After Drazeil left the Royal Court, he teleported straight to his Domain.
Far away, in a secluded corner of the Kingdom of Thaloria, where folk rarely — if ever — dared to tread, lay the cursed stretch of land known to all as Infernal.
There, brooding atop a jagged hill, stood the Domain of the Infernal King.
It was a towering edifice of dark gothic stone, ancient and deliberate — the kind of structure that had not been built so much as willed into existence by sothing that wanted to be feared.
Its silhouette alone was enough to chill the blood of any traveller foolish enough to glance its way. Most didn’t glance twice. Most knew better.
The mont Drazeil arrived, he made it clear to everyone within Infernal that he did not want to be disturbed for the next few hours. Then he went straight to his room.
The first thing he did when he got there was put his fist through the wall.
Not out of rage. Not exactly. Out of sothing worse — confusion.
He had been so close. Unbearably close to ending the life of that girl, that insufferable Celestial being, and yet he hadn’t. He couldn’t. And the reason refused to make itself clear no matter how many tis he turned it over in his mind.
"How have I never seen or heard of her before?"
Drazeil made it his business to know everyone of significance in the entire Kingdom of Thaloria. It made it easier to know where his wrath should be directed.
But this girl — this Celestia — had existed completely outside his awareness until today. He had never seen her. Never heard her na. Never once sensed Celestial magic radiating from her the way it should have.
"She is definitely a strange one."
His fists rested on the surface of his table, blood on his knuckles and sweat cooling against his face, when he heard a knock at his door.
He had made it explicitly clear he did not want to be disturbed.
Whoever was on the other side of that door had apparently decided that their life was no longer sothing they valued.
Eloise did not always have sense.
She had worked in Infernal for three years. Three years of learning which rules existed for decoration and which ones existed because breaking them got people killed.
Ulric had told her plainly — His Majesty had given orders not to be disturbed. He had told her to turn around, walk away, and under no circumstances do what she was currently doing.
But she had snuck out of Infernal earlier that day and gone to the Royal Court, watching from a distance. She had seen the fight. She had seen the hesitation — that brief, impossible mont where the Infernal King had been close enough to end a life and had not. She didn’t understand it. But she had felt sothing twist in her chest watching it.
Ulric told her not to push it.
She knocked anyway.
Sowhere underneath all the fear and the good sense she had accumulated over three years of service, Eloise genuinely cared about the Infernal King. Not the way the other attendants did — performatively, strategically, with one eye always on what caring might get them. Just genuinely. Quietly. In a way she had never said out loud and probably never would.
She had brought him blood every day for three years without being asked. Had learned exactly the temperature he preferred. Had morised the particular way the air in his corridor changed when he was in a mood that ant everyone else should find sowhere else to be.
She knew what this silence ant.
She knocked anyway.
"Your Majesty?" She kept her voice light. "I have brought you sothing."
Silence.
"Your Majesty, are you in there?"
More silence. The kind that pressed back.
"I am coming in," she announced, because she had already committed to this and there was no elegant way to retreat now.
She pushed the door open.
The first thing she registered was his silhouette — tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of physical presence that made the air in a room rearrange itself around it. For one unguarded mont her eyes moved over him with frank appreciation.
That was the last mistake she would ever make.
She looked at his eyes.
Both irises had gone red.
Full, complete, bleeding red — not a trace of erald left.
Oh, she thought. Ulric was right.
The Infernal King carried two irises — one blood-red, one deep erald — and in his better monts the erald held. But when both bled to red, it ant sothing specific. It ant the part of him that tolerated the presence of other living things had gone very quiet.
And if they ever went black —
Well. Everyone in Infernal had a private understanding about what to do if his eyes ever went black. It involved leaving. Quickly. Without looking back.
She had once asked Ulric whether His Majesty’s eyes had ever returned to green — fully green, both of them, the way they presumably once were. Ulric had looked at her for a long mont.
"No," he had said. "Not since the incident."
He had not elaborated. She had not pressed.
Now Eloise stood in the doorway with a tray in her hands and both irises burning at her and the glass trembling against the tray because her hands were shaking that badly.
"Your Majesty, I brought you so b—"
She felt herself leave the floor.
His hand closed around her throat before she finished the sentence — one movent, no warning — the tray clattering sowhere below her as her feet stopped finding anything to stand on. She clawed at his grip the way people always did.
Uselessly. The way she had watched others do and had privately believed she would never be foolish enough to replicate.
"Pl — please," she managed. "Don’t — please —"
His other hand moved.
It was quick. He was always quick. That was the one rcy Drazeil offered, though rcy was not what he would have called it.
"That," he said, to the room and no one in particular, "is what disobedience costs."
Eloise’s body hit the floor.
Drazeil looked down at his hand. Blood ran between his fingers, warm and dark. He raised it slowly and drank with the unhurried ease of soone savouring sothing they had been looking forward to.
He felt better imdiately.
That was the thing about killing — not the blood specifically, but the act itself. The specific satisfaction of sothing that had been building finally finding its release.
"Ulric."
He didn’t raise his voice. He never needed to.
Ulric appeared within seconds, moving with the practiced efficiency of soone who had served in Infernal long enough to know that speed was a form of self-preservation. He took in the scene with the calm of soone who had taken in similar scenes many tis before, then dropped to one knee.
"Your Majesty. You called."
"Clean this up," Drazeil said, flexing his hand slowly. "And prepare a bath."
"At once, Your Majesty."
Ulric prepared the bath and saw to the room while Drazeil stood at the window, still and silent, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular and everything at once.
"Your Majesty," Ulric said from the doorway.
"Your bath is ready."
"You may leave."
Ulric bowed and withdrew.
Drazeil removed his clothes and threw them directly into the fire — partly because they were ruined, and partly because sohow, inexplicably, they still carried the faint scent of strawberries. He didn’t examine why that bothered him. He simply got rid of it.
He stepped into the bath and subrged himself completely.
He always stayed beneath the water longer than necessary. There was sothing about complete subrsion that the rest of existence didn’t offer — a particular kind of silence, pressure on all sides, the world reduced to the sound of his own stillness.
He stayed until the water had cooled from hot to lukewarm, then erged, washed properly, and stepped out.
Ulric had already laid out fresh garnts. Drazeil dressed without hurry, the way he did most things — deliberately, without wasting motion.
He caught his own reflection briefly as he passed the mirror.
Won fawned over him constantly. He was aware of what he looked like and considered it largely irrelevant. Beauty was a tool. He had never been interested in being anyone’s prize.
"Love?" The thought arrived the way unwanted things always did, uninvited and irritating.
He had watched enough of it over the centuries to form a thorough and unchanging opinion on the matter. Mortals. Creatures. Kingdoms. All of them undone, sooner or later, by the sa foolish weakness.
"People call it the greatest feeling in the world. Yet sohow it is responsible for the greatest destruction in the world."
He had never found that contradiction particularly romantic.
He had no interest in it. Had never had any interest in it. Not because of the heart he lacked — but because of what he had witnessed. Over and over and over again, across centuries and kingdoms and bloodlines.
Love did not elevate people. It exposed them. And then, inevitably, it destroyed them.
He turned away from the mirror.
Ulric was waiting outside his door, composed as always.
"Your Majesty."
"Speak."
"A letter has arrived from the castle. The King requests your presence."
"Decline it." Drazeil said it without breaking stride. He was in no mood to return to the castle and had other things that required his attention.
"Your Majesty." Ulric kept pace beside him, which alone indicated that whatever ca next was worth the risk of continuing. "There is an additional note. It states that the butler executed today is alive. It appears he carried vampire blood. His vampire nature allowed him to survive, and a witch has since restored his heart."
Drazeil stopped walking.
He stood very still for a mont.
Then he turned that information over slowly, the way he turned everything over — thoroughly, without hurry, looking for what it ant beneath what it said.
The butler was alive.
Which ant he could be questioned.
And the questions Drazeil had were multiplying by the hour — because an ordinary human butler from House Alwyn having vampire blood was not ordinary at all.
Soone had put that blood in him deliberately. Soone had been using House Alwyn. And that connected, sohow, to the girl who had appeared in that court today out of nowhere, with Celestial energy he had never once sensed before and a face he was finding unreasonably difficult to stop thinking about.
Celestia.
Not a surprising na, given what she carried in her blood.
"I will go," Drazeil said.
There was also the matter of Thaddeus.
He had given his stepbrother a very specific task to complete during the distraction of the Royal Court, and knowing Thaddeus, the outco could go either direction.
He either had the Celestial Codex waiting or he had managed to make a ss of the entire thing.
The Celestial Codex. A text written by the Celestial Council themselves — docunting their conquests, their seals, their victories over the realms they had systematically dismantled basically everything about them.
It had no business being in the Magical Realm when it was supposed to be kept safely in the Celestial Realm, but it was here, in the Kingdom’s Royal Palace, the Royal Archives, as though it had always belonged there.
It didn’t.
Sothing or Soone had placed it there.
Sothing or Soone that wanted it to be found.
Drazeil intended to find out what — and by whom. But first, he needed to actually have the book in his hands.
"I hope that fool actually managed it," he thought, with the particular brand of resigned expectation he reserved exclusively for Thaddeus.
"Ulric."
"Your Majesty."
"Ready my Royal Garnts."
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