The throne of the First Deathsinger shattered. Bones carved and worked upon for centuries were reduced to shards from a single word.
Break.
I shuddered at the command but stayed firm. The very volume we had used to sway Yethyr had been turned against us. He had used the throne’s own voices to sing itself apart. It had been a risky improvisation, a last-ditch effort.
Clever.
Realizing he could not win against the throne, he instead chose to remove it from play. It pained me to lose such a sudden and unexpected ally, but I was cheered up by the fact that it would pain him too.
After all, he had just destroyed the chair he was sitting in.
Yethyr tumbled unceremoniously to the hard floor. His strange frail bones screamed at the fall, but Yethyr himself didn’t make so much as a grunt.
He jerked himself back to his feet to find the whole room staring.
The silence was deafening.
“Something wrong with your chair, brother?” Yugrir laughed.
“Very wrong,” Yethyr said softly, but his words carried throughout the hall. “It is an affront to Maethe. It just tried to kill us all.”
“The chair is dangerous now?” Yugrir laughed harder and the room joined in.
Yethyr sighed. He had just saved all their lives and they were laughing.
“What humors you so!” The King roared and the laughter ceased. “That is a throne of the foulest demon worshippers Heaven has ever known! And you doubt its deadliness? Are we to grow stupid as well as fat at this feast?” The room grew uncomfortably silent, but the King cheerfully pretended not to notice. “What a blessed sight we have all witnessed. The destruction of a weapon of Hell. A throne of death, broken at our mere touch.”
“Broken at the weight of his arrogance, maybe,” a hunter in the crowd huffed. In the silence of that acoustic hall, his words were deafening. Everyone looked at him and after hours of drinking, defensiveness made him only speak louder.
“Even a city of necromancers rejects you, Skeleton Prince! What gives you the right to the spoils of this city!” He stumbled toward Jaetheiri. “Venerated Victor, I challenge you for what belongs to the Host of Heaven.” He drew his red blade. “Weeping Fang, no, Founding Fang of Maethe. I dedicate this glory to you!”
I trembled. Those ancient words seemed to thrum through me. Yethyr had said something similar right before he had activated the Death Circle. All those lives, all that death. It filled me with grief; it filled me with shameful hunger.
I was not the only one hungry. Jaetheiri was just reaching for the roasted wing of some bird when the challenge was issued. She huffed in annoyance.
“If you’re presently occupied, would you prefer I deal with this?” Yethyr asked her mildly.
The confidence in the challenger evaporated at the very suggestion.
“No.” Jaetheiri straightened. “If someone is foolish enough to interrupt my dinner, they deserve to suffer the consequences.” She unsheathed her warfang. The archer who killed my father had once wielded that blade. The sight of it filled me with distaste.
She turned toward her challenger and swung in the same motion. It was so fast that she had decapitated his head before he had even moved to parry.
Jaetheiri sheathed her blade before his head stopped rolling down the steps.
“Conquering Fang of Maethe,” she said hollowly. “I dedicate this morsel to you. May we both eat in peace.”
She returned to her chair and her unfinished plate.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The party hastily returned to revelry, no one even bothering to remove the body at the steps. Demons below, the Brinn were strange.
“You kill without joy, woman,” said a voice. “It is unbecoming.”
“Thank you for the correction, Master,” Jaetheiri said neutrally.
Yethyr turned to the speaker and I was very glad he did. I wanted a good long look at this man who apparently trained the only person to so far best me in a swordfight.
His name was Ettisar. The name came so quickly to Yethyr’s mind, that I might as well have felt the man touch my hilt himself.
He sat proud and straight across from Jaetheiri, a picture of the perfect Brinn hunter.
His black curls were pulled back into a tight ponytail revealing hard blue eyes, bushy eyebrows and an impeccable goatee, just starting to grey. His blackscale shoulder pads were adorned with dozens of red broken warfang tips that sang of a lifetime of duels, all won.
“Joyless or not, watching is always a good lesson,” Yugrir said cheerfully.
“Don’t take lessons from her, my prince,” Ettisar said. “Your form is already more precise than hers was.”
Yugrir beamed. “Thank you, Master.”
“It is good to finally train a prince.” Ettisar stretched performatively. “That was what I agreed to do after all. I wasn’t put on this earth to train a whore—”
“You trained a Victor of the Oredreirium,” Yethyr said sharply, and his sudden smile was just as sharp. “Your legacy is assured. Even if all else fades, you will always be known as having taught such a legend.”
Ettisar glared at Yethyr resentfully and the Prince’s smile widened.
Oh, they hated each other. Pure hate was a new sensation from Yethyr. His foul passions were usually complicated concoctions filled with softer things like affection and colder things like fear.
His loathing of Ettisar was refreshing in its simplicity. He wanted to kill him; he had wanted to for a long time. The murderous intent was almost righteous in its purity. This was a man I could probably convince him to swing me at right now.
Interesting.
“It must be interesting finally being in Datrea.” Yugrir was saying to Jaetheiri. “Your grandfather was Datrean, right?”
Jaetheiri shrugged. “He was no Tezem of mine; it matters not.”
“Stop looming over dinner, my son.” The King spoke over them. “Let us get you a new chair.”
“No need. I’m off to duel three dozen master arcanists alone,” he said drily. “I will waste no more time. Lady Jaetheiri, come to me…” he caught her mid-chew. She gave him a murderous glare as if he had personally betrayed her by the very suggestion.
“…when you’ve had your fill.”
He left the hall. It was all he could do not to speed up his tempo and run.
The moment he was out of the palace, he moved to the left, out of view of the festivities, and sagged against the wall.
It sang haunting broken stonesong only I could hear. Yethyr could only hear the dull beat of the drums the party danced to.
He shut his eyes, deliberately focusing on the rhythm. He did not want to think of his father or the throne or the massacre that had almost happened in the hall.
Instead, he fixated on the drums. The sound they made did not quite reach the frequency of deathsong, but it was close. Yethyr idly wondered if he could push the spirit of whatever creature that had gone into the drum’s stretched-tanned hides to ever so slightly change the pitch. He could possibly turn the entire rhythm to deathsong in a moment.
It would be an interesting experiment to try. Later. He decided, with a self-depreciating sort of humor, that he was done almost killing the festivities for one day.
He groaned. He was trying not to think about that.
“My prince.”
Yethyr cracked open an eye to see Jaetheiri offering the roasted leg of some small creature. “You stormed out before taking your fill.”
He took the leg and bit into it without a word. Salt, blood, and warmth filled his mouth. The taste on his tongue was glorious! I was so delighted I urged on his hunger without noticing.
Yethyr noticed.
“Ravenous thing,” he muttered to me in Datrean as he took another bite.
No more than you, Yethyr, I almost said.
“What was that, my prince?”
“Nothing. Thank you. I much prefer eating out here. It has a better view.”
Jaetheiri looked at the bloody palace steps, desolate and littered with corpses.
“Of course.”
They stewed in silence, the only sound being drums and Yethyr’s chewing.
“That could have gone worse,” Jaetheiri said at last.
The Prince sighed. “How exactly could that have gone worse?”
“At least he gave you permission to take the aeromancers.”
“He most certainly did not.” Yethyr spat. “He gave me permission to ask for them. ‘If they can spare any’ were his words. Do you think Aesherri is likely to spare any? For me?”
“She hates you,” Jaetheiri said sagely.
“I noticed.” Yethyr started down the palace steps. “Let’s go pester her anyway.”
Thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate all the support I have gotten during the transition to move this story to Royal Road. Do tell me what you think! I love comments and often respond to them
I will be posting a chapter every day until July 30, 2025. Make sure to follow the story and come back to read more!
The First Prince does not appear to be very popular. Why do you think that is?
