Malakar's viewpoint.
I watched the championship match's aftermath from a rooftop considerably farther from the arena than my earlier surveillance had required — a necessary distance, given how thoroughly Lukas Gigonos had just demonstrated, in front of an entire kingdom, exactly how little effort it would take him to sense a far closer observer.
My master's instructions after the arena test had been characteristically brief, delivered through the cold, distant channel that bound us across whatever distance separated his grey, sunless realm from this one. Report what you witnessed. Nothing more.
I had witnessed considerably more than a simple combat assessment. I had witnessed a being of genuinely staggering power choose, repeatedly, to reveal himself rather than abandon strangers to save his own concealment. I had watched him build alliances — with a fellow otherworlder, with a kingdom's own crown princess, with a disgraced scholar who'd spent years chasing exactly the truths my master had spent three centuries burying.
I had watched, in short, something my master's own account of the war that exiled him had never once described: a display of power used, consistently, in service of something other than raw ambition.
I did not know what my master had refused to do, three hundred years ago, that cost him his crown and his court. I had served him too long after the fact to have witnessed it myself, bound to him through means predating my own clear memory. But watching Lukas Gigonos this past month, I found myself wondering, for the first time in three centuries, whether my master's own version of that ancient refusal might have looked something like what I'd just witnessed in that arena — a choice to protect rather than exploit, made by someone who'd been offered the alternative and simply declined it.
It was a dangerous thought. My master's binding did not permit genuine disloyalty, and testing its limits too openly had never once, in three hundred years, produced anything but suffering for those foolish enough to try.
And yet.
I composed my report carefully that night, describing the arena test's outcome factually — the shadow creatures' performance, the extent of power Lukas had revealed, the new political alliance now visibly forming around him. I did not editorialize. I did not share the growing, uncomfortable doubt that had been building in me for weeks.
But I found myself, for the first time since accepting this assignment, deliberately omitting one detail: the exact wording of a conversation I'd overheard between Lukas and the princess Seraphine, in which he'd specifically named my master's title — the Grey Sovereign — and speculated, aloud, that the being might have been wrongly punished for refusing an unjust order rather than being the straightforward villain three hundred years of careful historical erasure had painted him as.
I told myself the omission was strategic — that revealing Lukas's specific theory might provoke a reaction from my master too swift and too public to control, jeopardizing whatever patient plan currently guided our approach. I told myself several other justifications too, in the quiet hours before dawn, none of which fully addressed the actual, uncomfortable truth underneath them all.
I was beginning, after three centuries of unquestioning service, to genuinely wonder whether my master deserved that service at all.
It was not defiance. Not yet. I remained bound too thoroughly, too painfully, for anything so direct. But it was, I recognized with something between fear and a strange, unfamiliar hope, the first small crack in three hundred years of absolute certainty — and I suspected, watching Lukas Gigonos walk away from that arena surrounded by people who trusted him completely, that the crack was only going to widen from here.