For a full minute, their eyes locked on each other without blinking.
Celestia looked at him.
He looked at her.
The silence between them was not the comfortable kind. It was the silence of disbelief, the kind so complete that neither of them could react imdiately, could only stand in it and wait for their minds to catch up to what their eyes were telling them.
Celestia recognized him slowly.
Maybe it was because he looked slightly different here, glowing with a quiet, ancient magic the way she had only ever seen in the animated stories she used to watch in her original world.
The kind of glow that belonged to sothing that had just been released from a very long captivity and was still rembering what it felt like to exist without walls.
The height first. Then his silver hair, sparkling faintly, catching the dim light of the storage room in a way that made her fingers twitch involuntarily. It reminded her, absurdly, of the silver cat she had once seen at a zoo, soft looking. Deceptively so.
Then the particular aura of darkness that seed to belong exclusively to him.
Then his eyes.
One blood red. One deep erald.
She had seen those eyes before.
The Royal Court.
The realization arrived slowly and then all at once, the man who had been about to end Edrian’s life this morning, the one who had looked at her with that particular brand of cold fury that suggested she was sothing he wanted to remove from existence, the one whose eyes had dropped to her wrist and stayed there a mont too long before sothing shifted in his expression, was standing in front of her.
This close.
In her grandmother’s room.
With his hands on her waist.
After she had just wished for him to kiss her.
Oh, she thought. Oh no.
Drazeil had known the mont his eyes opened.
Before he fully accessed the room, before the lamp, before the darkness, before any of it, that scent reached him. Strawberries, warm and sweet and faint and entirely, infuriatingly familiar.
The sa scent that had followed him out of the Royal Court and into Infernal and apparently had no intention of leaving him alone.
And then he saw her face.
The girl from the Royal Court. Standing in front of him with her bright ruby eyes wide and her fan clutched in one hand and the particular expression of soone who had just connected a series of dots and was still processing where the line had landed.
The fury that moved through him was imdiate and absolute.
Her. Of all the people in the Kingdom of Thaloria — of all the people in every realm he had passed through in centuries of existence — it was her.
The Celestial being he had been unable to kill this morning. The one who had stood in that court and disrupted everything with a speech about justice and a glowing wrist and a scent that had apparently decided to fill his head.
And now she was his Master.
His hands were on her waist.
He removed them. Deliberately. With the precise control of soone who was not going to acknowledge that removing them required any effort whatsoever.
He took one step back and straightened, the irritation settling into the cold flat thing it beca when he had decided to be controlled about sothing.
"You," he said.
It was not a greeting.
Celestia straightened.
The intimidation was there — she was not going to pretend otherwise, not even to herself. He was ancient and enormous and radiating the kind of power that pressed against the inside of her chest and behind her eyes simultaneously, and every intelligent instinct she possessed was suggesting, strongly, that the correct response to this situation was to be very careful.
But underneath the intimidation was sothing else, sothing that had been sitting in her chest since she first felt the darkness pouring from the lamp and recognized it as sothing familiar, sothing that looked at the fury in his heterochromic eyes and refused, stubbornly and entirely without her cooperation, to be extinguished by it.
She did not back away.
"You were at the Royal Court this morning," she said, calmly. "You were the one who killed Edrian — the butler of House Alwyn."
"I did kill him," Drazeil said. "He ca back to life."
Celestia blinked. That was surprising and also intruiguing...she filed it away. Later. Everything was later right now.
"And you looked at my wrist," she said, bringing her eyes back to his face.
Sothing moved across his expression. Brief. Gone almost before she caught it.
"You noticed that," he said. Not a question.
"I notice most things." She held his gaze steadily and turned her wrist over slowly, presenting the faint crescent mark to the space between them — pale silver against her skin, thin and quiet now, nothing like the blazing thing it had been in the court.
"You looked at it like you recognized it. Like it ant sothing to you specifically." She paused. "So I would like to know what it ans."
The silence that followed had a different quality than the one before. The silence of soone choosing carefully what to give and what to keep.
"It marks you as a Celestial being," Drazeil said finally. Flat. Stripped of everything except the bare fact of it. "A birthright mark. It identifies what you are to those who know how to read it."
Celestia looked at her wrist. How was that possible? She was supposed to be a witch. Everyone had always said she was a witch, a powerless one, yes, but a witch nonetheless.
"I am not a Celestial being," she said.
"You are."
"I have no magic."
"You have magic." His voice did not change. "It has been suppressed. Whether deliberately or by circumstance is a question for another conversation." His eyes dropped briefly to the mark — involuntary, the way eyes move toward things they are trying not to look at. "The mark does not lie. It never has."
Celestia absorbed that in silence.
She had known sothing was wrong. Had known it since she woke up in this world.
She folded her wrist back against her side.
"And the mark shifting," she said. "The phases. What does that an?"
"It responds to your emotional state. Your power. The fuller the phase, the stronger the manifestation."
"How many phases would my mark have?"
Drazeil looked at her.
She must be very dim, he thought privately, to ask sothing so obvious. But then what should I expect from soone who has been practically erased from society. She’s had no proper education on what she is.
The thought was entirely internal. But sothing of it must have reached his face — so flicker of it — because Celestia felt the shift in his expression before she could read it clearly, and the particular quality of it made sothing uncomfortable move through her chest.
She cleared her throat.
"It was very bright in the court," she said, changing direction smoothly.
"Do you know why?"
A pause.
"Because of what I was about to do," he said. "Your power recognized the threat and responded. It has been doing that for so ti most likely — you simply had no frawork to understand what you were feeling."
Celestia tried to think back — to all the strange monts, the cold spots, the objects that moved wrong, the feelings she had dismissed as imagination. She pressed too hard into the mory and felt a dull ache bloom behind her temples. The old soul’s mories were still so blurry. She let it go.
Drazeil was watching her with the expression of soone who found her continued existence deeply inconvenient and was still calculating what to do about it. The fury had not gone anywhere. It had simply settled, pulled inward, banked low, and patient.
"You hate ," she said.
Not an accusation. Simply an observation she had made and was stating plainly.
Drazeil’s sneered.
"You are a Celestial being," he said.
"My kind and yours have been enemies long before the Great War."
Sothing flickered in his eyes — brief, gone before she could fully know what it was. Like a door opening and closing in the sa breath. "That is not hate. That is simply the nature of what we are. But after the Great War — after what your kind did and called it ensuring order —" His voice dropped to sothing quiet and absolute. "I have more than hate for Celestial beings. And I will see every last one of your kind ended!."
Celestia watched his face.
She had caught it. That flicker. Whatever the Great War had cost him — it lived in him still, sowhere underneath all the cold and the fury and the centuries of careful control. She said nothing about it. But she filed it away carefully, in the place where she kept things she intended to return to.
"And yet here we are," she said quietly. "Why didn’t you kill ?"
He said nothing.
Because the truth was that Drazeil himself didn’t know. And now she had beco his Master — this girl who didn’t even know what she was — and whatever he felt about that, he would deal with it by being useful. He would use her. She was powerful without knowing it and bound to him whether she liked it or not. That was enough for now.
The lamp on the floor had stopped glowing entirely.
"Your na," Celestia said, deciding not to press further. The look on his face was sothing to be approached carefully and she knew it.
"I believe you already know it."
"I do," she said. "But wouldn’t it be proper for you to introduce yourself? Especially since —" She tilted her head slightly. "I am your Master."
The Pact pulled at sothing beneath his sternum — insistent, unavoidable, the particular pull of sothing that could not be refused by the nature of what it was.
"Drazeilvion," he said. The na landed with the weight of sothing that had not been spoken aloud to another person in a very long ti. "King of the Infernal Realm."
Infernal Realm. Celestia had absolutely no idea what that was. She filed that away too, alongside everything else, and kept her expression perfectly composed.
"Drazeilvion," she repeated, testing the shape of it on her tongue.
When he heard his na from her lips sothing moved through him — strange and unbidden and entirely unwelco. He locked it away before it could develop an opinion about itself.
"And the wish," he said. His voice had dropped back to that register that lived below ordinary sound. "The one you made before you knew who I was."
The air between them shifted.
Celestia did not look away. "What about it?"
"It stands," he said. "Every wish made to stands regardless of circumstance. That is the nature of the Pact. It cannot be unmade."
The silence stretched.
"Then it stands," Celestia said simply.
Drazeil stared at her.
Even after everything — after knowing who he was, what he was, what he thought of her kind — she would still want that wish fulfilled.
He was a King of the Infernal Realm.
She was a Celestial being.
She was his Master.
And she was looking at him with those bright ruby eyes like she was not afraid of a single thing about him — not his fury, not his nature, not the centuries of darkness he carried in every cell of his existence.
He felt it again. That pull. Stronger this ti. Drazeil’s tried to calm himself down, he didn’t know how he was feeling, he was feeling weird, like sothing stronger that this pact they have made between themselves, like a pull drawing him to her, he hated it, he took a deep breath and said;
"We need to establish the terms of the Pact," he said.
Celestia blinked. "The Pact?"
"You unsealed . The mont you did, a Pact ford between us whether you agreed to it or not. You are my Master. That is not a title without conditions."
"I didn’t agree to any Pact."
"You didn’t have to. It sealed itself the mont you touched that lamp."
He held her gaze. "You think binding an ancient King of the Infernal Realm to your will is as simple as making requests and waiting for results?"
Celestia looked at him for a long mont. Then at the lamp. Then back at him. Then she walked to the nearest chair, sat down with the unhurried ease of soone making themselves comfortable in a situation they had decided to own, and folded her hands in her lap.
"Fine," she said. "Terms."
He nodded once.
"But —" Sothing shifted in her expression. That particular shift that ant a decision had been made and would not be unmade. "Since you want terms regarding this Pact —" The corner of her mouth curved. "I shall have terms too, Zeil."
He went very still.
That na. Said like that. With that smile.
He clenched his fist slowly at his side.
She, Drazeil said to himself internally, looking at her sitting there in that chair like she wasn’t even bothered —
Was going to be a problem.
User Comments
0 comments from readers