The Reborn Sovereign of Ruin, Bound by His Star

"Yes," Rex said.

George’s face flushed a deep, mottled purple. A thick vein pulsed at his temple, strained against his sweating skin. He leaned forward, pressing his heavy weight onto his elbows, not caring as a drop of spittle flew from his lips and landed on the polished mahogany of the conference table.

"You think you are better than this," George sneered, his voice dropping into a wet, breathless rasp that sounded like rot scraping against bone. "You sit there with your mother’s stiff spine, playing the noble prince. But you are just a naive boy who thinks clean hands can hold a throne."

Rex did not blink. He simply watched his father with the hollow eyes of a man viewing a corpse.

George mistook the silence for submission.

He always did.

He settled back into his chair, a cruel, satisfied smirk stretching his damp lips. He looked around the room, making sure every adviser, every guard, and especially Ray Canmore, was listening to him.

"That is the problem with all of you," George continued, his voice thick with satisfaction now that he had found a wound and pressed his thumb into it. "You portray cowardice as restraint. You dress weakness as ethics. Felix, for all his filth, understands one thing better than most men in this room. Power is not kept by being decent. Power is kept by making sure no one forgets the cost of disappointing you."

The silence curdled.

Ray’s expression went flat.

Rex still did not move.

Arik’s hand remained beneath the table, fingers curled so tightly that the cold around them hardened into a thin white bloom across the underside of the polished wood.

George kept going.

"He was a vicious little dog even when he was young," George said, with an ugly laugh. "Always waiting for someone to look away so he could bite. If he was humiliated at noon, someone was crying by evening. If a man refused him, a servant limped the next day. If a woman laughed at him, she found her family accounts questioned before supper. If a child did not flinch, he made sure the child learned."

Rex’s eyes changed.

Only slightly.

But Arik saw it.

So did Ray.

The old king leaned forward again, enjoying the disgust now, feeding on it like a man who had mistaken repulsion for power.

"And you know what the obscene part is?" George said. "He is still more honest than half the court. Felix never pretended to be clean. He wanted to be feared because he could not bear being laughed at. He wanted people weak because his own pride was a crippled, leaking thing that could not stand unless someone else was beneath it. He killed a god and his empire out of ambition and spite."

Arik’s cold, merciless eyes flickered to George, leaving a flash of gold in their path.

For one second, the modern conference room seemed to hold its breath with him.

The lights did not flicker. They were too well made for that. Wrohan’s royal palace had spared no expense in the ether-fed systems built beneath its floors, inside its walls, behind its climate control, its privacy wards, its holo-projectors, and its polished table with embedded display veins running under the mahogany like silver nerves.

Everything in the room drank ether.

Everything in the room obeyed it.

And beneath Arik’s skin, something old heard George’s words and turned its head.

Goliath did not rise inside him like another man.

Goliath reached through rage like an old wound, remembering the hand that made it.

Arik casually withdrew his hand from beneath the table.

The white bloom of frost that had gathered on the underside of the wood hissed, evaporating into the sudden, biting chill that flooded the conference room. The embedded ether lines beneath the polished surface flashed once, not visibly enough for most men to understand, but enough that Ray Canmore’s eyes sharpened.

George drew a heavy, wet breath, his chest expanding as he prepared to spill whatever new rot he had reserved for his next sentence. He raised a thick finger, his face still flushed with grotesque, arrogant triumph.

He never exhaled.

Arik rested his elbow against the arm of his chair. His expression was completely blank, his golden eyes devoid of anything resembling mercy or hesitation. The ether in the room bent toward him with the dreadful obedience of a system recognizing a stronger command.

The climate conduits.

The warding grid.

The silver veins beneath the table.

The quiet hum of modern luxury, all of it fed by power.

All of it suddenly was his.

With the lazy, dismissive elegance of a man brushing away an insect, Arik raised his hand.

He flicked his fingers.

Snap.

The sound was delicate, the sharp, clean fracture of winter ice breaking across a deep lake. But in the tense silence of the room, it cracked like a whip.

George’s voice vanished.

The thick, pulsing vein at his temple stopped dead, flashing instantly from deep purple to a sickly, frosted white. The ether around him compressed, threaded through the room’s systems, entered through the air he had been so eager to foul with another insult, and locked his body from the inside.

The King of Wrohan did not choke.

He did not thrash.

His jaw simply froze into a rigid, unnatural grimace as the heat in his blood collapsed in a fraction of a heartbeat. A faint spiderweb of black frost bloomed across the skin of his throat, following the pathways beneath like ink drawn through glass.

Then his weight gave out entirely.

George slumped forward, his face slamming into the polished mahogany table with a heavy, lifeless thud. His cheek came to rest directly on the briefing reports he had spent the last hour insulting.

He was dead before the wood stopped vibrating.

Total, suffocating horror slammed into the room.

One of the royal secretaries let out a strangled, high-pitched gasp, pressing both hands over her mouth. The two senior guards at the door stiffened, their hands instinctively dropping to their weapons, but neither dared draw them.

To draw a weapon in a room where the Crown Prince of Agaron had just executed a king without leaving his seat, using nothing but a flick of his fingers and the ether-fed air they were all breathing, was suicide.

Rex did not flinch.

He did not blink.

He simply looked down at the lifeless body of his father, his expression perfectly composed, though the faintest, almost imperceptible knot of tension finally bled out of his shoulders.

Ray Canmore had gone completely still.

His crossed ankles remained in place, his ringed fingers resting lightly against the edge of the table, but the lazy amusement had been wiped clean from his posture. What replaced it was a profound, calculated stillness as he stared at the frozen corpse.

Then, very slowly, Ray’s hand shifted.

Barely.

A ring turned against his finger.

Arik saw it.

The old rage inside him had gone quiet again, retreating beneath Arik’s name, beneath his breath, beneath the warm mark of Liam’s bond waiting far from this room. The ether in the walls loosened from his grip. The oppressive, freezing aura dissipated as quickly as it had arrived.

Arik leaned back in his chair.

Then he turned his head slowly, his golden eyes finding Ray.

Arik smiled at him.

It was a pleasant, terribly polite expression that did not reach the cold gold of his irises. Without breaking eye contact with the youngest senior of Canmore, Arik pitched his voice so it echoed clearly through the terrified silence of the room.

"I know you don’t like your father," Arik said smoothly, "but you shouldn’t kill him."