They march me through a corridor of the same pale stone, down one flight of stairs, and along a passage lit by steady white globes set into the walls. Entherian tech, maybe, or Glowranth bio-lamps. The effect is too clean for torches. It makes the place feel institutional rather than medieval, which is somehow less comforting than a dungeon would have been. Dungeons at least admit what they are.
This place looks like bureaucracy with knives.
We pass two more locked doors, a central chamber with a desk and two scribes, then another corridor where the air grows warmer. Not hot. Just less damp. Better appointed. Which tells me we’re moving into a part of the building meant for conversation rather than storage.
I catalogue details automatically—turnings, the number of guards, the smells—and out of habit. It won’t help me escape. Not really. But knowing things has always made me feel less like prey.
The room they take me to is not what I expect.
There’s no chair bolted to the floor, no chains hanging on the wall, and no tray of glinting implements laid out for dramaticeffect. It looks more like an audience chamber that has been pared down to its essentials. A long table of dark wood sits off to one side, untouched. The centre of the room is open, with two chairs facing each other near a brazier that gives off no smoke and very little heat. Pale blue light glows under the stone veins in the walls, tracing subtle patterns that might be decorative or might be some kind of old power system.
A place designed to unsettle without appearing crude.
Very…royal.
The guards leave me alone. For a moment, I stand in the centre of the room and don’t sit. If they’re trying to make me nervous, mission accomplished.
The air feels charged in a way I can’t quite explain, as if the room itself is listening. Then the opposite door opens, and she walks in.
I know who she is before my mind catches up.
Some instinctive part of me identifies danger with perfect clarity, and the rest follows after.
The Queen.
Serresta.
She is taller than most Glowranth I’ve seen, though not as broad as the guards. Elegant in that unnerving, monstrous way their royal line seems to cultivate—every movement precise, controlled, and effortlessly predatory. Her skin is a deep, saturated blue that catches the low light and gives it back with a faint internal shimmer, lighter than the armour-dark tones of some of her soldiers but richer than the washed shades I’ve seen on merchant houses. Bioluminescent markings thread along the ridges of her arms and throat, subtle at first glance and impossible to ignore once you’ve noticed them. Her eyes are luminous, almost silver-blue, and utterly inhuman in the steadiness of their regard.
A sigil glows at the base of her throat and spreads down across her chest beneath the cut of her gown, etched into her skin like a birthmark made of living light. Royal markings, if the rumours are true.
Her nostrils flare once as she takes me in, and I get the immediate, ridiculous impression of a large cat deciding whether I’m food, threat, or entertainment.
“Pax,” she says.
Perfect English.
No accent I can place. Or perhaps all of them combined, smoothed into something almost too precise.
“Your Majesty,” I say, because I’m not stupid.
Her mouth curves, not kindly. “How pleasant. You do know your manners.”
“Selective miracle.”
One brow rises. “You joke.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Which occupation is that? Mechanic? Smuggler? Informant? Human curiosity?”
Every answer would be a trap, so I offer none of them.
She circles me once, not close enough to touch and not far enough to feel safe. She smells faintly of cold spice and ozone.
“Are you comfortable?” she asks.
The question is so absurd, I almost laugh. “I’ve had better mornings.”
