The heavy nebula wood door sighed shut behind Statera, sealing the three women inside a tense, triangular standoff. The air, still vibrating from Lucifera's thunderclap slap and the psychic aftershock of her furious declaration, was thick enough to drink, a cloying mélange of ozone, charred sugar, and the metallic tang of impending crisis.

Nyxara remained on the floor, one hand pressed against her flaming cheek, the other braced against the cold stone. The two impacts, physical and psychological, reverberated through her in conflicting waves. Lucifera's words, "You will be the pole star… even if you have to fake the light," were a brutal mantra against the searing pain on her face. It was a command, a challenge, an impossibility.

Her mind was a screeching vortex. Fake the light. How could she? The light was gone. Extinguished by the flat, dead certainty in Ryo's eyes, shattered by the cold glint of the Oji ring on Corvin's finger, drowned in the accusing stares of her own council. The foundation of her entire being, her judgment, her trust, her resolve was dust.

But Lucifera was still there, a statue of furious light, her brilliant white gaze burning away the fog of despair. Statera was there, her Polaris composure a familiar, if currently terrifying, anchor in the raging sea. They were waiting. The Queen was on the floor. The woman was broken. But the crown, however tarnished, was still on her head.

The weight of their expectant silence was heavier than the leaden cloak of her failure.

With a shuddering breath that felt like drawing glass into her lungs, Nyxara moved. It was not a graceful rise. It was a slow, painful uncurling, a pushing upward against the gravity of a world that wanted to crush her. Her muscles screamed in protest, every joint aching with a deep, spiritual fatigue. She did not look at them as she gained her feet, her focus inward, a desperate gathering of scattered, terrified pieces.

She could feel their eyes on her: Lucifera's challenging, impatient glare; Statera's anxious, sorrowful watchfulness.

She turned her back to them, facing the pulsating, sickly heart of Algol in the Celestial Tapestry. Its arrhythmic beat was a mirror to her own. She closed her eyes.

Fake the light.

The first shift was subtle. A deep breath. The fine tremor in her hands stilled, not by force of will, but by an act of sheer theatrical defiance. When she opened her eyes again, the swirling, chaotic storm of her multi hued irises began to still, the frantic colours coalescing, cooling, settling into a deep, steady, and terrifyingly calm Polaris blue. The pale, steady luminescence of the North Star seeped into her skin, smoothing the anguish from her features, erasing the flush of the slap beneath a mask of glacial composure. Her posture straightened, the slump of despair replaced by the regal line of her spine. The Queen's mask was not a lie; it was a fortress, and she retreated behind its walls, leaving the weeping woman locked in the dungeon below.

She turned to face them.

The transformation was absolute. Where a moment before a shattered woman had knelt, now stood the Queen of Nyxarion. Her gaze, when it settled on Statera, was not warm, but it was focused. Clear. The voice that emerged from her lips was layered with the resonant, unwavering certainty of Polaris, stripped of all tremors, all hesitation. It was a voice meant to command attention and broker no argument.

"Statera," Nyxara began, the title a formal acknowledgment that reestablished the hierarchy, drawing a line between the personal cataclysm that had just occurred and the business of state. "You said the news could not wait. Deliver your report."

The shift was so sudden, so complete, that even Lucifera's furious energy seemed momentarily checked, a flicker of something akin to grudging respect crossing her features before it was subsumed back into her impatient intensity.

Statera, to her credit, did not falter. She bowed her head slightly, a gesture of deference to the office, if not entirely to the person wearing it in this moment.

"My Queen," she said, her own voice weary but precise. "The situation is deteriorating. Rapidly. The unrest is no longer confined to the council chambers or the whispers of the Algol."

Nyxara's mask did not flicker. She simply waited, a statue of Polaris ice, her hands clasped loosely before her. Inside the fortress, the woman was screaming.

"Reports are flooding in from all sectors," Statera continued, her words quickening with urgency. "The Sirius quarter is in open debate; the binary pulse of their consensus fractured into a dozen competing frequencies. Public arguments erupt in the crystalline plazas. The Polaris lower sectors, those who have clung to your light the longest… even there, the 'Frost Walk' is being discussed not as a discipline, but as a futile gesture. They are cold, My Queen. And fear is a colder master than any winter."

Nyxara's heart gave a sickening lurch. The Polaris. Her people. The bedrock of her support. 'Futile.' The word was a shard of ice in her soul. But outwardly, she only gave a slow, deliberate nod. "Go on."

"The Betelgeuse forges," Statera said, her voice dropping as if the news was too volatile to speak at full volume. "Phthoriel's warriors… their Ember Bursts are being channelled not into defence, but into heated arguments. Brawls have broken out between those who call for immediate, total war despite the truce and those who… who see your parley as a betrayal that must be answered. They are turning their fire on each other."

A vision flashed behind Nyxara's eyes: the great, lava cracked warriors of Betelgeuse, the steadfast guardians of Nyxarion, splintering into factions, their explosive power turned inward. It was a nightmare. The fortress walls of her composure trembled. A single, almost imperceptible crack appeared in the Polaris calm. The porcelain perfection of her skin flickered, and for a microsecond, a web of fine, angry Algol red crackled across her cheekbone, a flash of the volcanic rage and hungry desperation boiling within. It was gone as quickly as it appeared, smoothed over by a monumental effort of will.

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"And the Algol?" Nyxara asked, her voice miraculously retaining its steady, analytical tone, though it felt like speaking with ground glass in her throat.

Statera's expression became grim. "Umbra'zel's faction grows stronger by the hour. They are not just hungry; they are evangelists. They preach a new truth: that your truce is a covenant with the void, a promise to deliver the 'strongest and hungriest' of us to Ryo's altar to secure your own power. They are calling it the 'Queen's Tithe.' Their numbers swell with every rumour, every fearful soul looking for a simple answer to a complex terror."

The Queen's Tithe. The phrase was a masterpiece of venomous propaganda. It was the perfect perversion of her intent, the exact fear Kaustirix had seeded in Umbra'zel now spreading like a plague. Inside, the woman in the dungeon howled in denial. The Queen on the throne absorbed the blow without a flinch.

"This is not random dissent," Nyxara stated, her mind, honed by decades of rule, cutting through the emotional horror to the strategic nightmare beneath. "The timing is too perfect. The coordination across clans, too precise. This is a targeted campaign. These whispers have a source." Her Polaris gaze sharpened, focusing on Statera with laser intensity. "What is the factor or rather Who? How is this poison being spread?"

This was the question that truly frightened Statera. She hesitated, a rare show of uncertainty. "That is the most troubling part, Your Majesty. We cannot find one. There are no new proclamations, no missives from Astralon that we have intercepted. The Corvus network, what remains of it that is still loyal, reports… nothing. It is as if the doubts themselves are simply… coalescing from the air. As if they were always there, sleeping, and have now been awakened by a single, silent note we cannot hear."

She took a step closer, her own fear breaking through her professional demeanour. "It is a psychic epidemic. A memetic virus. The people are turning against you not because of evidence, but because of a feeling, a pervasive, instinctual certainty that you have betrayed them. It is in the water. It is in the very light of our fading stars."

The explanation was more terrifying than any tangible threat. An enemy you could not find, could not fight, could not reason with. Kaustirix. It had to be. This was his masterpiece. Not an army at the gates, but a rot in the foundation. He was making her people tear themselves apart for him.

The sheer, brilliant, vicious cruelty of it was too much.

The royal mask shattered.

It did not fall away slowly; it exploded from within.

The steady Polaris blue in her eyes was violently swamped by a whirlpool of Algol red, a torrent of raw, betrayed fury. Her skin, once pale and luminescent, now pulsed with the hot, cracked lightning patterns of a star going supernova. The air around her grew hot, shimmering with the reek of ozone and the cloying sweetness of charred sugar.

"NO!"

The word was a roar, torn from a place deeper than reason, layered with the screaming harmonics of a thousand betrayed ancestors. It was not the controlled voice of a queen, but the raw outcry of a woman pushed to the absolute brink.

"They look at me," she seethed, advancing a step toward Statera, her form flickering dangerously between her solid shape and something more elemental, more volatile, "and they see a monster? They call my peace a tithe? After everything I have endured? After I stood in his house and faced the void itself for them?!"

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, the veins beneath her skin tracing furious, glowing constellations. "I have given them everything! My youth, my peace, my safety! I carried my father's dream until my back broke under its weight! And for what? For this? For their whispered accusations and their faithless, fearful hearts?!"

"My Queen, you must…" Statera tried, her voice laced with a new, rising panic.

But Nyxara was beyond hearing. The Algol hunger, the desperate, consuming need that she fought to keep suppressed every moment of every day, now surged to the forefront, a ravenous beast finally unleashed.

"LET THEM STARVE!" Nyxara screamed, the words echoing off the obsidian walls, a blasphemy against every tenet of her being. "Let them feel the true cold! Let them choke on their own suspicions! If my compassion is seen as weakness, if my attempt at peace is viewed as treason, then let them have the war they seem to crave! Let them see what happens when the last thread of patience snaps! If they want a butcher for a queen, then perhaps I should…"

"ENOUGH!"

Lucifera's voice was another thunderclap, but this one was not meant to awaken. It was meant to halt. She stepped between Nyxara and a visibly trembling Statera, her Sirius light not furious now, but horrifyingly clear and cold.

"Look at yourself!" Lucifera commanded, her voice cutting through the heat haze of Algol energy. "Listen to the words coming from your mouth! You speak of letting your people starve? Of giving them the butcher they 'deserve'?"

She took another step forward, forcing Nyxara to meet her blazing white gaze. "You are not describing a queen making a hard choice. You are describing Cyanelle."

The name landed with the force of a physical blow. The mad queen. The one who had tried to murder a star in a fit of pique, who saw her people as disobedient children to be punished, not protected.

Nyxara recoiled as if struck. " I am nothing like her!"

"Aren't you?" Statera whispered, her voice thick with a grief that was far more damaging than fear. "She, too, felt betrayed. She, too, believed her people were ungrateful, that they failed to understand her grand design. She, too, decided that if they would not appreciate her light, they could perish in the darkness she would create. Please, My Queen… do not walk that path. I beg you."

For a terrible, suspended moment, the Algol fury burned even hotter, fed by this ultimate accusation. Nyxara's form seemed to swell with incandescent rage, the light in the chamber dipping as if she were drawing all energy into herself for a catastrophic release. Her eyes were pure, unadulterated crimson fire.

"How dare you…" she breathed, the sound like the grinding of tectonic plates. "After all I have sacrificed… you compare me to that… that madwoman?"

"We dare," Lucifera said, her voice dropping into a deadly calm, "because we are standing with you. And standing with you sometimes means standing in front of you. It means stopping you from becoming the very monster your enemies are painting you to be. This is not strength, Nyxara. This is a tantrum. This is the hurt of a child lashing out at the world. A queen must be better. A queen must endure."

The words did not calm the storm; they simply redirected it inward. The fury, with no external target, collapsed under its own impossible weight. The Algol red in her eyes didn't just recede; it shattered, dissolving into a swirling, chaotic maelstrom of colour, the sorrowful silver of Vega, the exhausted, guttering orange embers of Betelgeuse. The oppressive heat vanished, leaving a sudden, shocking void of cold in its wake. The magnificent, terrifying energy that had filled her dissipated like smoke, leaving behind a vessel that was empty, fragile, and shaking.

She stumbled back, her legs buckling, and caught herself on the edge of the frozen obsidian pool. The fight was gone. Extinguished. All that remained was a hollowed out shell of a ruler, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps that sounded dangerously close to sobs.

She looked at her hands, the hands that had moments ago seemed capable of tearing the world apart, as if she didn't recognize them. They were just hands. Small. Useless.

When she spoke again, her voice was a threadbare whisper, stripped of all resonance, all power, all artifice. It was just her voice. Small. Tired. And filled with a despair so profound it was worse than any rage.

"What do they want from me?" she asked the empty air, the question a plea to gods long dead, her gaze drifting between Lucifera's hardened face and Statera's grief stricken one. "What more can I possibly give? What more can I possibly do?"

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