CHAPTER 64
Azra'il - POV
The applause went on long enough to become, technically, a logistical problem.
The whole hall was still on its feet, and the audience that, seconds earlier, had lived under the spell of twenty years of war, sea, and someone else's longing, was gradually pulling itself back together, like a body remembering its own posture after an electric shock. Nobles rearranged themselves in their chairs. Fans reopened. Side conversations resumed in hesitant whispers, as if speaking too loudly might break something no one there quite knew how to name.
I caught enough fragments to reconstruct that crowd's emotional map. One group discussed the magical technique with the nervous enthusiasm of people who'd just seen something that defied everything they knew about the limits of mages. Another group, more visibly moved, still dried their eyes with silk handkerchiefs, trying to decide whether that was socially acceptable in the middle of a Boreas banquet. And a third group, the most interesting to watch, was already whispering about "the masked artist" with that calculating tone of people starting to run numbers on future invitations.
I hung the bow across my back, and briefly glanced towards the corner where Sauros still stood, fists still clenched against the table, his face red with an emotion he clearly didn't know how to process in silence.
He didn't take long to solve that problem by shouting.
"THIS SONG BELONGS TO FITTOA!" His voice swept through the entire hall with all the delicacy of thunder in an enclosed space. "NO OTHER TERRITORY IS GOING TO CLAIM OUR ASTERIA! DID YOU ALL HEAR ME?! IF ANY MILIS NOBLE TRIES TO COPY THIS STORY, I'LL GO THERE MYSELF AND DECLARE WAR!"
A brief, uncertain silence followed the declaration, the kind that only happens when an entire room tries to work out whether that was a joke or an actual diplomatic threat.
With Sauros, honestly, you could never be sure.
"THIS WILL BE FITTOA'S NEW EPIC!" he went on, now pounding his fist on the table hard enough to make two wine glasses tremble dangerously close to the edge. "IT SHOULD BE CARVED IN STONE! IN THE MAIN HALL! IN GOLDEN LETTERS!"
Philip, beside him, smiled with the patience of a man who'd calculated, long ago, the emotional cost of being that man's son.
"Father," he said, with the gentleness of someone who'd said that sentence hundreds of times, "the song doesn't need to be carved in stone to be remembered."
"YES IT DOES!"
"I'll consider the proposal," I replied, still masked, because it seemed like the kind of answer that would close the subject without feeding old Boreas's territorial enthusiasm any further.
It worked for approximately four seconds.
"AND FURTHERMORE," he continued, his finger now pointed generically at the whole audience, "ANYONE HERE WHO DARES SPEAK ILL OF MY GRANDDAUGHTER TONIGHT WILL FIND OUT EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS TO LOOSE TONGUES IN THIS HOUSE!"
Eris, who still stood beside Rudeus with her face wet with tears she didn't even seem to have noticed, blushed instantly to the roots of her hair.
"Grandpa!"
"I'M MERELY SETTING REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS!"
I decided that was a good moment to discreetly step away from Sauros Boreas's territorial and emotional line of fire, as he continued handing out threats of war and mutilation with the same cheerful cadence as someone handing out sweets at a children's party.
Philip took advantage of the distraction to intervene with that natural authority of a ruler who knew exactly when to steer a crowd back to order.
"Friends," he announced, raising his glass again, his voice recovering absolute control of the room with an almost indecent ease. "I believe we all agree that we witnessed something truly extraordinary tonight." He paused deliberately, letting the silence work in his favour. "Please, take your seats again. There are still toasts, food, and, to my daughter's delight, a dance still waiting."
The hall obeyed with the docility of people who'd rather follow instructions than keep processing what they'd just seen on their own. Chairs settled back into place. Cutlery clinked against porcelain again. Normal life, or something close to it, resumed its natural course.
I took advantage of the collective distraction to retreat to the improvised backstage area, where I finally let my body register the real cost of that performance.
My fingers ached, a thin, deep fatigue spreading from the fingertips to the wrist, the natural consequence of sustaining four simultaneous elemental flows for long enough to tell an entire epic. My throat was dry enough to hurt when I swallowed. And, somewhere behind my eyes, a discreet pressure was beginning to settle in, the kind of headache any experienced mage would recognise as the fair price for sustaining that much channelled mana at once.
〈Eos, damage report.〉
[Elevated mana consumption, but within safe parameters. Micro-tremors in the hands, consistent with fine muscular fatigue. Emotional state: deliberately ignored by the user, with an almost professional dedication I'd classify as award-worthy.]
〈There's no emergency category for nostalgia, Eos.〉
[I strongly disagree, but proceed with the denial if it keeps you functional for the rest of the evening. Logging your choice for future mockery purposes, with date and time.]
〈Ever so kind.〉
[I do what I can with the material I have to work with.]
I drank a sip of water from a goblet one of the maids had left on the little backstage table, and allowed myself, for one genuinely selfish second, to simply breathe.
I had lived through every storm, every loss, and every homecoming in that song, in incarnations this world would never have any means of recording. And, for the first time in a long while, someone besides me had witnessed it, even without knowing it was real.
That was worth any amount of aching fingers.
I'd barely finished the thought before Rudeus burst through the velvet curtain with the enthusiasm of someone who'd run across the entire hall to get there first, probably knocking over at least one servant in the process.
"That was incredible!" was all he managed to articulate right away, his voice still hoarse from his own excitement, his eyes fixed on me with that mix of brotherly pride and technical astonishment I knew, from seven years of living together, would turn into an entire list of questions the moment we were alone.
"Thank you for that deeply articulate assessment," I replied, adjusting the mask over my sweaty face.
"I have questions."
"I know you do."
"Lots of questions!"
"I know that too, Chubby. You get that exact face even when you're not saying anything, it's honestly a bit unsettling. You look like a dog waiting to be fed."
"I do not make a dog face!"
"You absolutely do. A very specific one, actually. The kind that already knows it's getting the treat, but is polite enough to fake surprise."
He opened his mouth to argue back, but held himself at the last second, his eyes drifting towards the still-buzzing audience around us, as if remembering, with visible effort, that this might be neither the time nor the place.
"Later," he said, almost to himself, tucking away his own excitement with the discipline of someone who'd learned, the hard way, the difference between genuine curiosity and appropriate social timing.
"Wise decision. Go process your existential crisis in another corner, Chubby. I have public composure to maintain."
Before I could enjoy his irritation a little longer, Hilda approached, still holding the silk handkerchief between her fingers, her eyes reddened but her posture visibly working to recover some noble composure.
"Azra'il." She took a deep breath, like someone bracing for a rational question after an experience that had nothing rational about it. "That story. Where did it come from? Some bard from Milis? Some old manuscript your family keeps?"
"I wrote it," I replied, simply.
Hilda blinked a few times, the processing of that information clearly competing with her attempt to keep the noble, controlled expression she'd arrived with.
"You... wrote it?"
"Yes."
"The whole story? The music? The performance with the figures?"
"All of it. If you'd like, I could even show you my drafts later. Fair warning: the handwriting is terrible. Geniuses rarely have legible penmanship, it's almost a law of the universe, right up there with gravity and the fact that Sauros never whispers."
She laughed, a small, surprised sound, as if laughing in that moment were a betrayal of her own crying, and then composed herself, opening her mouth, closing it again, and for an instant seemed genuinely unable to decide which question to ask first. Then she leant in and said, in a lower, almost confessional voice:
"You know, at first I thought..." She hesitated. "Milis's heroes are always described as selfless. Virtuous. They save kingdoms, serve the gods, carry the world's weight on their shoulders out of duty." She shook her head slightly. "But Asteria didn't want to save anyone. She just wanted to go home. To Calliope."
"Yes," I agreed.
"And that, somehow..." Her voice faltered again, and this time her composure simply gave up trying to stay upright. "That hit me deeper than any sermon on virtue I've ever heard from anyone in the Milis faith."
She brought the handkerchief to her eyes again, and I chose, out of courtesy, not to mention that the battle for her emotional dignity had already been lost at least three stanzas ago.
"Her loyalty wasn't abstract," I said, choosing my words carefully. "It wasn't for a kingdom, nor for some divine duty. It was just for one person. That tends to weigh more than any sermon, and it's also much harder to fake when no one is watching."
Hilda nodded, unable to formulate any verbal response worthy of that, and stepped away drying her face with a determination I silently respected.
Philip took her place almost immediately, his smile already rearranged into something more calculated than emotional.
"I confess I imagined a good performance," he said, his eyes sweeping the hall with that constant reading of someone who never truly rests from his own political role. "I did not imagine... this."
"You're underestimating my capacity for unnecessary impact, Philip. It's a recurring mistake. I'd have thought you'd learned by now."
"Apparently not yet." He glanced briefly at the groups of nobles still whispering in the corners. "Do you see those groups over there?"
I followed his gaze.
"They don't seem to be discussing the party," I observed.
"No. They're trying to work out who Lyka is, the masked bard who apparently also masters advanced elemental magic without a chant." He almost smiled. "Tomorrow, half of Asura's nobility will be asking who wrote that story. The other half will be trying to find out who's actually beneath the mask."
"And then?"
"Then the invitations start. Weddings. Banquets. Diplomatic receptions. Everyone will want to hire the masked bard." He paused deliberately, the kind he used when he wanted the next sentence to carry more weight. "You did something rather dangerous tonight."
"Dangerous? I thought I'd just sung and made some pretty fire."
"You created scarcity." He clasped his hands behind his back, pleased with himself for having reached that conclusion before anyone else in the hall. "Everyone's heard of Lyka. No one knows who she really is. The rarer she seems, the greater the desire to see her again."
"That's an extremely cynical reading of an artistic performance."
"It's an extremely precise reading of how market value works," he corrected, without losing his affable tone. "The performance wasn't merely excellent, Azra'il. It was unprecedented. You blended music, theatre, magic, and narrative into a single work, and looking at those guests, I can tell not one of them even knows what to call what they just watched."
I acknowledged, with a pang of amusement I chose not to examine too closely, that Philip had just independently identified the accidental genius of his own bluff.
"And you," I added, "recognised good political manipulation the instant you saw it, because it's exactly the kind of thing you yourself would do."
He finally let the smile spread fully, with no attempt at all to deny the accusation.
"Coming from you, I choose to interpret that as a compliment."
Ghislaine appeared shortly after, crossing the hall with the posture of someone who didn't waste time on unnecessary preambles when the subject was already enough on its own.
"The bow," she said, with no introduction whatsoever. "Who taught you?"
"No one. I taught myself, in the forest, around the same time I was developing everything else," I lied without a shred of shame. Her ears moved, that sign of active processing I'd already catalogued months ago.
"I didn't know you also mastered archery," she replied, her tone almost accusatory, as if that were information that should have been disclosed in advance. "I only knew about your sword and magic skills."
"Paul only teaches sword," I replied, with exactly the right weight of sarcasm. "If I'd relied entirely on his teachings, I'd probably be singing cabaret songs about women of ill repute instead of performing an epic about faithful queens and vengeful gods. His repertoire is... limited. And morally questionable."
An almost imperceptible twitch passed across the corners of Ghislaine's mouth, the closest thing to a smile she allowed herself in public.
"That, at least, would be truer to his personality," she said, without changing her tone.
"Certainly."
She considered that for a second, her ears still tilted slightly towards me, her tail swaying lightly.
"Your posture was flawless. No tremor. No last-second correction." She crossed her arms. "Few archers I've seen keep that level of control under audience pressure."
"I'll assume that's a compliment, coming from you."
"It's a warrior's observation," she corrected, with that literalness I'd already learned to appreciate. "If you'd like to refine it further, I could point you to someone. I know a bow master in the adventurers' guild who'd take on a student with your foundation."
"I'll consider it. Though, honestly, my tutoring schedule is already fairly full. I have one pupil who still confuses 'equation' with a state secret."
She nodded once, satisfied with the answer, and withdrew back to the corner where she'd keep watching the hall with the permanent vigilance of someone whose bodyguard instinct never truly switches off.
It was then that I noticed Eris standing a few steps away, her fingers still gripping the fabric of her red dress hard enough to worry the stitching.
She didn't approach right away. She just stood there, shifting her weight between her feet, clearly trying to decide whether that was the right moment for whatever she was holding onto.
"Did she really come back?" she finally asked, without looking at me directly, her tone deliberately rude, as though the question were merely casual curiosity and not the most important thing she needed to know at that instant.
"She did."
"And Calliope was still waiting?"
"She was."
Eris stayed quiet for a moment, her eyes still fixed on the clay fragments.
"Then it was worth it," she said, finally, her voice too low to be merely neutral information.
"For Asteria, yes," I replied.
She seemed to want to ask something else, perhaps whether I believed it too, whether anyone could really wait that long and still keep their loyalty intact. But the words didn't come out, and I chose not to force the moment, letting it stay understood in the silence between us.
It was Edna, the etiquette tutor, who broke the scene by approaching with a well-trained professional smile.
"Miss Eris," she said, with that cordiality that perfectly masked any genuine nervousness. "The dance is about to begin."
Eris visibly stiffened.
"After that," she murmured, looking at me with an expression mixing contained panic and genuine irritation at feeling panic in the first place, "they expect me to dance?"
"Technically," I replied, "they expected you to dance before I declared artistic warfare on the entire hall. The evening's original plans didn't account for my intervention."
"That doesn't help."
"It wasn't meant to help. Only to be precise."
She huffed, but followed when I made a discreet gesture towards the side corridor, away from the hall's main bustle.
I led her to a small balcony, lit only by starlight and the distant echo of the music the guests were still discussing. I discreetly adjusted a fold of the dress that had come loose over hours of clenched fists and contained emotion, and wiped away, with my thumb, a lingering trace of tears still staining her face.
"You don't need to top the performance," I said.
"But everyone's going to compare!"
"No. They watched Asteria's story." I fixed the last detail of the dress before stepping back. "Now they've come to watch yours."
She stared at me for a second, processing that with the seriousness of someone receiving genuinely new information.
"Don't think about the guests," I continued. "Think about the rhythm. Weight, shoulders, hips, feet."
"Dancing is combat without swords," she murmured, almost to herself, repeating the lesson I'd insisted on over the past weeks of training.
"Exactly. And you've already knocked down people far bigger than a pair of ballroom shoes, Little Volcano. This is just a slower, more elegant, and infinitely less bloody version of the same problem. It should technically be easier. No one bleeds in a waltz. Usually."
She took a deep breath, and didn't even mind the nickname any more, her shoulders dropping a few centimetres from where the tension had been holding them, and nodded with a determination I recognised as the exact moment panic gave way to something closer to courage.
We returned to the main hall in time to see a visibly nervous young noble approach Eris with a carefully rehearsed bow. He had the air of someone instructed by his own family not to commit a single blunder in front of the Boreas family, probably briefed on the hostess's explosive reputation with enough detail to justify the visible sweat on his forehead.
"Miss Boreas," he said, his voice only slightly trembling. "Might I have the honour of this dance?"
Eris accepted with a stiff, but correct, nod, and the two of them positioned themselves at the centre of the hall along with the other couples already forming for the waltz.
I watched from a distance, beside Ghislaine, who was also following the scene with that analytical attention reserved exclusively for matters of posture and balance.
Sauros, predictably, couldn't keep quiet.
"THAT BOY HAD BETTER KNOW HOW TO DANCE PROPERLY," he grumbled, eyes narrowed at the couple, his volume only partially reduced out of respect for the moment. "IF HE STEPS ON MY GRANDDAUGHTER'S FOOT, I'LL CUT OUT HIS TONGUE BEFORE DESSERT."
"Father," said Philip, with the patience of someone who'd calculated, long ago, the social cost of restraining that man in public, "he's merely going to dance with her. Not marry her by force."
"EVEN SO!"
The music started, and Eris moved with a precision I immediately recognised as the direct fruit of weeks of training. She distributed her weight between her feet, relaxed her shoulders against her natural instinct to tense them, and watched her partner's hips instead of fixing her eyes on her own shoes, exactly as I'd insisted repeatedly during the lessons.
At one point, the young man sped up his step too early, signalling a turn ambiguously. Eris felt the incorrect weight transfer, corrected her own step with an almost imperceptible adjustment, and carried on without stumbling.
"Forgive me," he murmured, visibly relieved not to have caused an international diplomatic incident.
"Keep going," she replied, focused, with none of the irritation that would normally accompany any mistake made by someone else in her presence.
I witnessed, right there, the kind of social miracle Asura's chapel bells should, by law, formally record in their books of extraordinary occurrences, alongside things like "raining fish" and "Sauros speaking at a normal volume for over ten consecutive seconds."
Before the music ended, Eris glanced briefly in my direction. It wasn't a call for help. It was simply a silent confirmation, the kind of look that seeks a fixed point before a leap. I tilted my chin, discreetly, and she returned her full attention to her partner, without looking back again.
The dance ended with no incidents, no shouting, no noble boy needing to flee the hall in panic.
The young man bowed, visibly relieved to remain in one piece. "It was an honour, Miss Boreas."
"You danced well," she replied, a little stiffly, but correctly.
He seemed genuinely surprised at not having been insulted, injured, or thrown against a table, and withdrew with the discreet haste of someone who'd rather not push his luck twice.
The applause that followed was, this time, entirely hers.
I allowed myself to watch that with quiet satisfaction, because expressing it would probably draw more attention than Eris would be willing to tolerate at that moment.
What I didn't expect was that, minutes later, while I was briefly discussing tuning and string types for the lute with one of the musicians, I'd feel a small, surprisingly firm hand close around my wrist.
I turned and found Eris there, her face already red before a single word had been said, her eyes fixed on any point in the hall that wasn't directly my face.
"Come," she said, in a tone that tried, and visibly failed, to sound casual.
"Come where?"
"To dance!" She pulled my wrist harder than necessary, as if physical urgency could compensate for a lack of verbal eloquence. "With me."
I didn't move right away, just enough to watch her face grow progressively redder under her own impatience. I rarely find anything as entertaining to watch as a proud child fighting her own shyness in real time, especially when she herself seems surprised by her own behaviour with every passing second.
"I thought you'd already fulfilled your social obligation for today," I remarked, with all the calm in the world.
"That one was." She took a deep breath, still not looking at me directly. "This one's because I want to!"
"Ah. So it's official: Eris Boreas Greyrat wants to dance with me. I should write that down somewhere. It's a rare enough event to deserve a place in the history books."
"STOP MAKING IT COMPLICATED AND JUST COME ALREADY!"
I let the silence stretch a second longer, purely for the amusement of watching her patience evaporate in real time, like water in a pot forgotten on a high flame.
"Hmm," I finally replied.
"Hmm what?!"
"I'm trying to decide whether that was an invitation or a declaration of war."
"BOTH!"
I let out a short laugh, unable to resist that explosive sincerity, and nodded.
"Then I accept. I never turn down an invitation that's also a veiled threat. It has a particular charm."
"A-about time," she muttered, turning her face aside before I could comment on the stutter, which only made the temptation greater.
She pulled me by the wrist all the way to the centre of the hall, the whole gesture full of that stubborn urgency I already recognised as her personal signature, never letting go for even a second, as if releasing my wrist would mean giving me a chance to back out.
It was there, with her hand firmly closed around my wrist, that I noticed: her palm was damp with sweat, a small detail she would certainly have denied vehemently had I dared mention it aloud.
I filed that piece of information away with the same care I keep anything she'd rather hide. I have an entire vault reserved just for Eris Boreas Greyrat's vulnerabilities. It's getting quite full, and I haven't even started charging interest yet.
The musicians played an ordinary waltz, no magic, no spectacle, none of the techniques I'd used hours earlier to draw wars and seas before an entire audience. Just two people, moving to the simplest rhythm in the world.
Eris no longer needed to be led the way she once had. Her body already anticipated the movements, already corrected its own balance before even losing the beat.
"You did very well," I remarked, during a slower turn.
She made an immediate face. "You don't need to flatter me."
"I'm not." I let the pause stretch deliberately. "On the second turn, your partner lost his balance."
She blinked, momentarily distracted from her own embarrassment. "...You noticed that?!"
"I did. I notice everything, Redheaded Beast. It's rather my job."
"I corrected it before he could stumble!" she said, proud, nearly forgetting to keep sulking.
"Exactly as I taught you," I finished, allowing myself a small smile that, technically, no one had authorisation to see.
She fell quiet for a few seconds, her face still red, but now for a slightly different reason than the first.
"...It really was exactly as you taught me," she repeated, quietly, almost to herself, as if testing the sentence before deciding whether to believe it.
I merely smiled, neither confirming nor denying the obvious. Some moments don't need extra comment. That was one of them, and I knew how to recognise the few that deserved my silence rather than my sharp tongue, which, let's be fair, is a rarity worth noting.
The music ended shortly after, the last notes dissolving into the general hum of a hall already back to its normal activity. We stopped, still close enough that she kept holding my hand for a second longer than necessary.
When she noticed, she let go immediately, as if her own hand had betrayed her before an entire tribunal.
"D-don't think anything weird!" she said, crossing her arms hard enough to crumple her own dress. "It was just a dance!"
"Of course," I agreed, choosing, out of momentary generosity, not to prolong her suffering that night. There are limits even to my own entertainment, and I decided, briefly, to respect them.
She muttered something too low for me to make out clearly, but that quite certainly contained the word "idiot," and walked off with steps too quick for someone who supposedly wasn't running from anything.
I watched her disappear among the guests until the red dress vanished entirely into the hall.
Curious.
Eris Boreas would probably face an enraged boar, a kidnapper, or half a dozen swordsmen without hesitating. She might even smile at the challenge.
But asking someone to dance?
That, apparently, demanded an entirely different kind of courage.
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💬 Quick note for my readers
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The chapter frequency might slow down a little this week. I usually try to post every other day, but I’m heading into exam week, so things are probably going to get pretty chaotic for me 😂
Because of that, I’ll most likely only post two chapters this week. Maybe three if my exams don’t completely destroy me and I still have a few functioning brain cells left afterwards.
I’m not going on hiatus or anything, this is just a temporary slowdown while I try to survive college. Once this hellish week is over, I plan to go back to my normal posting schedule.
Thanks for your patience and for continuing to follow the story! ❤️