Zareth
Itake my seat at the head of the crescent table and say nothing. I don't need to. Every elder in this room already knows why I've returned alone. Word travels fast in a dying kingdom where the subject of the gossip is a human woman sleeping in the Crown Prince's chambers.
Their eyes find me the moment I enter. Not with greeting. With calculation.
There he is, those stares say. There is the thing we must now manage.
I let them look.
Veyrik stands before I've even settled fully into my seat. I should have expected that. He's never been a man who waits for permission.
"I'll speak plainly," he says. Which is his way of announcing that whatever follows will be anything but, it will be a blade wrapped in bluntness.
"The Prince returned from the lower ruins with a human woman.
Not as a prisoner or intelligence. As a companion.
" He lets that word rot in the air between us.
"He placed her under his personal protection before this council.
He has housed her, fed her, and—" a pause that does more damage than any sentence could— "kept her close. "
A low sound moves through the room. Not murmur or silence, I've learned to recognize it as the council deciding how offended to be.
"She is a distraction," Veyrik continues, his voice hardening.
"A leech. A surface creature who wandered into our kingdom and has since embedded herself into the highest levels of our leadership.
" He turns, finally, and looks directly at me.
"Our Prince is abhorring the enemy. Aligning himself with the very bloodline of those who once sought our extinction. "
Then there’s silence.
I keep my expression still. I've had centuries of practice keeping things still. But under the table, my hand closes into a fist.
Varkai does not stand. He rarely does anymore. The ancient elder simply leans forward in his chair, and the shift in his weight seems to change the pressure in the entire room.
"The Prince's personal attachments," he says, voice like stone grinding on stone, "are a secondary concern."
He lets that dismissal land before he continues.
"The underground magic is not failing. It is hemorrhaging.
" He places a carved obsidian marker at the center of the table.
Signaling finality. "The channels beneath the lower districts have collapsed beyond repair.
The corruption spreads at three times the rate our scouts projected six months ago.
We have months, not years. If the core fails entirely—" he does not finish the sentence.
The panic is quieter than I expected. These are Vrakken.
We have survived things that would have unmade lesser races.
But I watch the shift in the elders' faces, behind their composure and what I see there is timeless.
Ancient. It is the terror of those who have already survived one extinction and are watching another approach on the horizon.
I understand it and respect it.
It still makes me want to break every carved chair in this room.
Maevra speaks next. She briefly looks at me first. A mother's look. A warning wrapped in love wrapped in iron.
Remember what I told you, that look says. Remember where your duty lives.
"There is a solution," she says, to the table, to the room, to everyone except me. "Ancient. Tested. The Tithe of Essence."
The name alone makes the air in the room change.
"A ritual offering," she continues. "Blood and life-force, surrendered to the failing channels. Enough to stabilize the Wildspont and buy the kingdom time." A deliberate pause. "Our human guest would serve as an ideal candidate."
Our human guest.
The words land like a fist to the chest. Worse. Like a hand reaching in and closing around a vital organ.
I say nothing yet. I count my own heartbeat. One. Two. Three.
I think about Cybele navigating crumbling ruins by instinct alone.
Cybele shoving me out of a creature's path before I'd even registered the threat.
Cybele looking at my people, the starving civilians, the haunted faces in collapsed districts and not flinching.
Also, gazing at me, with that infuriating amber eyes, like she could see straight through the centuries of armor.
Four. Five.
"That," I say, "is the single most ignorant proposal this council has produced in three hundred years. And this council once voted to abandon the eastern warrens with civilians still inside them."
The temperature in the room drops.
"A sacrificial tithe is a bandage," I continue, because I'm already in it, I might as well finish it. "A bandage pressed to a wound that has gone gangrenous. You are not buying time. You are purchasing a slightly more comfortable death and calling it a strategy."
"The old rites—" one of the elders begins.
"The old rites were written when we still understood what was beneath us," I say.
"We don't anymore. Not fully." I push forward before they can cut me off.
"Cybele and I found evidence in the lower ruins.
Evidence that this corruption was not naturally occurring.
That the Wildspont was deliberately triggered—"
"Enough."
My mother's voice. Quiet. Immovable as the columns.
She looks at me across the length of the table, and for a second she is not the queen. She is the woman who once told me that love was a luxury the last prince of a dying race could not afford.
"Zareth." Just my name. Just the verdict of it. "The survival of thousands cannot be held hostage to the theory of one human woman and the instincts of a son who has not slept in days."
There it is.
Not cruelty. Not malice. Something harder than both. Certainty.
The elders do not argue with her. They don't need to.
She has done the work for them. I watch myself in their eyes—the prince, emotional, compromised, attached and I recognize with perfect clarity that nothing I say in this room tonight will land.
I am not speaking to a council anymore. I am speaking to a wall that has decided it is a door.
I stand.
No one stops me. I don't expect them to.
The corridor outside is dark and cold and blessedly empty. My footsteps echo against the polished floor, every step a small, sharp sound in the silence and then I just stop.
At the corridor's heart, at the kingdom's core, at the center of everything I have given my entire existence to protecting.
The Blood Bond moves beneath my skin like something alive. Not quite painful but the opposite, an insistent warmth that I am increasingly unable to rationalize away, pulling in a direction wholly removed from council chambers or ancient rites or the survival of my race.
She is somewhere in this kingdom right now. Probably studying something and ignoring every reasonable instinct in that stubborn human body of hers in favor of whatever she decided was worth understanding tonight.
My eyes fall shut.
What if I just took her and left?
The thought arrives with terrifying quietness. No fanfare. No drama. Just a simple, devastating clarity.
I could. That is the part that makes it dangerous, not the wanting, but the knowing that I could.
Take her, take the records, take nothing else.
Let the council convene without a prince.
Let Varkai read his omens to empty chairs.
Let the elders sacrifice whatever they choose to sacrifice with no human woman to offer and no son present to object.
The Vrakken have survived this long. They are remarkably difficult to kill.
Cybele, offered up on a ritual altar in a chamber I cannot reach in time, is considerably less so.
The bond pulls again, more steadier, like a tide acknowledging itself. And for one quiet, catastrophic moment, the survival of my entire civilization sits in my chest like a weight I could simply put down.
I don't move.
But I do not stop thinking about it.