Malakar's viewpoint.
The city of Kaldrath sprawled beneath the rooftop where I crouched, thousands of mortal lives going about their small, temporary concerns entirely unaware of how close they currently stood to something that could unmake every one of them without noticing the effort. I had watched cities like this burn before, on my master's orders, and felt nothing beyond the distant satisfaction of a task completed correctly.
I felt something now. I wasn't entirely certain what to call it.
Lukas Gigonos moved through the streets below with a deliberate, careful mundanity that would have fooled nearly anyone — anyone who hadn't personally felt the true weight of what lay beneath that disguise, pressed against a barrier of light in a forest outside Valoria, and understood immediately that they were nowhere close to his equal.
My master had ordered me to watch. Learn what he wants. Learn what he fears, if such a thing exists in him at all. Simple enough instructions, in theory. In practice, three weeks of observation had produced a portrait of a being I found myself, against every instinct my centuries of servitude should have preserved, genuinely unable to categorize as a threat in the way my master clearly assumed him to be.
He'd sparred with a noble heir today and pulled every strike short of what would have ended the match in a single motion. He'd shared unsolicited advice with the boy afterward, entirely without benefit to himself. He spent his evenings not plotting or accumulating power, but reading — old texts, dusty histories, alongside a disgraced scholar who clearly had no idea what she'd stumbled into.
This was not the behavior of something hunting for conquest.
I had served my master since before this kingdom existed in its current form, bound to him through means I no longer fully remembered the specifics of, only the cold, absolute certainty that defiance meant a suffering considerably worse than death. I did not question orders. Questioning had never once, in three centuries, produced anything but pain.
And yet. Watching Lukas Gigonos walk through a crowded market that afternoon, buying fruit from a vendor and lingering to ask about her children with what appeared to be genuine, unforced interest, I found myself questioning anyway, quietly, in the part of my mind my master's binding couldn't quite reach.
What, exactly, had my master lost three hundred years ago, in whatever war had shattered his crown and exiled him to a realm without sun? And what, exactly, did he think this man — barely more than a stranger to this world, however absurd his power — actually represented, that he would risk exposure by sending me to test him directly rather than simply waiting, patiently, the way we had waited three centuries for everything else?
I didn't have an answer. I only had my orders, and the growing, uncomfortable awareness that following them faithfully might, for the first time in three hundred years, require me to do something I found myself reluctant to do.
Below, Lukas paused mid-step, and for one heart-stopping instant, I was certain he'd sensed me — the same way he had in the forest, the same instant, unnerving awareness of a threat he shouldn't have been able to detect through my concealment. But he only glanced upward briefly, almost thoughtfully, before continuing on his way, giving no further sign that anything had registered at all.
He knows I'm here, I thought, with something that might have been respect if I'd allowed myself the luxury of the emotion. He's simply decided I'm not worth confronting yet.
I settled back into the shadows and continued watching, turning my master's orders over in my mind like a stone worn smooth from too much handling. Learn what he wants. Learn what he fears.
I was beginning to suspect the second question might be considerably more interesting to answer than my master expected — and considerably more dangerous for all of us, myself included, once I finally had a real answer to give him.