Two days felt like a strange unit of time to plan around, when Helios still wasn’t entirely sure how long a day out here was supposed to last, let alone whether Elysia’s calendar matched anything he remembered from before the headset.
The Council convened at midmorning, all five seats filled for the first time since the Broodmother, and Helios found himself grateful for the excuse to simply sit and listen for once instead of reacting to whatever the world threw at him next.
“Before Vellmarch’s delegation arrives,” Seraphina said, unrolling a hand-drawn map across the table that Helios hadn’t known existed until this exact moment, “it would serve you to understand what you’re actually negotiating with, Your Majesty. And what surrounds it.”
The map covered considerably more ground than Rexnest’s borders.
Aldrenhal sat near the bottom edge, a small marked circle among a scattering of others, rivers and ridgelines threading between them like veins, whole stretches left deliberately blank where nobody had bothered filling in what they didn’t actually know.
“This is Elysia,” Seraphina said.
“Or the portion of it we have reliable information on, which is considerably less than all of it.”
Helios leaned over the map, tracing a finger along the ridge line Vessa had mentioned.
“How much of this has anyone actually walked?”
“Honestly? Not much, this early. Most domains are still consolidating their own borders.” Seraphina tapped a cluster of markings well north of the ridge, deep amber ink that looked older than the rest, as if it had been redrawn from memory rather than fresh scouting.
“But some things were already known before Rexnest existed at all. The Ashen Dominion sits here, roughly nine days’ hard travel north. Vellmarch, three days, exactly where Vessa said. And further east, past a mountain range none of us have named yet, there are reports of something the old records simply call the Sunken Court.”
“Old records,” Helios repeated carefully.
“How old?”
“Older than they should be, Your Majesty, given how young this world apparently is. I don’t have a better answer than that yet.”
Kaelen, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, hadn’t said a word since the meeting started, which Helios had learned by now to treat as its own kind of information.
“Setting the maps aside for a moment,” Helios said, deciding to steer somewhere he could actually get real answers rather than more careful, half-finished ones, “I still don’t fully understand the races out here. I know the elf lineages. I met one Stonekin yesterday. What else is there?”
That got a genuine reaction out of the fourth council seat, an older Dark Elf named Vashen who handled trade and had said almost nothing all morning.
“Depends how far you’re willing to travel to find out, Your Majesty. Stonekin build in stone and metal, live long, trade honestly more often than not. Further south, past territory none of us have mapped, the old stories mention Kindred Beasts, people built along animal lines, though I’ve never met one myself to confirm it. And humans, apparently, though nobody at this table has seen one who wasn’t a Founder wearing an elf’s face by choice.”
“Humans exist here. Actually here, not just as Founders.” Helios sat back, turning that over.
“As their own people, I mean. Not just us, pretending.”
“So the old records claim,” Vashen said.
“Whether that’s still true is a different question.”
Seraphina’s expression didn’t shift, but something in the set of her shoulders did, subtle enough that Helios doubted anyone but Kaelen would have caught it too.
“We’re speculating on very old information, Your Majesty. I’d rather give you certainty than guesses, when I have it to give.”
“I’d rather have the guesses than nothing,” Helios said.
“I’ve had enough of nothing this week.”
That earned him the faintest suggestion of a smile from her, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
The rest of the meeting moved into more practical territory: what Rexnest actually had worth trading, what Vellmarch might want in return, how Helios’s own evolving abilities interacted with the domain’s broader classification on paper. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Vashen explained, patiently and only once, that a character’s lineage set the outer shape of what evolutions were even possible, that levels and EXP filled that shape in gradually, and that abilities were simply what a person’s specific journey through that shape happened to produce along the way.
It was the closest thing to a clean explanation Helios had gotten yet, and he found himself wishing someone had simply said all of it plainly, in one sitting, days ago.
By the time the Council adjourned, the map stayed unrolled on the table, and Helios found he didn’t want it put away just yet.
He stood over it a while longer after the others filed out, tracing borders that weren’t his, place names he’d never heard until an hour ago, feeling the shape of a world that had apparently been going on quietly around him this entire time, indifferent to whether he’d noticed it or not.
Seraphina lingered by the door rather than leaving with the others.
“You’re troubled.”
“I built a kingdom thinking I understood the game I was playing,” Helios said.
“I’m starting to think I understood maybe one corner of it.”
“Most kings never learn even that much,” she said.
“For what it’s worth.”
He looked up at her, and for a moment neither of them said anything else, the quiet stretching just slightly longer than a purely professional silence usually did.
“Get some rest, Your Majesty,” she said finally, breaking it first.
“Vellmarch arrives in two days. You’ll want to be more than presentable.”
She was gone before he could decide whether that had sounded like advice or something else entirely, and Helios stood alone with the map a while longer, listening to her footsteps fade down the corridor, wondering how many other things she wasn’t quite saying outright either.