Chapter 35: Beyond Expectations
Somewhere inside, in an incredibly spacious room, which suggests that it belongs not just to an ordinary noble house, but to a family with a long and distinguished history spanning hundreds of years.
The room did not so much announce wealth as assume it, the way mountains assume height — without needing to prove the point to anyone standing beneath them.
The walls rose two full stories, lined floor to ceiling with shelves of black lacquered wood. A fireplace large enough to roast a full ox sat cold and unused along the far wall, its mantle carved from a single slab of obsidian veined with faint threads of silver that seemed to catch the light without any obvious source to catch it from. Thick crimson carpets swallowed footsteps entirely.
Somewhere overhead, an enchanted chandelier hung suspended without chain or rope, drifting in place with the faint, unhurried motion of something enchanted centuries ago by someone who never expected it to still be working.
The centerpiece of it all was a desk carved from black serpent-wood, its surface wide enough to seat six men comfortably, its legs shaped into coiling serpents that mirrored a crest etched into the wall behind it — a black serpent devouring the sky.
Two people occupied the room.
One stood a respectful distance from the desk — an older man, silver-haired, his posture too straight and his frame too disciplined to belong to an ordinary servant. Age had softened nothing about the way he held himself, the stance of someone who had spent decades as a warrior long before he ever spent a single day holding a ledger.
Cedric. Chief Butler of House Vesperion.
The other sat behind the desk itself, broad shoulders straining faintly against the fabric of his robes even at rest, presence alone making the enormous room feel smaller than it actually was. The same person who had been observing from afar Maliric’s awakening, at the Awakening Ceremony — the same quiet, immovable weight of someone who had long since stopped needing to prove he was one of the strongest beings in all of Valthera.
Duke Vaelzareth Vesperion. Current ruler of House Vesperion.
He leaned back in his chair, setting down the quill he’d been holding without any apparent intention of using it again soon.
"...Cedric." A faint, genuine smile. "It’s been a while. I’d almost forgotten what you looked like ."
Cedric inclined his head, though the corner of his mouth twitched with something that wasn’t quite deference.
"If Your Grace had taken on even half the responsibilities that are, in fact, yours to begin with, you would see my face considerably more often. As it stands, I do most of your work for you and receive the pleasure of your company only when something requires your actual signature."
The Duke laughed — an easy, unbothered sound, the laugh of a man too powerful to feel threatened by being mocked in his own study.
"You know very well I hate paperwork." He spread his hands, palms up, as if presenting an obvious and unassailable truth. "And there’s no one else I trust with it. That’s practically a compliment."
"It is a compliment I would gladly trade for fewer sleepless nights, Your Grace." Cedric’s tone stayed perfectly even, the deadpan of a man who had delivered this exact complaint more times than either of them could count. "At this rate, you’ll be the death of me a full century before my time."
"A century." The Duke grinned. "You say that like it’s a bad thing. Think of the stories you’d miss."
"I would very much like to be alive to hear them told, Your Grace, rather than becoming one of them prematurely."
The Duke chuckled again, then let the humor fade into something more attentive — the shift of a man who understood that Cedric never simply appeared in his study without reason.
"So." He folded his hands atop the desk. "You didn’t come all this way just to remind me how much I owe you. Something’s happened."
"Indeed, Your Grace." Cedric’s posture straightened further, if that were even possible. "The Seventh Young Master has cleared the entirety of the Venom Spider nest. Not merely thinned it — cleared it. Every spider inside is dead, save for the eggs, which he left untouched."
"And the Queen?"
"Killed as well, Your Grace."
The Duke went quiet for a moment.
"...What Rank was she?"
"Awakened."
The silence that followed lasted longer this time.
The Duke’s expression didn’t change immediately — the particular stillness of a man recalculating something he thought he already understood. Then, slowly, something shifted behind his eyes. Not disbelief, exactly. Recognition, arriving a little faster than he’d been prepared for.
"...Good." A pause, and the single word carried more weight than a longer sentence would have. "That’s good."
He drummed two fingers once against the desk, thinking.
"Then we’ll need to revise the Banner Bearer Trial."
There was no mistaking the note underneath his voice now — quiet, restrained, but undeniably there.
Pride.
Cedric tilted his head slightly. "A new trial, Your Grace?"
The Duke didn’t answer right away. He leaned back further into his chair, eyes drifting toward the tall windows behind him, where the last color of sunset was fading into proper night over the Duchy’s grounds.
"If he can kill an Awakened-Rank Morveth this early," he said slowly, "there’s a real chance he reaches Awakened Rank himself before the Trial even begins. Which means the Trial as it currently stands would be an insult, not a test."
He turned back to Cedric, something sharpening in his gaze.
"It needs to matter. It needs to actually mean something, for him and for everyone watching."
"This reminds me of the first and second banner bearers; we had to change their trials as well to match their power."
Cedric said nothing, waiting.
Then, piqued by curiosity, he asked, "Do you have any ideas, Your Grace?""
The Duke’s eyes narrowed slightly, turning the problem over the way a man turns over a blade he’s deciding whether to sharpen or replace entirely.
"...Do you remember that Baroness—
**************
Meanwhile, Maliric and Eliza were on their way home in a four-horse carriage.
The road itself was quiet. No merchants, no patrols, no reason for anyone sane to be traveling at this hour.
The Duchy estate rose ahead of them as the carriage crested the final hill — pale stone catching the last of the sunset, windows already lit gold from within.
It looked exactly like it had that morning. Untouched. Unaware that the man walking through its gates had spent the day resurrecting an army and nearly killing himself twice over a spider.
Servants along the courtyard bowed as he passed. He didn’t slow down for any of them, didn’t really register the bows beyond the general shape of the motion at the edge of his vision.
Shower. Food. Sleep. In that order. Nothing else exists right now.
He reached his room with Eliza a step behind, still uncharacteristically silent, still processing.
"Have dinner ready," he said, already pulling at the ruined edge of his sleeve. "I’m going to wash."
"...Yes, Young Master."
He disappeared into the bathing chamber before she finished the sentence.
The cold water hit like a small mercy. He scrubbed at the dried blood — green in some places, red in others — until the water running off him ran clear, until the smell of venom and death finally gave way to something closer to just being tired. Not clean, exactly. Tired felt more accurate.
He ate without much attention to what was actually on the plate. Eliza set it down and said nothing, which he appreciated more than he had the energy to express.
By the time he reached the bed, whatever was left of him had already started shutting down piece by piece.
He didn’t remember lying down.
He was simply asleep — deep, dreamless, the kind of sleep that came after a body had spent everything it had and demanded the debt be paid in full before anything else was allowed to happen.
Tomorrow could have the evolution. Tomorrow could have the strategy, the Queen, all of it.
Tonight, there was only the dark, and the quiet, and finally, nothing at all.
Comments