Chapter 46: Chapter 46: The Third Prince Walks
"Come on," Alex said. "Follow me."
Zara looked up from the chair. "Are we going somewhere specific, or is this one of those situations where I trail a five year old through the palace and pretend I know what’s happening?"
"Follow me and find out."
She stood. "My master is so cruel," she said, in the tone of someone who had decided this was funny and intended to keep deciding it. "No information, no warning, just follow me into the unknown."
Alex was already at the door.
She followed him, as she always did, coming naturally to his side the moment they were in the corridor, not behind him, not ahead, exactly at his shoulder, the position that gave her line of sight on both directions without crowding him.
The first maid they passed was a woman Alex had seen before, part of the household staff that managed the west wing.
She was carrying linens and walking with the unhurried efficiency of someone three hours into a routine.
She registered movement to her right, glanced over with the automatic acknowledgment she’d have given any passing palace resident—
And froze.
Not dramatically.
A small freeze.
The specific kind where the body continues its last action slightly past when the brain stopped authorizing it.
She took one more step she hadn’t intended to take and then went still, the linens in her arms and her eyes on Alex with an expression moving rapidly through surprise, recalibration, and something that landed between wonder and professional mortification at the fact that she’d shown either.
She had felt it.
He could tell from the way her eyes moved, not to his face, to the space around him, to the mana that didn’t behave like a child’s mana anymore and hadn’t since the core formed.
Zara coughed once.
The sound was small and entirely deliberate.
The maid came out of it.
She shifted the linens into one arm, brought her right hand to her left shoulder, and bowed her head with the sharp precision of a deep formal acknowledgment.
"All things fall into the Abyss. The Abyss falls to you." A breath.
"Congratulations on Your Highness’s early awakening. The household is, we are all—" She was stuttering slightly, the words coming with the carefulness of someone who had not prepared for this encounter and was constructing it in real time.
"We are honoured."
Alex acknowledged it with a nod. "Thank you," he said, and kept walking.
Zara fell back into step beside him the moment they were past.
"That’s going to keep happening," she said.
"I know."
"Every person in this palace felt the disturbance two nights ago. Some of them knew immediately what it was. Everyone in this building is looking at you differently now."
"I noticed," Alex said.
"How do you feel about it?"
He thought about that honestly, which was the only way he tended to think about things.
"Tired of it already," he said.
"And I’ve been in the corridor for four minutes."
Zara made a sound that contained a lot of things, sympathy, amusement, the patience of someone who had already accepted this situation and was watching someone else arrive at acceptance.
"You should start," she said, "accepting that you are not normal anymore. You weren’t entirely normal before, but you were manageable. Now you’re the youngest awakened in recorded history walking through a palace full of people who know it. The looks are going to happen. The bowing is going to happen. You can be tired of it or you can let it become part of the texture of existing."
"Can I be tired of it and let it become part of the texture?"
"Probably yes," she conceded.
They kept walking.
The encounters came in sequence, each one a variation on the same pattern.
A guard at a corridor junction who registered Alex and went from professional to rigidly formal in one breath.
Two attendants crossing from one service corridor to another who stopped, looked, looked at each other, looked back, and performed the greeting in imperfect unison with the sincerity of people who meant it and the awkwardness of people who hadn’t rehearsed.
A palace scholar old enough that his rank meant he bowed to very few people, who nonetheless bowed.
Each time: the pause, the recognition, the greeting, the formal acknowledgment.
*All things fall into the Abyss. The Abyss falls to you.*
Each time: Alex’s nod, clean and without performance, and then forward.
By the time the double doors of the training complex came into view at the end of the east corridor, he had received the greeting seven times.
"I’m already tired of it," he confirmed, stopping at the doors.
"Noted," Zara said. "Does that change where we’re going?"
"No." He pushed open the right-hand door and stepped through
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