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arius ascended the steps to the War Room. The room was one of their grandest, ornamented with the keepsake trophies of the creatures they had conquered in the past. On the floor unfurled the black sheen of a lupari’s pelt, while suspended above was a chandelier made from the antlers of a qarnun buck.

He passed several other mounted heads on the walls, their eyes numb and fixed but still somehow all-seeing, all-judging.

Lanius stood before the ironwood table, a glass of gold graviji wine in hand. The sun’s first blades of light had pierced through the window panes and patterned his body in a fishnet.

He dropped like an anvil into his seat when Darius entered and waved aggressively for his son to move closer. “Yes, yes, come over here, boy, don’t dawdle.”

Darius edged towards him cautiously and kept himself firmly planted on the opposite end of the table. Then he dropped an amorphous scatter of maps and documents onto the table before his father.

“What’s all this?” Lanius asked.

“All the information I have gathered thus far on any intruders who managed to reach our shores,” Darius replied. “I would like your permission to look more into this… Soleterea.”

Lanius traced his chin with his thumb and forefinger in thought. “Any particular area you consider to be of interest?”

“Anything I can divine, but I think it best to focus in detail on the country’s methods of defence, their borders, and the size and structure of their armies.”

“You almost sound as though you’re looking to go to war,” Lanius scoffed in sardonic amusement. “Very well, Darius. I’ll let you have your little scavenger hunt. Find whatever treasures might be hidden down south and report back to me.”

“You’re agreeing?” Darius asked, incredulous. For years now he had been trying to broach the subject of foreign expedition with his father only to be tersely turned away. What had changed?

“While that little star girl was twittering away I got to thinking. It may be about time that Mortos did drop The Veil and end our reign of isolationism. For centuries now our predecessors had us believe we kept ourselves secret in order to protect ourselves from the outside world. But the outside world is a thriving place, full of wealth and opportunities I never truly thought possible before.”

“And you want your slice of the pie.”

“I don’t deal in slices, Darius. I intend to take it all. But for that I need to know who and what I’m dealing with. Which is where you enter.” He stood up from his seat and approached the fireplace, tracing his fingers over the carved jade mantle. “Put that poncey, bookish mind of yours to use.”

“As you wish, Your Majesty,” Darius said, accepting the backhanded compliment without so much as a flinch. “I assume you don’t intend to bring Dominus into the fold?”

“Not as of yet, boy’s distracted with his shiny new plaything and I intend to let him have his fun.” Lanius picked up the iron poker and nudged at the gyrating flames. “I shall call upon him when the time is right.”

Darius’ brow raised in interest. It was near unheard of for occassi to entertain lovers outside of the race. The House of Calantis, especially, was concerned with keeping their bloodline prominent. “You don’t mind that he’s fraternising with an outsider?”

Lanius removed the poker from the flames and inspected the red-hot end. “I have no intentions for Dominus to marry as of now, so he is free to pursue his pleasures elsewhere should the urge take him.”

Pursue his pleasures indeed, thought Darius. A Dominus distracted from taking a wife was one much easier to puppeteer than one with illusions of ascension. With an ambitious wife in his ear he might actually be persuaded to have his father disposed of. That would almost definitely spell the end of his reign. A move well-played on his part. But perhaps the solarite had ambitions of her own…

“Very well, Your Majesty,” Darius said, already calculating the logistics of which scout he should place where. “I shall get started at once.”

“Oh, and Darius?”

Darius paused before the door, slowly pivoting on one foot. “Yes?”

His father moved too quickly for him to be prepared for it. He snatched Darius by the hair before he shoved his face into the hearth, immersing him in flames.

Darius couldn’t cry out, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. There was fire in his eyes, in his mouth, writhing down his throat and stealing his tongue. For a moment there was only pain, agonising, blistering. Then there was nothing but heat.

Lanius tugged him out of the fire and left him to snuff out on the floor. “That was for neglecting to make sure there were no survivors.”

Darius whimpered softly, every orifice wheezing smoke. His immortal body had already mended enough to restore the feel of his fraying nerve endings.

“Don’t ever fail me like that again,” Lanius warned. Then he stepped over his body. “Now get out of my sight.”

Darius retreated to his quarters with a wounded face and a much more grievously bruised ego. Lanius knew how much Darius, along with others, prized his beauty and the attack on his features was a coldly deliberate gesture. It would take days for his face to resemble normality, much less for the searing itch as his skin regrew to subside.

With a sigh he entered his quarters to check the progression of his repairing visage, pausing only when he’d found Dominus awaiting him on his divan.

Dominus’ back straightened upon seeing him. “What happened to you?”

Darius averted his face from his brother’s gaze. “Father took it upon himself to express his disapproval with our newest houseguests.”

“I see,” Dominus said, acknowledging his brother’s burns with a swallow. He’d seen worse in the past and he knew Darius would soon heal, but he still felt the urge to apologise for his part in it. However, he knew that approaching Darius in a dialogue would be a much more fearsome battle than any former conflict he’d stared down with fangs bared and the hilt of a falcata close at hand. “I uh, I wanted to say it was erroneous of me to have brought up the flying ship to you in his presence. I should’ve known better than to rock the table like that.”

Darius snorted, knowing that was the most feeble attempt at an apology he would ever truly receive. Dominus and his skyscraping pillar of pride, his corroding shield of honour. “Well I suppose it doesn’t matter to you either way, does it? After all, we both knew it wouldn’t be you who would be the one to incur his wrath.”

Such was his plight as the firstborn, the elder-burdened, carrying the weight of Dominus’ faults on his shoulders but never his successes. It was to be his fate as a bastard, as the physical proof of his father’s own transgressions.

Dominus frowned, stroking down the bridge of his hooked nose. “I know his measures might seem harsh, Dara. But Papa only disciplines you so severely because he expects the best of you.”

“Discipline?” Darius scoffed in disbelief despite the pain it caused him. “Is that still what we’re calling this? This surpassed any reasonable form of discipline long ago. Father has become a maniac. Has been ever since he performed that accursed ritual and you know it.”

“That’s not true,” Dominus said quietly.

“How is it for you to say as if you’d know any better?” Darius retorted, raising an arm in dismissal. “You’ve been a block of ice for the better part of a lustrum. During all of which, I might add, Father did very little in order to find you.”

“You shut your mouth.” Dominus slammed his fist on the table, a spray of splinters powdering the air from the cracked wood.

“Look at you.” Darius shook his head in disbelief. “Still his ever loyal footsoldier. So eager to defend him even now.”

“Because everything we are today we are because of him. He is the reason why we now have a united kingdom of Mortos. Why we no longer have to spend centuries locked in battle with our neighbours. Why you get to fritter away your time sticking your nose in books and chasing occasselle rather than being the warrior that you are meant to be.”

Darius rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go.”

“How could you possibly be so ungrateful to him after everything he’s done for you? Papa took you in as a bastard, gave you his name, funded every one of your whims while you ran about the country doing your research. And you stand there and you denigrate him when it was your mother who tossed you aside and tore out his heart in all possible ways—”

“Don’t you dare throw her in my face,” Darius seethed, “I will not have you stand there and project her faults upon me. If I thought it possible for her to reverse the ritual, I would’ve marched to the Widowlands this very day and dragged her here kicking and screaming by her hair. But that is simply not the solution we have been presented with. And I truly tire of having to tiptoe around his temper for the sake of your misdeeds.”

“What would you have me do, Dara? Would you ask for me to conspire against our father with you again like you did the last time you two got into an altercation? I won’t do it. I won’t turn my back on him. I believe in him and his vision for Mortos to be the true and correct course. And as long as I do then he will have my continued support. I won’t supplant him. Not even for you.”

Darius recoiled as though struck. Then slowly he began to chuckle. “That’s fine, Dominus. Run off into the woods. Pretend we don’t have a problem. You’re not the one who has to be here and watch as Father further unravels. I do wonder what it is going to take for you to truly understand the depths that he has fallen. Perhaps only when he hurts someone you actually care about in front of you.”

The words were the finishing strike he intended and Dominus found himself disarmed, mouth gaping without hope of a counter. Thus he threw out a snarl, his muscles flexing in anger, and with a huff sent the table overturning onto the floor in scattered fragments before he sped out and left.

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Laila entered into the Portrait Hall and found herself observing the short line of rexes and their reginas. She could see Dominus and Darius reflected easily in the faces of the portraits: the same deep dusky skin, chiselled bone structure, hooked nose, and the hunger in their eyes, the calculated menace of a born killer.

Since her nightmare she had grown even more emboldened to explore every part of the stronghold she could gain access to. Even though she knew the Great Northern had long met a watery end, she couldn’t shift the sense that Hariken’s presence in her mind held some significance.

She walked along the aisle from portrait to portrait, examining each one, before her neck prickled with the spidery sensation of having been watched. She turned to find the source of her discomfort—a bronze relief of an imposingly large raptor with six heads leering vigilantly over the room.

The sculpture took her by surprise and she couldn’t help but feel a crazed impulse to get away from it. Instead she traced the span of one feather with her finger, observing the iridescent shades of colour as it shifted from different angles.

“You like it?” asked someone from behind her in Mortesian.

She turned to see Dominus there, silhouetted against the castle’s masonry like one of its rough-hewn pillars had split itself off and began to walk.

“It’s quite uh… large,” Laila said, her cheeks flushed with warmth from her limited vocabulary.

Dominus unclipped his cloak and fastened it around her shoulders, mistaking her blush for coldness.

“Oh that’s not, I—” she stopped herself when he had already adjusted the cloak around her shoulders. It was soft against her skin, grey silk inline cool while the fur trim tickled her chin, but the black velvet was heavy, almost suffocating. She could see that the brooch had been etched with his royal seal. “Thank you.”

He nodded back in response. “There are many more like it around the city. I’ll have to show you the one in our cathedral, one day.”

“Cathedral?”

“Yes,” Dominus said, “the six-headed raptor is the most common representation of our god, Calante.”

The name went through her like a chill. It felt so long since she’d heard it last. That elusive instigator of all the misfortunes that’d befallen her thus far.

“Are you alright?” Dominus tilted his head to one side. “You’ve gone pale.”

“I’m fine.” She hugged his cloak around her shoulders. “Six heads?”

Dominus gestured to the plaque on the wall. “According to legend the six heads represent the six facets he embedded in our creation. We were conceived in the core of a mountain thousands of years ago and birthed in flame.”

Laila read the plaque that described the statue on the wall followed by each attribute: Tenacity, Austerity, Ferocity, Supremacy, Cunning and Vigour.

Laila did not know much about Calante besides what already happened to align with their own set of beliefs. Asemani bore a son named Calante who was struck by a wicked lust for the earth she created and so sought to enslave it until he was thwarted and imprisoned within a mountain.

“Birthed in flame,” she echoed, wondering what it reminded her of. “Is that like a… uh, hole that spits fire?”

“Volcano,” he amended. He shared an image with her of a smoking mountain. “This is Mount Occassus. It’s considered to be a holy site.”

“Could I see it?”

He shook his head. “It’s considered consecrated ground. Outsiders can’t step foot on it.”

She sagged in disappointment. Though, of course, such a thing made sense. Should Calante truly dwell within the isle’s crust, his disciples would do their best to keep it safely guarded.

“Poor Dr Hariken,” she sighed aloud in Soltongue. All that effort and she may well not have seen her goal come to fruition in the end, after all. Though her sceptic’s mind still rationed it was just as likely for such a thing to be a work of elaborate myth and Mount Occassus was no more remarkable a sight than any average volcano.

Yes, in spite of all the phenomena she’d come to experience, a cosmic entity causing irrevocable doom was still far beyond the bounds of Laila’s disbelief suspension.

“So your god created you to be cruel and uh… hungry for blood?”

“Bloodthirsty. And that’s one way of looking at it. My father says that he created us to be the perfect predator. Swift, brutal, methodical, capable of withstanding anything.”

Her laughter was like the ringing of silver bells. “I think I’m beginning to understand.”

Dominus smiled back at her, something rumbling in his throat like a seismic movement. “Will you be staying long in Mortos?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. Long enough to settle negotiations, she supposed.

“Well, when you do go back I would like to come and properly see this Soleterea of yours.”

“Oh, you must,” Laila insisted with an eager bounce of her feet, “it’ll be a dream in the spring. Oh, I’ll have to show you the gold roses and the lavender fields and—” She stopped herself, realising in her excitement she’d slipped back into her mother tongue. Her chin lowered demurely as she looked up at him through gold curled lashes. “I mean if you’d like to.”

“I would like to.”

They traded a smile amongst themselves.

“Though I would likely have to persuade my father into dropping The Veil.”

“The Veil?”

“It’s a uh… a thin barrier of sorts separating our isle from the rest of the world. It has always existed. For protection. Or so our predecessors would have us believe. You probably would’ve seen it as we journeyed here.”

Laila rummaged around her mind for barriers seen throughout her voyage and retrieved none. Unless. “You are the ones who created the Dragon’s Breath!”

“Is that what they call it in your realm?” Dominus asked, not recognising the term she’d used. She projected an image of the infamous sea mist to him and he nodded in understanding. “Ah, yes, that’s it alright.”

“Well,” Laila exclaimed in astonishment. That certainly resolved one unanswered mystery.

“Come,” Dominus said, holding out his hand for her to take.

He led her out from the hall to the cloister with its pointed arches and left-leaning shadows, the grounds beyond coated in marshmallow frost.

Laila marvelled at the dense cotton snowfall that settled on the jagged spires of the Citadel. It covered the sunken rooftops, the splitting grooves, the abrupt hair-raising edges, making it look as though the edifice had grown a soft flocculent coat—a more docile shroud to its true ferocious shape.

Unable to resist, she stepped out beneath the softly falling flakes and raised her face to the sky, sticking out her tongue to catch a flake.

Dominus couldn’t help but feel a simmer in his chest watching her, locks and lashes freshly powdered, palms open to the sky with a laughter warm enough to dissolve the winter glaze around her. He began to wonder how it would feel to taste that mirth on her lips, catch the heat of her breath on the edge of his tongue.

He soon moved to do so, pulling her body to his by the waist before he joined their mouths together.

The kiss took her by surprise and there were moments between the interval of their lips meeting where her laughter was still vibrating in his mouth. The laugh soon melted away as she dithered on whether to return the kiss, before deciding she would reciprocate. Thus she closed her eyes and rested her hands on his chest, raising herself up on her toes to bridge the space between their heights.