Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

The shadows in the hallway began to physically writhe and twist around her boots, responding to the violent, protective fury boiling in her core. ’You left him to become a monster. And now you think you can just waltz into our home, insult my father, and call me a stray?’

Seraphina stepped out from behind the corner.

She didn’t sneak around or hide.

She marched directly down the center of the hallway, heading straight for the heavy oak doors, her white dress glowing in the dim light.

The four stranger guards saw her approaching. They sneered, moving to block the doorway with their heavy halberds.

”Halt, child,” the lead guard grunted, looking down at her with cruel amusement. ”The adults are speaking. Go find your nursemaid.”

Seraphina didn’t stop. She didn’t even slow down.

She looked up at the massive guard.

She didn’t use a spell or summon a shadow-duck.

She unleashed a fraction of the gravitational crushing power she had used to obliterate an Archdemon.

The air around the four guards compressed.

CRUNCH!

The guards didn’t have time to scream. The invisible weight slammed into their shoulders like a falling anvil, forcing all four grown men directly to their knees, their heavy iron armor buckling and groaning under the pressure.

They gasped for air, pinned to the marble floor, completely immobilized by a six-year-old girl who didn’t even break her stride.

Seraphina stepped over a kneeling guard’s halberd.

She reached up with her tiny hands, grabbed the brass handles of the oak doors, and didn’t push them open.

She kicked them.

With a deafening BANG that sounded like a cannon firing inside the mansion, the heavy doors burst open, slamming against the interior walls of the study.

The conversation inside instantly died.

Seraphina stepped into the doorway, framed by the shadows of the hall. Her dark hair was perfect, and her dress was pristine.

She looked at the pompous, gray-haired Uncle sitting in Kaelus’s guest chair. She looked at the beautiful woman in emerald silk, and the blonde man leaning against the bookshelf.

And finally, she looked at Kaelus, who was standing rigidly behind his desk, looking pale and haunted.

Seraphina’s violet eyes flared.

She offered the intruders a brilliantly sweet and utterly terrifying smile.

”Hello,” Seraphina chirped loudly, her voice ringing with the uncompromising authority of the true ruler of the estate. ”I heard we had a bug infestation. I came to take out the trash.”

The ghosts of Kaelus’s past had finally arrived.

But they were about to learn that the present belonged to the Sovereign, and she took no prisoners.

***

The oak doors bounced violently against the dark mahogany walls of the study, the concussive echo ringing through the room like a thunderclap.

In the hallway behind the doorway, four mercenaries were currently face-down on the marble floor, groaning in breathless agony, pinned by the invisible, gravitational crushing force of a six-year-old’s irritation.

Seraphina von Nacht stood still on the threshold.

She had marched down the corridor, prepared to execute a hostile takeover. She expected to walk into a room filled with venomous, cackling villains who were actively throwing verbal daggers at her father.

She had prepared to summon an entire flock of shadow-ducks to peck out the eyes of the siblings who had abandoned Kaelus in his darkest hour.

But as she stepped into the study, the Supreme Dark Core vibrating within her chest instantly paused its hum.

Her Spirit Sight swept the room and delivered a confusing, contradictory set of emotional data.

The atmosphere in the room was not what she had anticipated.

Sitting in the plush, high-backed guest chair opposite Kaelus’s desk was the Uncle.

Seraphina’s magical radar immediately painted him a sickly, rotting shade of swamp-green. He was a plump, balding man wearing a gaudy, gold-embroidered coat that looked as though it were struggling to contain his waistline.

He possessed a thin, waxed mustache and a pompous, sneering expression that practically screamed of untalented, unearned aristocratic greed.

He radiated malice, entitlement, and the slimy, transactional opportunism of a career politician.

He was exactly the kind of bug she had come to squash.

But the two figures standing behind the Uncle’s chair completely baffled her.

This was Caspian and Elara.

Kaelus’s estranged siblings.

Elara was a beautiful woman, dressed in a sweeping gown of dark emerald silk.

And Caspian was tall, possessing a sharp jawline, his blonde hair tied back elegantly. On the surface, their faces were arranged into masks of bored, haughty, high-society disdain.

But their auras told an entirely different, tragic story.

Seraphina stared at them. They weren’t radiating hatred, triumph, or malicious glee toward Kaelus.

They were bleeding with a suffocating sorrow.

Elara’s emerald-green aura was fracturing at the edges, pulsing with a deep, weeping blue of pure regret. Her manicured hands, clasped tightly in front of her dress, were trembling so violently her knuckles were white.

Caspian stood rigidly, but his aura was a heavy, stagnant gray of crushing guilt. He couldn’t even look Kaelus in the eye; he was staring at a point on the mahogany desk, his jaw clenched as if he were fighting the urge to vomit.

’What is going on here?’ Seraphina’s adult mind reeled, her brain stalling as it tried to process the dissonance.

Kaelus had told her the story by the fire.

He had told her that his siblings had walked away because they couldn’t bear the cold, because they resented him for becoming the monster the North needed.

He believed they had abandoned him out of selfishness.

But looking at them now, Seraphina knew with undeniable certainty that Kaelus’s perspective was fundamentally flawed.

Those were not the auras of selfish, callous traitors.

Those were the auras of people who were trapped, suffering, and drowning in a completely different kind of agony.

’There seems to be an inside story here,’ Seraphina concluded instantly, her dark eyes narrowing. ’Someone is pulling their strings. They didn’t come here to hurt him of their own free will.’