The air in the throne room was thick enough to choke on. Incense smoke coiled towards the high, shadowed ceiling, a feeble attempt to mask the silent, heavy truth lying on the velvet-draped bier at the room's center.
King Alfred was a pale, waxy sculpture of himself. Decked in his formal robes and crown, he looked less like a ruler and more like a doll arranged for show.
Queen Lenore stood beside her husband's body, a vision of severe grace in black silk. Her spine was a steel rod, her hands clasped so tightly the knuckles were white. On her right, her eldest, Prince Cedric, the official heir, shifted his weight. At sixteen, he had their mother's golden hair and a face that hadn't yet learned to hide its nerves. His younger sister, Princess Lysandra, twelve and wide-eyed, kept sneaking glances at her father's still form as if expecting him to sit up.
The rest of the room was a sea of silent, watching faces—lords, ladies, and council members, all holding their breath.
"Where is he?" Lenore's voice was a low, sharp whip-crack in the silence. She didn't look at anyone in particular, but a steward flinched. "That bastard whelp dares to keep us waiting? To keep his king waiting?"
"Mother, please," Cedric murmured, his cheeks flushing. "The servants said he was notified."
"Notified? He should have been on his knees here the moment the breath left Alfred's body!" she hissed, her composure cracking to reveal the raw fury beneath. "This is his final insult. A last, petty act of defiance from the grave he crawled out of."
The great oak doors of the throne room swung open without ceremony.
Every head turned.
Prince Adam stood in the doorway, backlit by the torchlight of the hall. For a moment, he was just a silhouette. Then he stepped inside, and the collective breath of the room hitched.
It was him, but it wasn't. The sullen slouch was gone, replaced by a spine straight as a spear. The downcast eyes that usually scanned the floor for insults now swept across the assembly with a calm, assessing weight. He moved with an easy, predatory grace that was entirely new, his footsteps echoing in the hushed room. He wasn't walking to an audience; he was surveying a territory.
Queen Lenore felt a cold prickle on the back of her neck. Cedric instinctively straightened up, his youthful face tightening with something that wasn't quite anger, but alarm.
Adam's gaze traveled over the mournful tableau—the rigid queen, the nervous heir, the dead king. A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. He muttered something under his breath, the words lost to all but himself. "So this is the scene. Read about it a hundred times. Never thought I'd be in it."
His eyes met Lenore's. The sheer, naked hatred in her glare was enough to make a lesser man stumble. He held it for a moment, then looked away as if she'd merely nodded at him, his indifference a sharper insult than any returned glare.
He walked directly to the bier, his focus now entirely on the dead king. He looked down at the face of the man whose memories told him was a distant, disappointed father. He felt nothing but a vague, clinical curiosity.
"Why is he still here?" Adam asked, his voice cutting through the ritual silence. It wasn't loud, but it carried, calm and utterly reasonable.
A stunned silence answered him.
Lord Beringer, the old Chamberlain, cleared his throat. "My Prince? We… we were awaiting your arrival for the Rites of Passage."
Adam turned his head, his expression unreadable. "The rites?"
"The tradition, Your Highness," Beringer explained, discomfort evident. "The firstborn son… he who carries the father's blood first… must be the one to seal the tomb. It is the law. Legitimate or… otherwise." He finished weakly under the queen's withering gaze.
Ah, Adam thought. So that's the play. They needed him. This little bit of theater required the bastard's hands. It explained the summons, if not the seething impatience.
He looked back at King Alfred. "I see," he said, his tone flat. "You wait for me to put him in the ground. Fine." He reached out.
A collective gasp rippled through the room. He wasn't supposed to just do it. There were prayers to be said, blessings to be invoked. It was a ceremony, not a chore.
His fingers brushed the cold, stiff forehead of the king. A final, formal touch. In his previous life, a touch like this would have made the body explode into flame. Now, it was just cold skin.
"It is done," Adam announced, turning his back on the bier as if he'd just checked a horse's shoe. "You can take him away now."
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the queen's sharp, indrawn breath.
"You…" she seethed, stepping forward, her composure shattering. "You vile, ungrateful cur! That is your king! Your father! You treat his passing like… like dismissing a servant!"
Adam finally gave her his full attention. He didn't get angry. He didn't sneer. He simply looked at her, and the sheer, placid confidence in that look made her words die in her throat.
"What would you have me do, Lenore?" he asked, using her name without title, a deliberate and profound disrespect. "Weep? I stopped weeping for fathers a long time ago. Give a speech? I doubt he'd want to hear one from me. The law required my presence. I am present. The law required my touch. I have touched him. The business is concluded."
Cedric found his voice, stepping forward to stand beside his mother. "You will show respect!" he commanded, though his voice cracked slightly on the last word.
Adam's eyes shifted to the boy. The heir. The true son. He saw the fear hiding behind the bluster. He'd seen it in the eyes of a hundred young soldiers before he'd buried them.
"Respect is earned, little brother," Adam said, his voice dropping into a conversational, almost friendly tone that was more terrifying than any shout. "It isn't handed out with a crown. Or a corpse." He let his gaze sweep over the assembled nobility, making eye contact with a few, seeing them flinch and look away. "The king is dead. The tradition is fulfilled. What happens now?"
He was no longer just the bastard prince in the corner. In the space of three minutes, he had redrawn the lines of power in the room without raising a fist or drawing a sword. He had taken their sacred ritual and treated it like a trivial task, and in doing so, had stolen all the gravity from it.
The queen, the heir, the entire court—they were all still playing a game of succession, of grief and ceremony.
Adam was already playing a different game entirely. And the look in his eyes suggested he knew all the rules, and was more than willing to break every single one.
He didn't wait for an answer. He turned and began walking back towards the doors, the same confident, measured pace.
"This is not over, Adam," Queen Lenore spat at his retreating back, her voice trembling with rage.
Without breaking stride, he replied, his voice floating back to them, calm and clear. "It never is."
The heavy throne room doors closed behind him with a soft, final thud, leaving a room full of stunned and terrified people alone with their dead king and a future that had suddenly become very, very uncertain.