Chapter 259: Petitions, Peculiar Demons, and The Giraffe Rat Who Has Had Enough
Chapter 259: Petitions, Peculiar Demons, and The Giraffe Rat Who Has Had Enough
Elyn’s POV
Two weeks.
Zorathys had been absent for two weeks.
Not just from the office — that was normal, that was practically his natural state — but from everywhere. His door hadn’t shown up once. Not at the top of the staircase where it usually appeared, not anywhere else in the palace that I had checked, and I had checked more than I was going to admit out loud. His shadows still moved through the palace sometimes, which meant he was somewhere, but wherever that somewhere was, he had clearly decided it did not include being in my line of sight.
I had things to say to him.
Several things.
Organized things, even, which was more than he deserved.
But I couldn’t say them to a door that refused to appear, so I had filed them away in the back of my mind alongside the dread that had taken up permanent residence in my stomach since the incident and was showing no signs of moving out.
I would deal with Zorathys when I got the opportunity.
For now, I had work.
An extraordinary amount of work.
The two weeks had not been quiet ones. Between the petitions that kept arriving — still in that infuriating bare-minimum format Zorathys had decided was sufficient, still offering no context, no names half the time, just demands which I was going to have to correct soon — and the administrative decisions that apparently couldn’t wait for a demon king who had decided to be temporarily unfindable, I had barely had a moment to think.
The children helped, in the way that children helped — which was to say they made everything louder and considerably less boring and occasionally reminded me that not everything in the palace needed to be handled with a straight face.
They came every few days. Sometimes more. The twins, Aziren, Azerion, Velira, and occasionally Zayrion and Brixton. I had stopped being surprised by their arrivals and started keeping extra snacks in the office, which Azerion found immediately every single time, and I had accepted that as a permanent feature of my existence.
They were good children.
Genuinely good, underneath all the mischief and the arguing and the questionable decisions. They were fun to be around, and I had stopped pretending otherwise to myself, even if I hadn’t said it out loud.
But today I had work to do.
Real work. The kind that required a hall and a long line of demons and my undivided attention, and Naviel standing to one side with the petition documents, because apparently this was now my life.
I had left the children in the office.
All of them — the twins, Aziren, Azerion, and Velira. I didn’t plan to waste time here, so it wouldn’t be long before I went back.
But from my calculations... that might not be the case. The hall was long, and the line was longer.
It stretched from the front of the room to somewhere behind a pillar that I couldn’t see around, which meant I didn’t actually know where it ended, which was information I had decided not to pursue because knowing wouldn’t make it shorter.
This was Zorathys’s job.
Technically. Officially. By every measure of the word. This was the Demon King’s responsibility — to sit in this hall and listen to the concerns of his people and handle their petitions and make the decisions that kept the realm functioning.
And yet here I was.
His assistant.
Sitting in the chair.
Because someone had to.
I settled into it with the quiet resignation of someone who had made peace with their circumstances through sheer repetition, smoothed the front of my clothes, and nodded to the demon at the front of the line.
He stepped forward.
And I tried very hard not to react.
I genuinely tried.
He was a beast demon. That much was clear. Beast demons came in a remarkable variety of forms — I had learned this over the past months — and the range of what that could mean was wider than I had initially understood.
This particular beast demon was tall.
Extremely tall.
The kind of tall that came specifically from legs — two of them, impossibly long, jointed in a way that reminded me very strongly of a giraffe, which tracked given his lower half. They extended upward for what felt like an unreasonable distance before connecting to a chest that was broad and large and had clearly not received the same note about proportion that the rest of him had.
Then there was the neck situation.
There wasn’t one.
Or rather — there wasn’t the neck one might expect after legs that tall and a chest that broad. Where a neck should have been, there was simply a head. A small one. The head of a rat, precise and whiskered, sitting directly atop his enormous chest with self-contained dignity.
I kept my expression completely neutral.
I was a queen. I had met nine-tailed fox demons and three-headed dragons and shadow kings who could dim the sky. I was not going to laugh at a demon’s appearance. I was not.
I heard someone chuckle from my left. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was.
But yes... I did anyway.
Rin had turned to face the wall.
She was facing it very intently, one would think she had found it fascinating. The only thing undermining this was the fact that her shoulders were shaking and the sound she was making, despite her best efforts, was audible.
Loud, even.
Rin’s laugh, when she was trying to suppress it, was arguably louder than her laugh when she wasn’t.
Vaelory was no better.
She stood, her mouth slightly open and her eyes very wide, staring at the demon in front of me with the expression of someone who had encountered something their brain was still categorizing.
She wasn’t looking at Naviel, which was a change.
Naviel himself was doing better than Rin — he hadn’t turned to face anything — but his jaw was set in a very specific way that meant he was working hard at something, and that something was not the petition documents he was holding.
The demon in front of me didn’t appear to notice any of this.
Or if he did, he didn’t care, which was possibly more admirable.
He bowed.
The movement was impressive given his... geometry, the long legs folding at their unusual joints, the large chest dipping forward, the small rat head inclining with genuine solemnity, his petition in his small hands.
Morthen immediately took it from him and brought it to me.
Was I surprised by the one line written? Not at all.
I read it.
Then I read it again.
Then I looked up at him.
"Your brother," I said carefully, "stole from you."
"Yes, Your Highness," he said. His voice was deeper than I expected and entirely at odds with his head, which was something I was choosing not to think about. "For the hundredth time."