"Any sign of her yet?"
The question settled over the study like a weight, pressing against the silence until the room seemed to shrink around them.
"No, Your Grace. The perimeter guards have tracked her as far as the eastern treeline, but the rain last night... it washed out the trail completely. We have men patrolling the lower villages. They are still searching, but she has vanished."
A heavy, exhausting silence settled back into the room.
Duke Harlan Elsher didn’t rage. He didn’t slam his fists on the desk or throw his crystal decanter against the brick hearth, though lesser men certainly would have cracked under this kind of pressure. Instead, he just sat there. Quite still. He looked out the high, arched windows of his study, watching the grey morning mist roll lazily over the peaks that marked the edge of his territory.
Slowly, Harlan turned his gaze away from the glass, his eyes fixing upon the man standing across the room. Ferris, his aide, remained frozen. He stood with his hands clasped tightly behind his back.
The Elshers had always been the Empire’s shield. For three generations, they had worn that loyalty like heavy armor, swallowing down the bitterest pills and executing the most dangerous, politically inconvenient directives without a single murmur of dissent. If the Crown commanded it, the Elshers delivered. It was a simple, brutal equation: sacrifice for the greater good of the realm, and in return, their people survived. There was no room for personal hesitation when the fate of humanity hung in such a delicate balance.
Apparently, his daughter didn’t share the same principle.
When the imperial decree had arrived, naming the House of Elsher as the one to provide the sacrificial lamb, the human bride meant to seal the shaky, blood-soaked truce with the Demon King, Hevira hadn’t even blinked. At least, not at first. She had smiled her perfect, court-trained smile and accepted the congratulations of the nobility with grace. Harlan had truly believed, perhaps naively, that his daughter understood the weight of the Elsher name. He thought she knew what was required of her blood.
Then came the cracks in the facade.
Within a month, the compliance mutated into sheer panic. It started with quiet tears, then escalated to screeching tantrums about the "monsters across the rift." Then came the escape attempts. The first time, she had tried to bribe a stable boy. The second time, she had disguised herself as a laundry maid.
By the third attempt, Harlan’s patience had finally snapped. He had done what any responsible lord faced with a diplomatic nightmare would do: he locked her in the highest tower room, stripping away her liberties until the vows could be spoken. He had genuinely thought the bars on the windows would be enough to hold her.
How deeply, thoroughly disappointing she had turned out to be.
But Hevira’s cowardice wasn’t even the bitterest pill Harlan was currently forcing himself to swallow. No, that honor belonged to his son.
Knowing his daughter’s habit of disappearing without warning, Harlan had taken what he assumed was the ultimate precaution. He had assigned Haviel, his stoic, perfectly dependable son, to guard Hevira personally during those final, critical hours. Haviel was supposed to be the fail-safe.
Yet, somehow, through some staggering display of incompetence or soft-heartedness, Hevira had vanished right out from under his nose. And the truth, when it finally dragged itself into the light, was far worse than a simple lapse in security. Haviel hadn’t been tricked. Haviel had opened the door himself.
So be it, Harlan thought, his jaw tightening until the bone ached. If his son truly couldn’t bear the thought of his precious sister being shipped off to the demon realm to secure the peace, then the alternative was already written in blood.
A child of Elsher had to cross that border. If not the daughter, then the son. Haviel had made his bed the moment he opened that door for Hevira, and now he was the one sitting in the back of a demonic carriage as the bride. No one in this household was permitted to turn away from their responsibilities.
And frankly, they should be more than grateful that the Demon King didn’t seem to mind the change of plans.
"Keep searching for her," he commanded.
"Yes, Your Grace," Ferris said without hesitation.
Then Ferris shifted his weight, the leather of his boots creaking softly against the heavy rug. He cleared his throat, breaking the suffocating quiet. "Your Grace... if I may speak freely?"
"You usually do, Ferris. Speak."
"Is it... is it truly wise to let the young master proceed like this? To replace Lady Hevira?" Ferris asked, his voice betraying a rare sliver of genuine hesitation. "The Demon King expected a bride. Can Lord Haviel truly fulfill what was originally intended? Can he handle a role meant for his sister?"
"Why do you keep asking me the same question, Ferris?" Harlan interrupted, his voice dropping an octave, cold and flat. "You asked this very same thing before the carriage even left the courtyard. You asked it while the high priest was validating the proxy sigils. And now, after the wedding is already finalized, you are still asking."
Harlan turned his head slowly, his grey eyes pinning his aide to the spot. "It is becoming an entirely useless exercise, don’t you think? They are married. The treaty is signed. What is done, is done. Reversing it now serves absolutely no purpose."
Ferris dipped his head, though he didn’t look entirely cowed by the rebuke. "I only worry, sir. Don’t you think Lord Haviel seemed... different. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something unsettling about his demeanor."
Harlan didn’t answer immediately because, quite frankly, inside his own mind, he couldn’t disagree with his aide’s assessment. Haviel’s behavior had been... bizarre. To say the least.
The boy had always been a rock. Composed, predictable, and remarkably dependable, he handled everything with quiet precision.. But in those final hours? He had been entirely unraveled. Agitated. Distressed.
Not to mention how he was muttering absolute nonsense under his breath.
But to Harlan, a fractured mind was a secondary issue. The real problem, the only problem that mattered now, was whether Haviel could pull himself together long enough to survive the Demon Realm. He had the Elsher training. He had the intellect. If he could just adapt to the hostile environment and perform the basic duties of a diplomatic hostage, the Empire would remain safe. The rest was just noise.
Harlan stood up, the heavy chair scraping against the floorboards with a sharp whine. He smoothed the front of his doublet, the absolute picture of a man who had already moved past the crisis and into the clean-up phase.
"We are done discussing the marriage, Ferris," Harlan said, walking toward the double doors of the study. He stopped just before the threshold, his back to his aide, his silhouette framed against the dim hallway. "Our primary focus now is the rogue element."
He paused, the air in the room turning distinctly colder.
"We need to bring Hevira back. Find her, by whatever means necessary." Harlan didn’t turn around, but there was something in his voice that made Ferris’s spine go completely straight. "When she is found, I intend to teach my daughter a very thorough, permanent lesson about the exact consequences of abandoning her mission."