Chapter 131: The Trial
The throne room of the palace was the largest space within its walls.
It was designed to inspire awe. To inspire fear. To remind anyone who entered that they stood in a place of ultimate power, ultimate judgment and ultimate consequence.
The ceiling soared so high that it seemed to touch the clouds themselves. Massive windows, positioned high on the eastern wall, allowed afternoon light to stream through in great, golden columns. The light caught dust motes in its path, turning them into something luminous and almost holy.
But there was nothing holy about what was about to happen in this room.
The floor was polished marble so smooth it reflected the ceiling above like a mirror. If someone were to lie down and look up, they would see themselves inverted against the sky, a distorted image of themselves, unrecognizable, transformed into something other than what they were.
And above, painted across the entire vaulted ceiling in scenes of impossible beauty, were dragons.
They were rendered in gold and crimson and deep indigo. They soared across clouds, their wings spread wide, their bodies rippling with power and grace. Some were engaged in battle....claws extended, teeth bared, fire erupting from their mouths. Others were in flight....spinning, diving, dancing through the air with the kind of freedom that could only belong to creatures of such magnitude.
It was said that the murals had been painted three hundred years ago by an artist who had actually seen dragons in flight. That he had spent years capturing their essence on the ceiling so that anyone standing in this room would remember what true power looked like.
Morgana looked up at them as she was led into the throne room.
The chains around her wrists were heavy.
They cut into her skin, the iron cold and unyielding. Her hands had gone numb from the pressure hours ago, when the guards had first locked them on in the dungeons and begun their escort to this room.
Now, walking across the polished marble floor, the chains dragged against her legs with each step. The sound echoed through the enormous chamber, each footfall announcing her presence, her shame, her crime.
Two guards flanked her on either side.
They didn’t hold her arms. They didn’t need to. The weight of the chains, combined with the weight of what was about to happen, was enough to keep her moving forward in a kind of grim procession.
On either side of the chamber, standing against the walls, were the nobles.
Morgana could feel their eyes on her.
They were watching her with expressions that ranged from curiosity to outright hostility. Some looked at her with pity. Some looked at her with barely concealed hunger for drama, for scandal, for the spectacle of someone’s life being destroyed before their eyes.
Behind the nobles, crowding the back of the chamber where there was standing room only, were servants.
Palace staff, drawn by the promise of trial and punishment and the kind of entertainment that came from watching one of their own be judged and condemned. Morgana recognized some of them...girls she’d worked with in the kitchen, and some from the stables, men she’d passed in the corridors, people whose names she didn’t know but whose faces were familiar.
They all looked at her with expressions that suggested they had already decided her fate.
At the front of the chamber, arranged in rows of dark wooden benches, were the ministers of the king’s council.
There were twelve of them.
Twelve grey-haired men in dark robes, their expressions ranging from curious to hostile to utterly indifferent. These were the men who would judge her. These were the men who would determine whether she lived or died, whether she was guilty or innocent, whether justice was served or whether an injustice was about to be committed.
They looked at her the way a doctor looks at a body on an examination table, with clinical detachment, with the sense that she was a problem to be solved, a case to be evaluated.
And above them all, at the far end of the chamber, rose the dais.
It was high enough that looking up at it made Morgana’s neck crane. It was decorated with carved dragons and elaborate scrollwork and symbols of royal power. And on top of it, arranged in a perfect line, were three massive thrones.
But the thrones were empty.
The kings had not yet arrived.
Morgana was led to the center of the floor, to that space where the marble was so polished it gleamed like water, where her reflection stared up at her from below, a ghost of herself made real by the stone.
And then she was made to wait.
Minutes passed.
Long, agonizing minutes where she stood alone in the center of this vast chamber, surrounded by hundreds of eyes, all watching her, all judging her, all waiting to see what would happen next.
The weight of the chains pressed down on her.
The weight of the stares pressed down on her.
The weight of her own fear pressed down on her.
And Morgana understood, in that moment, that she was not a person standing in this room.
She was a prisoner. She was an accused criminal. She was a problem that needed to be solved.
The sound came first.
A deep, resonant tone, like the echo of a bell tolling, that seemed to reverberate through the very stones of the chamber.
It was the signal.
The signal that the kings were coming.
And the entire room fell into a perfect, absolute silence.
Everyone stood.
The nobles straightened from their casual postures. The servants ceased their whispered conversations. The council members rose from their benches. It was a wave of motion that flowed through the chamber like wind through water.
Everyone stood for the kings.
And then, from behind the dais, they emerged.
First came Draeven.
The First King. The oldest of the three. The one they called the Fire King because of the fury that burned behind his golden eyes.
He wore black...a formal coat tailored to perfection, with intricate embroidery along the seams that caught the light and threw it back in glints of gold. His hair was dark, his bearing absolutely regal, his face a mask of controlled composure.
But his eyes.
His golden eyes were burning.