Lloyd, in contrast, played with a style that was utterly alien to the classical, formal traditions of this world. He did not build a fortress. He did not seek to control the center. He played a fluid, adaptive, and deeply, profoundly strange game. He sacrificed pawns with a casual, almost contemptuous, disregard for material advantage. He moved his pieces in strange, asymmetrical, and seemingly illogical patterns. To the Don, it looked like the frantic, panicked, and utterly amateurish flailing of a boy who was hopelessly out of his depth. He felt a flicker of disappointment. The challenge, which had promised such magnificent sport, was turning out to be a pathetic, one-sided slaughter. But Lloyd was not just playing. He was calculating. He was not playing the board; he was playing the man. He was not thinking one, two, or even ten moves ahead. He was thinking in probabilities, in branching, multi-layered decision trees, in the cold, hard, and utterly dispassionate logic of a twenty-second-century grandmaster. His mind was not a human thing; it was a quantum computer, processing a million possible futures in a single, silent instant. His seemingly random sacrifices were not mistakes; they were probes. Each one was a calculated move designed to test the Don’s reactions, to map his thought processes, to build a perfect, predictive model of his opponent’s mind. He was feeding the python, letting it believe it was winning, while he was silently, methodically, and ruthlessly mapping the precise location of its heart. The game continued, a silent, brutal war of attrition. An hour passed. The board was a graveyard of crystal and obsidian. The Don’s python’s coil had tightened. Lloyd’s king was exposed, his defenses shattered, his position, by any classical, rational assessment, utterly, completely, and hopelessly lost. The Don allowed himself a small, internal smile of satisfaction. The boy had been… spirited. But ultimately, foolish. He saw the path to victory laid out before him, a clean, elegant, and utterly inescapable checkmate in five moves. He reached out a gnarled, confident hand to move his queen, to begin the final, triumphant, and beautifully inevitable endgame. And it was then that the trap, which had been a hundred moves in the making, the trap that the Don had not even known existed, finally, silently, and absolutely, sprung. Lloyd moved his last, remaining, and seemingly insignificant bishop. It was a quiet, unassuming, and utterly suicidal move. It placed the bishop directly in the path of the Don’s most powerful rook, a free, and utterly irresistible, piece. The Don froze, his hand hovering over his queen. He stared at the board, his ancient, brilliant mind for the first time, in a very, very long time, feeling a flicker of… confusion. The move was a mistake. A blunder of such epic, amateurish proportions that it was an insult to the game itself. He looked deeper. He followed the new, impossible lines of power that the bishop’s suicidal move had created. And he felt a cold, unfamiliar, and deeply unsettling sensation snake its way up his spine. The bishop was not a blunder. It was a key. A key that had just unlocked a hidden, complex, and utterly terrifying new dimension to the game. It was a sacrifice that had, in a single, brilliant, and utterly insane move, transformed the entire, fundamental reality of the board. His beautiful, elegant, and five-move checkmate was gone. In its place was a new, and far more terrible, reality. He was the one in checkmate. In two. The hall was utterly, completely silent. The silence in the grand, shadowy hall was no longer a weapon of intimidation; it was a shroud of pure, unadulterated shock. The Don Garcia, the ancient, undefeated ghost-king, the man who had played chess with kings and grandmasters for over a century and had almost never lost, was staring at the board with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man who has just seen a ghost. His mind, a magnificent, ancient, and beautifully ordered fortress of logic and strategy, was in a state of chaotic, mutinous disarray. He traced the lines of power again, and then a third time, his brain refusing to accept the brutal, undeniable, and utterly impossible truth that the obsidian and weirwood battlefield was showing him. It was a checkmate. A perfect, beautiful, and utterly inescapable one. It was a trap of such profound, multi-layered, and insidious genius that he had not just failed to see it coming; he had been the one to have enthusiastically, and with a deep sense of his own impending triumph, walked directly into it. The boy had not just defeated him. He had led him, by the nose, to his own execution. He looked up from the board, his ancient, raptor-like gaze settling on the young man who sat opposite him. The boy was not gloating. He was not smiling. He was simply… waiting. His expression was one of calm, quiet, and almost sympathetic respect. He was a grandmaster who had just, with a beautiful, final, and utterly devastating move, defeated another, and he was now offering his fallen opponent the quiet, professional courtesy of a moment to process his own annihilation. Slowly, deliberately, the Don Garcia leaned back in his petrified throne. And a slow, wide, and utterly, magnificently genuine smile of profound, and deeply personal, respect spread across his ancient, wizened face. He had not been defeated. He had been… privileged. He had been a witness to a level of genius, a form of beautiful, alien, and utterly transcendent logic, that he had not known was even possible. “Magnificent,” he whispered, the word a sound of pure, unadulterated awe. “Absolutely, breathtakingly magnificent.” He then revealed a secret of his own, a final, beautiful piece of the puzzle that he now, with a new, and far deeper, understanding, saw in its entirety. “The two times your clever, upstart king managed to best me,” he said, his voice a low, musing rumble, “it was for the same prize. A single, perfect leaf from the Violent Purple Tree. Once for a plague that was sweeping his southern provinces. Once for a poison that had struck down his own queen.” He looked at Lloyd, and his eyes were filled with a new, and very old, kind of wisdom. “First the king, and now… his shadow. It seems that my poor, ancient tree has become the personal apothecary for the House of Bethelham.” He rose from his throne, his ancient body moving with a new, and surprisingly fluid, grace. The weight of a hundred and fifty years of pride and sorrow seemed to have lifted from his shoulders, replaced by the light, exhilarating energy of a man who has just been given a truly, magnificent gift. “A wager is a wager,” he declared, his voice once again the booming, authoritative instrument of a king. “And a Garcia always, always, pays his debts.” He made a solemn, binding, and utterly sacred vow. “I will grant your request, Jerrom Austin’s grandson,” he said, the title now not a challenge, but a term of deep, and very personal, respect. “But hear me now. This will be the third, and the very last time, that a single leaf from the Violent Purple Tree ever leaves the possession of my family. The price your king paid was a king’s ransom in gold and political concessions. The price you have paid… is a wound to my pride that I will cherish for the rest of my days. There is nothing left for any other to offer.” The deal was done. The impossible had been achieved. And Lloyd, who had just waged, and won, a silent, beautiful, and utterly brutal war of the mind, simply gave a low, respectful, and deeply, profoundly grateful, bow of his head. He had come here seeking a leaf. He had found, instead, a legend. And he had earned it not with the steel of his father, but with the mind of a man from another, and very, very different, world. Lloyd’s return to the Siddik mansion was a quiet, understated, and profoundly triumphant affair. He rode into the main courtyard not as a supplicant returning from a desperate, fool’s errand, but as a conqueror returning from a successful, if silent, campaign. He was met not by the full, formal reception of the household, but by the two women who had become the unlikely anchors of his new reality: Mina and Rosa. Newest update provıded by 𝗇𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅•𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾•𝗇𝖾𝗍 They stood on the portico, two beautiful, and utterly different, pillars of silver and shadow. Mina’s face was a mask of anxious, hopeful, and almost unbearable tension. Rosa’s was a study in serene, icy, and perfectly controlled neutrality. But her eyes, her dark, intelligent, and now terrifyingly expressive eyes, held a storm of unspoken, and perhaps even unacknowledged, hope. He dismounted from his horse, his movements slow, deliberate, his face a calm, unreadable mask. He walked towards them, and in his outstretched hand, he held not a sword, not a trophy, but a single, small, and exquisitely crafted box of polished, dark weirwood. He did not speak. He did not need to. He simply opened the box.