Inside the castle, what influence and money can buy together becomes hard to miss.

The main hall is broad and tall enough to swallow sound. Polished black-stone floors veined with thin lines of silver alloy. Tapestries on the side walls—old hunting scenes from the deep, monsters whose silhouettes I recognize and whose colors I’ve never seen rendered this faithfully.

The blue and white colors are pretty dominant inside.

Lamps overhead glow with soft, contained light. Not flame. Some kind of chambered crystal that hums at a frequency you only notice if you stop talking.

The strange part isn’t the architecture.

It’s that everyone we pass bows.

Servants pause and bend at the waist. A scribe carrying a stack of papers stops cold and dips his head. Two guards in formal armor straighten and salute. A woman in a high-collared dress drops a half-curtsy and waits for Veric to clear her line of sight before resuming her walk.

Every single person.

I lean toward Veric without breaking stride.

"Should I bow too, Your Highness? Out of respect?"

"Don’t you start."

"I could kneel. Make it formal. Maybe kiss a ring."

"Sands."

"I’m just saying. The protocol seems to be working. Everyone else is doing it."

He hits me lightly on the back of the head without looking.

"Shut up before I introduce you formally and you have to do this for the rest of your life."

I let myself smile.

At the foot of the main staircase, an informant peels off from a small pillar and approaches us. He’s lean, slightly stooped, dressed in the dark blue livery the royal house uses for its inner staff. The skin around his eyes is patchwork-discolored. Decades of Thirstfall dehydration, refused properly because probably he refused to leave. A career man. Local steward, maybe a confidant of the King.

"The Thalassarch of Thirstfall awaits you in the royal conference chamber."

Thalassarch.

The system’s word for what we’d call a king. Personally I find it overcomplicated, so I just say King. According to the Ocean’s Law archive, Thalassarch is borrowed Greek—Thalassa (sea) plus Archos (leader). Sea-leader. Whoever wrote the lexicon thought it sounded better than it reads.

We climb the staircase.

We turn right in the third room.

The conference chamber is mostly old wood. Heavy noble grain that takes the light without bouncing it. A long oval table runs the length of the room, surrounded by chairs that look more comfortable than they are. The walls hold shelves of bound books—a small private library. Portraits of past Thalassarchs that the Ocean’s Law itself rendered into existence at each succession. They can’t be removed. Anyone who has tried has had the painting reappear on the wall by the next morning, undamaged.

I’d never imagined I’d be inside a room like this. I let myself feel it for one second and then put it down.

Garen has his back to us when we enter. He’s standing beside one of the larger shelves, slowly leafing through a book I don’t recognize.

It isn’t real reading. The marker is poking out the wrong side of the binding by several pages. He’s performing.

He’s also not unaware of us. Garen is Hadal—Rank S. He felt me cross the gate of the castle five minutes ago. He’s making me earn the first word.

Veric clearly doesn’t know what to do with himself. The dynamic is wrong for him: his rival-friend has business with his father that he isn’t part of.

Every shift in Veric’s personality I’ve seen lately points to a man who fears his father and worships him in equal measure. Watching the man he idolizes get squeezed by the Deepwarden has to be a slow kind of corrosive.

"Mr. Azurea."

I open from the doorway. I don’t wait for Veric to walk me in.

Garen closes the book. He sets it back on the shelf carelessly—marker still skewed, spine slotted in at the wrong angle. That alone tells me everything I needed to confirm.

The book was a stage prop.

He turns.

"Sands. I didn’t expect you to invoke the family password this soon."

"Tomorrow is the mist. Today is the tide."

"Hm. Haven’t heard that one in a while." A flicker at the corner of his mouth. "Sounds like your father taught you a few trench expressions."

I wish my father had taught me.

"Looks like you’ve been in the trenches yourself."

"Nobody arrives in Thirstfall already at Rank S."

The Trenches of Crevona and the Abyss Trenches. Where the war of expansion happens. Humanity pushing against the edges of the known world, trying to map deeper, and the monsters thick enough that only specific people get sent.

Rank doesn’t matter. Utility matters. A useful Shell will get sent. A useless Abyssal will be quietly redirected to politics.

I fought in those trenches for years. There was no better cartographer than me in my last life, because cartographers tended to die before they got experienced enough to be good. That gap is exactly what I got reassigned into.

"Fair point." I pull a chair out and sit before Veric does.

"Crevona or the Abyss?"

Garen smiles. Real one this time. A comrade’s smile, warm and unguarded—someone has just rubbed the right spot on his old ego, and he isn’t trying to hide that he liked it.

"Crevona. Third Regiment. Squad ’Tide of Every Morning.’" He winks.

I catch the reference. The plan name from his office wasn’t ornamental. He named the plan after his old squad.

I let one corner of my mouth lift.

"Crevona? And no visible scars? Your squad must’ve been something."

Garen laughs. Loud enough that even Veric’s eyebrows climb half an inch.

"I haven’t heard you laugh like that in years, Father."

"This friend of yours is phenomenal." Garen turns back to me, eyes sharp. "You said ’visible’ specifically. Tell me, then. Where’s my hidden scar?"

He’s testing me again.

Nobody knows about that scar except the men who were with him in his trench squad. The information only entered public record when he was assassinated and his body got autopsied in my last life.

"Right thigh. Vertical puncture, eight inches. Aqualisk claw. Went through clean—front to back."

"You see, my son?" He starts pouring himself a drink from a decanter on the side table.

Veric is openly stunned. Even he—Garen’s own son—didn’t know about the scar.

The trenches are macabre, and probably Garen never talks about them at home like my dad does. That’s why Veric is as soft and spoiled as he is. The price of a father shielding his children from his own war.

"Down to business." Garen’s tone shifts in a heartbeat, like a switch being flipped. "What do you want from me, Sands?"

"I was clear before. Deep Asylum. Sector 4."

I hear Garen growl low. A sound from the back of the throat.

Pre-bite warning, dog-deep.