Sovereign's Path

Veth held out his hand toward Coryn without looking at him.

Coryn placed a remote in it.

Veth clicked it.

The Vaskareth disappeared from the wall.

What replaced it made the room go very quiet very fast.

Nine tails, white as fresh snow, fanned out behind a figure that the projection barely did justice to. Silver hair. Golden eyes that even through old footage carried something ancient and absolute in them. She stood at the edge of a treeline and the trees around her were bending away without wind. The air around her distorted slightly the way air does around something that produces too much heat, except this wasn’t heat.

This was just her.

Standing still.

"This... is the Nine Tailed Fox," Veth said. "A mythical beast. Centuries old. Power that sits in a category that doesn’t have a clean name." He paused. "She is the apex of Beastglade. Not one of them. The apex."

He clicked the remote.

The footage changed.

Old. Grainy. Reconstructed from records rather than direct capture. But clear enough.

Two kingdoms. Reduced to ash. Not damaged. Not razed. Ash. The footage showed the aftermath, vast stretches of what had been cities, what had been populations, what had been centuries of construction and history, and now was simply flat and grey and gone.

"Five centuries ago," Veth said. "She came out of Beastglade and attacked the human continent. Unprovoked as far as the humans determined in their records ." He let the image sit on the wall. "Two kingdoms in a single night."

The room was doing something between silence and noise. Not quite either.

"If we had that," Drevak said slowly.

"Don’t finish that sentence yet," Veth said.

He clicked again.

New footage. More recent. The damage this time was concentrated, a capital city, or what remained of one. Entire districts burned in that particular violet edged way that meant hellfire had been involved. The center of the city was simply missing, as though something had decided it shouldn’t exist anymore and acted accordingly.

"Three centuries later," Veth said. "She came back. The reason both times, according to every record we could access." He looked around the table. "Was beast slavery. Humans capturing and selling beastfolk. Both times she emerged it was in direct response to that."

"So she has a trigger," Malgros said.

"Yes she has a trigger," Veth confirmed.

Malgros leaned back. He looked at the destroyed capital on the wall for a moment then at Veth.

"Even granting all of this," he said. "A beast this powerful, this unpredictable, with no room for negotiation as you said." His eyes narrowed slightly. "What exactly is the point of telling us. If we can’t tame her, can’t negotiate with her, what does she contribute to our plans."

Veth looked at his lord.

"She does contribute," he said. "Very significantly, take a look at this my lord".

Veth clicked the remote one more time.

The footage that appeared was different from everything before it.

Not an image.

A video.

The quality wasn’t perfect, taken from a distance, through trees, clearly recorded by someone who had been trying very hard not to be noticed. But it was clear enough.

A human kid, snow white hair. Couldn’t have been older than seven. Standing in the middle of Beastglade at night facing something that had reduced two kingdoms to ash five centuries ago.

And fighting her.

Actually fighting her.

The footage captured the first exchange. Ice blades filling the air in their hundreds. Hellfire meeting them and being stopped. The frozen columns of violet flame suspended mid air. The shockwaves rolling outward and flattening the forest in every direction. A crater forming where ground used to be. Trees dissolving. Rivers freezing solid in their beds.

A quarter of Beastglade. Gone. Between two beings.

One of whom was seven years old.

Veth switched it off.

The wall went blank.

The room stayed exactly where it was for a long moment. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The candles on the walls burned in that slightly wrong color and the shadows did their odd things and nobody was paying attention to any of it.

Drevak was staring at the blank wall.

The others weren’t doing anything more useful.

Veth let the silence run for exactly as long as it needed to.

Then he spoke.

This human, not only defeated her but also tamed her, right now, the legendary Nine tails lives in the Silford estate, as his attendant.

"His name is Leonis," he said. "Leonis Silford."

Malgros looked up slowly.

"Silford," he repeated.

Then as if he remembered something he said again "Silford ?"

Veth nodded once.

The name settled over the table like a stone dropped into still water.

"He is a hero’s descendant," Veth continued.

"Main branch. And based on everything we’ve just shown you." He looked around the table. "And he... will be our biggest threat. By a considerable margin."

Malgros sat back in his chair and looked at the blank wall where the footage had been. At the space where a seven year old boy had been trading blows with a primordial beast and neither of them had been losing.

The other five devils at the table had stopped looking like they had opinions about anything. They just sat with the particular expression of people who had come into a meeting expecting one kind of conversation and received a completely different one.

Malgros was quiet for a long moment.

Then he said it low, almost to himself.

"We’ll need backup."