He Who Unmakes Kings

The sound of steel biting into their bones was the only warning I got.

It started with a wet, heavy thud, then a scream was cut short by a frantic, desperate gurgle of blood.

My heart clenched with fear and terror, but I did not look up from the desk. I was three pages into the final sequence of my father’s notes, my quill shaking as I copied the last symbols. I had spent three years making myself a ghost in these vaults, and ghosts do not look at murders.

I had spent three years being perfectly, deliberately invisible because invisible men do not end up on the Order's destroyed assets list the way my father did.

His father had also worked these same vaults. Same stone corridors, same guttering torches, same deathly silence. Then one morning when I was nine years old my father simply was not there anymore. The Order's record gave him four words: destroyed asset, cause unspecified.

They gave me his position two weeks later and told me to be grateful. I was grateful for almost a year, then I started reading things I was not supposed to read. Not because I was brave, because I was a boy who grew up into a man who could not stop asking one question: what did my father find in these vaults that was worth erasing him for?

But the silence that followed the initial violence was completely wrong and terrifying. It was heavy, like the air right before a thunderstorm breaks. Then came the heavy stomp of boots on the stone floor. They were using my corridor as a shortcut to bypass the upper surveillance!

I scrambled into the narrow gap between the stone shelf and the damp foundation wall. I made myself as small as possible, pressing my back against the rock and breathing through my mouth so the awful tang of spilled blood wouldn’t make me gag.

I counted the breaths. One. Two...Three.

I heard a body hit the floor hard and a groan of agony followed instantly. The wet slap of it echoed in the high ceiling of the vault. I knew that sound, I heard it in my nightmares. I closed my eyes and stared at the dark, praying to a god I didn't believe in that they would just walk past.

But...they didn't.

A hand with thick, grey scales shot out of no where and clamped around my throat. The grip was like a vice, cold and unyielding until my entire body turned cold with fear. The creature yanked me out of my hiding spot, my feet dangling inches off the ground.

He had the sharp, serrated teeth of a low-tier shifter and eyes that glowed with a sick, yellow light. He raised his blade with a cruel smile and tried to tear through my neck to finish the job, but, he never finished it.

A cold wave rose from deep beneath my ribs. It didn't belong to me. It felt ancient, like the permafrost that sits at the bottom of the world. It surged out of my chest in a sudden, violent motion that stripped the heat right out of the air. It passed through the hand on my throat, and the shifter dropped like he’d been struck by a lightning bolt.

The wave kept going until it hit Prince Drek, who was mid-transformation into his hybrid wolf near the altar.

The Prince was a covered in fur and muscle, halfway to his beast-form. He should have shredded the room and torn me apart, instead, he just stopped. I gasped in shock, unable to believe what I had just done.

Drek hit the stone floor in his human skin, his clothes shredded, his lungs heaving. He clawed at the air, his eyes wide, terrified, reaching for a power that was no longer there.

The last attacker took one look at the shivering Prince and the silent, standing archivist, and he immediately dropped his weapon and fled.

I landed hard on my knees as something drained out of me. The stone floor was slick with blood, but where I knelt, it was quickly turning to white frost. My hands were shaking violently. I looked at them, but they didn't feel like mine. That cold was still inside me eagerly, waiting to be used again. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever felt.

Then, the main doors burst open.

A squad of Order knights flooded the corridor, their spears leveled, but they stopped dead suddenly.

The Commander at the front of the line froze. He saw the bodies of the guards, he saw the broken Prince on the floor, and then he saw me. He looked absolutely clueless, unsure of what to do. There was no procedure for a human who could hollow out a shifter.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I looked past the Commander’s shoulder. Three feet away, sitting in plain sight on the vault desk, was my journal. The cipher was open and the pages were still exposed.

If they stepped toward that desk, they would see the proof of my father’s life. They would see the secrets I had spent eight months stealing. They would kill me for the crime of being a Null, and they would burn the only record of the man who died to protect me.

The Commander took a slow, heavy step forward, his eyes locked on the frost at my feet.

I tightened my hands into fists. I was not a brave man, I was just an archivist, but I was four pages from the truth, and I was done being a ghost.

"Don't," I said.

My voice didn't sound like mine, but more like the ice.

The Commander hesitated for a split second, then he tilted his head, his hand hovering over his sword. He didn't know what I was, but for the first time in my life, he looked at me like he was afraid to find out.

He moved his gaze from the floor up to my face. His eyes narrowed, trying to piece together the scene. A human in the vault, a dead guard, a powerful hybrid prince who looked like a shell-shocked child, and a frost that defied the laws of the heat-choked city above.

"Step away from the desk," the Commander commanded, his voice tight.

I didn't move and my fingers twitched. I could feel the cold waiting in my bones, a coiled spring ready to erupt. I didn't know if I could kill them or if I could even stop them, but I knew that if they reached that desk, my life ended anyway.

"I said move," he growled, and he drew his blade.

I looked at the Commander, and for the first time in my life, I didn't look down at my feet. I held his gaze firmly and as the cold began to bleed out of me again, I knew one thing: if they wanted a war, they had found one.

I took a single step toward the desk and the Commander lunged forward.

In that moment, I gave into the cold and just allowed it to reach out of my body.