Chapter 98 – Are You Happy, Princess? (6)
Day Four: Roots and Branches
Olivia woke to knocking.
Not the soft, apologetic tap of a palace servant. A firm, deliberate rap that said: I know you're awake. Stop pretending.
She dragged herself upright, limbs heavy with the exhaustion that came from dreams she couldn't escape. Dreams of starving children. Dead babies. A Baron's confession. Blood on cobblestones.
The knock came again.
"Your Highness?" Julia's voice filtered through the door. "Lord Milton requests your presence. Breakfast is ready."
Olivia's stomach twisted.
Another day. Another lesson. Another knife slipped between her ribs disguised as truth.
She dressed mechanically: simple clothes, the kind that wouldn't scream princess the moment anyone looked at her. The kind that let her pretend she was just another person in Erynd's strange, efficient world.
When she opened the door, Julia waited.
Blonde hair pinned up in that deceptively simple Japanese-style twist Erynd had once described in one of his weirder stories. Brown eyes assessing her with a warmth that had edges.
"Good morning," Julia said, smiling. "I hope you slept well."
Olivia hadn't.
"Well enough," she lied.
Julia's smile didn't waver, but something in her gaze sharpened. As if she knew. As if she could taste the lie and had decided to let it pass.
"This way," Julia said. "Today will be… illuminating."
That word choice made Olivia's skin prickle.
***
Breakfast was simple. Bread, eggs, fruit.
Erynd sat at the table alone again.
No Tamara. No Lyra. No Noelle.
Just him, and the weight of his attention when she entered.
"Sit," he said.
She sat.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. The food tasted like ash, but she forced it down anyway. Fuel. Survival. The things princesses learned when the world stopped being gentle.
Finally, he set down his fork.
"Today," he said, "I'm going to show you what I've really built."
Her heart stuttered.
"I've seen the villages," she said. "The mills. The settlements—"
"No," he interrupted. "You've seen the surface. Today you see the roots."
He stood and offered his hand.
She stared at it.
Calloused. Scarred. The hand of someone who'd worked, fought, bled.
He's only seventeen, she thought wildly. Seventeen, and his hands already look like that.
She took it anyway.
***
He led her through the estate: past the training yards, past the workshops, to a small, unremarkable building that looked like a storage shed.
Julia waited by the door, hands folded.
"Ready, my Lord?" she asked.
"Yes," Erynd said. "Olivia, what I'm about to show you is classified. If you repeat any of this outside these walls without my permission, people will die. Do you understand?"
Her throat went dry.
"Yes," she said.
"Good."
He pushed open the door.
Inside: a plain room. Stone walls. A single elevator cage in the center: metal bars, counterweights, the hum of mana conduits running beneath the floor.
Erynd stepped into the cage. Julia followed.
Olivia hesitated.
"Trust me," Erynd said quietly. "One more time."
She stepped inside.
The cage doors rattled shut.
Julia flipped a lever.
They descended.
***
The first level was storage.
Rows of shelves. Crates. Barrels. Nothing unusual.
Except for the scale of it. Enough supplies to feed an army for months. Enough weapons to equip a small battalion.
"Emergency reserves," Erynd said as they passed through. "We don't advertise how much we have. Appearances matter."
They descended further.
The second level was training halls.
Larger than anything she'd seen above ground. Open spaces with padded floors, weapon racks lining the walls, practice dummies that looked like they'd been beaten into kindling and repaired a dozen times.
People sparred in pairs—some Awakened, some not—moving with speed and precision that made palace guards look like children playing with sticks.
One of them noticed Erynd and straightened immediately.
"My Lord!" the man called.
Others turned. Bowed.
Not the shallow court bow.
The kind that came from respect. Fear. Devotion.
Olivia's chest tightened.
They descended again.
The third level was laboratories.
Glass and metal gleaming under mana-light. Flasks bubbling. Workbenches cluttered with half-assembled devices she didn't have names for. The air smelled sharp—chemicals, oil, a faint hint of ozone.
A young man with wild green hair looked up from a complex array of tubes and gears.
"Erynd!" he shouted, grinning. "The pressure regulation works! We can scale—oh."
He noticed Olivia.
Blinked.
"Your Highness," he said, trying and failing to look dignified. Then, to Erynd, in a hushed stage whisper that was not hushed at all: "Is she joining? Please tell me she's joining. We need more people who can read without setting things on fire."
"You set things on fire once," someone called from the far side of the lab.
"Twice," another voice added.
"That was for science," Ethan protested.
Erynd rubbed his forehead.
"Later, Ethan," he said. "I'm giving a tour."
Ethan deflated, then perked right back up.
"Then make sure you show her the EryMachines," he said. "And the healing array. And—"
"Later," Erynd repeated, firmer.
They moved on.
Olivia caught Ethan muttering as they left:
"Definitely joining. She has the 'I just realized the world is a lie' face. That's when people start doing their best work…"
Julia shut the lab door on the rest.
They descended.
***
Fourth level.
The elevator opened onto a corridor lined with subtle reliefs: branches carved into stone, forming the suggestion of a great tree. The bark-lines, she realized on closer inspection, were tiny formulas, battle diagrams, trade routes.
Beautiful.
Deliberate.
Terrifying.
"What is this place?" she whispered.
"Yggdrasil," Erynd said simply. "The World Tree. Roots in the unseen. Branches everywhere."
He led her to a set of double doors.
Gold banding caught the light. Handles shaped like intertwined branches.
He pushed them open.
***
The throne room stole her breath.
Not because it was opulent. It wasn't.
No soaring columns, no gilded saints, no ostentatious murals.
Just a clean, high space carved into living rock. Mana-lamps set in branching patterns overhead, their glow woven into a calm, steady web that hummed of both aesthetics and purpose.
At the far end, on a raised platform:
A throne.
Dark wood inlaid with golden branches. Cushioned. Solid. Real.
Someone sat in it.
Not Erynd.
A woman with short, ink-dark hair in a bob cut, a smooth half-mask covering the lower half of her face. Black uniform hugging a lithe, dangerous frame. Feline ears twitched as the doors opened; a long tail flicked once before curling lazily around the chair leg.
She stood immediately when she saw Erynd.
"My Lord," she said, voice warm and sharp at once. "You didn't tell me we were bringing royalty downstairs."
Her eyes slid to Olivia.
Assessed.
"Ah," she added. "The princess."
Erynd gestured.
"Olivia, this is Zoe. Jarl of Shadows. Intelligence, logistics, operations."
Zoe inclined her head—just enough to be technically polite.
"Your Highness," she said. Then, to Erynd: "Do I need to clear the room?"
"There's no one to clear," he said. "Everyone who's allowed to be here already is."
Olivia realized she'd expected more people.
An army of conspirators. A crowded council.
Instead, the inner circle was small.
Zoe by the throne.
Julia with a ledger stand to the right of the platform, quills and abacuses at the ready.
Further back, near a wall lined with maps and pinned notes, two other figures straightened: a wiry woman with short-cropped hair and a scar across her jaw, and a dark-skinned man with a healer's armband and a sword at his hip.
"Rana," Erynd said, nodding to the woman. "Jarl of Steel. Training, deployments. Halden. Jarl of Flesh. Medical, support."
They bowed.
"My Lord."
Olivia's head spun.
This wasn't a hideout.
This wasn't a gang.
This was a government.
Erynd walked to the throne and sat.
Not casually.
Deliberately.
Like someone stepping into a role he'd carved out himself and worn enough times that it fit.
The others shifted around him without needing direction: Julia to his right with her ledgers, Zoe to his left with maps, Rana and Halden flanking the lower steps.
He looked at Olivia.
"Welcome," he said quietly, "to Yggdrasil. The organization you've been helping without knowing it."
Her voice came out hoarse.
"Helping?"
"The grain distribution proposal you wrote yesterday," Julia said, not unkindly. "I've already implemented it in the outer villages. Your projections were accurate."
"The policy insights you gave me about how the palace reads reports," Zoe added, tapping a marked map behind her. "I've used them to adjust how we feed misinformation back up the chain. Very useful. Thank you."
Olivia's knees felt weak.
"I didn't… I wasn't…"
"You were," Erynd said. "Every question I asked. Every scenario I nudged you to think through. I was testing you. Seeing if you could think beyond the palace. Seeing if you were worth bringing down here."
He leaned forward slightly.
"And you are."
***
They gave her the tour.
Not of halls this time.
Of systems.
Julia explained the finances: how the bakeries, workshops, and mills above funded what lay below; how they'd built a network of "normal" businesses that laundered not just money, but people and information.
"We call them branches," Julia said. "Safe faces. If the Empire looks at our books, they see profitable estates and efficient management. They don't see… this."
She gestured to the carved roots in the stone.
Zoe showed her the intelligence network: maps with pins marking cult nests, corrupt nobles, sympathetic priests, vulnerable trade routes. Strings of notes connecting names to crimes to leverage points.
"We know where they are," Zoe said. Her tail swished, slow and pleased. "Who they buy from. Who they bribe. Who they hurt. When Lord Milton gives the word, we cut them off the tree."
Rana spoke about training and deployments: Awakened learning control instead of being hunted, refugees learning to fight in squads instead of dying alone, village militias being quietly upgraded under the guise of "estate guards."
"We don't just rescue," Rana said. "We build units. People who can stand on their own legs when Erynd isn't there to wave a sword and scare gods."
Halden explained the medical and support structure: clinics in the estate, traveling healers embedded in trade caravans, quiet agreements with a few disgusted temple healers who looked the other way when Awakened showed up bleeding.
"We patch the gaps the Church won't touch," he said. "With or without their blessing."
And through it all, Erynd watched Olivia.
Watched her face as the scale rose from implication to certainty.
Watched her hands clench and unclench as she realized this wasn't a fantasy scribbled in the margins of a textbook. It was real.
When the explanations finally tapered off and they stood back in the throne room, he broke the silence.
"So," he said. "Now you've seen it. The surface—mills, villages, refugees—that's the mask. Down here? This is the truth."
He gestured around them.
"This is Yggdrasil. And it's growing faster than the Empire can track."
Olivia's voice shook.
"This is treason," she said.
"Yes," Erynd said calmly. "It is."
"You're building a shadow empire."
"Yes."
"You're preparing to replace the Imperial structure."
"Not replace," he corrected. "Outlive. Survive its collapse. The Empire is rotting from the inside. You've seen it. The slums. The Baron. The cults chewing on the carcass. I'm not tearing it down—it's tearing itself down. I'm making sure something is standing when the dust settles."
She wanted to argue.
Wanted to defend her father, the palace, the system she'd been raised to protect.
But the words wouldn't come.
Because she'd seen.
"Why show me this?" she whispered. "Why bring me here? Why not just let me go back and pretend I never saw?"
Erynd stood.
Walked down the steps until he stood in front of her.
"Because," he said quietly, "you're going to be Queen someday. And when that day comes, I need to know: will you prop up the corpse of an Empire that's already dead, or will you work with me to build what comes next?"
Her breath caught.
"You want me to…"
"I want you to be my agent in the palace," he said. "My ally. When you sit on that throne, I want to know you'll protect Yggdrasil. That you'll feed us information, shape policy to give us room to grow, and sabotage anyone who tries to strangle this before it reaches the canopy."
He lifted a hand.
Cupped her face.
Thumb brushing away a tear she hadn't realized had fallen.
"I want you on my side, Olivia," he said. "Not as decoration. As a partner."
Something in her chest cracked.
"That's treason," she repeated, weaker.
"Yes," he said. "It is. And it's still kinder than letting the system keep grinding people into dust while you hide behind temple hymns and economic reports."
His eyes didn't waver.
"So I'm asking you again," he said. "Are you happy, Princess? Safe in your palace, signing papers that change nothing while children starve? Or do you want to step into this—into the truth, into the work, into something that might actually change the ending?"
Tears burned.
She hated him.
Hated how right he was.
Hated that he'd taken everything she thought she knew and shattered it in four days.
Hated that she was standing in a throne room underground, surrounded by traitors, and felt more alive than she'd ever felt in the capital.
"I don't know," she choked out. "I don't know what I want anymore. You've broken everything. My certainty. My world. My—"
"Good," he said softly. "Because the old you couldn't help anyone. This you—raw, bleeding, awake—might."
He let her go and stepped back up one step, reclaiming just enough distance to feel like a line.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Day five. I give you a choice. A real one. Stay or go. Join me or walk away. No tricks. But tonight, you're going to sit with this. With all of it. And decide who you want to be."
He glanced at Julia.
"Show her the guest quarters down here. No more secrets. If she chooses, she chooses with open eyes."
Julia bowed.
"Yes, my Lord."
***
Julia led her through the lower levels.
Dormitories where Awakened slept without chains or guards at their doors.
Libraries where texts that would have been burned in the capital sat side by side with mundane farm ledgers and medical manuals.
Meeting rooms where maps were spread, plans scribbled, supply lists argued over.
"This is where most of the field reports arrive," Julia said, pausing by one room. "From Morel, Orvel, Akarnian… and further. Runners, coded letters, merchants who owe us favors. Some of Lord Milton's best people are currently deployed."
Olivia's gaze snagged on two names stamped across a dispatch Julia set down.
FIELD LEADS: E. HART / Y. NO-NAME
STATUS: ENGAGED – FIVE EYES REMNANT
She didn't know who they were.
But someone out there bled for this place.
For him.
"He pulled them in young," Julia said, catching her glance. "Trained them himself. That's what he does. Finds people the Empire overlooks and turns them into something the Empire will regret ignoring."
Olivia swallowed.
They returned to a small room: bed, table, shelf. No windows. Underground.
"Rest," Julia said gently. "Tomorrow will be harder."
She left.
Olivia sat on the bed and stared at the stone wall.
In four days, Erynd had taken a naive princess and shown her:
* The suffering her comfort was built on.
* The rot her system protected.
* The alternative growing in the shadows.
* The treason that might be the only honest path forward.
And tomorrow, he'd ask her to choose.
She lay back, staring at the ceiling.
Are you happy, Princess?
No.
She wasn't happy.
She was awake, and angry, and terrified, and more alive than she'd ever been.
And that, somehow, hurt more than any answer she could say out loud.
⸻
Outside her door, in the throne room, Erynd sat alone in the dim mana-light.
Melody stepped out of his shadow, hair drifting around a body that was more suggestion than substance.
"Day four," she said. "She's breaking beautifully."
"I know," he replied.
"One more day," Melody murmured.
"I know."
"And then?"
He closed his eyes.
"Then we see," he said, "if she jumps… or if I have to push."
Melody said nothing.
In the dark, Yggdrasil's roots kept growing.
And in her room, Olivia lay awake, counting all the ways her life had changed.
And all the ways she could never go back.