Astelion POV
The screaming didn't stop when I left.
It followed me. Down the winding, stone hallways, bouncing off the damp, masonry. It leaked through the thick palace walls and settled deep into the very marrow of my bones. My ears rang with the agonizing, muffled groans of the royal guards who were currently dying behind those heavy iron doors. It was a brutal, unrelenting reminder Castel shadow loomed over every square inch of this kingdom.
By the time I reached the winding stairs leading down to the servant quarters, my vision was blurring, the edges going dark and hazy. I slammed heavily into the double oak kitchen doors, my hand gripping my chest right over my racing heart. My breath came too fast, too sharp, tearing at the back of my throat.
Breathe. Just breathe.
But I couldn't. Because all I could hear, echoing in the quiet, terrified spaces of my mind, was the sound of those men suffocating. And right beneath that horror, triggering an entirely different kind of panic, was the phantom sensation of Kiono's mouth crushing against mine. I could still feel the desperate, unhinged heat of his hands pinning me, the weight of his massive body, and the terrifying, beautiful certainty of us together. The sheer whiplash of the last hour moving from a public execution to a desperate, bruising confession of love, from feeling totally betrayed to being utterly consumed by passion was a weight that threatened to fracture me completely.
I shut my eyes tight, leaning my forehead against the cold wood of the door.
Get it together, Astelion. You cannot let them see you shake.
The doors creaked open slightly behind me under my weight. I forced my spine to straighten into a rigid line, burying the chaos of my heart beneath a mask of absolute, icy calm. I took one final, ragged breath, and stepped inside.
The shift in the atmosphere was instantaneous.
The low, familiar hum of kitchen magic froze. Not slowly, not fading out, but instantly.
Every single head turned. Dozens of eyes maids, cooks, scullery boys locked onto me. The silence lasted for the space of a single heartbeat, and then the whispers started. They spread through the damp heat of the room like a virus, low and frantic.
"That's her—" "She's actually alive—" "They said she was dragged to the courtyard—" "I heard the king himself tore the arena apart—" "Astelion?"
Through the frozen crowd, a figure broke free. Lilly came running toward me, her apron fluttering, her face pale with terror. She was moving fast. Too fast. She didn't care about the stares of the nobility-born servants around us. She threw herself forward and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck, squeezing me like she had been holding her breath for hours and had only just found oxygen.
"I thought you were dead!" Lilly cried into my shoulder, her voice trembling. She pulled back just enough to let her hands frantically scan my arms, my face, and my shoulders, her palms smoothing over the fabric as if searching for hidden stab wounds or broken bones. "I heard the screaming coming all the way from the walls... I thought they were executing you—I thought—"
"They weren't mine." My voice came out steady. Too steady. It was the detached, hollow voice of a girl who had spent her entire childhood learning how to survive monsters, a voice that didn't belong to a simple palace maid. "They were the guards."
The entire kitchen went utterly, breathlessly silent. Lilly froze, her fingers tightening on my sleeves, her eyes widening to dinner plates as the horrific weight of my words sank into the room. A collective shudder seemed to pass through the servants. Then, with a soft, trembling sob, Lilly buried her face back into my neck and hugged me again. Tighter this time.
I actually held her back, letting my gloved hands anchor her to me, burying my face for a brief second into her shoulder to catch my bearings. But my eyes weren't soft. They remained wide open, staring over her shoulder at the sea of pale faces watching my every move. I was already looking past the steam rising from the massive copper pots. I was already calculating the fallout, thinking about Castel's next move, and wondering how much time Kiono and I actually had left before the ice broke entirely.
Lilly pulled away completely, her gaze dropping to take in the sight of me. The relief on her face slowly morphed into deep confusion, her brows furrowing. "...Why are you dressed like that?"
I followed her gaze down to my own torso, blinking as if noticing it for the first time. The crisp lines, the expensive fabric, and the empty, ornate sheath hanging at my hip—the very one that had held Aheem's double-bladed purple spear before I had let it clatter against the courtyard stones.
"Oh," I murmured softly, the word tasting strange on my tongue. Right. I wasn't wearing a stained maid's apron anymore. I looked like a soldier. I looked like a killer.
Behind us, the kitchen slowly, hesitantly restarted. The suspended water crashed into the sinks, the knives resumed their rhythmic chopping, and the steam began to rise again. But the rhythm was entirely wrong. It was too quiet. Too acutely, painfully aware. The servants weren't watching me like a low-born, clumsy girl who scrubbed floors anymore. They were looking at me like I was an unpredictable variable.
Something dangerous.
I took a step forward, wanting nothing more than to wash the courtyard dust from my hands and break the suffocating tension, but I bumped directly into a solid shoulder.
The maid didn't move out of the way. She turned slowly, her posture. It was the girl from the high-born house who had spent the last two weeks making sure I received the heaviest lifting details. She looked me up and down, her eyes lingering with venom on the gold trim of my uniform before a sharp, ugly smirk pulled at the corner of her lips. "I see you survived," she said, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness. A heavy, mocking beat passed between us. "I guess you think you deserve to be here now."
She turned on her heel to walk away, dismissing me, but a dark, freezing clarity washed over my mind. The fear, the exhaustion, the panic from earlier—it all hardened into a single, sharp point of focus. Before she could take a second step, I reached out. My fingers clamped around her wrist like a steel vice.
Hard.
The entire kitchen paused for a second time, the sudden clatter of a dropped pan emphasizing the silence.
"So this was your doing?" I asked calmly, my voice smooth as silk, completely devoid of anger. She was the one who had slipped the note to the guards. She was the one who had made sure the captain's men found me out of place, ensuring I would be dragged to the arena for Castel's amusement. She had tried to have me slaughtered.
The maid tried to wrench her arm back, but my grip didn't give an inch. Her eyes widened slightly at the sheer physical strength behind my hold, but she forced her smirk back into place, laughing a high, mocking sound. "You should be thanking me," she sneered, leaning her face close to mine so only I could hear the venom. "You got exactly what you wanted, didn't you? You got noticed."
Lilly frantically tugged at the fabric of my sleeve, her face entirely devoid of color. "Astelion, please... just leave it alone. Let's just go."
I didn't move a single millimeter. I kept my gaze locked onto the girl's face. "Tell me," I said, my voice dropping an octave, carrying the dangerous, quiet resonance of the telekinetic currents humming just beneath the surface of my skin. "Was it you?"
The maid violently wrenched her wrist from my grip this time, stepping back and turning fully to face me, her eyes cold and sharp as needles. "Look around you," she said loudly, gesturing grandly to the vaulted ceilings and the sprawling, crystalline architecture of the palace kitchens. "To all of this. Everyone here belongs to a fallen or minor house of nobility. We have bloodlines." Her smile widened, showing her teeth, dripping with bitter malice. "And you... you are a nameless, low-born nothing."
I let a small, soft smile touch my lips. It was a cold, expression, one that Kiono would have recognized instantly as a warning sign. "I thought nobility had class," I said, taking a deliberate step forward into her personal space, crowding her until she was forced to tilt her head back just to maintain eye contact. "But here you are... standing in a kitchen, acting like pure trash."
The room went dead silent. You could hear the literal crackle of the wood snapping in the massive hearths.
The maid's breath hitched, the color instantly draining from her cheeks. "...Say that again," she whispered, her hands clenching into fists at her sides.
I leaned in slightly, my eyes boring into hers, letting her see the complete lack of fear in my expression. "If the shoe fits—"
"Let it go, Lady Tanya," a second maid stepped into the fray, placing a firm, patronizing hand on the first one's shoulder. She looked at me, her lips curling into a sickening, knowing smirk that made my stomach turn. "It's not her fault she had to spread her legs for the Captain of the Guard to get out of scrubbing floors." She let out a soft, mocking hum, crossing her arms over her chest. "But honestly? Smart choice on her part." She glanced toward the grand hallway I had just come from, her eyes glinting with a disgusting insinuation. "Kiono was a good pick for a common whore."
A wave of soft, ugly laughter rippled through the surrounding cluster of girls, names of minor houses whispered under their breath as they giggled behind their hands.
For a split second, the image of Kiono hit me—not the cold captain from the courtyard, but the man who had just dropped heavily to both knees on the dusty stone floor of a public hallway, swearing his entire life and his grandmother's soul to me while the screams of dying men echoed around us. The memory of his large hands tracing my waist, his raw desperation, his absolute devotion against the white silk sheets. They thought I was a casual plaything he used to pass the time. They thought he was a prize I had traded my dignity for.
I laughed too.
The sound burst from my throat, light, airy, and entirely unhinged, cutting through their giggles like a razor blade. The laughter around the room died instantly as the maids stared at me, their smiles faltering.
Then—I stopped laughing.
"You know..." I said slowly, letting my gaze drift lazily over both of them, my voice smooth and dropping to a dangerous whisper. "If you were jealous that he wouldn't even look in your direction... you could've just said that."
Silence fell over the kitchen like a heavy iron guillotine.
"Because," I continued, my voice terrifyingly calm as I took one more step, the air around my fingers beginning to shimmer with invisible pressure, "I was under the impression that nobility didn't beg for the scraps of trash."
The air in the room snapped, the temperature plummeting.
And then, it came.
Castel.
The kitchen didn't just shake the entire world seemed to collapse inward.
A catastrophic, monstrous wave of pure, psychic pressure tore through the thick palace walls, radiating outward from the distant eastern courtyard like a shockwave. It wasn't a physical tremor it was the weight of an absolute monarch's unchecked rage made manifest. Heavy copper pots and iron pans slammed violently to the ground from their hooks. Glass jars filled with spices and preserved fruits shattered into millions of sparkling, dangerous shards, raining down onto the stone.
Every single maid, cook, and servant dropped instantly to the floor. They were gasping, choking, their hands clawing desperately at their own throats as if an invisible, hand had plunged into their chests and crushed the air straight out of their lungs. The pressure was unbearable, a suffocating, dense gravity that turned the room into a chamber of pure, weeping agony. People were collapsing over tables, their bodies shaking as they tried to find a single pocket of oxygen.
Except for me.
I stood completely upright in the exact center of the chaos.
Still. Breathing normally. Entirely unaffected.
My own telekinetic currents, the hidden power I had spent my entire life masking and containing, rose instinctively to meet the king's pressure, creating a perfect, invisible shield around my skin. I didn't even blink as the psychic storm rolled over the room, shattering the remaining glassware against the counters. While the two maids who had just insulted my name fell hard to their knees at my feet, crying out in pain, shaking, and barely able to draw a single scrap of oxygen, I just stood there and watched them.
One of them the girl who had called me a whore looked up at me through a veil of panicked tears, her face twisted in a mask of absolute, terror.
Because I wasn't reacting. I wasn't fighting the King's magic, nor was I suffocating under the weight of his power. I was standing perfectly still inside the absolute eye of his monstrous storm like it belonged to me. Like I understood the power and the current of it. Like I was a part of the very fabric of this world, completely unbothered by the god who ruled it.
Two full minutes passed. Two minutes of glass rattling, metal vibrating, and high-born women weeping and gasping at my boots.
Then as abruptly as it had arrived it stopped.
The crushing pressure evaporated into nothingness, leaving the kitchen a disaster of coughing, wheezing, and violently shaking bodies. No one spoke. No one dared to even lift their chin from the stone floor. The silence was thick with the smell of spilled vinegar and broken glass.
The two maids stumbled frantically to their feet, their knees knocking together, holding onto each other's uniforms like they might slide into a bottomless abyss if they let go. Without casting a single, solitary glance in my direction, they fled through the back doors of the pantry, sobbing under their breath.
Slowly, deliberately, I turned back around.
Lilly was still on the floor. She was on her knees, her hands resting flat against the damp stone, staring straight up at me. But her face didn't hold relief. It didn't hold the warmth or the happiness of seeing her friend survive the king's wrath.
It held pure, cold fear.
Because in that horrifying, silent moment, Lilly finally understood the truth. I wasn't just a clever, lucky maid who had somehow managed to survive a close encounter with a tyrant. I was someone the King's monstrous, god-like power couldn't break.
And in a palace built entirely on submission that was the most dangerous thing of all.