Chapter 263: The Raven Who Almost Died, The King Who Arrived, and The Children Who Are Now in Jail
Chapter 263: The Raven Who Almost Died, The King Who Arrived, and The Children Who Are Now in Jail
Rin heard it before she saw it.
She had been making her way toward the office rather slowly, because she was Rin, and rushing was not something she did unless the situation absolutely demanded it—when the sound reached her.
A scream.
High, sharp, and unmistakably Thalira’s.
Rin stopped walking.
Then she transformed.
The shift was immediate—one moment a raven demon in her usual form, the next a raven in the truest sense, black wings spreading as she launched herself upward and angled toward the corridor that led to the office.
She flew fast.
The closer she got, the more she heard.
The grinding. The rushing water. The sound of something large moving through a space it had no business being in. The crack of what had been walls and the absence of what had been silence.
And beneath all of it, the children’s voices—sharp and urgent and carrying the particular quality of voices that belonged to people who were not yet panicking but were getting there quickly... very quickly.
Rin’s mind, moving at the speed of a demon who had spent considerable time around chaos and had developed efficient ways of processing it, produced one clear thought.
If she didn’t die by the Queen’s hands, she was going to die by the King’s.
And neither was ideal.
Neither was preferable.
Both were dangerous in their own right and for entirely different reasons.
These children should not have been left unattended.
They really, genuinely, should not have been left unattended.
She rounded the last bend in the corridor and stopped mid-air.
Outside the office—or what remained of the office’s threshold, given that the door had been blown open and the frame had developed opinions about its structural integrity—the situation was exactly as bad as the sounds had suggested.
There was water everywhere. The gravitational pull of something she couldn’t see clearly was making the debris orbit in slow, unnatural arcs. Two children were being held in place against surfaces they hadn’t chosen. The fire demon was struggling against something that had sent his own fire back at him. The other children were braced against the pull with varying degrees of success.
Rin opened her beak.
She had no idea what she was going to say.
It didn’t matter.
Because the shadows arrived before she could say anything.
They pooled on the floor of the corridor—dark, immediate, spreading outward from a central point unhurried.
And then Zorathys appeared.
His black hair fell past his shoulders. His ruby eyes moved across the scene like he was taking inventory. His shadows flared outward, immediately spreading into the space around him and the corridor beyond.
And then everything stopped.
The water hung suspended. The debris froze mid-orbit. The grinding sound cut off. The pulling force simply ceased to exist.
Like time itself had been politely asked to hold on a moment.
And had complied.
Zorathys looked at the beasts.
Both of them.
The deep water creature—the one from the cold, pressurized dark near the Hellfire Territory border, red and blue and four-toothed—had gone completely still. And even in its stillness, something visible had changed. Along its scales, where the red met the dark blue, there were beads of something that had no business being on a creature that lived entirely underwater.
It was sweating.
The moisture gathered and ran in thin rivulets along the edges of its scales, dripping from its jaw, pooling where its massive body pressed against the suspended water around it.
The stone creature—the one from the restricted parts of the Golemhold Territory, the Gravemourn Crawler, a creature known in academic texts as one of the only beings that fed on gravitational force itself, capable of generating a pull strong enough to collapse minor geological formations—had released the children the moment the shadows arrived.
Its hollow eyes, which had no pupils and therefore expressed nothing in the way other creatures expressed things, were nonetheless pointed very specifically at the ground.
Zorathys tilted his head slightly.
"You don’t need to stop," he said pleasantly, to both creatures. "You were in the middle of something."
Neither of them moved.
"You both know whose domain this is," he continued, with the same lazy pleasantness. "You’ve always known. So there’s no need to perform restraint on my account."
The deep water creature made a sound.
It was small.
Considerably smaller than any sound a creature of its size should have been capable of producing.
Zorathys regarded it for a moment.
Then he made a gesture.
It was small. Two fingers, moving in a direction that didn’t correspond to anything obvious.
But the deep water creature exploded.
The red and blue and the four teeth and the three tails all came apart simultaneously in a way that left nothing behind except the water it had arrived with, which immediately drained through the suspended state and vanished.
The Gravemourn Crawler contracted at the exact same time.
The stone plates folded inward. The hollow eyes narrowed. The grinding sound, which had been entirely absent since Zorathys arrived, did not return. The creature simply compressed itself, smaller and smaller, the layers folding against each other with quiet mechanical precision, until it had reduced itself to a point and then to nothing.
Zorathys sighed.
Then he looked at the office.
The walls rearranged themselves.
The window reformed—glass lifting from wherever it had landed and resettling into its frame with the quiet click of something returning to where it belonged. The cabinet rebuilt, splinter by splinter, in a smooth reversal that took approximately four seconds. The parchments unsoaked themselves and stacked back into their positions on the desk.
Everything settled.
The water drained.
The ceiling healed.
The doorframe remembered its shape.
And then time moved again.
The children gasped.
All of them, at once—the sudden sharp intake of breath that came from bodies that had been held in suspended mid-action and had just been returned to themselves.
Azerion was mid-transformation.
His eyes were still narrowed to slits, the blue jewel on his forehead glinting, his body half-shifted into something that was not entirely the small demon child he usually presented as. He caught himself, pulled back, and straightened—blinking rapidly, the transformation reversing, his eyes returning to the round blue he kept for the queen’s comfort.
The others were breathing hard. Thalira had water still dripping from her hair. Retheris had both hands raised from when he had been trying to regain control of the water. Velira was clutching her bunny to her chest with both arms. Aziren had his hands still stretched outward, flames guttering at his fingertips before settling back to the small warmth they usually maintained.
Zorathys looked at them.
Then he leaned forward slightly.
Not much. Just enough to bring himself closer to their collective level, ruby eyes moving across each of their faces with that lazy, half-lidded attention that somehow managed to see everything.
"It seems," he said, "that you’ve been having quite a lot of fun."
None of them said anything, and suddenly the shadows moved.
And then all five children were somewhere else entirely.
The cell was deep in the palace—further down than any of them had been before, past corridors that the upper floors didn’t connect to and through spaces that suggested the palace had more layers than its surface implied. The walls were dark stone, the light low and steady, and the door that closed behind them was solid enough that none of them felt inclined to test it.
Zorathys stood on the other side.
He produced a key with his shadows and locked the door to the cell.