Cannon Fodder To Villainess

🏮84. Empress Dowager

Amber frowned in confusion while she walked out of the cave. Why had she agreed to go on a date with him? That wasn't like her at all. Maybe it was the way he'd talked to her that made it difficult to turn him down.

All of that aside, the strangest part about everything had happened afterwards. She had walked back the way she'd come, to get better oriented into the cave. Then she discovered that the previously dead end passageway now had a large exit. She frowned in confusion while walking out of the cave and looking back at the entrance.

As soon as she exited the cave, a strange feeling of impending doom washed over her. She wasn't sure what was wrong and she saw no signs of danger. However, she knew deep down that something was terribly wrong. It was still night, but the green smoke that had previously wrapped around the trees was finally clearing out. The fog hadn't bothered her all that much, in fact she had barely been affected by the fog at all. Whereas others felt like they might parish from it at any moment. However, even though the fog was gone and she could see around herself clearly, she had the odd sensation of being watched.

Far away, in the capital city of Verglas, which was called Janara, there was a tower at its center. This tower was much taller than any other building and just as wide as a large mansion. It was dark gray, made from bricks as tall as a person, and covered in runes. Twenty cubes around the tower, the grass shriveled and died. This gave the impression that the tower itself was poisonous. Past the dead grass, there was a large artfully trimmed landscape garden that went around the tower.

Outside the perfectly trimmed garden, there were buildings built practically on top of each other, vying for a good position in the booming city around them. However, as cramped as the city was and as hard as it was to find a place to do business, no one ever tried to enter the garden or build anywhere near its borders. This was because the tower was the home of the Empress Dowager, whom no one besides her close relatives were brave enough to easily approach. The people called the tower, 'Overshadow'.

Belladonna was a woman who had come from mysterious origins and had pushed her way into the previous emperor's bed. After that, she had somehow managed to become the Empress despite not being able to conceive. The rumors running amok about her soon diminished however, once people started mysteriously disappearing. Even if people hadn't started to disappear around her, her never aging appearance, and her dark orange eyes would have been enough to gain people's concern.

She was a beautiful woman with flawlessly smooth skin, charcoal gray hair, and perfect mannerisms. Her hair curled in little spirals which she always had tightly pinned up by servants. She was well formed and ageless, other than the slight dull tone that had developed in her hair in more recent years. She had long become the Empress Dowager and was nearing her ninetieth birthday, but didn't look a day over twenty-five.

No matter where she was or what she was doing, she always wore clothing that befitted her station over her activity. She was a loveless woman, one who looked down on anything that wasn't purely logical. She had been married and then she had been a widow. She had been the only one of Emperor Cryose Verglas's wives who hadn't cried at his funeral and the only one out of five-hundred who remained living. She had made sure that most of them had been buried with him shortly after his ceremony. After all, if they had been so upset that they wanted to make fools of themselves, who was she to keep them from the man they all loved?

That day, the ceremony had ended and shortly afterwards she had ordered the other wives to be closed up in the royal tomb when they sealed it. He had been a womanizer. He had gone up to the empire's set limit of how many wives a ruler can have. They had been sealed inside the royal tomb alive without any more supplies than what the emperor had been buried with. Although she had seemed petty and cruel, this was her only way of securing her position of power.

At the moment she was standing at the top of her tower and looking through the enchanted dome. She had commissioned this tower from the Empire of Mavire with the help of their mages.

The mages of Mavire were excellent at creating buildings and objects with magical properties because their magic worked by creating runes. By creating the magical sequence of a spell written in runes, with the right amount of skill and magical ability, they could enchant any object whichever way they pleased. However, runes needed to have enough mana woven into them while being created. More complex runes required more skill and more magical power. There were rules to their form of magic, just as there were rules with any form of magic and there were some rune sequences that were forbidden magic.

In order to operate runes that are created by someone else, you either need the rune key, or you need to be a mage with enough skill to unravel the puzzle within the runes. The more skill the mage who created the rune had, the harder it is to break their enchantment. Runes were always written in their ancient lettering in the form of riddles or other puzzles, and imbued with the mana of the caster. There are some well known and basic rune sequences used in everyday items, but Rune Masters pride themselves on creating runes that no one else can unravel.

Commercial operating rune keys are either in the form of a button or in the handle of a magical item, which you can push your mana into. They are easily accessible to anyone who has mana and has one set function. There are also items that are simply meant to magnify your own magic or help you control it.

The Empress Dowager pushed her mana into the Sight Dome and spoke, "Show me the Shadow Forest."

The view zoomed in from her current position and showed an area of dark trees that had living shadows flickering and dancing between their branches. The forest had come alive and there were no signs of green smoke.

The Empress Dowager affectionately rubbed the sides of her toy. This was an object which had taken a great deal of effort on her part to obtain. Secretly kidnapping and then killing a renowned Rune Master from Mavire hadn't been the easiest feat.

She felt pleased seeing that Duke Dreyfus had completed his mission. She closed the Sight Dome with a small smile on her lips, never suspecting that her coveted dragon was currently in the hands of another.