You're alive. How... unfortunate. -- Luna
Earl Valiant Stormwight Hallowfine Whitekeep was in the best place in his world. Respected by his Barons, absolute authority in his realm, and everyone in his power obeyed his every word. Everyone in his castle bent to his whims. His favoured son was just like him, even if the boy did run off to take the Grand Tour without Valiant's express permission.
The situation was still controllable. He had mercenaries on the case to track Spitebane down and bring the boy back alive and whole.
Valiant needed his chosen heir by his side. It was of vital import to the realm. A state secret that could mean life and death for the entire world. A secret only he knew, and dared not write nor speak aloud. A secret best kept secure inside his own head.
He could no longer light the Blood Throne. He hadn't been able to light it properly since his shameful firstborn, the Hellkin, had hit his twentieth birthday. Valiant had feared that thing succeeding him since it should have hit twelve years of age. He'd been covertly testing his capability for nineteen years, and avoiding the Blood Throne for eleven of them.
People just accepted it. Using precedent and laws of his ancestors worked, as did his best to keep anyone else's hands off that damned ancestral chair. If he could keep it up until his passing, then people wouldn't remember what a chosen leader's light looked like.
All the same, he much preferred it if the Hellkin died. Only then would the world be safe.
If the Hellkin took the Earldom, it would rise to become the Thrice-Sworn King. According to prophecy, ruin to everything built by those who held intelligent life in chains. Ruin to everything built by slave-holders.
Everything had been built by slave-holders. The entire world depended on slave labor. Even Whitekeep had been founded by twelve runaway slaves. If it wasn't for slavers, Whitekeep would never have existed. Therefore, when the Thrice-Sworn King rose... the entirety of civilisation would fall. And a million woes would take its place.
Valiant never wanted that blood on his hands, but the family curse kept him from doing anything overt to the devilborn his wife had birthed. The best he could do was send it away and hope that the rest of the world would deal with it. Only the gods knew that he prayed for it to happen. His Barons only had the vaguest idea that Valiant still possessed a Hellkin heir.
They at least knew better than to ask after it.
The Barons were bickering over their shares of the Earldom's budget. The same argument they had had for a decade. Who spent the most on their armies, who needed the most defending, who had the most deserving poor for the social alms and so on. Valiant would interrupt if someone was fool enough to threaten fisticuffs.
A castle guard interrupted. "M'lord, there's a messenger for you."
"Put it on its place and go away," Valiant growled.
"He says it's ears only, m'lord."
Gods, he hated the fuck out of those. Secret missives entrusted to a living messenger because anything written down could be intercepted. Valiant sighed and grumbled, "Send them in then." He didn't look at them, because he didn't want to. All he needed was the shadow by his left elbow. "Out with it then."
"I am havink message for Earl," said the newcomer in a thick Teutonian accent. "Ears only."
He had accounting to finish up. "Go ahead. Give me the damn message and begone."
"Ist beink ears only," the foreigner protested. "So many ist listening. You ist wanting all hearink, ja?"
"I am not walking into a closet so some unwashed idiot can whisper in my ear," Valiant snarled. "This is too important to interrupt." He felt more than saw the stranger shrug.
A roughened blue hand placed itself next to his. The very same blue of every Whitekeep-spawned Hellkin. "Hello, Papa. Time for the dirty laundry to be aired, nein?"
The hand next to his was calloused and wore the signs of surviving many fights. The arm attached was lean and muscular. The Martialist robes were black as pitch... and the sharp-toothed, grinning face echoed his features.
Without a doubt, that devilborn was his unwanted son.
Oh gods. Oh may the gods help him. It had survived.
The world may be doomed, but that didn't mean that Valiant wasn't going to fight that fate all the way down.
[Photo by Magic Fan on Unsplash]
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