Chapter 300: Chaos, Calm, and the Queen Who Had Enough
Chapter 300: Chaos, Calm, and the Queen Who Had Enough
Elyn’s POV
I made a mistake.
A terrible, catastrophic, absolutely avoidable mistake — and I only realised it when I was too far gone to correct it.
The children were everywhere.
Not in the organised, manageable way they had been before. Not in the "we are sitting on cushions watching Zorathys put on a Broadway show" way. No. This was something else entirely. This was chaos in its purest, most unfiltered form.
Retheris and Thalira were arguing over a dress.
And no, it was not a dress for Thalira, it was a dress for Retheris. He had picked it out for himself, a flowing thing in pale blue that matched his hair, and Thalira wanted it for herself. So there they stood, three feet apart, arguing about who had seen it first.
"I saw it first," Thalira said.
"You were looking at the other rack," Retheris countered.
"I have eyes everywhere."
"You have two eyes."
"I have better eyes than you."
Velira had disappeared into a corner of the racks and was pulling out clothes that I could only describe as... ambitious. Dresses with necklines that plunged. Gowns with slits that went up to the hip. Fabrics that clung and draped and left very little to the imagination.
When I asked her what she was doing, she looked at me with complete seriousness and said, "I want to show off my boobs like Mama does. It’s sexy."
Now here was the thing, Velira did not have boobs. But she wanted to dress that way because Seraphielle always dressed like that — bold and confident and utterly unbothered by what anyone thought.
I turned to Velvetta.
"Handle this," I said, gesturing vaguely at Velira.
Velvetta’s ears twitched, but she nodded and moved toward the succubus child.
Aziren was another case entirely.
He almost burned the room down, which honestly wasn’t actually surprising given who he was.
Thankfully, the fox demons had measures in place for exactly this situation. When I asked, I was enlightened that this wasn’t the first time Aziren had been in the stall and had almost burned it down.
Aziren had looked at me with watery eyes.
"I didn’t mean to," he said.
"I know," I said. "Just... let’s keep the fires to a minimum."
He nodded and moved to the other side of the room, his flames now barely visible.
As if that was not enough, there was another trouble in the form of Brixton, who I had thought would be the least troublesome.
Oh, how wrong I had been.
He was currently holding a dress up to the light, examining the fabric with an intensity that bordered on obsessive.
"What is the thread count?" he asked the fox demon beside him.
The attendant blinked. "I... do not know, young master."
"How was the dye applied? Was it even? I can see variations in the saturation along the hem."
"Those are... decorative?"
"Are they?" Brixton turned the dress over, studying the seams. "And what about the stitching here? This is a double stitch, right?"
The attendant looked like she wanted to cry.
I left Brixton to his interrogation. He was not causing damage, at least. Just existential distress to the staff.
Azerion, contrary to what I thought, was the easiest to deal with.
He did not care about clothes. He did not care about fabrics or seams or necklines or hemlines. He cared about snacks. And there were plenty of snacks — the fox demons had brought out more trays, anticipating that the children would need sustenance during their own fashion show.
Azerion sat on a cushion near the window, a bucket of Cron’s Pops in his lap and a stack of small pastries beside him. And um... yeah, he ate both at once. I had no idea how he even did it.
But I almost thanked him for being peaceful and for not giving me a headache.
But while Azerion was doing his own thing with the snacks... Zayrion...
Someone explain to me why Zayrion did not even bother picking out clothes. He was not at the racks. He was not looking at fabrics or colours or designs. He was searching — pacing the room, his tails low, his eyes scanning every corner, every screen, every shadow.
"Zayrion," I called. "What are you doing?"
He did not look at me.
"I’m looking for the King," he said. "I have questions to ask him."
"About what?"
"About everything," he said.
Oh.
I understood this very well. I knew the signs. Zayrion was going to be another Aziren obsessed with Zorathys.
I kept quiet, choosing to just let him do his own thing.
But um... yes. This was a disaster. A complete, utter, absolute disaster.
And Zorathys himself?
I had no idea where he was.
After the show he put on — after all those copies walked the Broadway, after all those outfits, after all those thousand-point ratings — he had simply disappeared. Not the copies. The real Zorathys.
He was gone.
I suspected he was sleeping somewhere. That was his way, after all.
If I really needed to find him, I could.
But before that, it was time to put this to a stop.
The moment I thought it, water poured over me, drenching me from head to toe.
And from where, you may ask?
From Thalira and Retheris.
Thalira had summoned water to throw at Retheris — a retaliatory strike in their ongoing argument about the dress. But her aim had been off. Or maybe Retheris had moved. Or maybe the universe had simply decided that I had not suffered enough today.
The water hit me instead.
And Retheris, in his defence against the incoming attack, had been summoning something too.
Yes.
That was the last straw.
I took a deep breath.
Then, in the calmest voice I could manage — a voice so soft it was barely above a whisper — I spoke.
"Everyone stop."
The room went quiet.
The temperature dropped too, and suddenly the room wasn’t warm anymore.
Everyone stared at me with wide eyes.
I closed my eyes, then tilted my head as a wide smile took over my face.
"The outing ends here,"