The royal chambers were much warmer than the rest of the castle.
Someone had made a real effort for that, with magical looking runes on the walls and such. The room itself was large without being ostentatious. A bed that could have slept six people comfortably. A writing desk with nothing on it. Shelves of objects that had probably meant something once and now just occupied space.
Juno found a spot behind a heavy curtain near the far wall and tucked himself into the shadows there.
Two attendants suddenly materialized from somewhere and started to prepare the king and queen for bed. They worked quickly, with the efficiency of people who have been doing the same thing for decades on end. They helped Barax out of his formal red clothes, brought cold water to the couple, and didn't speak at all. From the corner where Juno was lying, he could make out a lot of details of the 4 people but didn't look too carefully in fear of them noticing his gaze.
So he listened instead, as well as watched the edges of things.
Eventually the attendants finished and filtered out, pulling the doors shut behind them with the soft click of practiced discretion.
The room changed immediately.
Not dramatically. Nothing so obvious as that. It was more that the quality of the air shifted — he could hear it in the way their movements changed, the slight adjustment of posture that fabric conveyed even at the periphery, the way both of them seemed to take up slightly more space than they had a moment ago. The careful performance was gone. Whatever they actually were underneath had simply stepped forward.
"Dain performed adequately," the Queen said.
"Better than adequately." The sound of a drawer opening. Footsteps toward the desk. "The priests are sufficiently convinced. Another month and the congregation will follow."
"And when they come to you for answers?"
He smiled — Juno could hear it in his voice. "I will grieve with them. Appropriately. A king burdened by the same silence as his people." The soft click of something being set on the nightstand. "Heart God's favor, it seems, has abandoned us all equally."
The Queen made a small sound that might have been amusement.
"He has of course just not sent any divine apithets to us," Barax continued, in the tone of someone discussing the weather. "The small sapling we have is as healthy as ever." A pause. "Fortunetly, very few know that."
The full picture assembled itself with the quiet satisfaction of an endgame becoming clear. The priests couldn't hear Heart God because Barax had made sure they couldn't — through the seed, through whatever arrangement he had constructed over the centuries of his impossible survival. The congregation's fear was manufactured. The power vacuum it created was entirely intentional. A people cut off from their God had nowhere left to turn but their King.
'There it is.'
Behind his curtain, Juno silently grinned to himself. His deductions were correct.
If he had to admit, though, the king's plan was quite stupid.
Not in execution, that was fine. But the premise itself was baffling. Barax had a sapling tree from Heart God growing in the center of his kingdom. This kingdom was, by all means, protected by Heart God, if Gods protected people of course, and it was clear to anyone that this territory was not to be messed with. And his response, apparently, had been to eventually decide that manufactured fear was more useful than divine favor.
'Shortsighted,' Juno concluded. 'Incredibly, stupidly, shortsighted."
Honestly, it was the kind of decision that would have started an argument back home. Juno had never been particularly good at keeping opinions to himself — teachers, headmasters, that one university professor who had been objectively wrong about medieval grain prices — he had disagreed with all of them loudly and at length and with great personal satisfaction. Authority had never especially impressed him. It was just people with titles, and titles didn't make you right.
Barax had a title. Barax also had the strategic foresight of someone who had been handed something extraordinary and immediately found the least interesting thing to do with it.
He would have said so, given the opportunity.
Unfortunately he was a snake.
'Hissss', he thought, with feeling.
After the king finished rambling about the topic, he and the queen sat around in silence for a long time. Barax was sitting down, evident from a scraping noise that was made, and the queen was doing something that Juno didn't want to think about.
Soon enough, however, the queen spoke once again.
"Troilly has been strange lately."
A pause from Barax. "Strange how?"
"Quiet. He kept looking at you during the meeting." Another pause. "More than usual."
Barax made a dismissive sound. "Troilly has always looked at me during meetings. That is what advisors do."
"Not like that." The Queen's voice had the particular quality of someone describing something they haven't fully decided how to categorize yet. "He looked at you the way people look at things they are about to lose."
A longer silence this time.
"He is old," Barax said finally, with the certainty of someone closing a door. "I am old, too. Old men grow sentimental. It means nothing."
The queen simply made a non-agreeing noise and left the conversation at that.
That was that. The conversation between the 2 metaphorical goldmines of information ended. Juno filed the information he just learned away, just like he had with a bunch of other information.
'Eh, dear ol' Barax is right. Old men are sentimental and weird. It's prolly nothing.'
Soon enough, a soft sound of a vial being uncorked reached him. Through the corner of his eye, he saw the king pour it into two bottles and hand one over to his queen. Then, a slight clink resounded around the room and the glasses were set down. Finally, the king climbed into bed right next to the already magically sleeping women and also fell into sleep.
Juno waited until he was certain.
Then, he slithered out and started to head to a soon to be dead king.
…
Nights at castles were a very particular kind of quiet.
Not silent, as castles were never truly silent, but quiet in the way that meant all the main players were gone. It was an empty board after a long game. Juno camped on this board with ease.
He had spent hours thinking
The plan, which he came up with on the chandelier, was simple. He was a snake, and snakes had venom. When the king and queen fell asleep, he would bite them and hopefully kill them. This, however, rested on two problems.
The first was simple: he didn't know if he actually had venom. Sure, he was part Nightmare Creature, but his soul was still partially that of a human in its First Nightmare. This soul was that of a mundane humans. That didn't matter as much as his physiology though.
Venomous and non-venomous snakes had completely different mouths. The venomous ones had only two fangs at the very front of the mouth, whilst non-venemous snakes had 2 rows of teeth like a human's. Juno, using his tongue, had figured out that his teeth were the former. Still, this was a fantasy world so anything was possible.
The second problem was thornier.
He had no way to know the Rank of the king or queen.
In Shadow Slave, Rank was quite important. An Awakened, especially such an old one, could be killed through mundane means. An Ascended could not. Their body was reconstructed after Ascension, making them far above a regular human. Regular old venom from a regular old snake would do absolutely nothing to such a being.
'If he is an Ascended,' Juno thought silently, 'this is going to be awkward. Can't explain myself, can I?'
He considered this for a moment.
'Well,' he concluded, with the breezy confidence of someone who had never especially feared being wrong, 'only one way to find out.'
The plan was straightforward enough. Kill the King and Queen, hope that was sufficient to end the Nightmare, figure out the rest afterward if it wasn't. Troilly existed as a secondary consideration — present, potentially relevant, but not the immediate priority. One thing at a time.
Juno looked down from where he was. Currently, he was curled up on a table right next to the king's head. Even though Juno was quite sure the King had taken some sort of sleeping medicine, he still didn't look at him directly. If he had, he would've noticed sooner how incredibly pale Barax's face was.
'I gotta keep reminding myself. It's so weird not to look at people, I dont wanna die because I looked too hard. Ugh, why does this world have to be like this?'
He had expected to feel a lot more as the moment approached, however. Nerves, maybe, or the weight of what he was about to do pressing down on him in some significant way. He had never killed anyone before. On Earth he had been a Sixteen year old boy from Bucharest who played chess and read fantasy novels and burned through hobbies like kindling. This was, by any reasonable measure, a significant escalation.
What he actually felt was focus.
Alert in a way that was almost pleasant, like the first few moves of a game when the whole board was still open and anything was possible. His senses, already sharper than any human's, had narrowed to the specific — the sound of breathing, the heat of bodies under blankets, the exact geography of the bed above him.
'Exciting,' he thought, and meant it completely.
This wasn't the first time he had mentally thought about what he was going to do, but it was going to be the last. It had been over an hour by this point, and Juno wanted to get out of the damn Nightmare and receive his boon!
Juno positioned himself.
'Fangs,' he thought, with the focused simplicity of someone issuing themselves an instruction. 'Venom. Now.'
He felt something respond — something instinctual and immediate, a biological readiness that hadn't existed a second ago, glands he hadn't known he was suddenly present and purposeful. The hesitation before was somehow driven away.
'Oh,' he thought, incredibly pleased. 'There we go.'
He struck.
It was faster than he expected — faster than he had any right to be, honestly, for a creature he had owned for less than a day. His body knew what to do in a way that bypassed thought entirely, the same instinct that had readied the venom now translating itself into motion. His neck coiled back and then snapped forward with a precision that felt borrowed, like a skill learned in a life he didn't remember living.
The fangs found the spot between heartbeat and jawline where the skin was thinnest.
The sensation was strange. Not unpleasant exactly, just deeply foreign — the give of the tough old skin, the faint warmth of a pulse against the tips of his fangs, and then the venom releasing itself with a pressure he felt more than controlled, something his body did on its own schedule and didn't particularly consult him about. It lasted less than a second. The whole thing — the coil, the strike, the release, the withdrawal — happened in the span of a single breath.
He was back on the table before he had fully processed that he had moved.
The taste of the blood was still in his mouth. Juno had been in fights before, so he knew what blood tasted like. It was supposed to be disgusting and metallic like. Barax's blood, however, was not. It could only be described as tasty.
'Heh, tasty for a Nightmare Creature. I see why Sunny always thought about almost losing himself when he mimicked other creatures. That was close!'
Deciding to talk about this experience in front of Sunny later, just in case, Juno turned his attention back on his target.
The king kept breathing.
A minute passed. Juno silently waited, coiled up on his table, listening with a focus of a person with their patience running thin.
The heating runes lit up a little, then dimmed once again.
The queen breathed her shaky and uneven breath on the other side of the bed.
Somewhere outside, a night bird made a sound.
'Was the last part necessary?" Juno thought harshly, with his ugly face flashing an extremely ugly and confused expression for no reason, which was quite ugly.
Another minute.
'Any time now,' Juno thought, at the King's continued existence.
The King did not take the note.
Another minute after that, Juno made a decision.
'Right,' he thought. 'Fine.'
He looked.
He had known it was a risk. He had spent the entire evening carefully managing his sightlines, keeping his gaze low and averted, treating direct eye contact with an Awakened like the loaded weapon it was. He had been disciplined about it in a way that did not come naturally to him. But Barax was unconscious, enchanted into a sleep deep enough that the world could apparently end around him without interruption, and Juno needed information, and sometimes the risk calculus simply shifted. Or did it?
He looked directly at the King for the first time.
Barax was… striking, in the way that very old things sometimes were. His hair was long, splayed across the pillow in thick ropes of deep grey, not white — a grey that still carried the ghost of whatever darker color it had once been, heavy and unwashed-looking in the way of someone who had stopped caring about appearances in private. His face had the architecture of someone who had been dreadfully handsome once, strong-boned and angular, but centuries had done something to the surface of it that went beyond ordinary aging.
He looked waxy.
Juno let his gaze drift sideways to the Queen.
Same.
The exact same quality of wrongness, now that he was looking for it — the waxy sheen, the too-smooth surface, the color of something that had been sealed away from the processes that made living things look like living things. It seemed like the anti-aging abilities Awakened got was peeling away from the faces of these two in real time, aging them decades in one night.
'Huh,' Juno thought.
It was interesting. It was also not solving his immediate problem.
He looked back at the ceiling and thought about his options, which were limited. He could wait longer. He could leave and come back. He could try something other than venom, though what exactly that would be for a snake with no hands was unclear.
Or he could simply try again.
'What's the worst that could happen?' Juno reasoned, with an ugly look on his ugly face. 'The saying was that only an idiot does the same thing twice and expects different results, but so what? A little idiocracy has gone a long way… for someone. Probably.'
He positioned himself a second time.
The same readiness answered him — faster now, more familiar, the venom glands responding like a muscle that had been used once and remembered the motion. He found the same spot by feel and heat, the thinner feeling skin over the slow pulse, and struck again with the same borrowed precision as before.
The release was larger this time. More deliberate. His body seemed to understand that the first attempt had been insufficient and adjusted accordingly, committing more completely, as if whatever instinct governed these things had assessed the target and revised its estimate upward.
After holding on for a little longer than last time, he withdrew.
Before he could get back to his previous position though, he heard the words he so desperately wanted to hear.
It was the words of the angelic sounding Spell, speaking loudly to announce his first kill.
[You have slain an Ascended human, Barax of Aldenmere]