It had been three days since his conversation with his father about the successor training, and in those three days Andreas's routine had changed less than he expected. Arden had begun slipping paperwork into his mornings, copies, he was careful to clarify, practice documents where mistakes carried no real consequence, and Andreas worked through them between his other duties with the same methodical attention he brought to everything. Beyond that, his days remained what they had always been. Magic with Barderossa in the mornings, training with Kaela until his body filed a formal complaint, the territory with Arden when schedules allowed.
That was, until today.
Today he would receive his first lesson from his father.
'I am nervous.'
Andreas was walking to his father's office alone. Arden had other obligations and couldn't accompany him, which had seemed like a small thing when it was explained and felt considerably larger now with every step he took toward the office. The palace corridors, familiar enough that he could walk them without thinking, felt subtly different this morning. Longer, maybe. More empty than usual.
He reached the office door and stopped.
The door was large. It had always been large. He had stood in front of it three days ago and it had been large then too. Somehow it was larger now, looming over him in a way that made him feel very much like a ten year old standing somewhere he wasn't entirely sure he belonged.
'I need to calm down.'
He tried. It didn't work particularly well. So he knocked.
"My lord, it is me. Andreas. May I enter?"
A brief silence. Then the same deep unhurried voice from three days ago.
"Come in."
Andreas opened the door. His father sat exactly as he had before, as though the chair and the desk and the rigid set of his shoulders were simply the natural state of this room and everything else in the world moved around them. He was holding a book. He closed it as Andreas entered and set it on the desk.
Andreas crossed the room and stood in front of the desk in a way that felt immediately awkward, too far from the chair, too close to the door, not quite anywhere in particular.
"Sit."
He sat. Khalid closed the distance between them, moving around to Andreas's side of the desk and pulling a chair to face him rather than sitting across from him, which Andreas hadn't expected and had to stop himself from reacting to. His father settled into the chair with the book resting on his knee, looked at Andreas for a moment in a way that gave nothing away, and then cleared his throat.
"Today I will tell you about our family history and our ancestors. If you do not understand something, ask. Listen carefully."
Andreas gave a nod.
Khalid began.
"Around thirty-five thousand years ago," he said, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in the cadence of his voice, not warmth exactly, but a different quality, the voice of a man setting down a weight he has been carrying a long time and choosing instead to carry you somewhere with it, "there were no archdemons. No great demons. Not even what we would recognize today as normal demons. What existed then were devils."
He let that word sit in the air of the room for a moment.
"There was a civilization in those days. Ancient, powerful, and extraordinarily foolish in the way that powerful civilizations often become when they have gone too long without being reminded of their own limits. They summoned the devils. Not out of necessity, not out of desperation, but out of greed, because they wanted more than what the world had already given them, and they believed they had found a way to take it. What they got instead was their own destruction. The devils they summoned tore through them like fire through dry grass, and that ancient civilization and everything it had built was reduced to ash and legend."
Andreas listened without moving.
"But it was not a clean victory. The devils paid for it too. Most of their upper ranks were destroyed in the fighting, burned away in the same flames that consumed the civilization that had called them. What survived were imps." Khalid's voice held something here, a quality like reluctant respect. "Imps. Small. Weak. Unimpressive by every measure that the world uses to judge such things. But tenacious in a way that very few creatures in the history of this world have managed to be. They hid. They multiplied. They kept themselves carefully out of sight while every other race looked at the wreckage of that ancient war and tried to understand what had happened. And all the while, generation by generation, quietly and without announcement, the mana density of this world and its thaumic field worked on them. Changed them. Shaped them into something new."
He paused.
"They became demons. Just another race in a world full of races, unremarkable on the surface, carrying the memory of devils in their blood. Their worship of strength survived from those ancient warring days. It was perhaps the most durable thing about them. But they were not foolish enough to be blind to the gap between what they worshipped and what they actually were. So." Khalid looked at Andreas. "What do you think they did?"
Andreas turned it over. A race built around the worship of strength, fully aware of its own weakness. A race that understood the distance between what it desired and what it could achieve.
'They found a way to close that distance.'
"They created archdemons."
Khalid continued without pause.
"The tribal chiefs began taking mates from other races. Strong races, powerful races, elves, orcs, trolls, beasts, whatever bloodline offered something useful. Generation by generation the chiefs married powerful individuals and produced powerful offspring, and those offspring married powerfully in turn, and the strength accumulated the way interest accumulates, slowly and then all at once. After thousands of years of this deliberate, patient accumulation, something new emerged from the great demon bloodlines. Something that had not existed before."
He turned a page in the book on his knee without looking at it.
"Because they were a war-driven race, the moment they judged themselves strong enough they opened war on every neighboring race. They called it the War of Reclamation. All twenty tribes united under a single banner for the first and perhaps only time in their history, with the intent to take back what they believed the world owed them."
A brief silence.
"They lost. They were not yet strong enough and the war ground them down until they had no choice but to withdraw. But losing did not change them. It never changed them. It only sharpened their goal and gave their patience a longer horizon." Khalid's voice held the cadence of someone who has told a story many times and has learned exactly where to slow down. "And the world they were fighting in was not the world we know. Civilization as we understand it barely existed. Humans were just beginning to gather into villages, tentative and fragile things that barely deserved the name. Elves lived in their trees and concerned themselves with elven matters. Orcs had no settlements worth mentioning. In a world where proper civilization was nearly nonexistent, power was everything, and the great demons had power, just not enough of it. So they looked further. Sought stronger blood than they had found before."
He turned another page.
"Our ancestor, the one who began the line that produced everything in this room, married a vampire knight called Lonchē. There are stories told of Lonchē, old stories, the kind that have been told so many times the edges have worn smooth, and in those stories Lonchē claims to have killed a half-divinity in single combat. Whether that is truth or the embellishment of a long retelling, no one living can say with certainty. What is certain is the child they produced together. A child named Valekor."
Andreas held that name somewhere in his chest without knowing he was doing it.
"Valekor was the first archdemon in our family. The first of our blood to be something genuinely new rather than simply something stronger. Other tribes did the same in those years, sought legendary blood, extraordinary blood, blood that carried something beyond the ordinary measure of strength. A family close to ours, the Ashspires, married a red dragon. Others married trolls, giants, heroes of the age whose names have since been half-forgotten. And from all of that seeking, all of that deliberate reaching toward something greater, a new race was born. Archdemons."
He let that settle before continuing.
"Our surname comes from that first child. Valekor's eldest Daughter was called Ametia, child of the Valekor. Over generations the title collapsed into itself and became simply Valekor. That is what you carry. That is what the name means when you hear it said."
Khalid took a slow breath.
"Now. With archdemons existing, with genuine power finally present among the demon races, the great demons wanted war again. The old hunger had never left them. But they could not have it." He looked at Andreas. "Can you think why?"
The answer came without needing to be searched for.
"Because of the archdemons themselves."
"Because of the archdemons," Khalid agreed. "Who had no desire for war. Who were long-lived and patient and less purely demon than their kin because of their mixed blood, and who understood that war consumed more than it returned. A great demon who opposed the will of his tribe could be overthrown. An archdemon who opposed the will of his tribe could not be overthrown by any great demon alive. By around ten thousand years ago the hierarchy had become absolute. Twenty archdemon families at the top, ruling all beneath them. Approximately one hundred great demon families in service to those twenty. Normal demons below that, countless in number, held in order by a structure that had taken millennia to build."
He picked up the book and opened it to a specific page, holding it out for Andreas to take.
What Andreas saw was a portrait of a figure with long black hair and short black horns, features that were difficult to assign to any particular gender, standing atop the corpse of a dragon that dwarfed them in scale. One hand rested on a spear taller than they were. Their expression was unreadable in the way that expressions become unreadable when they contain too many things at once.
"Your great-great-grandmother. Isolde Valekor. She lived approximately five thousand years ago and is the first in our line to have left a drawn likeness of herself. Turn the page."
The next portrait was a man of considerable size, the kind of size that seemed to challenge the dimensions of the frame containing it. His muscles and his horns were both enormous, the horns branching in a way that suggested they had simply kept growing because nothing had given them reason to stop.
"Your great-grandfather. Ronan Valekor. Turn the page again."
The third portrait showed a man with unremarkable features and normal-sized horns. There was nothing immediately striking about him except his bearing, which was the bearing of someone who has never needed to be striking to be taken seriously. Khalid looked at this portrait for a long time, longer than he had looked at the others, before speaking.
"My father. Roderic Valekor."
Before Andreas could turn to the next page Khalid took the book from his hands.
"Follow me."
He left the room without further explanation and Andreas followed him into the corridor and then through the palace toward the right wing, the half of the building that sat across from Andreas's own quarters like a place belonging to a different world. Andreas had tried to come here before, on several separate occasions, and each time something had intervened with the reliable precision of coincidence, Arden calling him back, Barderossa needing him urgently, some small matter requiring immediate attention. He had eventually stopped trying without consciously deciding to.
"These are copies of the original portraits."
The corridor they entered felt untouched. The dust that had settled over everything had the particular quality of undisturbed dust, the kind that accumulates when a space has not been entered in years rather than simply weeks. Portraits lined both walls. The ones from the book were here, Isolde, Ronan, Roderic, but others as well that had not appeared in those pages. Isolde with a old man in her arms and a young Ronan side by side, the difference in their size almost impossible to believe given that one had produced the other. Ronan again but decades older, his horns larger, three children arranged beside him with the slightly formal stiffness of children who have been told to stand still. One of them was presumably Roderic. A portrait of Roderic young, standing beside his own father. The lineage arranged in sequence down the corridor like a conversation that had been ongoing for five thousand years.
At the very end was a portrait unlike the others.
His father. Younger than he was now, though the difference lived in something other than his face, something in how he stood, something that had since been replaced by the rigid composure Andreas had always known. And beside him a woman with red hair, her belly large and round, one hand resting against it.
Khalid stood in front of that portrait for a long time.
Andreas stood beside him and said nothing.
When Khalid finally spoke his voice was the same as it had been for the entire lesson. Level. Even. Carrying only what was necessary.
"We archdemons are responsible for the demon race. Without us they would consume themselves in war the way they always have when left without direction. We guide them. We rule over them. We carry that responsibility whether we choose it or not, because no one else is strong enough to carry it in our place. Our ancestors understood this. My father understood it. I understand it now." He did not look away from the portrait. "Soon enough there will come a time when you will rule over Valekor. When that time comes you will need to understand it too. Do you understand your responsibility?"
"I understand."
Khalid looked at Andreas then, and his eyes held many things that his voice had not carried and would not carry, things that lived behind the level composure like weather behind glass.
"Today's lesson is over. Go to your room."