The banquet had begun to soften into murmurs when the first crack split the calm.
The King and Queen sat high above the hall on the raised dais, stone steps dropping away beneath their feet like a small cliff of marble and light. From there, every table lay spread out below them in neat, glittering lines lords and ladies arranged like offerings at the foot of the throne, every flinch and whisper laid bare to the eyes that watched from above.
Marquess Rhalis of House Verdan rose from the far end of the lowest table, his goblet catching the light like a blade. He did not look up at the dais as a whole. His gaze fixed on His Majesty and stayed there, as if the other figure beside the throne were nothing but carved stone.
He bowed not to the royal pair, but to the King alone angling his body so the line of his sight never quite crossed the Queen's. In this hall, where every courtesy was codified, to greet only the King and ignore the crowned consort at his side was not mere rudeness; it was a public denial of the Queen's existence, a calculated affront disguised as protocol. From their height on the dais, both Ecclesias and Soren saw the ripple his defiance sent through the rows below the stiffening shoulders, the averted eyes, the way a few hands tightened on goblets as if they had just heard a sword being drawn.
"Your Majesty," Marquess Rhalis said, bowing just enough to mock respect and never once shaping his mouth around the word Queen. "May I add something?"
The hall stilled. Even the musicians faltered, strings humming into silence.
Ecclesias' gaze slid to Rhalis like frost creeping across glass, cold and unblinking. The weight of his stare pressed against the man's spine until his breath hitched.
"Speak," Ecclesias said, velvet over steel not granting courtesy, but testing him. Testing whether he was truly so foolish as to sharpen that insolence into a blade in front of the crown.
Rhalis hesitated. His fingers tightened around the goblet, knuckles whitening. A tremor flickered through his jaw as if his own voice had turned traitor. For a heartbeat, silence stretched like a drawn edge between them.
And then Soren moved.
Not with words just a glance. Soren lifted his eyes from the rim of his goblet to the marquess, slow and unhurried, as though weighing him the way the court weighed offerings. For a heartbeat, Rhalis forgot his own line; the violet and gold, the crown catching the light, the calm set of Soren's mouth struck him all at once, and something sharp and ugly twisted in his chest. This was the "servant" they had whispered about? He looked every inch a sovereign.
Soren's face did not twist with anger or soften with hurt; it simply remained composed, the kind of stillness that left no room for Rhalis to pretend he had gone unnoticed. Under that steady, unblinking attention, the marquess' breath hitched and his throat worked around a dry swallow, resentment and reluctant awe tangling together in his lungs.
In a hall built on courtesy and performance, that single, measured look said what no decree could: you have already stepped out of line and you will not walk away from it untouched.
Rhalis swallowed hard, voice breaking as he forced the words out.
"We honour endurance, yes. But crowns have ever rested upon blood proven by lineage. If the court is to kneel, should it not kneel to what history commands?"
Whispers flared like sparks in dry grass. Eyes darted to Soren crowned, silent, framed in light like a painting come alive. He did not flinch. He did not lower his gaze. His fingers curled once against the stem of his goblet, then stilled.
Inside, his pulse roared. This is it. The first strike. If I falter now, they will carve me back into a shadow before the wine cools. He forced his breath even, spine unbroken, every lesson Arven had driven into him locking into place like armour.
Ecclesias' voice broke the hush like tempered steel, every syllable a blade.
"You speak of history as though it were a law," he said, frostfire eyes sweeping the assembly. "It is not. It is a graveyard. And I do not kneel to graves."
His tone dropped, velvet edged with fire.
"Tell me—who is the law in this hall?"
The question struck like iron. Silence stretched, brittle and suffocating, until voices rose in a fractured chorus, trembling yet unanimous:
"You, Your Majesty."
Ecclesias' mouth curved not in amusement, but in something colder. "Correct. I am the law. And because I am the law, your insolence will not go unanswered."
His gaze fixed upon Rhalis, his voice soft enough to chill bone.
"You dared to question what I have raised and to pretend the Queen does not exist at my side. For that, House Verdan shall be erased, your bloodline buried, and your name remembered only as ash. Let your last thought be this: your pride in 'pure blood' purchased the ruin of all you claimed to protect."
Rhalis' goblet shook in his hand. His lips parted, trembling around a stammered plea "Your Majesty, I—"
The words never finished. Ecclesias lifted his hand a gesture as quiet as a breath and Commander Veyric, captain of the royal guard, moved like a shadow unchained.
The sound was soft. A goblet tipping. A chair scraping marble. Then silence, heavy and complete, as Veyric stepped back into place with the same composure with which he had left it. The body was gone before most realised it had fallen.
A dark smear of wine or blood; from where he sat, Soren could not be certain stained the marble where the marquess had been.
On the left side of the hall, Lady Iliane, an omega draped in pearls, clapped a hand over her mouth so swiftly her bracelets clattered. Her scent spiked sharp and sour, panic seeping through layers of perfume as her stomach heaved; for a moment, it seemed she might be sick over her own plate. Across from her, Lord Cassian, a young alpha whose bravado had filled half the evening, had gone rigid in his chair. The rich spice of his scent thinned into something acrid, edged with fear, pupils blown wide as he stared at the empty space where Rhalis had stood, fingers clenched about his goblet until the glass creaked in protest. Even Baron Edran, a stoic beta famed for not flinching at battlefield reports, had paled a shade, jaw locked so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek, one hand pressed flat against his knee beneath the table as though to pin down a tremor.
The scents in the lower hall curdled fear, shock, bitter adrenaline rising in a faint, instinctive wave that no amount of incense could entirely smother. Upon the dais, the height and the steady drift of perfumed air spared the King and Queen the worst of it; only the nobles below truly tasted how near death had just walked past their chairs.
Soren's stomach lurched. For a heartbeat, the hall blurred at the edges, sound fading into a dull roar in his ears. He killed him for a sentence, Soren thought, pulse hammering. The scent of roasted meat and spiced wine turned heavy, cloying, wrapping around his throat like smoke. This was the part of Ecclesias the court whispered about in corridors the storm that did not argue, did not warn twice, only struck. And now it was awake, coiled inches from his chair.
He felt the anger coming off the King like heat from a forge. Ecclesias stood like a verdict carved in flesh, frostfire eyes burning with a fury that might have turned the coronation into a massacre. For the first time since the crown had touched his head, Soren wondered not whether he was safe, but whether anyone else in this hall would leave it alive if a single word fell wrong.
His first instinct was to shrink back, to let the storm rage and survive its aftermath in silence, as he always had. But the stain on the floor and the tremor running through the hall twisted something in his chest. "If I let him keep going, they will remember tonight as a slaughter, not a crowning. They will only ever see me as the reason he broke."
Soren drew a slow breath, forcing his spine to remain straight.
Ecclesias' voice cut through the suffocating quiet, low and lethal, now turned upon the living who dared to hope for weakness.
"Let this be a lesson," he said, his gaze sweeping the assembly. "If any of you think to humiliate him, to undermine him, or to lay a hand upon him, know this: I will not stop at one house. I will not stop at one name. I will burn your bloodlines to ash and grind your bones into this marble."
The hall froze. No one breathed. The weight of his words pressed down like a blade against their throats.
Soren's hand lifted hesitant for the span of a single heartbeat, then steady as he reached for Ecclesias' wrist. Only then did he dare to touch him, bare fingers closing over leather, choosing to step into the path of the storm rather than away from it.
Ecclesias' head turned, frostfire gaze locking upon him. At such nearness, Soren could see how wild that gaze had become, pupils blown, fury riding the edge of something close to madness. The King's pulse beat hard beneath Soren's fingers, a frantic war-drum that had driven both executions and campaigns.
Soren did not flinch.
"Enough," he said not as a plea, but as a command wrapped in courtesy. His voice was low, steady, threaded with calm steel. "They have seen. They have learned. Do not give them a festival of blood to remember."
The words slid through the hush like tempered glass soft, yet unbreakable. Under Soren's hand, Ecclesias' pulse faltered once, then began to slow, the wild hammering easing as though that single, quiet enough had reached down into the heart of the storm and taken it by the throat. His jaw remained clenched for a moment longer, then eased by a fraction, shoulders lowering the barest visible degree. The violence coiled within him did not vanish, but it stilled, madness and fury leashed in place by the Queen's touch and the low, steady voice that had become the only sound his heart was willing to obey.
------
From below, the nobles saw something they had never witnessed: Ecclesias, who had just erased a house with a gesture, reined in mid-rage because the Queen asked it of him. It was not the words alone that unnerved them it was the proof that his fury, which had never bowed to council or to bloodline, could be called back by a single omega's hand.
The court saw it. They saw the King this killer crowned in frostfire halt because a consort's hand rested on his wrist. They saw the calm that folded over fury like velvet over steel. And in that instant, fear deepened into something sharper: awe.
If Ecclesias was the blade, then Soren was the hand that could turn its edge. And that terrified them more than death.
Ecclesias held Soren's gaze a heartbeat longer, then released a slow breath and let his hand fall back to the armrest. As though a signal had been given, the musicians found their courage and let the strings rise again, soft and tentative at first, then swelling enough to cover the scrape of chairs and the clink of plate and silver as servants moved. Conversation did not truly return; it rebuilt itself in careful fragments, voices lowered, laughter forced and brittle. The hall moved as a court was trained to move as if nothing had happened yet every gesture carried the stiffness of people stepping around an invisible grave.
Only once that fragile illusion of normality had been dragged back into place did the whispers begin to thread the edges of the room again, thinner and more cautious than before.
"Did you see Commander Veyric?" whispered Lady Serane, an omega half-hidden behind a fan painted with lilies. "He moved before Lord Rhalis could even finish a word. He is… terrifyingly precise." The last words slipped out almost reverently, the awed thrill of someone watching a legend step out of rumour and into candlelight.
Lady Janel, seated beside her, shivered, her bracelets chiming softly. "They say he has never missed his mark," she murmured. "To see it so close… I thought such tales were meant to frighten children, not courts."
"Hush," Serane breathed, though her eyes were bright. "If he hears you, you will have proof of the stories at your own throat."
A little further down the table, Lord Cassian kept his gaze fixed stubbornly on his plate. "Do you not find it difficult," a young baroness murmured at his side, "to look anywhere but at the Queen? Each time I raise my eyes, he is the first thing I see."
Cassian's jaw tightened. "Of course I see him," he said under his breath. "Anyone with eyes does. That crown, those colours… he was made to be looked at."
"Then why do you not?" the baroness pressed, stealing a quick glance toward the dais. "His face—Saints, he is almost too striking. The way the light sits on his skin—"
"Because His Majesty is seated beside him," Cassian cut in softly. "And I have no wish to feel that gaze at my throat for staring too long."
Across the table, a young lordling leaned toward his companions, voice barely more than a thread. "Have you ever seen an omega carry a crown like that?" he whispered. "He looks as if the painters took him out of the frescoes and set him there."
"A servant's son," another scoffed, though his eyes lingered too long on the clean line of Soren's profile. "If the rumor is true, the gods have strange taste."
"Strange?" a third lord murmured. "Or deliberate? Look at him—he does not beg, he does not preen. He simply sits, and the room shapes itself around him."
"Careful," the first warned, fingers tightening around his cup. "If the King hears how beautifully you speak of his Queen, you may find yourself following Marquess Rhalis. Admiration is one thing. Hunger is another."
Still, more than one gaze slid back to the dais, drawn against its owner's better judgement. The violet and gold, the pale gleam of metal at Soren's throat, the calm weight of his dark eyes the court tried to look away, but the shape of him hung in their vision even when they stared down at their plates.
"An entire house gone in a heartbeat," murmured Lord Aldren, an older alpha with wine trembling in his hand. "For one challenge, spoken once."
"Not for that alone," said a countess opposite him, her gaze fixed on the stain upon the marble. "He slighted the Queen to His Majesty's face. You saw the price of it."
"He unmade Verdan as though they were nothing," an elderly lord muttered, fingers worrying the edge of his napkin. "I had thought the tales exaggerated."
"And yet… look at His Majesty's consort," Lady Mirenne breathed, eyes darting towards the dais where Soren now sat once more. "He speaks as though he has always sat there."
"Speaks?" her cousin hissed back. "He stopped him. I have seen generals beg the King for mercy and fail. One word from the Queen, and that madness listened."
"If he can calm that in a moment," another voice whispered, "what else might he bid the King to do?"
"A consort who can leash the crown," someone muttered. "That is not merely a comfort. He's dangerous!!!!"
"So what should we fear more?" a pale young viscount asked. "The King who kills for a question or the Queen for whom he is willing to stop?"
"Both," came the answer, scarcely more than breath. "Separately they are fearsome. Together, they are a wall. There is nowhere left to run."
Kael heard it. He did not move, but his eyes tracked every flicker of conspiracy like a hawk circling carrion. They are afraid of him, Kael thought, gaze flicking to Soren crowned, calm, framed in light like a verdict carved in flesh. And fear breeds knives faster than loyalty ever could.
Arven saw it as well. His jaw tightened, but his thoughts were colder. They think they can fracture the King by striking at the boy. They do not understand they have already lost. Ecclesias has chosen his war, and he will fight it with their bones if he must.