Damon slipped away after the meeting. He needed air, you see. He needed to not hear the word "demonic practitioner" inside his own mind for at least an hour.
His feet carried him through corridors he knew by heart, past guards who bowed without meeting his eyes, until he reached a section of the palace garden that didn't belong.
The rest of the garden was exactly what you'd expect from an empire. Uniform hedges trimmed to within an inch of their lives, flowers arranged in patterns that screamed we have gardeners and we pay them to be obsessive, and pathways so clean they looked like they'd never been touched by human feet.
It was beautiful in the way a painting is beautiful. Perfect and pristine.
But the next section...
