Last week began with Rozemyne performing the spring baptism ceremony for the lower city’s new seven year olds, including her brother Kamil. Rozemyne has a chance to see her lower city family and Lutz after the ceremony has completed.
Rozemyne is summoned to an archducal family meeting to discuss Ehrenfest’s defenses. She is not assigned a particular defensive duty due to the necessity of her leaving for the Sovereignty in the near future.
During the meeting Rozemyne has a vision of Ferdinand being poisoned and paralyzed at Ahrensbach’s Mana Replenishment hall in a plot of Georgine’s design. The rainbow feystone charm that Rozemyne gave Ferdinand is helping to protect him, but Detlinde puts schtappe sealing bracelets on him and forces his mana to drain into the foundation.
Rozemyne is adamant about saving Ferdinand before all his mana is drained and convinces Sylvester to provide his support. They use the magic tool given to Aubs to have an emergency meeting with Aub Dunkelfelger. Rozemyne explains the situation to Aub Dunkelfelger and convinces him to join in her plan to take Ahrensbach’s foundation to save Ferdinand and also to help defend the Sovereignty from Detlinde’s plan to take the throne with Lanzenave’s support.
Aub Dunkelfelger and Rozemyne discuss the necessary preparations for their battle and decide to meet at midnight at Dunkelfelger’s country gate. After the meeting Sylvester receives word that Eckhart and Justus have escaped Ahrensbach and are in Ehrenfest’s tea party room at the Royal Academy. Sylvester agrees to contact the Royal Family and other duchies as well as to go meet with Eckhart and Justus. Rozemyne leaves to prepare with her retainers for the coming battle.
This week should see the end of the main story for this volume. What do you predict will still happen? Who’s point of view would you like to follow in the epilogue?
Feels like the volume should end with meeting Duneklfelger at the country gate. It’d make a good epilogue to have it be from someone else’s perspective, like Hannelore maybe.
Going to be quite the change of pace if the short stories circle back to earlier parts of the volume. There’s tons of space available for content while Rozemyne was absent, but it just feels like it would disrupt the tone.
Meeting with Aurelia also has to happen. She served both Alstede and Detlinde, and owes Rozemyne and Elvira a great deal, it’d be stupid to not ask her for information on Ahrensbach’s security protocols.
Ah right, that was mentioned. Maybe this will give her a chance to leave the estate and join the discussion despite the infant?
I do hope we will get something from either Sylvester or one of the royals about the upcoming negotiations that Sylvester said he was going to do, either as the epilogue or a side-story. I’m quite confident that Trauerqual will be only to happy to do whatever Rozemyne wants, the moment he learns of her having the Grutrissheit (I know technically she only has 2/3, but she didn’t even say out loud that she had it, much less that it’s incomplete, so he would probably assume it’s complete and report as much to the royals), but I have no idea how Sigiswald would react.
Anastasius would probably be happy to have a way to get rid of Detlinde, without plunging the the country into absolute chaos, but he might still be in timeout by this father.
Considering how this involved her son’s future home and wife, I wonder what Magdalena thinks about the whole issue. She was quite opposed to Ferdinand, so she might resist intervention in Ahrensbach to safe him, but how much say does the king’s third wife actually have?
Maybe we’ll finally get a proper introduction to Trauerqual’s first wife and learn a bit about her views and personality.
I fully expect there’ll be a chapter from someone in Ahrensbach’s view. No idea whether it’ll be from Letizia, Detlinde, Leonzio or Georgine, or maybe Eckhart or Justus, with their POV starting in Ahrensbach and then transitioning to their flight and then talk with Sylvester, but I’m sure we’ll get something from there. I certainly am very curious how Justus and Eckhart gained access to the teleporter to the academy. They must have taken that teleporter, since going over land would have taken longer and the only other teleportation circles we know of are the ones between the country gate and the palance and the one between the Lanzenave estate and the Adalgisa villa in the academy, but neither of them should be accessible without the Zent unlocking them, so they don’t seem like an option either. And if they arrived in the dormitory, how did they get out of it and into the rest of the academy? Did they already unlock the door again in preparation for the archduke conference?
There was something about a professor being removed from her post due to making too much of a fuss over Rozemyne’s disappearance, so does that mean Fraularm is already out and maybe someone loyal to either Letizia or Ferdinand replaced her and let them out of the dorm?
Justus and Eckhart probably had Ahrensbach dorm access badges from when they visited at the last archduke conference. So if they managed to get to the teleporter, they managed to get all the way to the door of Ehrenfest’s dorm.
But the doors get fully locked, when no students are present, aren’t they?
There’s probably some students taking remedial classes.
I think we’ll probably have a chapter with Rozemyne having a meeting with her retainers and preparing what they need for the fight. Then I’m thinking the epilogue maybe with Sylvester contacting the royal family and meeting with Eckhart and Justus.
It’s hard to guess how much the story will progress lately. Some weeks it seems like the story is on fast forward and other weeks it’s a lot more chill. Now that we’re on a time crunch to save Ferdinand I think the time is going to slow to fill in more details about the rescue. I expect the next 24 hours to span maybe 4 or 5 chapters, although we’ll have side stories in the middle.
