a terrible, relentless strength from the collective outrage of the council. "Fighting beside the rebellion. The Twin Stars. And we saw what he carries on his hand, plain as Polaris." She finally looked up, and her eyes were not just accusing; they were grieving. "The ring. The ancient signet ring of the Oji lineage. The crest of the Butcher King himself, worn on the hand of your most trusted blade. The man you call your right hand. The man you sent to watch over our last hope, wears the mark of our eternal enemy."

The revelation did not land like a bomb; it unfolded like a poison gas, silent, insidious, and utterly suffocating. Gasps echoed, not loud, but horrified. Umbra'zel looked vindicated, a predator who had just seen his prey corner itself. Phthoriel's embers flared a blinding white hot. This was not political; it was personal. It was intimate.

Nyxara's mind reeled, her thoughts scattering like leaves in a hurricane. The ring. Kuro had mentioned it in the fissure, a fleeting detail lost in the avalanche of worse revelations. She had dismissed it, trusted Corvin's cryptic explanations implicitly. His loyalty was the bedrock upon which she had built her entire strategy, the one constant in a universe of shifting alliances and betrayals. The image of him, her confidant, her protector, the keeper of her deepest secrets, wearing the symbol of the man who had murdered his own wife, who had tortured his own son, who had murdered her husband and now who sought to exterminate her entire race… it was not just evidence. It was a fundamental violation that shattered her understanding of reality. It was a betrayal so deep it felt like the sky itself was a lie.

"It is not what it seems!" Nyxara insisted, but her voice sounded weak, desperate, a child's plea against an avalanche of damning logic. "It is a tool, a trophy, he, he took it from K…"

"A tool?" Umbra'zel shrieked, the sound scraping the inside of the skull. "It is a brand! It is the mark of the enemy on the hand of the man you let walk behind you! Did you know? Of course you did. Which means you knowingly sent a man bearing the sigil of our greatest foe as your envoy, tainting any 'peace' he might have helped you secure. Or you are so blinded by misplaced trust that you are unfit to see the viper you have warmed in your own den! Which is it, Nyxara? Treachery or incompetence?"

The logic was airtight, poisoned by perfect half truths and masterful manipulation. Kaustirix hadn't needed to invent anything. He had simply taken the facts, Corvin's presence with the rebels, the ring, Nyxara's absolute trust, and woven them into the most damning possible narrative. He had turned her greatest ally into the proof of her treason.

Nyxara stood utterly alone, the council's hostility a physical force pressing in on her, stealing the air from her lungs. Her triumph in Astralon was ashes. Her trust in Corvin was now a noose around her neck. Her faith in her father's dream was used as evidence of her treason. She had never felt more isolated, more utterly betrayed.

Statera took a final, solemn step forward, her expression one of profound, tragic duty. "The Cyanelle Ecclesia is convened. The question is before us, Queen Nyxara, forced upon us by your actions and your… catastrophic associations." She took a deep, shuddering breath, the words she spoke next echoing with the grim finality of a tomb sealing shut. "How do you answer the charge that your judgment, your very heart, has betrayed the legacy of Nyxarion itself?"

The words were a perfect, vicious mirror of her own plea to Ryo. The trap was complete. She had walked into the serpent's den in Astralon, and returned to find her own sanctuary had become another one, her most trusted guardians now her executioners.

And as she stood there, reeling, the haunting question hanging in the air like a headsman's axe, the most chilling realization of all dawned: the most dangerous enemy was not the one who ruled from a throne of obsidian. It was the one who could turn your own heart's song into a weapon for your execution, and make your deepest loyalty look like your ultimate crime.

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