The main palace of Wrohan was impressive in the way smaller powers always tried to be when they had spent too long confusing intimidation with magnificence.
It glittered correctly.
That, Arik thought as he stepped out of the private transit corridor and into the main reception level, was perhaps its greatest flaw.
Black-veined marble polished to a mirror gloss. High arches threaded with ether-light filaments instead of ordinary chandeliers, each suspended ring glowing in steady gold-white bands that hummed faintly overhead if one listened closely enough. The walls carried old royal portraits framed beside modern wardplates, their silver inlays pulsing at measured intervals with enough power to maintain security grids, atmospheric regulation, and decorative projection all at once. Even the air had been tuned, temperature-controlled through the palace's central ether core, carrying the expensive neutrality of filtered ventilation over perfume, old money, and political deceit.
Noah took one look around the reception hall and leaned just enough into Arik's orbit to murmur, "I know they want this to feel grand, but it still doesn't compare to the palace you were raised in."
Arik did not look at him.
"No," he said.
That was all.
But Noah heard the rest anyway.
This palace had money. Technology. Defensive architecture polished into diplomatic display. It did not carry the old imperial weight of a place built by people who had never once needed to prove they were the center of the world. Wrohan's palace wanted to impress. The palace Arik had grown up in had expected obedience and considered admiration an aftereffect.
Mezos, at Arik's other side, let his gaze pass once across the room with the cold efficiency of a man already marking exits, hidden security nodes, ether relays, and which sections of the floor would likely lock down first if the palace decided diplomacy had become optional.
"They've increased the internal guard presence," he said quietly. "Not overtly. Just enough to suggest someone is nervous."
"Several someones," Noah muttered.
Arik said nothing.
His attention was elsewhere.
The reception hall was a sea of moving bodies, silk, and shifting scents, but Arik's attention had focused on a single point in the room's tactical geometry. He was not looking at the circling diplomats or the King of Wrohan.
He was searching for a ghost.
"Arik," Mezos said, his voice dropping to a low warning tone. "Three o'clock. Beside the grand conservatory arch."
Arik's gaze followed the direction. There, standing in the shadow of a massive ether projection of the Wrohan crest, was the man who had been avoiding his political corps for three consecutive summits.
Felix Canmore.
Felix stood for one measured beat beneath the projection, one hand resting lightly over the head of his cane, his pale hair catching the gold-white ether glow in a way that would have looked almost saintly to anyone with less sense than instinct. Around him, the room continued its careful motion with nobles speaking in lowered tones, ministers smiling with their teeth hidden, and servants moving along silver-lit tracks with trays balanced steadily despite the pressure gathering in the air.
Arik watched him from across the hall and concluded, with the calm of a man considering a solved equation, that Felix had aged exactly as he deserved: beautifully enough to be trusted, elegantly enough to be forgiven, and not nearly enough to be spared.
Noah went still beside him.
Mezos did not speak again.
Felix moved.
He crossed the distance with the ease of a man accustomed to rooms parting for him before he had to ask. Nobles noticed and shifted almost imperceptibly aside. One minister broke off a sentence mid-word. A councilwoman from the eastern districts lowered her glass and bowed more deeply toward Arik than she had seconds earlier, as though proximity to the moment required better manners. Others followed the instinct. Court protocol, however embellished by modern politics, still had bones. And Arik Oberon Lyon was the Crown Prince of Agaron.
Power recognized power, even when it planned treachery later.
By the time Felix reached him, the air between them had become so taut that even Noah had stopped fidgeting.
Felix halted at the correct distance.
Then he bowed.
Not low. Not enough to insult himself.
Just the head, politely inclined, the exact degree owed by a man of great domestic standing to the heir of a greater empire. It was perfectly measured, publicly irreproachable…
And Arik did not return it.
He stood with one hand in the pocket of his black formal coat, gold-threaded insignia catching the ether light only when he moved, which he did not. He merely looked down at Felix Canmore, with that old, cold stillness that had once made generals fall silent in campaign tents and enemies understand, too late, that mercy had never truly entered the room.
Felix lifted his head and saw the smile.
Not Arik's usual one.
Not the polished, princely variation he wore for diplomats and negotiations and state dinners where entire economies depended on whether he looked amused or bored.
No.
This one was colder. Older. Sharp in a way that belonged not to courts but to pyres and battlefields and a throne carved out of survival. A smile that, rather than warming his face, revealed the person hidden beneath it.
Goliath.
Felix froze.
The light purple of his eyes seemed to fracture. In that singular, terrifying expression, he saw not a twenty-five-year-old prince, but the man he had poisoned sixty years ago. He saw the Alpha, whose ether channels he had personally helped burn to ash. He saw the ghost that had finally come to collect its debt.
Arik leaned in, his voice a low, lethal whisper that carried only to Felix's ears.
"Sixty years," Arik murmured, the gold in his eyes flaring like a dying star. "Sixty years of planning, of hiding, of pretending you had finally cut the head off the snake."
Felix's breath caught, and the scent of the gala's mixed pheromones and perfumes was quickly replaced by the odor of ancient ash and ozone.
"And yet," Arik continued, his smile widening into something truly monstrous, "here you are. Still bowing your head to me. Still playing the servant to a master you thought you'd buried in the dirt."
Felix's fingers trembled against the silver head of his cane. The realization struck him with the force of a physical blow: the Nurian Sovereign had not died. He had simply waited for the vessel to catch up with the soul.
"You..." Felix's voice was a mere shadow of itself, stripped of its usual poisonous grace.
"Don't look so surprised, Felix," Arik said, straightening his posture until he seemed to tower over the Canmore patriarch. "You should have known. Some fires don't go out just because you choke them."