Here is the expanded text at 1,400 words:
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The Life Monarch stood on his throne and looked down at Enzo like he was an ant.
His divine aura was sothing Enzo had never felt before.
It pressed down from every direction, heavy and absolute, the kind of weight that didn’t co from effort. It simply existed. Even with Enzo’s borrowed rank of divine sitting around him like a shield, it did almost nothing against this.
Suffocating didn’t quite cover it.
’This is what a true divine feels like.’
He kept his expression flat and said nothing.
"Greetings, Father of Life."
Victoria bowed ceremoniously beside him, smooth and practiced, and with a small motion of her hand indicated for Enzo to do the sa.
He started to.
"[You don’t need to bow]"
A voice landed beside him before he could finish the motion.
Enzo stopped and turned his head.
It wasn’t a sound exactly. More like a ntal imprint, a pressure that arrived fully ford with no point of entry. His eyes moved across the room, already knowing before he found it.
The void coffin.
It stood there in the room, tall and still, the black slab of stone present in the way it always was. Like it had always been there and the room had simply arranged itself around it.
Enzo stared at it for a mont.
’It followed us in here on its own.’
"Haha, it ca in here by itself? That’s wonderful!!"
The Monarch laughed, open and genuine, his gaze landing on the coffin with sothing that looked almost like delight.
Only a handful of people in existence knew the origins of that black slab of stone.
The Monarch was one of them.
The first ti he had seen it, standing beside Victoria, a chill had run down his spine sharp enough that he had avoided his daughter for days afterward. Not out of fear for himself. That wasn’t it.
He was afraid of what it ant for her.
What a thing like that, attached to a person like her, could an for where her path was going.
Thankfully it wasn’t exactly that.
He exhaled now, the laugh fading into sothing quieter, and looked at it with sothing closer to fondness.
"Hmm."
Enzo frowned.
The coffin didn’t move on its own. That wasn’t sothing it did. He had grown used to its presence, the weight of it, the way it sat at the edge of his awareness like sothing patient. But speaking on its own volition, crossing into a space like this uninvited and announcing itself?
That was a lot.
’What are you doing.’
The coffin offered nothing back. Just stood there.
"It’s fine," the Monarch said, his attention shifting back to Enzo. He looked at him for a long mont, unhurried, reading sothing. "I wouldn’t accept bowing from a foreigner either."
The aura hadn’t lifted but sothing in its pressure shifted slightly. Not gone. Just adjusted, like a hand pulling back two degrees.
"What do you want from , child?"
The question landed plainly. No edge to it.
Enzo was here because he had permanently killed a son of corruption. That act had consequences already moving through the universe whether he could feel them yet or not. In the near future, corruption would spend everything it could to put him in the ground. Every resource. Every asset.
The Monarch understood that. His question wasn’t confusion. It was invitation.
Enzo glanced sideways for just a fraction of a second.
Victoria’s voice had arrived in his mind monts before, calm and precise, laying out exactly what to say.
"I want to know the location of the other treasures of the night."
The Monarch’s expression didn’t change much, but sothing behind his eyes moved.
The areas of the universe where these treasures were stored were not places Enzo could simply walk into. Dangerous didn’t cover it properly. They were environnts that had resisted divine presences, that had swallowed entire expeditions whole and kept nothing.
Enzo wasn’t ready for them yet.
But Victoria was thinking ahead. She wanted to place her designs on those locations now, to prepare the ground before Enzo arrived, so that when the treasures pulled him in he wouldn’t be walking in blind.
That was step one.
"Ohh."
The Monarch leaned back slightly on his throne.
"I know where two are right now." He said it plainly, shalessly, like he was passing along sothing minor. "Take that as a reward for saving Victoria in Galafray, and from that bastard Razz."
He said it with the ease of a man who had watched both events unfold from exactly where he sat and had not moved once.
No acknowledgnt of that. Not even a flicker.
"Thank you, Father."
Victoria bowed, smooth and imdiate, and in that sa motion sothing passed between them. The information on both sites, received and stored.
"The other two I don’t know."
He shrugged his shoulders casually, the gesture enormous given his size, and then lifted one finger and pointed.
At the coffin.
"But it might."
Enzo looked back at the void coffin standing there in the room.
Auspicious. That was the only word for it.
He looked at it differently now than he had a few minutes ago. There was more there than it was letting off. He could feel it vaguely, sothing deep behind the surface of the stone, sothing that had been sitting on information the way old things sit on things. Quietly. With no urgency.
He filed that away.
"I have a second request."
Enzo looked back to the Monarch.
The Monarch smiled. "Speak."
Not irritated. Not impatient. Just waiting.
"We need a mind root."
Enzo said it like he understood exactly what it ant and exactly why he was asking for it.
He didn’t, fully.
Victoria had placed that one in his mind too, clean and ready to deliver. He was the voice. She was the architecture behind every word.
"Granted."
The Monarch said it without hesitation, then settled back into his throne with the energy of soone who was waiting. Still smiling. Eyes on Enzo with a patience that had a shape to it.
He knew what Victoria knew.
There was a request she understood he wanted to hear. The right one. The one that would confirm sothing for him about this young man standing at the base of his bridge covered in borrowed darkness and void proximity.
He would wait for it.
He was prepared to indulge this for as long as it took.
He was not, however, prepared for what ca next.
"Can I have the divine army?"
The room shifted.
Enzo’s expression was completely open. Relaxed. The kind of face a child made when asking a parent for the most outrageous thing they could think of, fully committed to the ask, no embarrassnt behind it whatsoever.
Silence.
The Monarch stared at him.
The vegetation around the bridge rustled faintly.
"Don’t push it, Victoria."
His gaze moved from Enzo’s face directly to Victoria, the warmth gone from his expression for the first ti since they had arrived. Not rage. Not threat.
Just the flat, tired look of a man who recognized his daughter’s fingerprints on sothing ridiculous and was not going to pretend otherwise.
Annoyed.
Genuinely, visibly annoyed.
Victoria said nothing.
Enzo kept the sa expression on his face.
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