Lahat ng Kabanata ng Reborn as the villain's obsession : Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

The conversation happened in the King's private study rather than any official chamber, which was itself a kind of statement. Official chambers were for official things. This was something else.Aldric had asked Adrian to come alone, which was unusual enough that Adrian had spent the walk there trying to determine what was wrong. He had catalogued recent political decisions, potential diplomatic offenses, the various ways in which the integration work might have created friction that hadn't reached him yet. He arrived prepared for difficulty.Aldric was standing by the window when Adrian entered. He looked older than he had a year ago, which was simply true and not a political observation — the war had aged him in ways that titles and privilege provided no protection against. He had lost people he had known for decades in those months. That kind of loss left marks that didn't fade cleanly."Sit down," Aldric said, not unkindly.Adrian sat.His father remained at the window for another

The prophecy was in a book that Kieran had owned for longer than most kingdoms had existed, and he brought it to them on a quiet morning without preamble, which was either a sign that he had been thinking about how to say this for a long time or that he had decided preamble would only make things worse."I should have shown you this earlier," he said, setting the book on the table between them. "I didn't, for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time and seem less sufficient now."Adrian looked at the book. It was very old in the specific way that very old books looked — not theatrical old, not decoratively aged, but genuinely ancient in a way that made you careful about touching it. "What is it?""A record," Kieran said. "From before the segregation. Before the wars that established it. From a period when demon scholars were documenting things they believed might be relevant to future generations." He paused. "Some of it is historical. Some of it is observational. Some of it is — th

The first morning Cassian woke up as a father, he lay still for several minutes listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the house.It was not that the palace was ever silent — there were always distant footsteps, the settling of old stone, the particular rhythms of a building that housed hundreds of people and their attendant activities. But these sounds were different. Smaller. A soft shuffling from down the corridor. The creak of a door opened with the careful deliberateness of a child trying not to make noise and not quite succeeding.He got up before Adrian, which was usual, and walked quietly down the corridor to Kael's room. The door was slightly ajar. Kael was sitting up in bed holding his shadow-dragon toy with both arms, looking at the window with the particular expression of very young children in unfamiliar places — not frightened, exactly, but taking careful inventory of the situation.He looked at Cassian when the door opened."Papa," he said, which was the first time he

The thing about Kael was that he talked constantly, which Adrian had understood intellectually before the adoption and understood in a significantly more embodied way approximately seventy-two hours after it.He talked about the birds in the garden, the shadow-dragon's preferences regarding sleep position, the quality of various foods ranked from most to least acceptable, the specific characteristics of clouds observed from his window on any given morning, the comparative merits of different routes through the palace to the kitchen, and his ongoing assessment of every person he encountered, which was delivered with complete frankness and the innocent devastation of someone who had not yet learned that honesty was socially situational.He told the head of palace security that his hat looked like a bird's nest, which was accurate.He told Kieran that he was very old, which was also accurate and which Kieran received with the equanimity of someone for whom this observation had lost its s

Spring arrived and with it a period of relative quiet that neither of them entirely trusted at first, having spent long enough in sustained crisis to associate peace with the interval before something.But the something didn't come, or rather it came in the forms that things came in when the acute emergency was over and what remained was the ongoing work — the community councils and diplomatic correspondence and administrative complexities of maintaining a genuinely new kind of political arrangement. It was demanding in the way that important ongoing things were demanding. It was not, for the first time in several years, terrifying.Lyanna turned five in the spring. They gave her a party that she initially resisted on the grounds that parties required social performance that she found effortful, and then discovered she did not actually mind because it was mostly the people she liked in the garden with food that was specifically the food she preferred, and Kael threw flower petals with