The murmuring started the moment the woman's voice finished carrying his name across the hall.
Darion stood up from his corner and he could feel it immediately, that particular kind of attention that has nothing kind in it. Eyes following him from every direction as he made his way toward the podium, and not a single pair of them was wishing him well.
His palms were already damp. His heart was doing something uncomfortable in his chest, beating too fast and too hard, and he was very aware of how his simple tunic and old boots looked against the backdrop of silk and embroidered coats that filled the rest of the hall.
"Let's see what the bastard awakens," someone murmured, not particularly quietly.
A few people nearby snickered at that. Darion kept walking and kept his eyes forward, which was the only thing he could think to do.
"If he awakens anything at all," another voice added, and that got a proper laugh from a small cluster of nobles standing near the centre of the hall.
He reached the podium. The orb sat on its stone surface, still cycling through its soft, shifting colors the way it had for every person before him. Up close it was larger than it had looked from across the room. He could feel a faint warmth radiating from it, something almost like a pulse of some sort.
He lifted both hands and placed them on the orb.
The hall went quiet.
A second passed.
Then another.
The orb flickered, and for a brief moment something moved within it, a dark, trembling light that seemed to pull inward rather than radiate outward, like it was swallowing itself.
Darion actually felt hopeful…
He was about to awaken something…
Then even that disappeared, and the orb returned to its idle shifting colors as if his hands were not on it at all.
The woman stared at it for a moment, then looked at Darion, then back at the orb.
"No awakening," she said plainly. "The subject has awakened nothing."
The silence lasted about one second before the hall came apart.
Laughter broke out first from the back, then spread forward like a wave rolling in, filling every corner of the room. Darion stood at the podium with his hands still resting on the orb and his face burning so intensely he was surprised no one remarked on it.
"Nothing?" A noble near the front said it loudly enough that the word carried, his voice wrapped in the particular delight of someone who had hoped for exactly this outcome. "He awakened absolutely nothing?"
"Not even the lowest class?" another voice called from somewhere in the crowd. "My grandmother's hunting hound has more use than that boy."
More laughter. Someone else chimed in, and the remarks began to layer over each other.
"As useless as a candle in a flood."
"The Emperor's blood truly is wasted on some people."
"Wasted? What blood? I mean, look at him, he clearly has no blood in him."
Darion stood frozen. He had expected it to go badly. He had spent the better part of the week before the awakening bracing himself for something bad.
But there was a particular feeling to standing in front of a room full of people while they laughed at you that no amount of bracing actually prepares you for. His feet felt nailed to the floor and his mouth had gone completely dry.
He glanced, without meaning to, toward where his half-siblings stood.
Godric was smiling with his arms crossed, the way someone smiles when something confirms a long-held opinion. Sylara had turned to Emmeline and said something quietly, and Emmeline, despite her earlier moment of pity, was laughing softly behind her fingers. Rowan simply watched, wearing the same faint smirk he had carried past Darion earlier.
The Empress, seated on her throne, wore a smile that she was not even pretending to conceal. She looked genuinely pleased in a way that made her beauty seem a great deal colder.
Then the Emperor stood up.
He did not say anything at first. He simply rose from his throne and the movement alone was enough to pull the laughter out of the room like a plug pulled from a drain.
The silence that followed was immediate and effective. Every noble in the hall straightened without being told to.
He descended the steps from the raised platform one at a time, unhurried, and every footfall landed with a weight that seemed disproportionate to the sound it made. He walked through the parting crowd and came to a stop directly in front of Darion, close enough that Darion had to look up at him.
Emperor Valdris was a tall man and he used every inch of it now.
"You awaken nothing?," he said. His voice was low and controlled and somehow that made it worse than if he had shouted. "How. How is it possible you awaken nothing!"
Darion opened his mouth.
"Do not speak," the Emperor said, and Darion's mouth closed.
"You are a disgrace to my bloodline. To the name Wentworth, to this throne, to every ancestor whose blood you have apparently done nothing to deserve. I should have you executed where you stand for the embarrassment alone."
Darion's chest felt hollowed out. He was aware of his own breathing in a way he had never been before, shallow and too quick.
"How are you to defend yourself in a world like this one? How are you to serve an empire? You cannot fight, you cannot lead, you cannot do a single thing that justifies the air you have been consuming in my palace for eighteen years."
"Your Majesty," Darion started, barely above a whisper.
It had been long he addressed the Emperor as 'Dad or father' by the way. To him, the man was more of an Emperor and a stranger than his father.
"You are worth less," the Emperor said, speaking directly over him as though he had not produced a sound at all, "Than the dogs in my kennels. At least they serve a function."
From the throne, the Empress's voice drifted down, sweet and perfectly… sweet!
"My lord, surely death is too generous a mercy. Let him live and let the world see exactly what becomes of weakness. That is the far greater lesson."
Darion absorbed those words slowly. She had genuinely expected his father to have him killed for this. Had perhaps been hoping for it. He stared at the floor because looking at either of them had become something he was no longer capable of.
The Emperor turned back to face the hall.
"Darion, bearing no class and no title earned, is hereby named Baron of Percvale."
The murmuring that moved through the crowd this time carried a different quality to it. It was quieter and almost uncomfortable. Even among nobles who had spent the last several minutes laughing openly at him, Percvale drew a different reaction.
Everyone in that hall knew what Percvale was. A remote, hostile stretch of land on the empire's most dangerous border, where three previous lords had died within their first year of appointment and a fourth had lasted eighteen months before disappearing entirely.
It was not a reward actually, being appointed to that place. It was not even truly a punishment in the conventional sense. It was a disposal.
"Furthermore," the Emperor continued, "You are hereby disowned. You are no longer my son in any capacity that this empire recognizes. I want nothing to do with you."
He turned and walked back toward the steps without looking at Darion again.
As he passed the edge of the crowd, close enough to the front row that only those nearby could hear it clearly, the Empress leaned very slightly forward in her throne and said, at a volume that was not quite a whisper:
"He won't last a week."
Two guards appeared at Darion's sides before he had fully processed that the Emperor had stopped speaking. They took him by the arms and walked him toward the doors at the back of the hall, and the crowd watched them go with the casual interest of people observing something they had already moved on from.
Darion did not cry. He wanted to, somewhere underneath the shock, he could feel the shape of it waiting, but his body had apparently decided that crying was a function too complex for what he was currently running on.
He moved because the guards were moving him and he looked at nothing in particular as the doors of the hall drew closer.
They opened, and the cold air of the corridor outside hit him, and then the doors swung shut behind him.