Malakar's viewpoint.
My master summoned me two days after my meeting with Lukas Gigonos, and the moment I entered his throne room, I knew, with a cold certainty that settled into my chest like a physical weight, that my absence had not gone as unnoticed as I'd hoped.
"You left your assigned post three days ago," the Grey Sovereign said, his voice carrying none of the measured calm I'd grown accustomed to over three centuries. "For nearly two hours, by my own count. I would very much like to know where you went, Malakar, and I would strongly advise you not to insult me with a lie."
I considered, in that terrible, extended moment, every possible response — denial, partial truth, some careful evasion that might preserve at least a fragment of the trust I'd need to continue warning Lukas in the future. I found, in the end, that three centuries of fear finally gave way to something else entirely: a tired, resigned honesty that felt, despite everything I knew was about to follow, strangely like relief.
"I warned the Otherworlder about Vessyl's planned assault," I said. "I have done so twice now, my lord. I do not regret either warning, though I understand the consequences that will follow from admitting it."
The Grey Sovereign's expression, what little remained visible beneath his shadow, transformed into something I had never once witnessed in three hundred years of service — not the cold, patient menace I'd grown accustomed to, but genuine, unguarded fury.
"Three centuries," he said, voice low and dangerous. "Three centuries of absolute loyalty, and you would throw it away for a mortal you've known less than a year, based on nothing more than a few months of watching him play at unity and compassion?"
"I would throw it away," I said, forcing the words out despite every instinct screaming at me to stop, to beg forgiveness, to salvage whatever remained of my master's favor through immediate, complete submission, "because I no longer believe your cause justifies the suffering it requires of everyone caught beneath it, my lord. I do not know what the Court of Heaven took from you three hundred years ago. I do not doubt that your grievance was genuine, once. But I have watched you become willing to sacrifice innocent lives specifically to wound one man's morale, and I cannot reconcile that willingness with whatever cause I once believed I was serving."
The binding activated before I'd fully finished speaking — a wave of agony unlike anything I had experienced even in my earliest days of service, when the Grey Sovereign had first forged the chains that bound me to his will. I fell to my knees, every nerve in whatever remained of my physical form screaming in protest, and still, through the pain, I found myself holding onto one small, defiant certainty: I did not take back a single word of what I had said.
"You will learn," the Grey Sovereign said, his voice distant through the roar of my own suffering, "exactly what three centuries of loyalty are worth when they are so carelessly discarded. I will not kill you, Malakar — your suffering serves my purposes considerably better than your death would. But you will remember, every moment from this point forward, precisely what betrayal costs."
The pain finally receded, leaving me trembling on the cold stone floor of a throne room that had never once, in all my years of service, felt more like the prison it had apparently always actually been.
"Get up," my master said, his voice returning to its usual measured coldness, as though the fury of moments earlier had never happened at all. "You will continue to serve, Malakar, bound more tightly than before, until I decide what further use your continued existence might still offer me. And you will watch, from whatever vantage I choose to grant you, exactly what becomes of the Otherworlder's precious coalition when Vessyl's assault finally launches. Perhaps witnessing that failure firsthand will finally cure you of whatever foolish hope you've allowed yourself to develop."
I rose, unsteady, every fiber of my being screaming with the aftermath of the binding's punishment, and understood, with a clarity that cut through even the lingering pain, that I had just crossed a threshold from which there could be no genuine return to my previous three centuries of unquestioning service.
Whatever came next, I would face it as something other than my master's obedient instrument, regardless of how thoroughly his binding still constrained my ability to act on that change.