Zyrax's POV
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I am in the middle of ending a war council when Vrael walks in.
He knows better than to interrupt a war council. Every creature in my court knows better. The fact that he is doing it anyway means something has happened that he has decided I need to know about immediately, which means I am about to be annoyed.
I hold up one hand and the council goes silent.
"Speak," I say.
Vrael says, "The new sacrifice arrived."
I stare at him. "You interrupted a war council to tell me a sacrifice arrived."
"I interrupted a war council," Vrael says, with the specific careful tone he uses when he is about to say something he knows will irritate me, "because this one is different."
I dismiss the council with a look. They file out. Vrael waits until the last one is gone and then he tells me what happened in the receiving cavern. How she walked in. How she didn't make a sound. How she stood in the middle of the space with all of them watching and did not weep, did not beg, did not faint.
"She looked up," Vrael says. "At the ceiling. Like she was studying it."
I say nothing.
"Then she found a rock and sat on it," he continues. "And she watched us. The way you watch something you are trying to understand."
I lean back. "She's performing bravery. They do that sometimes."
"I know what performed bravery looks like," Vrael says. "This wasn't that."
I look at him for a long moment. Vrael has been my second for longer than most things in this world have been alive. He does not rattle. He does not come to me with small things dressed up as large ones. If he is standing in my war council with that expression on his face, he believes what he is saying.
"I'll see her tomorrow," I say.
Vrael nods and turns to leave.
"Vrael."
He stops.
"Which cavern?"
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I tell myself I am going for strategic reasons.
A human with unusual behavior in my court is a variable I should assess personally. That is a reasonable and entirely logical motivation. I am not going because a single sentence about a girl sitting on a rock and looking at my ceiling with curiosity instead of terror has lodged in my mind like a splinter. I am going for strategy.
I take the lower corridor to avoid being seen by the court. I don't want commentary. I don't want Vrael's expression, which I can already picture _ the carefully neutral one that means he knows exactly what I am doing and has chosen not to say so out loud.
I reach the entrance of the receiving cavern and I stop.
She is still there.
She is sitting cross-legged on the flat rock near the entrance wall, and she has her palm pressed flat against the glowing stone beside her. Not gripping it. Not bracing against it. Just resting there, like she is feeling for something. Her head is slightly tilted. Her eyes are half closed.
She looks like she is listening.
I stand very still.
In four years of receiving human sacrifices, I have seen every possible version of fear. Loud fear, quiet fear, collapsed fear, angry fear that tries to look like bravery. I have seen humans pray to things they aren't sure exist and I have seen them bargain with things they know won't listen.
I have never seen one of them sit quietly in the middle of my court pressing their hand against the wall like they are having a conversation with it.
I don't announce myself.
I just watch.
-
She stays like that for almost a full minute. Then she opens her eyes, drops her hand into her lap, and looks at it the way a person looks at something they don't entirely trust yet. Turning it over. Examining it. Her expression is not afraid. It is focused. Like she is working through a problem.
Something shifts in my chest.
I don't have a name for it immediately. That is unusual. I have been alive long enough that most things have names. Most feelings have been felt before and filed away. But this _ watching this small human girl think quietly in the middle of my cavern like it is her own personal study room _ this doesn't have a file.
I take one step forward.
She goes completely still.
She felt me before she saw me. I watch it happen _ the stillness, the sharp breath, the way her hand closes into a loose fist in her lap. But she doesn't spin around in a panic. She turns slowly. Deliberately. Like she is choosing how to do it.
She looks at me.
Most humans, when they see me for the first time, stop being able to think. I can see it happen _ the way the mind simply empties out from overload. They see my height, my build, the way the light catches what I am, and every thought they had before that moment evaporates.
She doesn't do that.
Her eyes go wide _ yes. Her breath catches _ yes. But behind the shock, something else moves across her face. Something I was not expecting.
Recognition.
Like she has felt something and is now putting a shape to it.
She stands up slowly. She doesn't run. She doesn't bow. She doesn't open her mouth to beg or bargain or perform.
She just looks at me.
And I feel it.
Something coming off her _ not a weapon, not a trick, not the shaky false-brave energy of a human trying to survive an encounter. Something that reaches past all of that and lands somewhere deep and specific inside me like an arrow that has been flying for a very long time and has finally found the thing it was aimed at.
It lands in the loneliness.
The part of me I do not show the court. The part that has been sitting in silence for so long I stopped expecting anything to reach it.
She gasps.
Not in fear. The sound is different from fear. It is the sound of impact _ of something hitting you that you weren't braced for.
She felt it back.
She felt me.
The court around us has gone absolutely silent. Every creature watching. Nobody breathing.
She looks at me and her voice comes out steady. Not performed steady. Actually steady. Like she has decided something.
"What do you actually want?"
Five words.
Five words and my entire court disappears. There is no war council. There are no sacrifices, no history, no four years of hollow humans performing their fear for my throne.
There is just this girl who walked into my court with a white cloth and sat on a rock and listened to my walls and is now standing in front of me asking the one question nobody has ever asked.
My mouth opens.
I close it.
Something is happening that I do not have a protocol for and I am a king who always has a protocol.
"You felt something," I say. "When you looked at me."
It isn't a question.
She doesn't treat it like one.
"You're the loneliest thing I've ever felt," she says quietly.
The silence in the cavern becomes absolute.
And in that silence, something happens that has not happened in longer than I can easily remember.
The loneliness moves.
Not gone. Not healed. Just _ moves. Like a thing that has been frozen shifting one inch toward something warm.
I need to say something. I am a king. I always know what to say.
What comes out is two words.
"You stay."
I turn and walk back toward my throne room before she can see what those two words cost me.
But I have only made it six steps when Vrael appears at my side from nowhere, which means he was watching the whole time, which means tomorrow he is going to have that expression.
He says nothing.
I say, "Not a word."
He says nothing louder.
And in the cavern behind me, I can still feel her.
That is the thing that stops me walking for just one half second before I keep going.
I can still feel her.
Like a signal I didn't know I was broadcasting, finally, impossibly, received.