The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 467: The ten tailed monster

“You look terrible,” his uncle said finally.

“I fought for almost two weeks,” Jolthar replied by way of explanation.

Caelum’s eyes widened fractionally — the first genuinely uncontrolled reaction Jolthar had seen from him.

“Then you need rest,” Caelum said, and the statement contained a command beneath its surface.

He looked at Haryntha briefly, assessing, clearly noting her divine-touched nature without commenting on it.

“Come. We have a camp with proper defenses and supplies.”

He turned and walked back toward the Kaezhlar position, not waiting to see if Jolthar would follow because apparently it didn’t occur to him that Jolthar wouldn’t.

Jolthar watched his uncle’s retreating back for a moment.

Then he followed, with Haryntha beside him, into the complicated territory of a family encountered in the last place either of them had expected to find it.

*

Jolthar had slept for six hours before his body decided it had taken what it needed and returned him to consciousness, whether he was ready or not.

The recovery wasn’t complete — the Void Requiem left a particular kind of depletion that full sleep couldn’t entirely address, the reserves it drew from requiring time measured in days rather than hours to fully replenish. But functional was achievable, and functional was sufficient.

Caelum had a fire going when Jolthar emerged from the tent that the Kaezhlar camp had provided. Two cups of something that smelled medicinal and tasted worse were already poured, which suggested his uncle had been waiting without making a performance of waiting.

They sat across from each other in the particular silence of people who have a significant history and are taking a moment to determine which parts of it are relevant to the present situation.

Caelum then asked, “Why are you in the depths? Aren’t you supposed to take care of that barony?”

There were no feelings in his words. It was plain, a simple question.

“I had no choice; the emperor’s orders,” Jolthar said, because starting with the straightforward part seemed sensible.

Jolthar told him about the ministers and the accusations and how the emperor had given him a choice to make things right. Caelum was already aware of what was happening in Tekkora and the accusations against him. He had been learning about his nephew from time to time.

Caelum absorbed this without visible reaction. He didn’t ask about the crimes the pardon would cover, didn’t ask about the circumstances that had produced the mission, didn’t ask any of the questions that the history between them might have made reasonable.

He simply filed the information and moved forward.

“You killed two of those dukes at Blackmoss Spire,” he said.

“Yes,” Jolthar agreed.

“There were only two of them. I didn’t find others. Duke-class nynthralls aren’t stationary — they roam the Depths, expanding their malice influence, consuming and corrupting as they move. The spire was likely a convergence point rather than a permanent residence.”

“It was really fortunate for you that you found two of them in that spire at that moment. They don’t usually stay there for a long time,” Caelum said.

Jolthar looked toward the deeper Depths, where the corrupted landscape continued its endless wrongness. “It could be anywhere within several days’ travel from here.”

“We’ve been in the Depths long enough,” Caelum said.

“Our mapping of the region is extensive. I can have our scouts cross-reference locations of unusually high malice concentration — duke-class entities leave signatures in the corruption around them that persist for weeks after they’ve moved on.”

Jolthar nodded, recognizing the offer for what it was — practical assistance delivered without the weight of expectation or debt attached. Caelum had always operated that way, he remembered. Helping because it was logical and useful, not because it created an obligation.

It had been one of the things Jolthar had respected about his uncle before everything else had made respecting him complicated.

“The spire itself,” Caelum continued. “You said it was a meeting point for the dukes. That implies coordination beyond what standard nynthrall behavior suggests.”

“The dukes spoke,” Jolthar confirmed.

“Not brilliantly, but deliberately. They assessed me, communicated with each other, and adapted their tactics during the fight.”

He stayed silent for a moment, remembering his fight with the dukes.

“Whatever intelligence duke-class represents, it’s sufficient for at least rudimentary strategy. If they were using the spire as a meeting point, there was probably a reason for it.”

“The ten-tailed monster,” Caelum said quietly.

“Possibly, it seemed very different from those nynthralls. Like it was made from the pure evil.”

Jolthar wrapped both hands around his cup, the warmth of it grounding.

“My friend, she is an expert in magic and knows very well about the history of these creatures; she believes the creature accelerated its development when I destroyed the dukes — absorbed the malice energy they represented. If the dukes were congregating at the spire, maybe they were already aware of it. Attending to something.”

He didn’t mention Haryntha’s identity; he didn’t want to reveal that she was a goddess. Though Caelum had an idea that she wasn’t human.

“Feeding it deliberately,” Caelum said, the implication arriving in his expression before he voiced it.

“Using the spire as a focal point to funnel malicious energy toward whatever was developing in the deep foundation.”

“Which would mean the entity isn’t an accident,” Jolthar said.

“It’s a planned project.”

They sat with that for a moment, both of them running the implications forward and finding the destinations uncomfortable.

Captain Eran’s arrival interrupted the thread of the conversation, the veteran moving through the camp with the purposeful speed of someone carrying information that couldn’t wait for a natural pause.

He stopped before Caelum, noted Jolthar’s presence with a brief widening of the eyes that he controlled quickly, and delivered his report with military conciseness.

“Ten-tailed monster sighted again, my lord. Moving from the northeastern sector, heading southwest toward our position.”

He hesitated for a second, struggling with the news he brought and then he said, “That’s not the full report.”

Caelum’s eyes sharpened.

“Continue.”

“It’s not alone. There’s a horde preceding it — nynthrall numbers we haven’t encountered since arriving in the Depths. Our forward scouts estimate several thousand, with giant variants and beast-class distributed throughout.”

Eran’s jaw tightened with the expression of someone delivering the worst part.

“And the entity itself. There’s something on it. Riding it or positioned on it — our scouts couldn’t determine which. A figure, not nynthrall in appearance.”

Both Jolthar and Caelum were on their feet.

They moved to the camp’s elevated observation point, a formation of corrupted rock that the Kaezhlar expedition had reinforced into a functional platform.

The Naemarys camp, positioned perhaps two hundred yards from the Kaezhlar position in the uneasy proximity of two clans who needed the mutual security without particularly wanting the mutual company, had apparently received similar intelligence — Jolthar could see movement there, figures preparing with the urgency and efficiency of people who had spent months learning to respond quickly to the Depths’ particular brand of sudden escalation.

The horde was visible as a disturbance on the horizon first — a darkness that moved against the already dark landscape, a churning mass that resolved into individual shapes as it came closer. The numbers were staggering even by the Depths’ standards, thousands of pale ashen forms moving with the mindless momentum of malice-driven creatures following the strongest signal.

And behind the horde, above it, through it — the ten-tailed monster.

In daylight — or what passed for daylight in the Depths, the dim corrupted illumination that served instead of a proper sun — it was worse than it had been in the spire’s ruin. The full scale of it was visible now, the ten tails moving in constant independent motion around a central mass that defied clean anatomical description. The ground shook with its movement, shallow tremors running ahead of it like a herald.