Chapter 343: Abyssal Heart

The room had no windows.

Whatever light existed came from sources Lady in Dark had never identified in all her visits here.

All she ever saw was a faint, directionless illumination that revealed shapes without revealing details, leaving everything at the edge of recognizable.

The walls were made of dark stone, with a floor of the same stone. The throne at the center was carved from something darker still, its surface absorbing what little light reached it rather than reflecting any back.

Lord Vine sat on it the way mountains sit on the earth. Not placed there. Simply present, as if the room had formed around him rather than the other way around.

His entire being radiated anger. The kind that had been compressed over time into something dense and cold, and it pressed outwards from him in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with what he was.

Lady in Dark walked in and stopped at a comfortable distance.

“You left the boy alive,” Lord Vine said.

“I didn’t anticipate how quickly Edric would move to install him as Camelot’s answer to their problems,” she replied. Her voice was even.

“The council session changed the calculation. If I had killed him before his value was made public, it would have been clean.”

“Did you know his potential?”

A pause. “Yes.”

Lord Vine’s eyes moved to her slowly. “You knew.”

“I knew,” she said. “And I judged it manageable. A powerful asset without freedom of movement, surrounded by people watching him, in a kingdom he has no loyalty to. I didn’t consider him a priority.”

The silence that followed was not comfortable.

“Eliminate him,” Lord Vine said.

“Camelot’s hope must come from what I give them,” he continued, each word placed with the deliberateness of someone who does not repeat themselves. “Not from something they grew themselves. Not from something that exists outside my reach. The boy is a variable I did not introduce. He needs to be removed.”

Lady in Dark looked at him for a moment. “You don’t give me orders.”

Lord Vine said nothing.

He simply looked at her, and the cold pressure in the room increased by a degree that had no measurable quality but was felt completely.

The silence stretched. Lady in Dark held it for as long as she reasonably could.

Then she exhaled once through her nose. “I’ll handle it.”

Lord Vine’s expression didn’t change. He moved on as if the exchange had already been forgotten. “The Sleeper Beneath. Where does the summoning stand?”

Lady in Dark settled back into her usual composure. “The ritual is complete in every respect except one. I still need an abyssal heart as the final component. Without it, the summoning cannot be initiated.”

“Progress on acquiring one?”

“I’m already growing it,” she said. “The process takes time. It cannot be rushed without compromising the integrity of the heart, and a compromised heart won’t survive contact with the ritual. It needs to be whole.”

“How long?”

“A month. Perhaps less, if conditions remain favorable.”

Lord Vine absorbed this without a visible reaction. Then, after a moment, he gave a single nod.

“And your next move?” she asked. “After Noah is handled.”

Lord Vine leaned back slightly in the throne, and something shifted in his expression. It felt like the particular satisfaction of someone looking at a game board they have been arranging for a very long time.

“The capital,” he said. “I’m going to make it into a place where a father cannot trust his own son. Where a son cannot trust his father. Where friends look at each other across a table and wonder.”

He paused.

“I want the suspicion so deep that no one can remember a time before it. And when they are all looking at each other, when every eye in Camelot is turned inwards, I will be exactly where I want to be.”

Lady in Dark felt the smile spread across her face before she could stop it.

“Enjoy your evening, Lord Vine,” she said.

She turned and walked back into the dark.

*****

Cecilia opened her eyes.

The ceiling above her was low and familiar, with the crack running from the left beam to the right that she had stared at every morning for the first nine years of her life.

The smell was right too. Candle wax and the particular damp of old stone that no amount of fires ever fully drove out.

She was home. The palace.

She sat up slowly, looking down at her hands. They were small, and her fingers were short and soft, without the calluses that years of work had built into her palms.

She pressed them flat against the blanket and felt the weave of it, rough wool, the blanket her mother had made.

She was a child.

She hadn’t become anything yet. Not yet a mage. And that meant she had no fire and no wings.

She was just a little girl in a room she had grown up in, in a body that hadn’t even grown past needing a bedtime.

The door exploded inwards.

The wood splintered into pieces, and the soldier who stepped through it filled the doorway completely.

His armor caught the light from the hall behind him. His expression carried no particular cruelty. He was simply doing something that had been asked of him.

He reached down and took hold of her hair.

Cecilia screamed. She kicked, her bare feet finding nothing useful, her hands pulling at his wrist with everything a nine-year-old could bring to bear.

He walked without slowing, dragging her through the corridor and out through what had been the front door and into the cold air outside.

He threw her.

She hit the ground and rolled, the grass cold and wet against her cheek, and when she looked up she was in the middle of them.

Women and girls, gathered into a rough circle by the soldiers standing at the edges. Some were crying. Some had gone somewhere quieter inside themselves.

Then her mother found her.

The arms came around her from behind, pulling her in tight, and her mother’s voice was in her ear, saying things that were meant to help but couldn’t.

She remembered this day. The day the Demon Lord had revolted.

The soldier at the edge of the courtyard raised his hands, and the others raised their torches.

And then the screaming started as the fire enveloped them, and—

Cecilia opened her eyes.

The same ceiling, the same crack in the beam, and the smell of candle wax.

The door was still whole.

For now.

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