Chapter 25

“Let it be known that until the stars themselves burn dry, upon the throne of the cluster shall reside my kin. They shall be as I am, the font from which all the people drink their contentment, and all shall drink for they shall know that there is no better way than this. By our governance shall all know peace and prosperity, and any who would oppose us shall be laid low and cast from the sight of man into those dark places where the [translation error] of the [translation error] reside. In those stygian depths may their souls be rent and sundered for having the temerity to turn their backs upon those with the mandate of heaven.”

—Upon a Throne of Shimmering Light, King Jeremiah Dusont, Part One

Everything on the planet shone like it had been polished. 

Whether Dusont was the name of the royal family or the planet itself had never been clear to Sylvas, and Mira had unhelpfully explained that it was both, which just made things even more confusing. They had emerged from the ship and were taken directly to the palace in what Sylvas would have described as open-topped carriages, but for the fact that they were led by no horses and traveled suspended above the ground on a bubble of air rather than wheels. 

The Ardent had been separated from them at some point in their journey through the shining city, diverting along some other route to ‘receive medical care’ according to Simeon. Sylvas knew for a fact that none of them were injured, so the ploy was a pretty transparent attempt to isolate them, but ultimately, there was little he could say or do about it. If it really came down to it, having a little army at his back would mostly have been for the optics of it rather than them being of any actual help. His power had grown in so many leaps and bounds that having more people to protect would have presented considerably more of a problem than any help that the Ardent might have been able to offer up. Not that any of them were expecting a fight.

Sylvas had spent enough time among the nobility of his own world to know that there would be no fighting. That was for the lesser folk to do in the name of their lords and ladies, not for the nobility themselves to suffer through. No wonder the place rankled Malachai so much.

The palace loomed up from amidst the shimmering buildings almost immediately after they had cleared the landing strip. It towered like a mountain over the cityscape spread out around it, rising up in a similar shape. The lower levels spread wide, and the buttressed towers sprouting up from that lower pyramid stretched up into the sky. Sylvas would have struggled to say whether the city or the palace was actually bigger. 

He supposed that the throne of a cluster of stars and planets would be bigger than the one for a single world, but it begged the question of why all this grandeur was really needed. To turn over so much of the limited land on this planet to a monument to its rulers seemed wasteful. Egotistical. Sylvas would really need to get used to being among nobility again. He had no doubt that any of the nobles back on Croesia would have been delighted to build a palace bigger than most towns for themselves.

I certainly would have.

Arches stretched up over the road to the palace, shimmering with both their own crystalline forms and the magic that had infused them. There were layers upon layers of protections surrounding the palace, and each of these arches dropped more and more restrictive magic on top of them as they passed under. Layers and layers of restraint tying themselves around Sylvas and the others as they went. Trusting in strength of arms to protect the royal family in a universe where magic could tear their whole castle down in an instant clearly wasn’t a good idea, so this had been their solution. Cripple anyone who got close so that any attempt to cast would rebound on them from inside the shell that the arches were layering around them.

By the time that they arrived at the palace steps, Malachai was entirely incapable of using magic. Rania wasn’t able to use it anyway, and both Sylvas and Kaya probably wouldn’t have been able to cast through normal means, but their covenants meant that if worst came to worst, they might be able to break free of the bonds. Sylvas did not appreciate the level of distrust being shown towards them, even if he did understand it. He particularly didn’t like the level of distrust that they were showing towards Malachai. He was their crown prince, and this was how they treated him? 

Malachai looked up the hundreds of steps to the palace doors and sighed. “We walk the rest of the way.”

“You certainly do, my dear nephew, but I’m afraid that while you have all devoted yourselves to a sweaty life of hard labor, I was destined for finer things, and as such, I must bid you adieu.” Simeon began to cast, to Sylvas’ immediate surprise, until he saw the counter-magic throbbing out from the signet ring on the duke’s hand. It didn’t remove the restrictions that had been layered over them, but it seemed to allow certain magics to pass through. In this case, a helpful little cloud that gathered around Simeon’s feet before lifting him off the ground and carrying him up the stairs ahead of them.

I’m already analyzing it so we can replicate the effect, darling. You don’t even need to ask. See how dutiful I am.

“We walk.” Malachai maintained a calm and stern expression despite everything. “Just like I have every time I was summoned to court ever since I was old enough to walk on my own.”

“You don’t have one of those rings then?” Kaya asked as the trudging began. It seemed that she, too, had noticed how Simeon had escaped the trap of the arches.

Malachai kept his eyes on the stairs, giving nothing away. “I relinquished my signet along with my title when I left.”

Sylvas didn’t want to push and make the other man uncomfortable, but they had known each other for a long time now, with very little personal information being shared. “I wasn’t aware that you’d left your inheritance behind when you joined the Ardent.”

“My affinity caused uproar—as you might imagine.” Malachai had always been reticent to talk about his life before the Ardent, even now that they were all firmly friends, but he pressed on all the same. “Few of the common folk relished the thought of a necromancer king. I chose the path of least resistance.”

“Weird,” Kaya mumbled to herself. “Culghs could have had a necro-king, changed all the décor to skulls and bones, and nobody would mess with you.”

“My decision to leave was much debated. My mother was of the opinion that the consent of the people was not required for me to rule. My uncle, and others for whom the throne had previously been out of reach, were all in favor, of course.”

“Of course,” Rania echoed back, with a grimace.

“So your mum is going to be happy to see you.” Kaya counted along on her fingers as if she were doing math. “Everyone else is going to want you dead.”

“I am dubious as to how pleased the queen will be to see me returned. I wouldn’t have been allowed to depart, to begin with, if it had been so politically expedient to remove me. Now I am unsure as to how welcome I will be. Particularly given the years she has had to formulate alternate plans for my continued existence.”

“Getting the feeling I’m not going to like your mum.” Kaya said it with a smile, but the anger bristling just under the surface of that smile was hard to miss. As it turned out, no matter how they bickered, Kaya did care about Malachai. It was just unfortunate that it had taken a situation like this to make it show.

“On the contrary.” Malachai forced his own smile into place. “I am sure that the two of you shall discover that you have a great deal in common in terms of temperament, if you get past the initial hurdle of your different stations.”

Kaya’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that meant to mean?”

“Only that you are the second most stubborn person that I have ever met.”

She huffed. “I’m the first most insulted I’ve ever been.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll pardon your culgh!” she cried.

The two slipped into their usual back and forth as the group worked its way up the stairs and had returned to their usual simmering silence by the time that the doors of the palace swung open before them. Inside, there was what Sylvas could only describe as the most vulgar display of opulent wealth that he’d ever encountered in his life. Everything that was not crystal was gilded, or maybe even solid gold. The shimmering opalescence that was the hallmark of the planet was so omnipresent that it completely lost all impact. A single shining pearl caught the eye; walls of shining pearl just made it difficult to see. They walked along a long carpet, the only thing that was not shining bright enough to blind the unwary, and proceeded up yet more steps towards the throne room.

Just as the castle had dominated the city with its ridiculous size, so too did the throne command almost half of the room in which it was situated. Spears of crystal shot out from behind the seat back, shimmering in all the colors of the rainbow and charged with mana of every different affinity. Illusions swirled around the throne, shimmering images of creatures, both mythical and real, moments from history, similarly fabricated, and other reminders of the importance of whosoever was seated there. 

The irony, of course, was that by making the seat of power so massive, it made whoever did sit on the throne seem minuscule by comparison. It took Sylvas a moment to realize that the queen was not in fact a child seated there on the massive cushion but a full-grown woman made to look like a child by her surroundings. She was as overdressed as her throne room. Gold everywhere there could be gold, cloth of gold where there couldn’t be, and shimmering strands of some sort of silk that carried on the pearlescence across the whole gown. 

Even her face seemed to glow with all the illusions and aesthetic tweaks that had been made. Her eyeshadow was of the same pearlescent quality as everything else, contrasting sharply with her dark skin and the eyes, darker still, beneath that glow. Sylvas could make out Malachai’s aquiline nose in the midst of all the glamour, but beyond that, he would have struggled to pick out any detail of the queen’s appearance. She had been ‘improved’ in so many ways that everything that made her face distinctive blurred into the modifications.

Malachai took a step forward from the rest of the party and snapped out a picture-perfect bow, as if he’d memorized every motion of it, right down to the correct angle to tilt, from some old book of manners. The rest of them did the same. Sylvas still had enough practice from his youth to pull it off, and Rania, with her historical studies, must have felt quite at home with her curtsey. Kaya was the fish out of water here, and it showed. She tried to curtsey like Rania, only for her mechanical knees to let out a complaining creak, then switched to a bow, which combined with the bent knees to make her look like she was trying to impersonate a chicken.

“Welcome home, my son. It has been far too long since I have set my eyes upon you.” Just as her appearance had been ‘massaged’ by magic, so too was the queen’s voice manipulated into something very aesthetically pleasing but not particularly real-sounding.

“It is a joy to see you, too, Mother.” Malachai didn’t even sound sarcastic when he said it. It took Sylvas a moment to realize that maybe it was the truth.