Chapter 7
LORD IMAS
The knowledge of what she is sits in my gut like a stone swallowed whole.
I should have opened her throat the moment the sapphire of her eyes was swallowed by that unnatural, starry void.
I should have offered her heart to The Serpent while it was still beating, a penance for allowing a Purna—a creature hunted to extinction for their heresy against the natural order—to breathe my air.
But I did not.
Instead, I dressed her in the midnight blue silk of my House and stood her in the shadows of my dining hall, a weapon I am arrogant enough to believe I can wield.
I glance toward the corner where she stands. She is fulfilling her role as the silent servant, clutching a silver pitcher of wine, but my gaze lingers longer than strategy requires.
I had the tailors cut the gown to fit her properly, shedding the rags of the slave market. The silk clings to the sharp fragility of her frame, exposing the long, pale line of her neck and the hollow of her throat where I rested my thumb only days ago.
A muscle feathers in my jaw. I find myself tracing that line with my eyes, remembering the warmth of her skin against my cold hands.
The urge to cross the room, push the heavy hair back from her shoulder, and bury my face in the curve of her neck is a sudden, physical ache.
I tell myself it is the addiction—the craving for the silence she carries in her blood.
But the heat curling in my lower belly feels dangerously like a man’s desire, base and mortal.
I want to own her. Not just her fear, and not just her quiet.
Her.
It is madness. I tear my eyes away, forcing my attention back to the table. She is not human. She is a fracture in the world. And she is the only reason my mind is clear enough to endure the man sitting across from me.
The heavy oak table groans under the weight of a feast fit for a king, yet the room is stale, suffocating beneath layers of tension and pretense.
Across from me sits Lord Malek. He is everything a devotee of The Warrior should be—broad-shouldered, loud, and utterly devoid of subtlety .
He tears into a haunch of roasted taura with grease shining on his chin, his red eyes darting around the room, assessing threats, counting exits, calculating weaknesses.
I despise him.
He is a blunt instrument in a world that requires a scalpel.
Yet, tonight, he is dangerous. Not just because of his armies or his favor with the War God, but because he has the nose of a bloodhound.
If he catches even a whiff of the secret rotting in the center of my estate—if he senses that my magic is dormant, or worse, that I am harboring a Purna—he will not just kill me. He will dismantle me.
"Your estate is quiet, Imas," Malek says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He does not use the linen napkin. It is a deliberate insult. "The screams from your dungeons usually provide such charming dinner music. Have you lost your taste for the whip?"
I steep my fingers together, resting my chin on them to hide the tick in my jaw. I can feel Leora’s presence against my mind, a soft, terrified static. I need her silence to think, but I hate that she is witnessing this. I hate that she knows I am vulnerable.
"Silence is its own form of terror, Malek," I reply, my voice smooth as oil. "Only the unimaginative rely solely on noise."
Malek laughs, a barking sound that grates against my nerves. "Or perhaps you have simply lost your edge. Rumors fly on wings of shadow in Lliandor. They say the Serpent's favorite son has been neglecting his prayers."
He leans forward. The atmosphere in the room suddenly thickens.
It is not a metaphor. Malek is pushing his aura outward—a heavy, suffocating pressure of pure aggression granted by The Warrior. It presses down on my shoulders, a challenge meant to crush me into submission before my own servants.
I reach for my own magic. I command the Chaos within me to rise, to flare outward and meet his brute force with the twisting, maddening power of The Serpent.
Push back, I order the void. Crush him.
Nothing happens.
My obsidian ring remains cold, a dead weight on my finger. The connection to my god is there, but it is faint, a distant, static-filled whisper that refuses to coalesce into power.
Panic, sharp and metallic, floods my mouth.
It isn't working.
I glance toward Leora again. She is staring at Malek, her eyes wide. She does not see me looking at her, does not see the way my hand twitches on the table, wishing it was her skin I was gripping instead of the wood.
I was a fool. I thought I could control this. I thought I could use her as a tool to sharpen my mind and then discard her influence when I needed my power. But the silence she brings isn't a switch I can flick. It is a mire. It is dragging me down, stripping me naked before my enemy.
I am defenseless.
Malek senses it. His grin widens, revealing teeth that seem too sharp. He pushes harder. The pressure intensifies. The candles on the table flicker and dim. My breath catches in my throat, my lungs refusing to expand against the weight of his dominance.
He knows. He can feel the hollowness where my power should be.
"Well?" Malek taunts, his voice dropping to a growl. "Where is the bite of the viper, Imas? Where is the sting? Or are you truly nothing but a serpent without fangs?"
Rage flares in my chest, hot and impotent. I want to flay him alive. I want to summon a thousand shadowed horrors to tear the flesh from his bones. But I can't. I am trapped in the silence she has created.
I look at Leora. I want to strangle her. I want to drag her from the shadows and break her neck for doing this to me.
She meets my gaze.
Her sapphire eyes are wide, dark pupils swallowing the blue as she takes in the scene. She sees Malek’s looming aggression. She sees my stillness, which is rapidly crumbling into paralysis.
She does not look afraid for herself. She looks afraid for me.
No, I think, a snarl rising in my throat. Do not dare pity me now.
But she doesn't offer pity.
The air around me shifts. It is subtle at first, a ripple in the suffocating pressure of Malek's aura. Then, a sensation washes over me—not the cloying warmth of peace, but something harder. Something steel-spined and unyielding.
Certainty.
It floods my mind, a cold, crystalline clarity that sweeps away the panic. It feels like standing on a mountaintop, breathing in air so thin and pure it burns. It is a borrowed strength, a projection of absolute, unshakeable confidence that comes not from a god, but from her.
She believes I am powerful. She believes I am the monster Malek fears. And in her belief, she creates a reality I can inhabit.
The weight on my chest vanishes. I sit up straighter, the phantom strength filling my limbs. It is not magic. It is something else—a psychological armor forged from her will and draped over my shoulders.
I look at Malek. Suddenly, he does not look like a terrifying rival. He looks like a loud, boorish child playing with a stick.
I pick up my wine goblet. My hand is perfectly steady.
"Fangs are for beasts who must tear their meat to swallow it," I say. My voice is smooth, devoid of the tremor that threatened to expose me seconds ago. It carries through the room, cutting through Malek's heavy aura like a razor through silk. "I prefer to swallow my enemies whole."
I take a slow sip of the wine, watching him over the rim. I let a small, bored smile touch my lips. "Your aura is leaking, Malek. It smells of desperation. Is your hold on your own territory so tenuous that you must come here and flex your muscles like a common tavern brawler to feel like a man?"
Malek blinks. The pressure of his magic falters. He expected me to cower. He expected me to struggle. Instead, he sees a man utterly unaffected by his power, sitting in relaxed repose.
Doubt flickers in his red eyes.
"You speak boldly for a man who hasn't cast a spell in weeks," he growls, but the weight of his presence recedes.
"I don’t really need to cast spells to know that you are overextended," I lie smoothly, the borrowed confidence making the words taste like truth.
"How are your Neptherium mines in the north, Malek?
I hear the production has stalled. Perhaps you should spend less time posturing at my table and more time managing your assets. "
It is a guess, a calculated shot in the dark based on half-heard rumors. But it lands.
Malek stiffens. His jaw works. He pulls his magic back entirely, the crushing atmosphere in the room evaporating.
He looks at me with a new, wary respect.
He thinks I am playing a deeper game. He thinks my lack of magical display is a choice, a sign of arrogance so profound I don't deign to use power on him.
"You have always had a sharp tongue, Imas," he mutters, reaching for his own goblet to hide his unease. "Be careful you don't cut your own throat with it."
"I am always careful," I reply.
The dinner continues, but the dynamic has shifted. I dominate the conversation, dissecting his arguments, parrying his probes with icy precision. I do not use a single spark of Chaos. I use words. I use the terrifying clarity of mind that Leora grants me.
But beneath the triumph, a dark, cold fury is coiling in my gut.
I needed her.
I, a Lord of the Khuzuth, a master of the arcane, sat helpless before a brute until a human slave poured her strength into me. It is a humiliation that burns deeper than any defeat. I am not the master here. I am the parasite.
Malek stands abruptly, throwing his napkin onto the table. "I have lost my appetite. The air in this place is... stale."
"A pity," I say, not rising. "I was just beginning to enjoy myself."
Malek turns to leave, his heavy cloak swirling around him. Asema opens the doors, her face a mask of stone, though I catch the relief in her eyes that no blood was shed.
Malek pauses at the threshold. He does not look at me.
He looks at Leora.
She is standing perfectly still in the shadows, her head bowed, her hands clutching the empty wine pitcher. But the air around her still hums with the residue of the power she projected. To a sensitive eye, she must look like a beacon in the gloom.
Malek’s eyes narrow. He inhales, tasting the air. He looks from her to me, a slow, dawning suspicion tightening his features.
He says nothing. He simply gives a short, sharp nod—not of farewell, but of acknowledgement—and strides out into the corridor.
The doors close.
I stare at the wood, my heart hammering a rhythm I can no longer suppress. He saw something. He sensed the connection.
I look at Leora. She is trembling now, the adrenaline fading, leaving her exhausted. She looks at me, waiting for praise, or perhaps just acknowledgement of what she did.
I feel the confidence she gave me curdle into something sour and violent.
"Get out," I whisper.
She flinches. "My Lord?"
"Get out!" I roar, sweeping the heavy silver candelabra off the table. It crashes to the floor, extinguishing the lights, plunging the room into shadows that I can no longer command. "Get to my chambers. Now."
She flees.
I sit alone in the dark, clutching the arms of my chair. I won the battle. But as I look over my dead ring and feel the ghost of her strength fading from my veins, I know I am losing the war. And Malek knows it too.