Chapter 13 #2
From the far end of the crescent table, Deimos admired his long, sharp claws armored in Nightstone, his voice a silken murmur.
“Two demons from the lower court thought themselves clever enough to plot taking over the Pride Court while your seat sat empty. Their lives had since been snuffed out.” His thin smile sharpened.
“Their ashes were left on display so others may think twice.”
Hardly of note.
Rune didn’t care about politics. “Tell me of Argyle. I want to know about the curse.”
The air shifted.
Calla’s spinning dagger stilled. Hadeon’s jaw tightened. Even Deimos blinked, as though uncertain he’d heard correctly.
Alora had asked him to break the curse once before.
But back then, Rune had not been bound by a god’s promise as he was tonight.
He had entertained her pleas, feigning to help her search for answers.
In truth, he merely waited for the spell to run its course, so he might claim her without a kingdom to tether her.
But then the Blood Moon came, and Alora had died.
That same night, the curse reached its completion.
It swallowed Argyle within a veil of unbroken magic. Its citizens fell into an eternal sleep. Trade routes withered. Letters went unanswered. Those who sought its borders lost the path and forgot why they had come at all. Though it remained on maps, Argyle simply… slipped from the memory of Urn.
A kingdom half-remembered, half-erased, lingering like a hazy dream.
Unable to endure a place where once the ranges had rung with her voice, Rune then took Alora’s body and left with his court. They had eventually settled in the south of the Everfrost, where he let his rage and grief eclipse all else.
Regardless, he had never cared for humans.
His Harbingers didn’t expect him to care now.
Rune’s eyes narrowed. “Speak.”
Deimos bent his head, a Shade coiling up his shoulder like a speck of dust to whisper into his ear. “It is the same as before, sire. We know little of its makings. Or of the hand that cast it.”
Rune drummed his claws against the table in an agitated rhythm. “Suspects?”
“Perhaps the Thornbearer or the Argyle Queen,” Calla suggested.
Too obvious. Both already held seats of power, so what would they gain? The curse had swallowed the Midlands as well.
“King Thalion and his kin,” Hadeon rumbled. “We returned in the year of the War of Serpents. Calveron laid siege precisely when King Laurent was weakest. One might think they cast the curse to break his defenses.”
Logical, but Rune knew pride and power.
This curse was too powerful to come from fae.
“It was not his doing.” Rune leaned back in his chair, chin resting on a fist as he studied the shadow-image of ships on the table. “This magic is older. Stronger.”
And familiar…
Though he could not yet place it. Intriguing, for he had sensed the same thread of magic when Alora drew her blood.
“Could Arthal be involved?” Deimos wondered aloud.
“I recall no dealings between King Laurent and the fae across the sea,” Rune said, jaw tight. He knew every secret in the dark, but it rankled that this one eluded him. “The curse itself does not concern me, but the one behind it.”
Silence filled the chamber, his Harbingers falling still as they took in his meaning.
They had been sent back exactly six months until the Blood Moon arrived.
And he spent nearly half the time bound in this wretched cave.
“The Fates are playing their games again,” Rune murmured.
They dangled Alora in front of him like a prize and if he was not careful, she would slip from his grasp again.
“Do you think they have something to do with it?” Calla asked, sitting upright.
If anything, Rune suspected the Heavens interference. His brothers had all returned to the Heavens, and he now sensed they watched from whatever heights they deem divine, waiting for him to fail again.
“Time, it seems, is not constant,” Rune said tightly. “Already the patterns are changing. Our first meeting should have been in her chambers, yet she came to me here. Who knows what else has changed… or what rules bind us now.”
“Alora came to you on her own?” Calla said with a tilt of her head, red eyes glinting.
“Lured.” His voice dropped into a purr of amusement. “She freed me in exchange for her kingdom’s salvation.”
Calla smirked. “And in return…?”
His slow smile was all the confirmation she needed.
“Sire…” Hadeon cleared his throat, straightened in his seat. “While we have managed to keep order, I fear the Seven Courts grow restless.”
“Yes, I imagine the Dominions still wage that my claim on the throne is false and my rule is weak,” Rune retorted. “Yet they continue to kneel as they have for thousands of years. They know they cannot contend with me.”
But his Harbingers shifted in their seats, their unease tainting the silence. They had not reported everything.
Rune’s gaze sharpened on Deimos.
His spy winced, tail flicking nervously. “Word has spread of your bride being alive at this time. There is rumor… that you forget yourself for a mere mortal.”
The air grew thick with Rune’s quiet wrath. “Is that all?”
He had never had to press them for answers before.
Red eyes dropping, Deimos swallowed. “The statues of the Primordials had been uncovered in the old throne room, sire. The roots that once shrouded them were cut away. My shades failed to see who.”
The air grew colder, as if the warmth in the chamber itself withdrew. The mention of the statues stirred an unease Rune hadn’t felt in an age. A reminder of what even gods feared.
“By the Abyss,” Calla muttered, pressing on her temples.
“What else have your Shades heard?” Hadeon asked Deimos.
His tail flicked. “The Dominions have begun to whisper of the first shadow.”
“Let them,” Rune snarled. “They waste breath on things long gone.”
The irony was not lost on him. His bride had been gone, yet he had clawed at every possible means to revive her.
Calla laced her fingers together. “And if they do more than whisper?”
The shadows thickened, dimming the candlelight.
“Then I will remind them why I rule now.”
Snuffing dissent would have once been a priority, but other matters took precedence.
Rune’s gaze returned to the shadow-map. The Calveron fleet bobbed in the bay like bloated ticks, warships marked with the golden Hydra coat of arms. “Perhaps it’s time I let the court taste blood. It will serve as a good distraction.”
“We are ready to wreak havoc with you, sire,” Hadeon said, gripping the haft of his Warhammer.
The map hissed to smoke at a flick of Rune’s fingers. “Good.”
In three days Alora would be his.
He would wait no longer.