Standing at the altar of the Great House of Prayer, the Envoy felt the invisible steam of ten thousand prayers funneling into his palm. It was a delicious heavyweight. In his mind, he was already composing the report to the Center.
"Another soul tethered, another set of eyes added to the Emperor’s glorious, all-seeing tapestry! Hehe, " he silently sneered.
The blessing was, after all, the ultimate divine leash, and the Envoy took a professional's pride in its seamless tightening.
But then, he touched Kael Valerius.
The moment his palm met the boy’s forehead, the world tilted. The blessing didn't anchor, nor did it bloom. Instead of a soul surrendering to the Light, the Envoy felt as though he had tried to pour a flagon of liquid sun into a bottomless, freezing well.
What is this? he thought, a flicker of irritation crossing his golden features. He pushed harder, summoning the Great Golden Hawk with the practiced arrogance of a man who owned the sun. He expected the usual melting away of the boy’s ego, that beautiful, necessary gutting of a personality to make room for a divine occupant.
Instead, something in the velvet dark of that boy’s psyche looked back at him. A predatory, feminine chill that seemed to find the holy radiance... appetizing.
He strained to force the connection, his jaw tightening as he reached for the boy's secrets, but nothing happened. The Light didn't anchor. It simply vanished.
But an Envoy of the Purest Royal Blood does not panic, nor does he admit that the Divine gaze just hit a wall. If the miracle fails, the fault must
lie with the vessel, never the vintage.
He smoothed his robes, his Golden Eyes flickering with a practiced, razor-sharp disgust.
He needed a scapegoat.
Something that would explain the failure and satisfy the watching nobles without admitting the Light had just been treated like a light snack. In this instance, he decided that he needed to make this failure the boy's burden, not his own.
"The boy is... defective," the Envoy announced, his voice carrying to the furthest rafters like a final judgment. "His soul is a sieve. The blessing simply fell through. "
"Duke, unfortunately, your son is hollow."
There, the Envoy thought, watching the Duke scramble for his broken heir.
I wouldn't get caught anyway. This son of his was well known to be defective even before the ceremony.
A soul with no place to hold the glory, the Envoy sneered. A waste of my divine breath.
He watched them retreat with a sneer of dismissal, but inwardly, he was scrubbing the feeling of that cold, dark hunger from his skin. He didn't care for the Duke’s tragedy or the boy’s vacant stare. He only cared that the North would now view Kael as a useless paperweight.
After all, the Center did not keep toys it could not play with, and as far as the Envoy was concerned, Kael’s reputation ensured one simple conclusion.
“Better keep him hidden here. The boy would never amount to anything worth the Center’s attention anyway,” he uttered, in the smallest voice he could manage. Quiet enough to sound indifferent, but not so soft that the Duke would fail to hear it.
What he didn't realize was that in the dark, silent space where the Light couldn't reach, the broken toy was finally alone with a protector who had no intention of ever letting him go.
Ever.