Chapter 4 All Play and No Work
ALL PLAY AND NO WORK
Azrion
Kat. Kaaat. Kh’at.
“Doesn’t suit her,” Azrion mumbled as he twirled a finger over his copper cup, coaxing the liquid inside to swirl.
“What was that, Azrion?”
He flashed a grin at Elder Itcheran, vision refocused on the grandiose meeting chamber, its thick marble columns holding an unnecessarily high ceiling above a table twice as long as it needed to be, and the human pressing herself to the wall of the cramped post disappeared from Azrion’s mind’s eye. “A dozen celestial, er…phases.”
“A year?” another voice asked, the ass-kissing twinge to it unmistakable.
“Right, that thing. As always, your mind is as sharp as your horns, Zelvax.”
The orange demon scowled from his seat beside the elder that led the scholar’s meeting—the incredibly boring scholar’s meeting that was going to be the death of Azrion if his father didn’t get to him first.
He flicked his gaze two seats to the left, and there was Valinerath looking downright murderous. Azrion pierced the inside of his cheek with a fang to keep from snickering.
Elder Itcheran commanded his attention again with an unsteady growl. “It’s going to take an entire year to mend the millhouse’s grindstone?”
Azrion blinked then laughed in his achingly charming way.
“Oh, the grindstone? I thought you said Maltazan’s collarbone!
Well, that explains my confusion—surely a healer would do his own osseous mending.
But no, it won’t be a year on the millhouse.
Zelvax, surely you didn’t think that?” He threw a quick withering look at the orange demon, took a sip of tea, then grinned at the elder again.
“A week, perhaps, if the weather cooperates.” He chanced another glance at his father whose features had shifted from homicidal to merely violent.
It seemed Azrion would survive another day.
At least he hadn’t wasted time scumbling the hard lines of his last upset with Valinerath—it would be easier to wait it out and just apologize for everything all at once.
Then again, he’d probably always be waiting when it came to his father.
He supposed he sort of deserved the contempt, being so distracted and not even with the right being of the feminine persuasion.
Really, if Azrion was going to be distracted by something, it should have been with the passage of time.
Three days. It had been three days since Melora told him they were finished, and he’d made no headway.
She’d always been stubborn, but this was unprecedented.
At the very least he expected ripped up petals on his doorstep and at the most to be stormed up to in the middle of Aldgate Square and slapped—gods, anything to know he’d made some kind of impact—but he’d seen neither tail nor horn of her.
Perhaps he had done something wholly egregious this time.
But whatever the misdeed, it couldn’t require a real apology: That was the kind of thing he would remember.
“…deliver it to the council chambers.”
“I’ll take it,” Azrion offered, eyeing the shrouded rune another scholar had placed on the table.
His father reacted subtly to that, mild annoyance that Azrion would lower himself to a scribe’s task, but Valinerath also understood the value of ingratiating himself to those of higher rank.
Of course, his father didn’t know Azrion’s true reason for wanting to dally in the council chambers.
He could probably guess it was for general fucking-off reasons, but he probably wouldn’t be able to narrow down the exact fuckery.
More bureaucratic nonsense followed, during which Azrion labored unendingly to appear attentive, but it was futile when his thoughts bounced between Melora and that human, that Kat.
Both inspired confusion, but the human’s was even more befuddling, mostly because he was thinking about her at all.
It might have to do with that funny feeling he’d had when they met, but it wasn’t really all that funny when he pondered it.
In fact, it wasn’t haha-funny at all. It was just peculiar funny, but only a very, very small amount of peculiar.
An insignificant amount one could even say, which Azrion would because it was more convenient that way.
When the meeting adjourned, Azrion was quick to collect the rune, rewrap it more artfully in its shroud—no need to be messy even if it was being delivered to the wastewater department—and slip out of the Scholar’s Hall.
Aldgate Square was brimming with life in the middle of the day, the moon high and casting a mesmerizing shimmer over every color as demons passed beneath it.
Moon flowers peppered the fence around the scar, brilliantly white amongst the indigo moss, hints of craggy earth peeking through like a Dreadmoor beast lurking in the shadows.
Azrion mentally painted the scene—it would have been easier to bring a canvas to the square, but his memory would have to do.
The council chambers were busier than usual, probably because of those humans.
The star Ockna had crested the horizon the night of their arrival in Heck, so it had been, what, just under three weeks?
They were perhaps easier to accept when unconscious victims of the cruelty of their kind, but now that the humans actually did things—like that red-haired one who was always skipping about and asking questions—there were no doubt complaints from the most closed-minded of demons.
And there might be some cleaning up after the more rambunctious ones too.
Not that Kat, though. She didn’t seem to have a rambunctious bone in her—Azrion shook his head.
He was here to spy on Melora, not muse about some stranger.
“Special delivery,” Azrion announced with a flourish, presenting the rune to a skinny blue demon at one of the entry desks.
“For whom?”
“You seem like a smart one—you’ll figure it out.” Azrion flashed him a grin and flitted off into the depths of the council building.
From its outside, the chambers were grandiose and beautiful, and the areas most demons saw mirrored that. But deeper in, the rooms shrank and the corridors narrowed, and unglamorous busywork was slogged through.
Azrion casually brought himself to the hallway where Melora’s office was located. He gave a polite nod to those he passed and only garnered one strange look. News traveled fast, and they probably knew he and Melora were on the outs, but that wasn’t terribly abnormal.
As he reached her closed door, he slowed and took interest in a painting of the Council Chambers’ exterior.
Rudimentary work, uninspired, and even a little garish when it came to its use of color, but then it at least livened up the dreary windowless hall.
He leaned toward Melora’s door but couldn’t quite make out the words coming from inside.
He reached up for his ear, a spell dancing on the tips of his fingers.
“You should see a healer.” Fenthorn knocked into Azrion’s shoulder and wrecked the delicate magic he’d conjured. “You look terribly constipated.”
Azrion snorted. “If only the solution to my problems were as simple as emptying everything out of me.”
The Vumheri heir snorted back, a tinge of disgust to his mirth. He leaned against the wall between Azrion and Melora’s door. “You still don’t know.”
Azrion pretended to be very interested in the painting’s bottom left corner where a splotch of yellow had been left that didn’t belong. “Don’t know what?”
“What you did to hurt Melora’s delicate feelings.”
Azrion shrugged. Zaiya wasn’t the only one who had great fun prodding at his obliviousness. On that, his closest friend and his sister often bonded, and Azrion didn’t relish being left out. “We just had a meeting you know.”
“What’s the point when the scholars took away my only project?” he asked sourly then slipped back into a smirk. “Come on, at least take a guess why she’s so angry.”
The painting’s splotch looked animal-like then, as if some demon who might be toiling inside the chambers left his loyal pet out in the dark to wonder if he had been abandoned.
“No idea. Though I hear Gorlax’s aegian is about to have another litter.
Do you think Melora would accept a cub as an apology? ”
“You can certainly try, but I don’t think even the cutest aegian would replace the engagement you failed to propose.”
Azrion was too stunned to respond, the colors before him blurring. What in blazes did Melora want that for?
“She actually expected it on your birthday, and when you didn’t deliver, was gracious enough to give you one last chance on your anniversary.”
“On my birthday?”
“What greater gift could you give yourself than Melora’s hand?” Fenthorn threw an unexpected arm around his shoulders. “And it’s not like you’re getting any younger.”
“You sound like my father.” Azrion scoffed as he was guided away from Melora’s door. “No, that can’t be it.”
“I got it out of Tuli last night, among other things”—he chuckled suggestively—“but believe what you’d like.”
Azrion let himself be led a few steps down the hall mostly because he was dazed and…and angry. Melora wanted to be engaged? To be married? But the two of them weren’t even…
“You’re sure she said she wants a proposal out of me? As in, for a wedding and a legal commitment? Not anything else?”
Fenthorn huffed. “What else is there? She certainly didn’t say she expected a blightspawn heart, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Azrion rounded out of Fenthorn’s grip just in time to see a flash of pink disappearing around the corner at the other end of the hall. He had half a mind to storm up to her and demand the truth, but…but it had been years of this game, and he supposed it was an inevitability.
“Who knows about this?” he rounded on Fenthorn again.
“Well, everyone knows the two of you split, but I don’t think she’s been terribly open about why beyond her closest circle, and they’re only open about it if you can find that spot they like with your claws.”