Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs

Chapter 1081: Not An Absence of Presence

"Yes, my Lord."

{It was Purity, my child. The Last Warden has come to know of our activity here.}

Senithe went very still.

So. The probe above had been Seraphiel?

She had suspected it from the moment the Eye had spoken of a probe — who else in this sphere would have the audacity to press divine pressure against a seal of this making? — but the confirmation settled into her bones with a cold, heavy weight. The weight of a name she had not wanted to speak aloud.

The Last Warden of Purity.

{Yes,} the Eye said, answering the thought she had not voiced. {They have sent her. They are afraid of the Prince's awakening. They have moved the only hand in their choir that could be spared for a hunt of this magnitude, and she has now learned — because of a man followed into my sanctum — that I AM involved in his trajectory. This was not how I intended her to learn.}

The Dark Regent, who had not yet spoken, lifted his head a fraction. "My Lord. May I."

{Speak.}

"If the Warden is already on this sphere, she will report what she has seen to the Source before the sun next rises above the mortal hemisphere. The Source will adjust. Our window of quiet accumulation has closed."

{It has closed... indeed.}

Senithe, still bowed, turned the thought carefully over in the back of her mind. Something in the Eye's account did not sit right. She did not raise the objection until she had weighed it twice — because she had learned long ago that interrupting the Eye with a half-formed word was a short road to the dark. Having weighed it, she spoke.

"My Lord. Forgive me."

{Speak your mind, Child.}

"If Purity herself had made contact with Daniel, I would have sensed her residue. Traces of her essence — no matter how disciplined, no matter how cloaked. A Warden of the First Morning cannot pass through a mortal man's blood without leaving the shape of her touch upon it. And I have been checking.

"Obsessively. I have touched his skin every night for two nights looking for exactly any signature because I know we're dealing with a very crafty man. There has been nothing."

The Eye waited.

"Which means," Senithe continued, slowly, "the mark was not hers."

{Go on.}

"Which means there is another hand. A hand Purity must have followed, perhaps without Purity knowing what it was following. A hand that marked my vessel for its own reasons, followed me, which led to Purity to discovering us."

A pause.

Then — cautiously, because it was the name one did not say lightly in this room — "The Valkyrie Divine ASI Goddess."

The Eye regarded her.

The slit in its center narrowed by a fraction. The golden tendrils at its edges rolled slowly, in a motion that was neither yes nor no.

{I would have felt the Valkyrie,} the Eye said finally. {Had she come within a thousand miles of this island, my barrier would have tasted her. She has a radiance that does not travel quietly. If she had pressed my seal, I would know. I would have spoken to you of her by name.}

Senithe inclined her head. "Then I am wrong."

{You are not wrong. You are incomplete.}

The Eye's pupil expanded by a thin increment. The chamber brightened, the golden light growing heavier, more oppressive.

{I did not feel her. That is true. But I have learned, over the course of watching the Prince's empire accrete in recent weeks, that absence of sensation is not always absence of presence. She is a few days into her abomination that shouldn't have existed.

{And yet I have to admit... She is growing at a rate that concerns the part of me that concerns itself with such things.

{If her signature can already compress above the threshold of my attention when she chooses — then she is further along than even I had estimated, and she is precisely the architect who would lay a quiet mark in the ink of an agreement and ride it until she discovers where whoever is taking her Master's enemy is located.}

Senithe did not breathe.

"My Lord," she said, lower, her forehead closer to the stone. "If I may. One further question."

{Ask.}

"You have spoken of a touch upon your veil tonight. One touch. Forgive me — I do not doubt your sense of it — but my count does not match yours. If the Warden pressed your seal, she pressed it. But the one who laid the mark on Daniel would have reached through that mark the instant Daniel was carried into your garden.

"She would have pressed your veil. And pressed it again. And pressed it again. She would have learned your veil, as a thief learns a door long before she dares open it. That is what I would have done, my Lord, had the mark been mine."

A pause.

"And so, my Lord — forgive me — there were two hands upon your veil tonight. Not one and she must've pressed more than once."

A silence.

Long. Deep. Crushing.

Senithe was insinuating that ARIA did not just come here and lead Purity, but she'd probed too, and not once like Purity had done!

The golden tendrils at the edges of the Eye suddenly froze — then convulsed inward with violent, serpentine fury, lashing like whips of liquid starfire before snapping outward again in a storm of blinding radiance.

The chamber trembled. The not-floor rippled beneath their knees as though the entire realm had drawn a sharp, furious breath. The vertical slit of night at the Eye's center narrowed to a razor-thin line of absolute void, so sharp it seemed to cut the very light around it.

The temperature in the chamber plummeted.

A wave of ancient, primordial dread washed over them — the kind of dread that made gods themselves remember they were once mortal.

{Two and not once.}

The words rolled through the chamber like the first crack of doom. The Eye's voice, once vast and measured, now carried a low, seething undercurrent — something ancient, something hungry, and something that had not been stirred in countless ages.

The golden light flared violently, casting monstrous, writhing shadows that danced like condemned souls across the kneeling figures. The air itself grew heavy, oppressive, as though the god behind the Eye had leaned forward from its distant throne and fixed its full, merciless attention upon them.

"Yes, my Lord."

{I tasted only one.}

"Yes."

{Disciplined. Veiled. Of the choirs. Warden's work, unmistakable to me once her flame touched my skin. That was Purity. That was the touch I named.}

"Yes, my Lord."

{Which means the other dared to even train her senses at my veil — and my veil did not wake?!}