Chapter 82: Insubordination

Seraphina let out a wet, ragged gasp, her small hands maintaining their death grip on his tunic beneath his armor.

She tilted her tear-streaked, snotty face up just enough to look into his glowing violet eyes.

"Y-You’re... you’re not giving me back?" she choked out, a crystalline snot bubble expanding at her nose.

Kaelus didn’t flinch.

With tender, excruciating fatherly care, he reached up with his ungloved thumb and gently wiped the snot and tears from her blotchy face, uncaring of the mess on his own skin.

"I am a monstrous, arrogant fool, Seraphina," Kaelus whispered, his glowing violet eyes burning with an unshakable devotion.

He pressed his forehead directly against hers, his voice vibrating into her soul. "I thought... I believed my fortress was too dark for a creature of your light. I believed I was protecting you by offering the garden."

He tightened his arms around her, holding her as if she were the only anchor preventing him from falling into the dark abyss.

"You are never," Kaelus vowed, his words ringing with the sacred irreversibility of a blood pact, "staying anywhere else. Oakhaven is anything but clay and dirt. The Verdant Reach is weeds. The Capital is ash. You belong to the Bastion. You belong to the black stone. You are Seraphina von Nacht, the Sovereign of my Vanguard, and my true daughter."

He looked deep into her dark eyes, exposing his bare, hidden heart.

"If you wish to crawl across the mountains, we will crawl. If you wish to turn my state ledgers into paper waterfowl, I will order the Imperial Spire to supply the parchment. You never have to stay anywhere you do not desire. You are my daughter. And I will never, until my soul is scattered into the Abyss, leave you behind."

The certainty of his vow flooded Seraphina’s small chest like a rush of warm, liquid gold.

The hyperventilating gasps smoothed out slowly, replaced by a deep, shuddering exhale of relief.

She didn’t deploy a clever orphan riposte.

She didn’t act cute.

She let go of his tunic, snaked her small arms upward, threw them around his neck, and buried her wet face securely into the crook of his shoulder.

"Okay, you promised, Papa," Seraphina whispered, her childish voice turning peaceful, rubbing her residual nose-drizzle securely into his velvet collar. "I’ll stay. But you have to pick up the ducks. Sir Lucas stepped on the Iron Duke."

A deep, fond chuckle ripped through Kaelus’s chest.

He held her close, rocking her gently among the velvet floorboards, his glowing violet eyes staring out into the swirling mist of the Spire of Granite with peace.

Let the loud industrialist threaten.

Let the toxic botanists scheme.

Let the fanatical fire-Archduke summon his legions.

The Reaper of the North had finally accepted his crown, and as he sat on the floor of a mythril box swaddled in origami ducks and toddler affection, Duke Kaelus von Nacht knew that there was no force in the mortal or demonic realms capable of taking his tiny dark Sovereign away from him.

The journey to the Capital was back on schedule, and the rest of the Empire was about to learn exactly what happens when you threaten the family of the Leviathan.

***

The meltdown on the ledge of the Spire of Granite had officially been resolved.

The tears had dried.

The snot bubbles had been wiped away with a pristine linen handkerchief.

The blood oath of non-abandonment had been sworn, and Duke Kaelus von Nacht had successfully convinced the tiny Mushroom that she was, in fact, not going to be mailed back to Oakhaven like a defective head of cabbage.

Disaster had been averted for now.

However, the meteorological climate inside the mythril carriage, and indeed, across the entire encampment of the Black Bastion, had not returned to normal.

Seraphina was perfectly fine.

In fact, she was more than fine; she was absolutely thriving.

Having secured the ultimate, unbreakable verbal confirmation that the terrifying Reaper of the North loved her more than his own sanity, her mind had locked away its residual abandonment issues, and her six-year-old body had rebounded with the terrifying, elastic resilience of youth.

She was back to her bright, bubbly, unmanageable self, humming tuneless melodies and organizing her paper ducks into complex, fortified battle formations.

The cold atmosphere currently suffocating the convoy had absolutely nothing to do with Seraphina.

It had everything to do with the fifty elite, heavily armored, mythril-clad warmongers riding outside the carriage, who had decided that their Liege Lord, their Sovereign, their Archduke, was an absolute, irredeemable scumbag.

Kaelus von Nacht was intimately familiar with the concept of being hated.

He was the Reaper.

Assassins loathed him.

Southern nobles despised him.

Archdemons trembled at the mere mention of his name.

He thrived on animosity; he wore the terror of his enemies like a second, comfortable cloak.

But this was different.

His knights were not looking at him with fear.

They were looking at him with the judgmental disappointment of a village tribunal staring at a man who had just deliberately kicked a basket of newborn kittens into a river.

It started the very morning after the meltdown.

The carriage door, which Sir Lucas had ripped from its hinges during the panic, had been hastily reattached by Sir Boris using a field anvil, a blacksmith’s hammer, and brute strength.

As a result, the door now possessed a high-pitched squeak every time it opened.

When Kaelus stepped out of the carriage that morning to inspect the perimeter, he had been met with a wall of insubordinate silence.

Normally, the Vanguard would snap to attention, their armor clattering in perfect synchronization, barking their morning salutes.

But today?

There was nothing.

Sir Lucas was sharpening a broadsword on a whetstone.

As Kaelus walked past, Lucas didn’t even look up.

He simply dragged the steel against the stone with a harsh, screeching SHHHHK, pausing only to shoot the Archduke a side-eye so loaded with judgment it could have physically bruised a lesser man.