The carriage moved through the night like a ghost, its wheels whispering over roads worn by centuries of marching armies and fleeing refugees. Nyxara sat rigidly upright, her kaleidoscopic eyes reflecting the flickering light of torches held by Korinakos, who rode silently beside her. The air outside the carriage was thick with the stench of burning, charred wood, singed fur, the acrid tang of ozone, and the distant, mournful howl of winds that carried the whispers of a land scarred by war.

Every mile that passed between Nyxara and her homeland felt like a blade cutting deeper into her soul. The weight of her decision pressed down on her chest, a leaden crown replacing the one she had left behind. She could feel the eyes of her people on her, not just the living but the dead, the poets, warriors, and scholars whose voices had been silenced by Ryo's void. She carried them all, their hopes and their ghosts, in the quiet spaces between her breaths.

The road grew darker as they travelled. The trees lining their path seemed to lean inward, their branches clawing at the sky as if pleading for mercy. Nyxara's thoughts drifted to the Black Keep, to the throne room where Ryo's shadow would stretch like a curse over everything that mattered. She imagined its obsidian walls swallowing the light, its ceiling choked with the whispers of fractured stars. She wondered if the carriage would even make it that far, or if the road itself would betray them, leading them straight into the jaws of Ryo's void touched traps.

As the first hints of dawn began to stain the horizon with a sickly grey light, Korinakos spoke, his voice barely audible over the creak of the carriage. "They say the Keep's walls are alive, Your Majesty. That they drink the blood of intruders and remember every face that crosses its threshold."

Nyxara did not turn to look at him. She stared straight ahead, into the void that waited for them. "Then it will have quite the feast tonight."

Hours Pass and now, the carriage shuddered to a halt in the shadow of the Black Keep. The air thickened, as though the very atmosphere recoiled from the fortress. Nyxara stepped out into the cold, her boots sinking into a layer of ash that clung to the ground like the whispers of forgotten souls. Above, the stone towers loomed, jagged and relentless, their spires piercing a sky void of stars.

Guards emerged from the gloom, their armour silent, their faces obscured by helmets forged in void ice. They moved with the mechanical precision of automatons, their presence a silent extension of the Keep itself. Nyxara felt her essence being siphoned with every step, a living decay chewing at the edges of her strength.

The journey through the labyrinthine corridors was a descent into the bowels of time itself. Torches flickered feebly along the walls, their light warped by the oppressive weight of the stone. Each turn felt familiar, ancient, as though the Keep bled the past into the present. When the doors to the Obsidian Throne Room finally swallowed them, the heavy, rune carved doors of the throne room sealed behind Queen Nyxara and Korinakos with a final, resonant thoom. The sound was not a conclusion, but an incarceration, the clang of a trapdoor shutting. The suffocating silence that rushed in to swallow the echo was a physical presence, thick and heavy, tasting of tombs and extinguished dreams. It was the silence of a predator holding its breath.

The air itself was a weapon. It coated the tongue, gritty and cold, a cloying mélange of burnt stardust, that familiar, nauseating scent of ozone and charred sugar, the funereal sweetness of decaying lilies, and the ever present, metallic tang of old blood, so potent it felt like a film on the teeth. It was the reek of a place that didn't just absorb light; it consumed hope, digesting it into despair.

Nyxara did not allow herself to hesitate. Every step into the chamber's oppressive embrace was an act of will. Her multi hued eyes, a swirling testament to her fractured legacy, did not dart in fear. They took in the horror with a regal, analytical calm that was her armour. The obsidian walls, polished to a depthless, liquid black, devoured the light from the guttering torches held in tarnished silver sconces shaped like skeletal hands, their fingers eternally frozen mid claw, straining for a ceiling lost in shadow. Only when her vision adjusted to the perpetual twilight did the true ceiling reveal itself: not stone, but ancient, vaulted black ice, thick and impossibly old, etched with mutilated constellations. Cassiopeia's throne lay shattered, her spine snapped clean through. Polaris, the Unmoving Star, was depicted chained directly to the silhouette of the obsidian throne below, its celestial light siphoned downwards in pale, agonized rivulets, feeding directly into the jagged, iron sharp points of the King's crown.

At the room's heart, on the dais, sat the source of the decay.

King Ryo Oji did not rise. He was a study in controlled power; a statue carved from shadow and spite. He was draped in heavy velvet robes the colour of clotted blood, one hand resting on the arm of the throne, the other holding not a sceptre of gold, but a length of petrified star wood, blackened and twisted as a diseased limb, capped with a jagged, pitted shard of meteorite. His face was a handsome, ageless mask, but his eyes... his eyes were voids. Cold as the space between stars, they fixed on her with an unnerving, absolute focus. He did not blink. He simply... consumed, drinking in her form, her posture, the slight tension in Korinakos behind her, filing it all away in the cold archives of his mind.

Korinakos, a step behind her, emitted a faint, reedy gasp, the sound instantly swallowed by the room's sound suffocating embrace. Nyxara could feel his terror like a cold draft at her back. She was alone. Truly alone. The weight of her father's portrait, of Eltanar's dream, of Uncle Shojiki's ghost, was a crushing pressure on her soul. This is the man who murdered your dream, Father, she thought, the words a silent scream in the cathedral of her mind. This is the architect of all our suffering. But she was the Queen of Nyxarion. She would not break here. She would make them see.

She took another deliberate step forward, her boots whispering on the polished black marble floor. The sound was obscenely loud.

"King Ryo Oji," she began, her voice not a shout, but a clear, resonant tone that carried effortlessly in the dead air, layered with the compelling harmonics of Vega's persuasion. It was a voice meant to weave understanding, not declare war. "I thank you for receiving me. I come under banner of truce, to speak of peace between our nations."

The words hung in the cloying air. Ryo did not move. His void like gaze remained locked on her, and for a terrifying moment, Nyxara wondered if he would simply have them killed where they stood for the audacity of breathing in his presence. Is this the Butcher King? she questioned internally. This calculated, silent predator? Where is the raging monster from the stories? This is far more dangerous.

Then, he moved.

The motion was unnervingly smooth, like oil flowing over bone. He rose from the Obsidian Throne, his blood coloured robes whispering against the dais. It was not a gesture of respect, but one of theatrical presentation, a predator uncoiling to its full height to better assess its prey. He descended the steps slowly, deliberately, his shadow elongating, a living darkness that seemed to swallow the already feeble light as it spread towards her like a stain.

"It takes a unique kind of courage and resolve," Ryo said, his voice a venomous rasp that carried with an intimate, terrifying clarity. It was not loud, yet it seemed to vibrate in the bones, a sonic shard tearing through the silence. "Or perhaps a unique kind of arrogance. To walk unarmed into the heart of your enemy's power. A gesture often mistaken for foolishness. Or desperation." He stopped mere feet away, close enough that she could smell the grave soil and spoiled wine on his breath. He looked down at her, not with anger, but with the cold, analytical curiosity of a vivisectionist. "Which is it, I wonder, that brings the 'Demon Queen' to my door? I must admit, I respect the initiative. I wish more leaders possessed such... decisive conviction. It would make their subjugation so much more efficient."

Liar, the thought was a shard of ice in Nyxara's mind. Every word is a trap wrapped in silk. He respects nothing but his own reflection. Her father's face, Shojiki's laugh, they were shields against the psychic onslaught of his presence. This was not the raving monster of Temple propaganda. This was far worse. This was calculated, patient evil. The Butcher King was a title earned in blood, but the man before her was a master architect of despair.

Outwardly, she remained a pillar of Polaris certainty. "I prefer to think of it as necessity, King Ryo. Courage and foolishness are often two sides of the same coin, minted by desperation. My people are starving in the dark. Yours are bleeding on the ice. This war serves no one but the grave and the scavengers who circle it."

Ryo's thin lips twitched in a parody of a smile that never touched his eyes. "War is the great clarifier. It strips away pretence. Reveals the true nature of things. Strength. Weakness. Loyalty. Betrayal." His gaze flickered over her shoulder to Korinakos, a look so dismissive it was itself a form of violence, before returning to her with predatory focus. "You speak of necessity. I am listening."

Nyxara drew a steadying breath, the foul air coating her lungs. This was the opening. She must anchor this in the past, in the man he once was, the boy he must have been.

"I come not only out of necessity for the present, but in memory of the past," she said, allowing a thread of genuine, unfeigned sorrow to weave into the Vega resonance of her voice. A true memory offered as both olive branch and probe. "I come in the name of King Shojiki Oji. Your father."

The name detonated in the silent room. For a fraction of a second, a micro expression flickered across Ryo's perfectly composed mask. Not grief. Not fondness. Something colder, sharper, a flash of pure, undiluted contempt, so quickly buried it might have been a trick of the guttering light. The void in his eyes seemed to deepen, to grow hungrier, as if the name had stirred an ancient, bitter hunger.

There, Nyxara thought, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. There is the splinter. Not of the boy who wondered at the stars, but of the son who hated the father who loved them.

"He was a man of vision," Nyxara continued, pressing the advantage, her voice softening into a dirge like quality that seemed to make the very torches burn lower. "A scholar. A dreamer. He and my father, Eltanar, shared a dream. A future where Astralon and Nyxarion were not master and subject, not predator and prey, but partners. One great tree, its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky. He believed in unity. In a world that could be more than this..." She gestured slightly, encompassing the mutilated constellations above, the skeletal hands, the reek of decay. "...cycle of endless consumption. I mourn his loss. I mourn the potential he represented. The potential that was extinguished with him."

She let the words hang, a tribute and a challenge. Your father dreamed of peace. You have built a throne room of nightmares. Remember him. Remember the ethos of his teachings.

Ryo was silent for a long moment, his expression unreadable. He took a slow, deliberate step closer. The reek preceding him intensified, rot, deep and organic, mingled with the cloying decay of lilies and something else... like stardust left to fester in a sealed tomb.

"My father," Ryo said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, conversational intimacy, "was indeed a brilliant man. His knowledge of celestial mechanics was... unparalleled." He said it like a curse. "He could chart the course of a comet a thousand years hence. He could name every star in a dead constellation." He paused, his void like eyes holding hers, and she saw it then, the deep, abiding resentment of a son forever living in the shadow of a gentle giant, a shadow he had finally eclipsed with absolute darkness. "But he was also a naive fool. He believed in the inherent goodness of things. In honour among kings. In treaties built on handshakes and shared dreams. He believed in a world that could never, will never, exist. It is a luxury of peaceful men to believe in peace." The venom was there now, just beneath the surface, a serpent coiled in his words. "You come here, claiming to honour his legacy, yet you are the living embodiment of everything he failed to understand. You wield power that twists the mind, which harmonizes dissent into obedience. You are not a queen offering peace. You are a predator who has finally realized the herd has grown horns."

The accusation was delivered with a clinical precision that was more damaging than any roar. He was reframing her entire being, her lineage, as a weapon. He was using Shojiki's own ideals to condemn her.

Nyxara did not flinch. The Queen's mask held, though she felt it strain. "You mistake harmony for control, King Ryo. A symphony is not the silencing of instruments, but the unification of their unique voices into something greater. My father taught me that. As I am certain yours tried to teach you." She met his gaze, her own kaleidoscopic eyes swirling with defiant light. "I am not here to repeat the past. I am not my father, and you are not yours. I am here to forge a new path. One that honours Shojiki's dreams without the naivety you accuse him of. One that acknowledges the reality you have built, but offers an alternative to its inevitable, self destructive end."

She took a step forward, closing the distance, a breathtaking act of defiance. Her voice hardened, infused with the unyielding resolve of Polaris certainty.

"Our worlds are bound by stars that are fading. Algol weakens by the hour. Its decay is a mirror to our own mutual destruction. We can stand here in this... palace to despair," she said, her voice ringing through the throne room, "and watch the light die. We can continue to bleed each other dry, until there is nothing left for the scavengers to pick over but frozen bones and ash." She held out her hands, a gesture empty of weapons, full of stark, terrible truth. "Or we can choose to nurture the embers that remain. This is not a surrender. It is a strategic imperative. A cessation of hostilities. An end to the purges. Shared, regulated access to the Skywells. A joint council, Astralon and Nyxarion, its sole purpose to understand Algol's fading. To pool our knowledge, not for conquest, but for survival. For balance."

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She finished, her words echoing faintly in the suffocating silence. The offer was on the table. A queen's gambit laid bare before the Butcher King.

Ryo looked at her for a long, unnerving moment. His face was an unreadable mask, but the void in his eyes churned with a cold, distant fury. He was calculating, weighing her words not for their truth, but for their utility, for the angles of attack they presented. Let him see the logic, she prayed silently. Let the strategist in him override the monster.

Finally, he smiled. It was a thin, cruel thing, devoid of any warmth or humanity, a crack in the mask that showed only more darkness beneath.

"Balance," he repeated, the word a sour, alien note in the dead air. "A poet's notion. The universe understands only one true balance: that between power and submission." He tilted his head, the gesture almost avian. "You offer a sharing of the sky's bounty. You speak of a joint council. These are... interesting proposals. They suggest a certain... flexibility of thought I did not anticipate."

He took a step back, his shadow receding slightly. The respectful mask was back in place, flawless and impenetrable.

"Very well, Queen Nyxara. You have my attention. Let us... discuss the terms of this 'balance'." He gestured with the petrified star wood sceptre toward a low obsidian table to the side of the dais. "Shall we?"

The movement was courteous. The tone was diplomatic. But the words were a lie. Nyxara could feel it in her soul, a chill that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. He had no intention of discussing terms. He was playing a different game entirely, and she had just willingly stepped onto his board. The courteous gesture felt like being offered a seat on the executioner's block.

The true parley was over. The dissection was about to begin.

The low obsidian table was a slab of frozen night, its surface so highly polished it reflected the mutilated constellations above in distorted, nightmare shapes. Nyxara took the seat offered, her movements fluid and deliberate, a queen claiming her place at a board she knew was rigged. Korinakos remained standing a few paces behind her, a tense, silent shadow. Ryo settled into the chair opposite her with an oil smooth grace, placing his petrified star wood sceptre on the table between them like a boundary marker. It was not a tool of office; it was a threat.

For a long moment, the only sound was the soft, rhythmic plink of condensation dripping from the black ice ceiling somewhere in the shadows, a timer counting down in the dark.

"Your proposals are... broad, Queen Nyxara," Ryo began, his voice that same venomous rasp, now modulated into a tone of condescending reason. He steepled his fingers, his gaze fixed on her. "A joint council. Shared access. These are concepts for poets and starry eyed dreamers. Governance requires specifics. It requires... concessions."

Nyxara met his gaze, her own multi hued eyes reflecting the guttering torchlight. The Vega persuasion was still in her voice but now layered with the unyielding hardness of Polaris certainty. She was no longer just an emissary of peace; she was a negotiator stating terms.

"Then let us be specific," she replied, her tone cool and precise. "I propose an immediate and total cessation of all hostilities. The purges in the Warrens and the lower sectors end today. Your black cloaks withdraw to the city's garrison. The 'Hunts' for my people within Astralon's walls cease." She let the first demand hang in the air, a direct challenge to his reign of terror. "Secondly, a formal truce along the Styx River. The current front line becomes a demilitarized zone, monitored by observers from both our nations. No fortifications. No troop movements. A true ceasefire."

Ryo's expression did not change, but the air around him seemed to grow colder, the reek of festering stardust intensifying. He was a statue of calm, but Nyxara could feel the fury radiating from him, a glacial hatred so intense it was a physical pressure. He is not used to being dictated to, she thought, a sliver of cold satisfaction piercing her dread. He expects supplication, not negotiation.

"Third," she continued, pressing her advantage, her voice unwavering, "shared, controlled access to the Skywells. Not a surrender of Astralon's resources, but a regulated sharing. A quota system, managed by the joint council. Your people do not freeze. My people do not starve. The energy is used to sustain both our nations, not to forge weapons aimed at each other's hearts."

She finished, leaving the final, most important term unspoken for now. The air in the throne room felt charged, thick enough to drink. Korinakos had stopped breathing behind her.

Ryo leaned forward slowly, the movement like a glacier calving. The void in his eyes churned. "You ask me," he whispered, the sound slithering across the table, "to open my borders to the very 'demons' my Temple has sworn to eradicate. You ask me to give my enemy a seat at the table of my power. To relinquish control over the very lifeblood of my kingdom." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Each word was a shard of ice, dripping with contempt. "You come into my house, a queen of a broken, starving people, and you dictate terms to me? You underestimate my resolve to protect Astralon from all threats, foreign and domestic. Even those that come cloaked in pretty words and false peace."

There it is, Nyxara thought. The Butcher King, barely concealed beneath the diplomat's mask. She did not retreat. She leaned forward as well, mirroring his posture, closing the distance. The scent of him was overwhelming.

"I ask you to reconsider what truly protects Astralon, King Ryo," she said, her voice losing its melodic quality, becoming sharp and clear as a shard of black ice. "You speak of resolve. I see a man so obsessed with dominating the sky that he is blind to the ground crumbling beneath his feet. Continued war only weakens us both, draining our resources, costing the lives of your own subjects, leaving us hollowed out and vulnerable to greater threats." She paused, letting the implication of Kaustirix hang unspoken between them. "You claim to seek strength, yet strength built solely on the suffering of others is a fragile, brittle thing. It shatters at the first true test. I am not offering weakness. I am offering a different kind of strength. The strength of a system that endures."

She hands herself to me on a silver platter, Ryo's mind hissed, a silent, venomous counterpoint to her words. She stands in the heart of my power, surrounded by the evidence of my absolute control, and she preaches to me about endurance? She believes her words are weapons? that they can chip away at a mountain of ice? How profound her foolishness is. She is a living relic of her father's naivety and my father's fatal softness. They all believed in words. They all learned, too late, actions speak louder than words.

Nyxara saw the flicker in his eyes, the utter, unshakeable disdain. She sensed the vast, unbridgeable chasm between his reality and hers. For a terrifying moment, she felt the sheer futility of her mission. This man was not capable of being reasoned with. He was a singularity of hate. But she had to try. For Eltanar. For Shojiki. For the children crying in the lower sectors.

And so, the battle began.

It was not fought with blades or stellar fire, but with clauses, implications, and fine print. It was a brutal, psychological siege that stretched for hours, measured not by any clock but by the gradual, draining toll it took on them both.

The torches in their skeletal sconces guttered and were replaced by silent, unseen attendants, the new flames casting longer, more desperate shadows that danced across the mutilated heavens above. The constant plinks of freezing water became the metronome to their duel.

Nyxara's throat grew raw. Each breath was a conscious effort, drawing in the toxic air that seemed to thicken with every passing hour. The regal posture she maintained was a suit of armour growing heavier by the minute; a dull ache settled deep between her shoulder blades, and the muscles in her neck corded with tension. Her kaleidoscopic eyes, once bright with resolve, began to feel dry and gritty, as if scoured by the endless, cold negativity radiating from the man across from her. She found herself mentally reaching for the comforting, singular light of Polaris within her, using it as a lodestone to keep her from being pulled into the despair of this place. Every time Ryo twisted a word, every time he proposed a "compromise" that was a blatant trap, it was a psychic blow she had to absorb and deflect. She was not just negotiating; she was constantly reinforcing her own mental shields against a relentless, corrosive presence.

Ryo, for his part, was no less engaged. His mask of calm calculation was a masterpiece of control, but it required immense energy to maintain. A faint sheen of perspiration, invisible in the dim light, had broken out on his brow. The fingers he kept steepled occasionally betrayed a minute tremor, which he would instantly still by pressing them more firmly together. The endless, circular arguing was a kind of torture for a mind that preferred decisive, brutal action. This queen was like grinding water, wearing away at his patience with her infuriating, principled persistence. He was used to commands being obeyed, to threats being met with immediate submission. Her refusal to break, to even acknowledge the fundamental rightness of his power, was a constant, low grade irritant that gnawed at the edges of his focus. He found his jaw clenching so tightly a dull headache began to pulse at his temples. The temptation to simply slam his fist on the table, to summon Vorlag and end this farce, was a rising tide he had to constantly beat back. Patience, he reminded himself, the word a cold mantra. Let her believe she is winning. Let her exhaust herself against the immovable object of your will.

The negotiation became a fractal pattern of attack and parry. Each of her points was met with a counter that was not a refusal, but a perversion. He attempted to twist the joint council into a subordinate body of the Temple, its "observers" being Inquisitors with full authority to root out "stellar corruption." He proposed the "demilitarized zone" be patrolled by his black cloaks alone, to "ensure its neutrality." The Skywell quota, he suggested, should be delivered as raw, unstable energy to the border, where Nyxara's "technicians" could "attempt to harness it if they possessed the skill," a clear setup for an accidental catastrophe he could blame on her incompetence.

Each time, Nyxara retaliated. Her voice grew hoarse, but it never wavered. She reinforced boundaries, clarified language, and defended the integrity of her people with a ferocity that seemed to surprise even him. She was drawing on a deep well of resolve, fuelled by the faces of the starving hungry, the fading light of Betelgeuse warriors, the memory of her father's dream. This was no longer just politics; it was a fight for the soul of her nation, and she would bleed herself dry on this obsidian table before she surrendered it.

Hours bled together. The ache in Nyxara's back was a constant fire. A faint tremor had developed in her left hand, which she hid by folding her hands in her lap. Ryo's replies became fractionally slower, his silences more pronounced as he calculated and recalculated. The civilized veneer was thinning, the pauses between words stretching just a second too long, filled with a humming, hateful tension. They were two master duellists, circling each other in a space of endless night, their energy waning but their wills unbent, each waiting for the other to make a fatal misstep.

Finally, after a particularly brutal circular argument over the definition of "observer," Ryo fell silent. He leaned back in his chair, the movement slightly less fluid than before, a hint of fatigue in the slight slump of his shoulders. He steepled his fingers again, the gesture now looking less like a thoughtful pose and more like a man trying to keep his hands from curling into fists. His void like eyes considered her, and for the first time, she saw something new in them: not agreement, but a cold, calculating assessment of utility. He was not convinced. He was bored. He had measured her resistance and found it… sufficient to warrant a change in tactic. For now.

"You are... persistent," he conceded, the word sounding like an insult dragged from a place of deep irritation. "Your father's daughter, indeed." He paused, drawing out the moment, letting the exhaustion of the hours hang heavy between them. "Very well."

The two words dropped into the silence like stones.

"We will establish a peace along the River Styx," he said, his tone flat, devoid of any triumph or concession. It was a statement of fact, the words of a man ending a tedious business meeting. "The purges will be... suspended. For a probationary period. A joint announcement will be made to the courts of both our nations, declaring a cessation of hostilities and the framework for these... talks."

It was not the whole victory she sought. It was a fragile, temporary, and likely treacherous foothold. But it was more than anyone else had ever gotten from the Butcher King. A flicker of fragile, desperate hope ignited in her chest, so bright and painful it felt like a shard of glass. Her body screamed with relief, but she allowed none of it to show. It is a beginning. A crack in the door.

"These are acceptable terms," Nyxara said, her voice steady, a monumental effort that cost her the last of her strength. She rose, her muscles protesting, a wave of dizziness washing over her that she forced down through sheer will. The audience was over. Korinakos let out a shaky, exhausted breath behind her.

As she turned to leave, Ryo's voice stopped her, slithering across the chamber, the rasp now layered with a newfound weariness that made it somehow more sinister.

"You truly believe this will work?" he asked, the mocking, genuine curiosity now tinged with a flat, drained quality. "You believe a piece of parchment and a few pretty words will end the bloodshed? After all that has been spilled? After all this... effort?"

Nyxara turned back, her silhouette framed by the towering obsidian doors. Her kaleidoscopic eyes met his void like stare one last time. She saw not a king, but a tired, hateful man in a throne room of his own making. The hours of battle had stripped away the myth, leaving only the barren, exhausting reality.

"It is a beginning," she repeated, her expression unreadable, a queen's mask perfected at great cost. "What comes next, whether it is peace or a sharper sword…depends entirely on your choices now, King Ryo. The world is watching."

She did not wait for a reply. She turned and walked towards the doors, her steps slower than when she had entered, each one an effort of will. Korinakos fell in step behind her, his own movements stiff with spent adrenaline. The skeletal sconces seemed to lean in as she passed, their frozen claws straining towards her retreating form.

Ryo did not move. He watched her go, a statue on his dais, the energy required to maintain his facade finally spent. The heavy doors began to grind open, revealing the slightly less oppressive gloom of the antechamber beyond. As the gap widened, the sound of her retreating footsteps, slow and deliberate, echoed faintly in the chamber.

The moment the doors sealed shut with another echoing, final thoom, the polite, interested mask on Ryo's face dissolved. It was wiped away, replaced by an expression of pure, undiluted malice. A cruel, thin smile stretched his lips, a rictus of contempt and profound fatigue. He let his head fall back against the throne, closing his eyes for a second as a wave of utter exhaustion passed over him. The headache at his temples pulsed.

"Pathetic," he muttered into the suffocating silence, the word dripping with a disdain so profound it seemed to stain the very air. It was the exhausted sigh of a master after dealing with a tiresome novice. "So desperate for a kinder world that you walk willingly into the wolf's den and negotiate for your own place on the menu. All that fire... for this. For words I will erase before the ink is dry."

He remained seated on the Obsidian Throne, the smile not fading but deepening, becoming a thing of terrifying promise. The parley was over. The Queen of Nyxarion had played her gambit, and she had left him feeling not threatened, but profoundly, insultingly weary.

And the Butcher King, in his exhaustion, began to plan a downfall that would be swift, absolute, and require no more tedious conversation.

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