Location: Tashlan — Trisoc's Palace, Banquet Hall | Year 8002 A.A., under the amber glow of a waning moon
Tashlan, jewel of Carlon, slumbered uneasily beneath the waning moon. From a distance the city shone as though it were a diadem of light upon the spine of Mount Seraxis, but the closer one drew, the more its brilliance soured into rot. For above, towers of white marble and gold glimmered with the wealth of conquests long past; while below, among the lower tiers and blackened streets, hunger crouched like a starving beast. Yet the Trisoc's palace cared nothing for such imbalance.
It rose at the very heart of the city—a mountain of carved marble, crowned with golden domes so polished that even the weakest starlight clung to their curves. Tonight, its windows blazed with unnatural warmth, as though the palace itself mocked the night sky by keeping its own false sun alive within.
The banquet hall was the palace's pride, and it was here the Trisoc and his chosen companions gathered. The hall was vast enough that a hundred voices could shout within its walls and still be drowned by the echo of their own splendor. White pillars soared upward into shadow, branching like petrified trees, while from their heights hung chandeliers of gold and crystal—each spilling molten light as though the very stars had been caught and shackled there.
Beneath this canopy of captured brilliance stretched a sea of opulence. Tables long as rivers bore the weight of roasted boar and lamb, honey-glazed game birds, spiced fish drawn from the far eastern waters, and fruits whose skins gleamed like gems. Silver knives and golden plates reflected the flickering light, turning each morsel into a bauble of temptation. Servants moved swiftly among them, barefoot and silent, carrying fresh trays and goblets as though born to servitude. Their shadows—thin, fleeting—slid across the marble floor where ancient mosaics immortalized battles long faded to myth. Lions with sunlit manes wrestled serpents of impossible size; beasts trampled the enemies of Carlon into dust; yet beneath the diners' hooves and paws, these images were half-smeared with spilled wine and carelessly dropped bones.
And so the nobles feasted.
Boars adorned with bronze circlets tossed back their heads and let their laughter rattle like drums. Stags with gilded antlers clinked chalices heavy with wine, their jeweled collars catching the light. Serpents cloaked in silks of green and violet lounged at the edges of the table, their forked tongues flickering as they tasted both the air and the wealth spilling in every direction. All around, there was the rustle of brocade sleeves, the clatter of goblets, the dull pounding of paws and claws upon marble tiles in a careless, restless rhythm.
Jewels
It was a music of decadence—a symphony without harmony, where every sound jostled for dominance and none cared to listen.
One might have thought this splendor a kind of worship—a thanksgiving for the bounty of the land. But it was not gratitude that ruled here, only pride. The feast was less a meal than a proclamation: we are untouchable, we are eternal, and the world itself must bow before us.
And yet, for any who had eyes to see, shadows lingered even in this sea of gold. For outside the palace walls, in the low tiers of Tashlan, children with hollow eyes and cracked paws watched their mothers trade honor for bread. In alleys where torches flickered like dying stars, the same wine that nobles spilled for sport might have bought life for a week.
But here in the banquet hall, such thoughts never entered. To the lords and ladies of Carlon, hunger was an abstraction, suffering a tale told by enemies. Their revelry was both shield and blindness, a golden mask against the truth.
And so the hall thundered with laughter while the city groaned with want.
At the far end of the hall, lifted high above the clamor of revelers, rose the ivory dais—a throne-stage carved not only for rule, but for spectacle. Its surface glimmered with mother-of-pearl, shimmering like trapped moonlight, so that even silence could not ignore it. And upon that throne, bloated with wealth and authority, sat the Trisoc of Carlon.
He was a mountain of flesh and power. The throne, though immense, seemed strained beneath him, as though even the stone feared to displease. His tusks, plated in molten gold, curved outward like twin scythes catching every drop of candlelight. Rings banded his thick fingers—sapphires, rubies, diamonds, each cold gem a monument to some unspoken tale: a rival slain, a city bribed, a lover betrayed. His laughter rolled across the banquet hall, rich and booming, a storm-cloud given voice. Yet for all its volume, it carried no warmth. His eyes—small, beady, deep-set beneath ridges of bristle—betrayed the truth. They gleamed not with mirth but with a constant, gnawing suspicion. He trusted nothing, and no one, save the crushing weight of power.
Beside him stood another throne, less ornate, but no less commanding in presence. There, poised like a spear still unsheathed, sat Prince Erezhan. He was his father's image sharpened, stripped of excess and fattened years. The Trisoc was a mountain; Erezhan, a blade. His tusks were darker, curving like obsidian hooks, his frame lean but hardened, every muscle carved in restless tension. His bare hooves tapped against the mosaic floor in an unbroken rhythm, a heartbeat of impatience that only those closest to him could hear. Where his father laughed, he remained silent, eyes like coals that never cooled. He watched the hall as a hawk might watch a field—seeking prey, marking weakness, storing away insults that others assumed had passed unnoticed.
And then—
The doors.
Grand and bronze, they groaned as though burdened by age and secrecy. Hinges screamed against their weight. The laughter in the hall faltered, broke, and fell into silence, like a song cut short by a sudden draft. All eyes turned. From the yawning shadows of the doorway emerged a figure swathed in robes black as midnight. He came slowly, as if each step bore both dignity and dread. His back hunched; his long tail curled like a serpent's question mark about his feet. Where candlelight touched him, his scales shifted color—blue, green, violet—like oil shimmering atop still water.
The Vizier.
A name few spoke loudly.
He advanced with deliberate grace, claws whispering against the marble. He did not meet the gaze of nobles; he bowed low, spine curving like a drawn bow, until the crown of his head nearly brushed the stone. Only then did his tongue flicker, a quick silver dart testing the air, before retreating behind shut lips.
The Trisoc's face stiffened. His thunderous joviality drained as wine drains from a shattered goblet. A hush swelled, more potent than any roar. His fingers—thick, jeweled, greedy—tightened around the stem of his chalice until the metal bent beneath his grip.
Prince Erezhan rose. The motion itself was a threat. His nostrils flared, the grind of tusk upon tusk carrying across the silent hall like a blade dragged over stone. No herald announced him; no flourish softened his words.
"Noblemen of Carlon!"
His voice cleaved the stillness. It was not a shout, yet it carried sharper than any trumpet. Clear. Cold. Merciless.
"Your presence honors us," he said, though his tone betrayed no such sentiment. "But the night draws late. Retire with my gratitude."
There was a pause—an unbearable heartbeat. Then, as if compelled, voices rose. Cheers, stiff and forced, echoed from every table. Goblets were raised; wine spilled afresh. But the laughter that followed was thin, nervous, hollow. Like shadows dancing on the wall, it convinced no one of its truth.
The nobles bowed—some deep, some shallow, all perfunctory—and began their retreat. Hooves, paws, and claws rang hollow on the mosaic floor, where old heroes wrestled beasts and gods in colored stone. Each footstep seemed less celebratory than the last, until at last they dwindled into the corridors beyond.
The hall emptied. Its chandeliers, once radiant above a sea of bodies, now seemed cold—chains of gold shackled to a ceiling too high to warm what remained.
At last, the Trisoc exhaled heavily. His great shoulders slumped, not with weakness but with release, as though the mask of feasting had finally grown too heavy to bear. He gestured curtly, dismissing what servants lingered.
Through the hush, the Vizier's tail twitched. Erezhan remained standing, gaze hard as obsidian.
And then—with no ceremony, no proclamation—the three figures slipped from the hall.
Behind a curtain of velvet, almost invisible to the eye, lay a narrow archway. Through it they vanished, their massive and reptilian forms swallowed by torchlight and shadow. Downward they went, past marble and gold, into the deeper marrow of the palace, where secrets slept and conspiracies breathed like smoke.
________________________________
Location: Tashlan — The Trisoc's Secret Chamber
The palace above was gilded light, music, and masks; here, beneath its marbled bones, the truth of Carlon festered. The chamber into which the Trisoc withdrew was not built for beauty, but for endurance. Its walls, rough-hewn stone swallowed in velvet long since dulled and frayed, exhaled the must of centuries. Incense burned in shallow bowls, its heavy sweetness coiling through the air, desperate to disguise the mildew clinging to the stones. It could not. The chamber stank of things too old to be washed away: dust, rot, and the weight of secrets hoarded like gold.
Lanterns sputtered along iron hooks, their flames reluctant, each one throwing long, broken shadows that seemed to crawl and recoil upon the walls. There hung banners of wars half-forgotten, maps where borders bled and blurred, scrolls covered in spidery script pinned carelessly, as though the schemes of yesterday were already ash. This was no place of pageantry—it was the marrow of conspiracy.
At the chamber's heart stood a throne—not the ivory dais of the banquet, but a hulking chair of black oak. Its arms were carved into snarling boar heads, their tusks frozen in eternal charge. Dark jet stones studded its back like eyes that did not blink. Here the Trisoc lowered himself, the weight of his body thudding against the flagstones, sending a shudder through the floor. He did not laugh here. He did not smile. His face, stripped of its feast-day mask, was harder, older, a mountain of suspicion and calculation.
Beside him, standing rather than sitting, was Prince Erezhan. He did not need a chair. His very stillness was his throne. Arms crossed, tusks gleaming in the sickly lantern light, he radiated both challenge and inheritance—the heir apparent, forged sharper than his father's bulk, the edge to the mountain's immovable weight. His gaze did not wander. It fixed like a spear upon those who knelt before him.
There were two.
First—Sahira. Her bronze scales shimmered faintly as the lamplight touched them, the cobra's hood collapsed tight around her neck, her body pressed low against the stone. Her emerald eyes, usually quick and calculating, now stared firmly at the floor. No movement betrayed her thoughts. Still, one could sense it—the tension in the stillness, the controlled coil of a serpent waiting, wary of striking only at the wrong moment.
Beside her knelt Baraz. Where Sahira was sleek, Baraz was a fortress. A rhinoceros Tracient, his horn curved like a dagger honed by the desert wind, his massive shoulders rippling beneath his travel-worn cloak. He bowed so low his horn nearly scraped the stone, his massive hooves planted wide upon the flagstones, muscles taut as if even kneeling was a battlefield concession. He did not speak. But his silence was not humility; it was endurance.
And then—the Vizier.
He slid forward, robes of liquid night trailing across the stones, the lanterns' light glancing off his iridescent scales. His every movement was too fluid, too deliberate, as though even the act of bowing must serve some darker calculus. He lowered himself with a grace that mocked the weight of the others' obeisance, claws outstretched upon the floor in ritual submission. Yet his tail, curling behind him, never stilled—it twitched and shifted, betraying the lizard's eternal habit of listening to vibrations no one else could hear.
The Trisoc's thick fingers drummed upon the carved boar-head of his chair. Each thud echoed into the velvet-hung chamber like a judge's gavel. His eyes moved across the three before him—not with kindness, nor with wrath, but with that cold measuring that had built his throne higher than his rivals'.
"Great Trisoc, may you live forever," intoned Sahira and Baraz together, voices low but resonant, like a pair of winds converging at the mouth of a cavern.
The Vizier, ever more serpentine, whispered the same—"Forever"—yet his tone carried an aftertaste, as though he were savoring a word more than pledging it.
The Trisoc's voice rolled outward, slow and heavy, filling every stone of the chamber. "Report." No flourish, no courtesy. Only the command of one who had forgotten long ago what it meant to ask. His drumming hoof against the oak boar-head carved into his throne struck like a low war drum, an ominous heartbeat that the chamber itself seemed to echo.
Sahira stirred. The bronze-scaled cobra raised her gaze, careful, deliberate, her voice uncoiling in the stillness. A hiss clothed in reverence.
"Great Trisoc, your humble servant brings news… of the Ronins."
At that single word, silence fractured like glass under strain.
Erezhan's head snapped. His tusks ground against one another with a faint, grating sound that filled the chamber louder than any shout might have. His hooves shifted, tapping the flagstones in a restless rhythm that betrayed the storm churning beneath his austere composure. The very air seemed to narrow, tight and watchful.
The Trisoc's gaze turned molten and sharp, the jovial mask of the banquet hall utterly vanished. His small eyes pierced like twin spearpoints. "They infiltrated my city… undetected?" His words were not raised, yet their weight pulled warmth from the air. The room seemed to chill around them, as if even the lantern flames bent inward to hear their judgment.
None dared speak. The silence that followed was not the pause of thought—it was suffocation, thick as smoke choking the lungs.
The Trisoc's head turned slowly, deliberately, to his son. "Explain, my son."
All eyes swung toward Erezhan. His shadow stretched long across the stone. His chin dipped in deference, but his fists told a truer story, clenched so tightly that the short fur on his knuckles stood pale. He knelt in form but not in heart.
"Forgive me, O gracious father," Erezhan said, the words rasped through clenched tusks. Each syllable scraped like a blade dragged across stone. "My failure stains your reign. It shall not happen again."
There was bitterness in the apology, bitter as gall. For though his voice claimed shame, his eyes glittered with the cold vow of vengeance—not against the Ronins only, but perhaps against the weight of a father's throne that pressed ever upon his shoulders.
The Vizier stirred. His long body shifted, claws twitching faintly as though the silence itself demanded filling. He raised his narrow head just enough to speak, words careful, almost pleading.
"Great Trisoc," he said softly, "if I may, let the generals—"
The thought was never finished.
A blur of motion—Erezhan's hoof crashed into the Vizier's stomach. The sickening thud echoed through the chamber like a war gong. The lizard folded, scales scraping stone, his body curling upon itself. His strangled gasp clawed its way into the air and then broke off, swallowed by pain.
"Imbecile!" Erezhan's voice was a snarl, tusks bared, rage hot and untempered. "You dare interrupt?"
The Vizier writhed, clutching his side, his breath wheezing like bellows. His eyes, though half-shut, glittered with something dangerous—fear, yes, but also a sharpness that had not been crushed.
Above them, the Trisoc lifted his hand. It was not a swift gesture, but it carried the authority of law. A shadow swept through the chamber with it, quenching the moment's fire.
"Desist, Erezhan."
The prince's breath heaved, nostrils flaring, hooves braced. For a heartbeat he looked ready to strike again. Yet the father's word, heavy as iron, froze him. His jaw tightened until the bones creaked.
"The Vizier's point stands," the Trisoc said at last, each syllable deliberate, cutting through the air like a chisel. His eyes moved, unyielding, back to Sahira. "Continue.".
Sahira exhaled, the faint rattle in her chest betraying how long she had been holding her breath. Her scales shimmered faintly in the lantern glow, rippling like bronze leaves caught in wind.
"We engaged two Ronins aiding refugees in the catacombs," she began, voice thin but steady. "They concealed both their Mana and Rank."
The Trisoc leaned forward in his carved chair, the weight of his massive frame bending shadows closer. His golden tusks caught the wavering light of the lanterns and flung it back in sharp reflections across the chamber wall. His eyes narrowed.
"A Hazël level technique," he said slowly, savoring each word as though testing its flavor. "Are you suggesting these Ronins possess such skill?"
A hush followed. No one in the chamber could mistake the danger in that suggestion. To claim Ronins—exiles, renegades—were wielding sacred techniques was to suggest an order older and deeper than Carlon's own walls stirred again.
Baraz shifted where he knelt, his horn brushing faintly against stone. His hooves rasped against the cold floor, a sound that filled the silence like the far-off rolling of thunder before a storm. He lifted his head just enough for his deep voice to travel, rumbling and steady.
"They intercepted my Combustion Blast, Great Trisoc," he said. "No ordinary Özel could manage such a feat."
The words hung in the chamber like a great stone dropped into still water. Ripples of unease spread through the dim air.
Sahira's voice followed, softer, near breaking. "And… they weren't alone."
Erezhan's head turned with slow, terrible precision. His gaze froze her where she knelt, colder than any serpent's blood could withstand. The chamber itself seemed to tighten around his presence.
"Speak plainly, Sahira," he said, his tone a blade of ice. "The Trisoc waits."
Her throat worked, swallowing back the instinct to coil inward. Finally, she forced the words out in a whisper, as though naming the thing might bring it fully into being.
"A third Tracient appeared… wielding the Kurtcan Arcem."
The air fled the chamber. For a heartbeat, even the flames of the lanterns seemed to hesitate.
At the name, the walls themselves seemed to draw closer. Erezhan's Mana surged outward in an instant, a crushing weight that slammed into every chest like an invisible tide. Dust, long settled into the high beams, shuddered loose and drifted down in pale motes.
His roar erupted, shaking the velvet hangings as though thunder had been loosed within the earth. "LIES! Kurtcan vanished two millennia past! Are you certain?"
The sound struck Sahira to her core. She pressed her scales flat against her flesh in a posture of submission, her forehead nearly kissing the stone. Her voice trembled, desperate, yet unwavering in its oath.
"I swear on my life," she gasped. "He broke my hold on the refugees, shattered my power. None else could have."
Erezhan's breath came like fire through his tusks. His rage blazed so hot it threatened to consume the chamber whole. But before his fury could grow into something unbridled, a great weight settled upon his shoulder.
The Trisoc's massive hoof, heavy and deliberate, rested there.
"Calm, my son."
The words carried no sharpness, no thunder—only the steady gravity of authority. Yet it was enough. Slowly, like a beast reined in at the edge of the charge, Erezhan's shoulders lowered. His tusks dipped. His breath grew ragged, then steadied.
The lantern flames, which had bent beneath his outburst, righted themselves again, flickering in fragile steadiness.
The Trisoc's eyes glinted, not with fury but with something colder—an illumination that was part calculation, part revelation. He leaned back into his throne, tusks gleaming faintly in the shifting light.
"If this is truth," he said, his deep voice rumbling low, "then the whispers speak rightly. The Narn Lords live." His eyes narrowed, sharp as a hunter sighting prey. "And that wild cat, Azubuike Toran, harbors them."
From the floor, the Vizier stirred, his ribs rattling like brittle reeds. He wiped a trembling claw across his mouth, smearing a dark line of blood that caught the light. The scales along his snout twitched, betraying pain he dared not voice. Yet his mind—cold and coiled like a serpent—never lost its sharpness.
His claws tapped the stone, deliberate and echoing, as he spoke:
"My Lord, all these afflictions—Ronins, Narnans, whispered ghosts of Hazël craft—trace back to one root: the Fall of ArchenLand. Its architect must be reminded of the debts his war brought upon your dominion."
The Trisoc, leaned back with a slow, ponderous rumble. His massive tusks gleamed as they curved upward into something far more dangerous than anger—a grin. Not the warmth of feasts, but the wolfish, hunting grin of one who scents prey at last.
"A fair thought, Vizier," he said, voice curling through the chamber like smoke. "Yes. Yes, indeed. Summon the Shadow."
The Vizier's eyes flickered once, almost in triumph, before he lowered his snout and began. His claws etched into the stone, scraping slow and steady. Sparks leapt from the cuts, but then sank into the grooves as if drunk by unseen thirst. Soon the etchings began to glow—not with warmth, but with a pallid, spectral light, the kind that made fur bristle and scales tighten.
His chant rose in a tongue so ancient it rasped like wind across forgotten graves. The syllables clawed at the edges of thought, each word seeming to unravel the air. A chill swept through the chamber, biting sharp enough that Sahira's scales rippled and Baraz's thick hide prickled. Even Erezhan, forged in the fires of his own wrath, stiffened against the cold.
The lanterns guttered. Their flames bent and shuddered, then shrank, as though cowering from what answered the call. Shadows stretched along the walls, twisting in shapes that were not their own, until the very air thickened with presence.
Then—from the rune's heart—darkness rose. It did not merely gather, but coiled like smoke with intent, alive in its silence. The room felt suddenly smaller, as though all stone and air were being drawn into that singular center.
From it stepped a figure.
Fur white as snow at midnight, yet no lantern dared touch it with color. Paws, silent as breath, pressed into stone with the stillness of inevitability. Twin Amythx eyes—luminous, ancient, unblinking—emerged from beneath a hood spun of living shadow. They pierced every heart in the room, laying bare secrets unspoken, wounds long concealed.
A fox Tracient, yet more and less than one: sleek and terrible, every movement rippling with the quiet inevitability of death itself.
The Shadow had come.
____________________________________________
The Shadow's presence hollowed the chamber's air; even the embers in the lanterns seemed to wither beneath his gaze, shrinking to timid sparks. The velvet drapes at the walls stirred though no wind passed, and the smell of incense soured into something metallic—like iron drawn fresh from the forge. Around him, darkness swirled with a patient, almost predatory rhythm, as though the night itself obeyed his quiet pulse.
Where stray light touched, the fox's fur shimmered, pristine and terrible, its whiteness sharper than bone. At his paws, veins of shadow split the stone, each heartbeat widening faint cracks that crawled outward like roots burrowing into the earth. No one mistook them for simple fractures. The shadows were alive.
When at last he spoke, his voice came low and ageless. Not harsh, not kind—merely there, immutable. It was a sound that belonged less to throats and tongues than to the slow turning of ages themselves.
"Trisoc."
The name lingered in the room, heavy as dust in lungs.
The Trisoc leaned back in his throne, and the creak of carved oak beneath his massive frame rang strangely small in that moment. His tusks caught the lantern light as he grinned, but his small, cunning eyes never left the Shadow's form. He did not bow; he did not rise. But in his stillness was an acknowledgment: this was no underling to be cowed, but an equal—or something worse.
"Too long, old friend."
The Shadow did not return the smile. His gaze, twin orbs of pale flame, moved across the chamber, pausing briefly upon Sahira's bowed head and Baraz's stooped shoulders. To them it was as though a blade hovered over their spines, unseen but ready to fall. Sahira's breath came shallow, the ripple of her scales betraying what she dared not show. Baraz's massive hands dug faint furrows into the stone floor, his strength instinctively seeking anchor against the unseen weight pressing upon him.
Then the fox's gaze returned, steady as a tide.
"What is it you desire?"
The Trisoc's hoof tapped once against the armrest, echoing like a judge's gavel. He let the silence stretch before answering, savoring his own words as though to remind the others that this chamber was his.
"Straight to it, as ever," he mused, tusks gleaming in the dim light. "Very well. Your campaign in ArchenLand—its ruin has spilled into my dominion like poison. These Ronins, once yours, now flit about my city like wraiths. They are vermin gnawing at my walls. See them ended. It was your hand that tore their world apart; let your hand finish what it began."
He leaned forward then, tusks catching in the lantern glow, the weight of his request—no, his command—ringing through the chamber.
But the Shadow did not flinch, nor did his veil of darkness stir. Only the faintest narrowing of his pale brows shifted his face. When he spoke again, his words carved through the air like stone dragged across stone.
"I serve no master, Trisoc. Do not mistake our alliance for chains upon me."
A moment passed, heavy with ancient grudges and unspoken bargains. The silence was a living thing, crawling against the walls, tugging at every ear and heart in the chamber. It was the kind of silence that made even breath feel like an intrusion, that pressed upon spines until bowing seemed natural.
Then the Shadow stirred.
His pale gaze slid once more to the kneeling generals, and with it came a faint stirring in the air—as though the chamber itself remembered to shiver. The fox raised one hand, fur silver-white where light dared to glance, and at his fingertips dark Mana gathered. It writhed like liquid midnight, thick and alive, twisting in slow revolutions. From its shape emerged crystalline shards, jagged as broken glass, their edges bleeding violet flame.
The shards hovered in the air, humming faintly with a resonance that clawed at the marrow of those who looked too closely. They drifted toward Sahira and Baraz with terrible gentleness, like predators certain of their prey.
Neither general flinched. To move would have been weakness before their sovereign. Yet in Sahira's breast, her heart pounded against her ribs, each beat a hiss of fear she refused to voice. Baraz felt sweat bead along the base of his horn, though the chamber was cold. Even the Vizier—ever the sly spider among webs—shifted backward upon the stone, claws splayed for balance.
The shards touched flesh.
Sahira gasped, her body arcing as though caught by unseen chains. From her scaled brow a fissure split—clean, terrible, and precise. It opened like the seam of an egg, revealing an eye where no eye should be. At first it was black and void, a hole into nothing. But then, with a sickening pulse, it filled with amethyst light, the glow burning so brightly that shadows recoiled from her face. That eye blinked once, unnervingly slow, and when it opened again the chamber itself seemed smaller, as though she saw with sight deeper than mortal.
Baraz's transformation was thunder instead of silence. His vast shoulders trembled, then ignited with violet fire, his massive frame a torch of unnatural flame. Arcs of Mana leapt from shoulder to horn, sparking down his thick arms and licking at his hooves. Each spark that struck stone left a burn, black veins scorched into the flagstones. His breath steamed as though his lungs were forges, and when his eyes opened they glowed faintly, two embers in the cavern of his face.
The chamber bore witness.
"Punisher Duo," the Shadow intoned, his voice resonating against the walls like the tolling of a bell deep beneath the earth. "I grant you strength to raze what dares oppose Carlon's will."
Sahira's new eye blazed as though it hungered. Baraz clenched his fists, and the violet arcs snarled in answer, like wolves straining at a leash. Both generals bowed low, their voices cracked with awe as they rasped in unison:
"We obey."
The darkness about the fox shivered, restless, as though even his shadows found unease in what he had given. Yet the Shadow himself turned calmly back to the dais, his eyes twin moons in a sky of endless night.
"Will this suffice, old boar?"
The Trisoc leaned forward. His tusks caught the firelight as he grinned, though his eyes remained sharp, calculating. A soft chuckle left his throat, low and satisfied.
"It shall do. You have my gratitude."
The words were smooth, but gratitude was not in them.
The Shadow offered nothing further. Without another word he dissolved, his form unraveling into coils of mist, fur and claws vanishing into living shadow. It rolled outward, creeping across the stone like spilled ink, then rose upward into curling black smoke that thinned and disappeared. His presence was gone as though he had never stood there—save for the chill that clung stubbornly to the air, and the faint cracks that remained etched into the flagstones where his paws had rested.
The lantern flames, guttered and weak, fought to reclaim their strength. They rose again, but dimmer than before, their warmth bruised and uncertain, as if wounded by his passing.
For several breaths, no one moved. Even the Trisoc, mountain though he was, remained still, savoring the silence that lingered in the Shadow's wake.
It was the Vizier who rose first. His robes were damp with his own blood, his jaw darkly stained, yet his spine bent low in a gesture of praise. "Your majesty," he murmured, his voice thin but eager, "superbly handled. To hold discourse with that one and emerge with boon, not bane—it is no small triumph." His claws clacked softly against the floor, the rhythm betraying a nervous tremor he could not conceal.
The Trisoc exhaled deeply, the grin lingering on his mouth like a scar that refused to fade. His tusks gleamed, his shoulders straightened, and in his vast chest a breath filled the room with its weight.
"Now," he rumbled, the word carrying like a drumbeat, "we shall see what power can accomplish where caution failed."
The generals stirred at once. Sahira bowed, her third eye never blinking, its amethyst glow flickering faintly across the chamber's stones. Baraz thumped one massive fist against his chest, the violet flame guttering along his shoulders with the motion. The power burned through them already, alien yet intoxicating.
But another figure stepped forward.
Erezhan.
The prince's silence until now had been its own presence, brooding at the dais beside his father. But now his hooves struck the stone with sharp certainty as he moved forward, lowering himself into a bow that bent both pride and fury into something resembling devotion. His tusks gleamed low beneath the lantern light.
"Great Trisoc," he said, his voice hard as hammered bronze, "permit me to finish what was left undone. I will bring you their heads, and bury their legend with them."
His words rang with hunger—the hunger of a son desperate not only to serve, but to surpass. His hands, still clenched from earlier, trembled faintly, not from fear but from restraint. His mind played the image over and over: Ronins slipping through his grasp, his failure gnawing like a worm. He longed for their blood to wash it away.
The Trisoc studied him in silence. His eyes, small and dark beneath the golden tusks, weighed his son with the care of a butcher deciding which cut of meat would serve best. He saw not just loyalty but desperation, not just ambition but rage. And in those things he saw something he could shape, something he could wield.
Slowly, heavily, he nodded.
"So be it. Go, Erezhan—hunt them, and let none escape."
The decree filled the chamber, its echo ringing like prophecy. Sahira's third eye gleamed, Baraz's violet fire snarled, the Vizier's claws clicked faintly in anxious approval.
And the Trisoc smiled his terrible smile.
Above them, unseen through stone and marble, the waning moon drifted on. Its pale light touched the palace's towers but could not pierce the shadows beneath. Within those shadows, the future shifted—threads of power knotted tighter, sharper, around the throats of men and beasts alike.
A hunt had begun.