The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 484: Silver winged angel and a Goddess on his hand

It arrived before anyone understood what it was – a concussive impact of tremendous force that reached the hall not through the air but through the stone itself, traveling up through the palace floor and into the feet and legs of every person standing in it before it registered as sound at all. The walls caught it a fraction of a second later and sent it back from multiple directions simultaneously, a deep resonant bang that had no obvious source because the source was outside and the stone was carrying the information inward from every direction at once.

The hall went absolutely silent.

Every head turned toward the entrance. Every conversation, every murmur, every prepared argument died in the same instant, replaced by the collective held breath of several hundred people who had just felt something significant happen and did not yet know what it was.

Outside, beyond the palace walls, beyond the great entrance and the long, wide stairs that descended from it to the palace forecourt, a cloud of dust and displaced grounds was settling.

In the forecourt, where a crater now existed that had not existed ten seconds earlier, two figures stood.

*

The dust moved with the indifferent patience of disturbed grounds returning to rest, and as it thinned and dispersed in the late afternoon air, what it revealed produced in the gathered soldiers at the palace entrance a response that none of their training had specifically prepared them for.

The wings were the first thing visible.

They rose from the figure’s back with the particular quality of things that did not belong to the natural order of the world and were not attempting to pretend otherwise.

Dark at their base where they connected to his shoulders, transitioning through deep silver toward their edges, they caught the descending sun light in ways that ordinary material did not, the Void Phases existing somewhere between physical presence and the suggestion of absence, as though they were wings shaped from the space between things rather than from any substance that could be named.

They were spread to their full extension, and their full extension was considerable, the span of them reaching wide enough that the soldiers nearest the stairs took involuntary backward steps simply in response to the spatial reality of what they were seeing.

Jolthar stood at the center of the crater with Haryntha beside him, her hand still in his from the landing; the journey from the Depths concluded in the manner of someone who had run out of time for the conventional approach and had found a more direct one.

He was not dressed for a palace arrival.

The Depths had left their record on his clothing and his face and the set of his shoulders, the evidence of twenty nine days in a corrupted wasteland present in every visible detail.

But he stood with the ease of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin regardless of what that skin had recently been through.

The Voidphase wings drew back slowly, folding into themselves and disappearing against his back with the same quality of wrongness that had characterized their appearance, there and then not there, the absence they left feeling briefly significant before the eye adjusted and forgot them.

He looked up at the palace stairs.

Haryntha walked beside him with effortless composure. The weeks spent in the Dreadland Depths seemed to have left little mark on her, especially when compared to her companion. Still, the quiet attentiveness in her eyes suggested she was examining the palace and everyone around it with divine senses that perceived far more than ordinary sight.

The palace guards at the top of the stairs had formed a line by instinct and training, the automatic response to an unidentified arrival of unusual character.

And all of them have rounded them up, even when they know that it might be dangerous. It was their duty to stand guard.

They held their positions with the discipline of men who were absolutely certain of their duty and considerably less certain of their situation.

Then the guard nearest the top of the stairs got a clear look at the man ascending toward him.

He held his position for precisely two more seconds.

Recognition dawned on him as he saw the young man. The weapon in his hands dropped to the ground as he stepped back.

His mind went blank for a second before making a decision of running.

Not away from the palace.

Into it, through the great entrance, moving at a speed that his formal posting had probably never required of him before, his boots loud on the stone floor as he passed through the entrance corridor and turned toward the hall beyond it.

The remaining guards at the stairs looked at each other.

Then they looked at Jolthar, who had reached the base of the stairs and was beginning to climb them with Haryntha at his side, neither of them hurrying, neither of them particularly concerned about the line of guards above.

Slowly, without a word passing between them, the guards stepped aside.

*

The running guard hit the hall’s entrance at speed, his composure entirely abandoned in favor of the information he was carrying, and his voice went ahead of him into the silence that had descended over the assembled court since the impact had reached them through the floor.

“He’s here!” he exclaimed in between his gasps.

The guard was breathing hard, his formal bearing completely dissolved. His eyes found Prince Milan across the crowded hall and he said it again, louder, making sure it reached every corner of the room.

“Jolthar Kaezhlar!”

“He’s here. He just landed in the forecourt. He – there were wings, Your Highness, I don’t… he’s coming up the stairs right now.”

The hall erupted.

Not in chaos exactly, but in the sound of several hundred people absorbing information simultaneously and finding it more than their composure could quietly contain.

Voices rose. People moved.

The careful hierarchical arrangement of the assembled court dissolved at its edges as people shifted to see, to speak, to process what the guard had just reported.

Milan stood in the center of it and felt something that had been wound very tight inside him for the past two hours release all at once.

He turned and looked at Andrion.

Andrion looked back at him with an expression that said I told you clearly and without any particular satisfaction in being right, just the simple acknowledgment of a fact that had been established and could now be set aside.

Richardus stood very still among the ministers, his prepared arguments sitting unused in whatever part of him had been holding them ready. His eyes were fixed on the hall’s entrance with the expression of a man recalculating with considerable speed.

Lorryll had not moved from his position.

But something in the quality of his stillness had changed in a way that was difficult to define precisely and impossible to mistake entirely.

The Emperor sat on his dais and for the first time since the gathering began, something moved at the corner of his mouth.

Not quite a smile.

Close enough to matter.