Algernon Black

(Chapter 133) Ballrooms and Battlefields

Selice had been enjoying the night to as reasonable an extent as someone as introverted as herself could. She spent most of her time watching Loy socialize with the students who were closer to his age than the Conclave members and the young girls batting their eyelashes at him, though theirs weren't half as beautiful as Loy's princely long ones. It left her to casually observe everything from a corner which she tremendously preferred to being dragged along onto the dance floor by Loy. He still remained there, entertaining some haughty-dressed noblewomen. Selice noticed him dancing earlier with a girl in the gray dress Aloysius had picked out for Lucy, though she couldn't catch a clear look at her face, just blonde hair swaying while she danced. She went about trying to find Lucy now, to introduce herself as a friend of her brother, but the crowd of people was hard to navigate and Selice was forced to walk the perimeter of the room looking for her when something suddenly stopped her in her tracks. It was a certain man's figure with silver-white brass hair, and glasses hanging down from a chain on his neck. Someone who blended in to look as normal as anyone else, except that he didn't.

Selice veered directions to follow the man, thinking she must be imagining things, that there was no way..... surely it couldn't be... It was just a flash she caught of his profile but a profile entirely unchanged between the fifteen year interval since the last time she beheld it.

Selice chased after the hair disappearing and reappearing amongst the crowd of bodies. Her pendant suddenly pressed against her chest and radiated a deep heat into her heart, or maybe that was her heart pumping with adrenaline.

Luke was dancing with Orenza in the middle of the floor while glaring at a particularly bulky prince drawing a lot of attention to himself, but what really stood out to Luke was his glistening chain necklace.

Cecil couldn't be bothered to dance and stood at the sidelines, trying to work out a plan to leave without Boyce noticing and wringing his neck.

Selice tracked the head of hair all the way to the outskirts of the sea of bodies and burst free from the crowd after him. But she came face to face with a blank wall and a man nowhere in her sights.

"Hello, child." A serene man's voice said from behind her. "You've grown so big."

Selice turned around having paled to a ghost's parlor. That smile. That voice. Those eyes.

It was him. The man who gave her her necklace. It was an impossibility for it to be him as she perceived him. His face free of any imperfections that time induced; as if he was carved out of stone. Stone was the only explanation she could make for the fact he remained unchanged after 15 years.

Selice's necklace undoubtedly burned, and then it began to vibrate.

"Why do you keep looking back?" Orenza asked Luke when his bucking head movements started to affect their dance.

Luke was about to answer when Orenza abruptly peered down at his hand that held her own and the metal cuff started to vibrate softly, and then extremely fast all within a second.

Loy's chain did the same.

As did Cecil's earring.

The next second all Hell broke loss.

An explosion burst from the stage and up through the ceiling before combusting wide and outwards. Collapsing boulders of marble littered down onto the crowds who erupted in screams of terrors before a wave of their deaths.

Selice was blinded by the pervasion of flames but was saved by the man who shielded her from the attack with his body. It had happened so fast...she wasn't even processing what was happening and could barely process her savior, the same savior who had given her the pendant necklace all those years ago, now completely motionless on the ground. Selice froze upon his lifeless body.