Chapter 20: The plan to kill a queen.
They walked through the camp in silence.
Eventually, they reached one of the larger tents near the center of camp, reinforced with beast hide, metal clasps, and a small banner marked with an unfamiliar sigil stitched in silver thread.
Iane stopped in front of it.
"Alright," he said, "this is the one."
He pulled back the flap and stepped inside.
Arah followed behind, but the moment they entered, he froze.
A man sat at the desk. He was massive, with dark brown skin stretched tight over thick cords of muscle. His shaved head bore a jagged X-shaped scar, and a heavy black beard flowed down to his chest. He didn’t look up when they entered. Instead, he kept scribbling something into a worn leather-bound notebook, the quill scratching loudly in the silence.
He wore a plain black shirt that looked like it was barely containing his broad frame, the fabric stretched taut across his chest and shoulders. His pants were simple and utilitarian, though even they seemed strained against the size of his legs.
But it wasn’t his appearance that made Arah’s heart lurch.
It was the pressure.
An invisible crushing weight hung in the air, suffocating, dense, and hot. The kind of heat you would experience if you were near a volcano, but he knew it was an illusion of the senses, and that the heat was not there. He didn’t even need to try and actively feel soul energy in the air to know it was crying at the presence of the man. He wasn’t even sure how that was possible. The man himself seemed to defy the very nature of this place.