The Seat of Knives
Zyrean
Hell had shifted around him.
The moment the Citadel gates cracked open and Lucien spoke his true name, everything changed. The air thickened. The walls remembered. Power—ancient and territorial had stirred beneath the obsidian bones of the realm like a creature waking from centuries of silence.
I felt it the moment we crossed the threshold.
Not just recognition but in allegiance.
It rippled through the halls like heat, slow and consuming, latching onto Lucien’s footsteps as if the stones themselves sought penance for forgetting him. No one said it aloud, but the Citadel had not opened for a prince. It had opened for a king.
And yet, Lucien hadn’t lingered.
He’d spoken barely a word since entering—his voice colder now, laced with that devil’s indifference t
