Dragon did not return home immediately after the palace tour.The corridors Divine granted him access to were vast, winding, and deliberately confusing, built to disorient outsiders and trap enemies in circles. But Dragon had been raised by assassins who learned castles by counting footsteps and breathing patterns. He memorized everything.Guard rotations.Hidden passages.The places where servants lowered their voices.And most importantly, the chamber of the cactus.The king lingered too long in conversation with his generals, boasting about a border skirmish that meant nothing. Dragon excused himself politely, claiming the need to relieve himself from the wine.No one questioned him.The cactus chamber smelled worse at night.The thing pulsed faintly, its thick veins glowing a sickly green as liquid traveled through transparent tubes toward the king’s chambers. Dragon waited until the sentry shifted his weight, just a fraction too late, and moved.Silent. Precise.He slipped a narr

Sneak stood to leave, her form already beginning to soften at the edges.“The king,” she said quietly, “is part Liroid.”Snake’s eyes narrowed. Dragon stilled.“Tan became obsessed,” Sneak continued, her voice calm in the way only long knowledge could make it. “Obsessed with our blood. With what we endure. What we become. He created a mixture…Liroid blood, Mogro essence, and placed it inside the body of a child born to a god of Fallen Idra.”Dragon whispered, “The woman who birthed him…”“She never knew,” Sneak said. “She carried a weapon. Tan pulled the strings for years. Divine ruled, believing himself free.”Snake exhaled slowly. “Tan knew Evilside would come for Elo.”“Yes,” Sneak replied. “And he believed he had trapped her. Made her think she had won.”Her eyes hardened.“Now,” she said, “he will understand how very stupid he was.”She turned toward the door.“I must return. Lord Blood will arrive soon. The streets will run red. You should rest. This will be messy.”She paused,

Tan crossed the line quietly.That was the worst part.There was no rage-filled proclamation, no shattered hall, no thunder from the gods. Just a single decision made in cold certainty, another abomination approved, another child’s name struck from worth, another warning ignored.Felt, felt it before she heard it.The ache in her chest had grown familiar over the centuries, but this was different. This was not grief. This was not denial.This was clarity.That night, she wrote two letters.One to Iswa of the Brave, wife of Kiria, in Kovu, City of Solitude, where the air was clean, and the gods still remembered restraint.One to Twan.She did not embellish. Felt never did.She wrote simply that she would no longer stand aside. That Tan had crossed into a place where silence became complicity. That she would try, one last time, to pull him back from the abyss, even if it cost her everything.And if she failed,She sealed the letters with shaking hands.Twan read hers at dawn.She laughe

The room was already thick with rage.Tan’s voice filled it, accusations, justifications, promises sharpened into threats. Felt stood before him, still as stone, letting the storm pass through her without answering.Until she did.“I will step back.”The words were quiet. Final.Tan stopped.“What did you say?”Felt met his eyes, no fire now, only exhaustion.“I will rule as head wife,” she continued. “I will stand beside you when guests arrive. I will keep your house intact.”Her breath trembled once.“But I will no longer share your bed.”The silence that followed was brutal.“You have more than enough women for that,” she finished. “Use them.”Tan felt it then.Not rage.Loss.First Delia.Now, Felt, of all women.“Felt…” he reached for her, instinctively.She stepped back.“You crossed a line,” she said. “One I can no longer pretend not to see.”She turned and walked away.Tan’s hand closed on empty air.For the first time in centuries, he did not shout.He covered his hurt the on

Losing Felt did not break Tan all at once.It hollowed him.She avoided him with a precision that cut deeper than rebellion. When he entered a hall, she exited through another door. When he summoned councils, she sent written decrees, cold, flawless, final. She ruled as the head wife without ever standing beside him.And when he killed.A concubine spoke out of turn, executed.Another wept too loudly, silenced.Once, Felt would have intervened. She would have placed a hand on his arm, murmured reason into his ear, bent his rage into something survivable.Now she walked past the bodies as if they were furniture.Tan watched her do it once.It terrified him.He came to her bed one night, drunk and shaking with fury and need. He expected resistance. Expected her to bar the door.She did neither.She lay still beneath him, eyes open, distant.When it was over, she turned her face away and asked, calmly:“Are you satisfied, my lord?”The words stabbed deeper than any blade.Tan recoiled as