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arius reclined into his alcove-backed leather seat. For the past hour he had been discussing matters of the kingdom in the Eyrie, the affectionate term for the council chamber, for it perched like a bird’s nest at the top of a stone spiral staircase. To scale the steps was a perilous affair with abrupt curves and bends at ankle-twisting speed. Wrought iron balustrades enclosed on either side adorned with bronze-carved eagles, ever-vigilant to any catastrophe that might befall with a lacquered twinkle in their eye.

Behind brass-barred oak was the chamber itself—a room of varnished ironwood panelled with particle-dusted plaques. Stained glass windows dressed in velvet drapes depicted the sextuple-headed eagle of the royal insignia. With the soft-toned lambency of cavorting chandelier flames and the sweet smoke pluming from the fireplace, the room appeared intimate. Yet, lingering beneath the deception was a frigid ambience that seeped into Darius’ bones the same way whiskey diluted on ice: slow to settle but once there, impossible to shift. It kept his spine rigid so he never thought to get comfortable at the pinnacle of the social ladder he’d scaled, when he could be so carelessly knocked off.

His father, Lanius Rex, paced around the ironwood table with his prefects around him. The firelight bounced along the virile mane smoothed atop his head with pomade, half-tamed with a gold hair-cuff, the rest permitted to flow lavishly down to his shoulder blades. He stood where the others were seated, his face delineated in the gyrating flames. The light seemed to eclipse him, erase him; he looked almost a spectre. His obstruction of the fireplace caused his shadow to enlarge and the rest of the occupants to darken until only the unearthly gleam of their eyes remained.

“Well?” Lanius asked. Having recently concluded matters of their isle once more being breached they had now moved onto food and agriculture. He waved for a ghoul to pour him a goblet of gold wine from the diamond decanter.

Claudius Orlovis, his prime prefect, cleared his throat to go first. “Recent forecasts have warned of a significantly harsh winter this year, Your Majesty. One fraught with violent storms and a stubborn frost. With such conditions, there will be cause for concern that our game and livestock shall be affected.”

Throughout this report Lanius’ eyes were vacant, his expression bloodless, every last ounce of emotion having leached from him the moment he’d had his heart extricated from his chest. Darius wondered whether he had it with him now—guarded inside that egg of lapis lazuli with gold cagework.

Lanius ran his fingers down the aquiline bridge of his nose. “How severe?”

“The figures vary, sire, but they do not look hopeful.” There was a pause as Claudius debated whether to broach this next topic. “Perhaps if we ask for aid from the Vidua Nocte—”

“No.” Lanius held up a hand definitively. “I have no intention of ceding any more power to those hags. They were downright unbearable the last time we haggled. The less influence they hold in this time of crisis, the better.”

Food production had long been caged inside the black talon grip of the Vidua Nocte, a faction of blood sorceresses to which Darius’ mother belonged, and market domination always made them uppity. Much to the dismay of Lanius.

“Your Majesty, if I may—” interjected Delanus Levitis, prefect of the treasury, “—I no more want another blood sorceress at court than you do but I have seen the numbers Prefect Orlovis has forecast and, if we do not act quickly, this may lead to famine. Many of us will most certainly starve.”

A plea to empathy that would fall upon indifferent ears. They all knew it. Yet such a foregone conclusion did not dissuade them from the belief that they might be able to stir their monarch.

“Starve we may, Prefect Levitis,” Lanius responded, hands clasped behind his back, “but perish we will not. We have survived famines before and we will do so again. This is a hard land and we are hardy people. In the meantime, we have forests full of beasts and seas full of fish. Plenty of meat to be had before the storm arrives.”

Delanus flexed his jaw, clearly unsatisfied. “Your Majesty, I must pray you see reason—”

“You must?” Lanius challenged. His tone was calm, almost toneless, but there was the finest shard of vexation.

“Do forgive me, Your Majesty,” Delanus conceded, swallowing down his defiance. “I spoke out of turn.”

“No, do continue, Prefect.” Lanius took a step closer, one heavy brow arched. “Speak your mind. After all, the only thing worse than an insubordinate worm is one who lacks the spine to follow through with his conviction. So, tell me—” Lanius rested a hand on Delanus’ shoulder and squeezed firmly, “—are you a worm, Prefect?”

Nobody dared speak or breathe for they had seen an encounter like this before and lived in fear of what followed. The last dispute between the rex and his prefect had ended with the latter’s spine removed and cast off into the fireplace.

Darius cleared his throat, and moved to speak. “I am sure Prefect Levitis meant no offence, Your Majesty.”

“You will speak when you are spoken to.” Lanius tossed off his words with indifference. His attention then narrowed onto Delanus. “Well?”

“No, sire,” Delanus stumbled over his words, the tips of his pointed ears darkened. Small beads of sweat now studded his forehead. His pupils nearly eclipsed the iris entirely. “No, I am not a worm. I only meant to say I think you are making too hasty a decision by refusing to entertain the Vidua Nocte’s aid.”

Lanius regarded his prefect for a long pause, his manacle grip tightened. Then slowly, he loosened it.

“I will take your counsel into due consideration,” he said, a shift arriving in the corner of his lips. Not quite a smile, it looked more like a fissure splintering on a slab.

Delanus exhaled the moment he was released, as though his throat instead had been within Lanius’ pincer grip.

The rex approached a polished wooden cigar cabinet standing nearby, firelight reflecting on bevelled glass doors and brass handles. He took out a stick of nightleaf and ran it across his nostrils, gesturing for a ghoul to light it before he inhaled.

“You are dismissed,” Lanius said, his nostrils frothing with smoke like a disgruntled beast.

The prefects rose from their seats with a stretch of long legs and broad shoulders. So vast their bodies were; the earth couldn’t help but tremble when they moved.

“Not you, Darius,” Lanius ordered, just as he was about to join them.

Darius returned to his seat. “Your Majesty?”

“Did you handle that little problem I tasked you with?” Lanius asked on the edge of an exhale, smoke encircling around his manicured beard like tusks.

“Yes,” Darius replied, knowing he referred to the foreigner. “I have made certain she will no longer be a nuisance.”

Perhaps not the way his father would come to expect. But certainly, the hapless scholar was unlikely to be heard from again.

“Good,” Lanius said, stubbing his cigar on his backhand. The stub sizzled on his swarthy skin, blackening it to char. “Keep it up the way you have been and you may prove yourself worthy of a commendation yet.”

Such words might have once made his chest lift but Darius had long learned how emptied of substance his father’s praise was. Thus, he merely bowed his head in compliance. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“Hm,” Lanius acknowledged, waving his hand. “Now go, get out of my sight.”

Darius nodded, turning on his heel to depart after the fellow prefects.

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When he reached his quarters Delanus was already there, having helped himself to a couple of glasses of his polugar. His shoulders were hunched pitifully over his glass as he nursed his wounded pride.

Darius hadn’t seen him come to him in such a state for a while, not since he’d gotten betrothed, but he sported a blasé air as he closed the door behind him.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Delanus sputtered the moment Darius entered. “God, I’m such an imbecile.”

“Calm down,” Darius said, lifting the lid of the decanter to pour himself a glass. He swirled the wine around before he sipped it. “He’ll already have forgotten about it tomorrow.”

Delanus refused to be consoled. “I almost feel as though I can’t say anything right around him anymore. He used to regard me so well and then…” An exhale of bitter laughter. “I suppose they don’t call him heartless for nothing.”

“Since Dominus’ disappearance, he’s been rather… tempestuous,” Darius agreed; though as the primary target of his father’s capricious moods he often failed to tell the difference. “But really you ought to have known better than to mention the Vidua Nocte to him directly after the last incident that occurred between him and the emissary.”

“I know, I know.” Delanus pinched the corners of his eyes. “I suppose I thought enough time had passed for him to have gotten over that little altercation.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Darius chuckled, revealing two rows of perfect teeth. “Sadly, while becoming heartless may have excised my father of most emotion, his pride appears to have only swelled to make up for it.”

“And I suppose your mother being appointed their most recent leader hasn’t helped.”

Darius’ hooked nose wrinkled. He didn’t often like thinking about what his mother had cast him aside to achieve. “Don’t remind me.” He swallowed the rest of his drink. “The only good thing about that is it’ll offer me a little more sway when I go to visit Katerina myself.”

“After all this time you still have your old dalliance on the hook?” Delanus asked, his mirth distorting his features into something feral.

“We keep in touch,” Darius replied, unbuttoning his cream kaftan to unveil the sheer rubakha that clenched tightly around the contours of lean, sculptural muscle.

Delanus sat up immediately in discomfort, eyes everywhere but on him. He’d almost forgotten what a slight dip of a waist Darius had. The way his hips lengthened into generous thighs.

“One blood sorceress will certainly not be enough to resolve the entire crisis but at the very least she’ll keep the city fed, where most of our race is concentrated. What to do about the qarna tribes in the hinterlands, well… the enforcers will have to manage that.” Darius placed his hand on the obsidian mantelpiece and drummed his fingers against it. “All of these are merely temporary measures that distract away from the real issue. What we need is new land, fertile land, that is less prone to famine or frost than ours.”

Delanus snorted into his glass, grateful for the liquid distraction. “And we all know what the rex thinks about that.”

“Indeed.” Darius twisted the signet ring on his little finger.

Lanius’ insistence on maintaining the brutal isolationist principles of his predecessors had often perplexed him. Darius knew his father had a stomach for conquest, something two centuries of unchallenged domination over Mortos could more than attest to. Though after the war for racial supremacy with their competing neighbours had been won, the appetite had long waned. Another consequence of his now heartless state.

“Perhaps what we need here is a new perspective.” Delanus raised his glass in salute. “Or even a new leader.”

Darius chuckled as he shifted from the mantelpiece to the divan next to Delanus. “Not an easy task to manage when you have half the kingdom willing to dismiss you out of turn for being a bastard and the other half scared witless to move against the monarch.” He crossed one leg over the other, relaxing into his seat. “But I’ve been biding my time and it seems Dominus’ disappearance may have presented something of an opportunity. You might say I’ve been finding myself strange bedfellows as of late.”

Delanus tensed upon his proximity. “Oh, of that I’m certain.”

Darius responded to this with the slimmest smirk, allowing his hand to slide into Delanus’ lap. “Though I think we’ve had enough talk of politics.” He stroked his hand along Delanus’ thigh. “Let me help you relax.”

Delanus swallowed, his mind aswarm with the alcohol and the dark, intoxicating scent of Darius’ perfume so enticingly near. He placed his hand over Darius’ own. “We shouldn’t.”

“You always say that,” Darius said, deftly unwinding the sash of his kaftan. “And yet, you come here anyway.” His hand wandered leisurely to his trousers next, undoing the button, and slipping between the folds.

Delanus grabbed his throat, squeezing hard. A warning, perhaps, but Darius only took it as enticement.

“Would you like me to stop?” Darius asked, leaning daringly into Delanus’ grip. His blue eyes were bright as a beetle’s carapace, alluring in the way all things poisonous appeared to be. He was far too pretty to be a predator and yet such a thing only made his strikes more deadly when they came.

Delanus held Darius’ throat fast in his hand as he regarded his softly flushed cheeks, the lips that appeared so full and pink even in the dimness of the room. Those lips, especially, had haunted him through many a stressful night.

Delanus closed his eyes with an exhale, opening them to reveal sclera blackened and veins bulging. But the smirk that overcame his features was one of carnality. He pulled Darius into a rough kiss, tongues and teeth clashing.

Darius moaned softly into his kiss as his fangs descended, parting to litter bites and kisses down the expanse of Delanus’ throat. He slid down onto his knees to stroke his hands up Delanus’ thighs, one final glance given beneath boyish lashes before he sank down into his lap and gave Delanus what he’d been wanting since he came into the room.

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When Delanus had long left, Darius parted the curtains to his alcove bed and stepped out into the night. His body was still bruised from Delanus’ rough handling, his throat especially. But the post-coital clarity provided by a good ravishing always stirred him to inspiration.

It took moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, though the colours were a ghost of what they ought to be. He debated briefly on a lantern and decided against it, pulling on a rubakha and a pair of trousers from his oaken chest before closing it softly behind him.

From there, he crossed towards the large bookcase of calfskin tomes and touched the heftiest, manoeuvring it around until it clicked. The case yawned open to a hidden passageway where a rugged wooden staircase ran downwards into a cellar. He took the widely spaced steps one at a time, his footsteps wool-soft against the creaking dark wood.

The tunnel at the bottom seemed to lead on forever until finally he stepped into light again inside a laboratory. The room was in impeccable order, pristine as a picture. With its lacquered workbenches edged in gold and scintillating apparatus, it was a motionless landscape, until Darius wandered into the foreground and transfigured it from still art to animation.

He passed beneath his ceiling dome bookcase, the skeletal figures modelling deformed shapes, and the walls papered with labelled diagrams of unidentifiable creatures hybridised from several sources. Here stretched over a century of his research into chimera production where he’d made a slow, if not steady, progression into the mutagenesis of organic matter.

Throughout the years he’d made great use of his surgical knowledge and lithe embroiderer fingers to vivisect the beasts of many classes that roamed their lands, sewing them together in a means that would adapt them for warfare. Such pursuits had borne him little fruit thus far and it wasn’t until a little foreigner filled with dark magic landed into his lap that he received the catalyst he didn’t realise he’d been missing.

His footsteps came to a pause before her now as he smiled, reaching towards her. She was all bones, whittled down to nothing. Whatever pitiful remains were left of her limbs had been bound to a gurney. The only thing that kept her suspended from the release she so begged for was the intravenous drip of chaotic essence, slowly invading and subsuming all of her blood, muscle and organs.

Her body was changing, mutating. Into what, one could not say. Each of her veins had become sullied from blue to black, jutting out with a twiglike protuberance. A notable leakage had seeped through to her fingers, giving them the impression of having festered and charred to coal. Her nails had overgrown, equally black, curved like sharpened scythes that spasmed with soreness.

But most noteworthy of all were her eyes.

Gone was the clear-eyed health of spongy white sclera—now filled to overflowing with the tar-like substance of chaos. Though she could no longer blink, each time she wept the heavy coating on her eyes would wobble and glisten, spilling over into inky streaks across her cheeks.

“I want to thank you, Emica, for your contribution. Without you, I never would’ve made it this far. Being able to study you has been a very rare gift indeed.”

Darius slid his hand down the damp, matted hair of Dr Hariken who gave him little response but to swallow weakly and part her lips with a plea. “Please… let me die.”

Darius tutted, shaking his head gravely. “I’m afraid I’m far from finished with you yet. Though not to worry, I can promise that your suffering will be in the service of something very, very grand.”

He removed the empty canister of chaotic essence and replaced it with another. As the blight poured into the withered veins of Dr Hariken she felt herself ripple with another sob, her ailing body contorting to the pernicious effects of foreign magic.

No longer did she resemble anything like the scholar that had haplessly stepped foot on accursed soil. The only thing that could be said for certain was whatever tether she’d still held to humanity had now been lost.