"Yes, my lord." Relief flickered across Nathaniel's translucent features. "Shall I send word of your participation?"
"No. Let them wonder."
Nathaniel bowed and withdrew, leaving Dante alone in the throne room.
His jaw tightened. Countless tributes over countless centuries. All of them corpses.
The first had been some noble's daughter. Pretty thing, he supposed. She'd arrived in silk and trailing perfume, spent her days weeping in the chambers he'd assigned her. She lasted two weeks before fading away, becoming translucent like his bound servants until one morning she was no longer there.
The second had tried seduction. She'd worn revealing gowns, positioned herself in his path, spoken in honeyed tones about service and pleasure. He'd explained why distance was the only option. She'd ignored the warning. When she'd finally worked up the courage to touch him, death claimed her before her fingers met his skin.
After that, the details blurred. Poison attempts. Hiding in towers. Suicide jumps. Madness from the twilight.
His hand flexed against the armrest. He'd given them safe quarters, servants, everything except proximity to himself. It hadn't mattered. The realm killed them, or he did when they got too close.
He'd stopped going to check on them after the tenth one died. If they lasted long enough to require his attention, someone would inform him. Usually, they didn't.
This new tribute would be no different. The only question was whether they'd last six weeks or sixteen before death found them.
But first, he had more pressing concerns than another doomed mortal.
Dante rose from his throne, shadows swirling around him as hestrode toward the northwestern wing. The ward-keeper had reports waiting, and those failures were actually worth his attention.
The journey through his palace took him past corridors where the architecture shifted from grandeur to something older, stranger. Here, the walls weren't lined with skulls but made of them. A tunnel of interlocked bone, jaws hinged open to form the passage.
Skeletal hand sconces emerged from the walls at intervals, cupping cold flames. Some beckoned. Some pointed deeper into the darkness. One, near a junction he rarely used, was frozen in a gesture of warning.
The hands twitched sometimes. He'd stopped noticing.
The ward-keeper's chambers occupied the highest tower in the northwestern wing, where the barriers between realms were thinnest and most easily monitored. The staircase spiraled upward, carved from ancient bone. The walls were studded with remnants that gleamed in the perpetual twilight. The dusk seemed deeper here, tinged with aurora-like streaks of green and silver that danced across the sky visible through tall windows.
The air hummed with residual magic from the barriers and tasted faintly of dust and old graves.
Dante climbed the spiral stairs, shadows streaming behind him. He found Keeper Theron hunched over a table covered in maps, charts, and fragments of ward-stone that glowed with unstable light.
"My lord." Theron straightened, his elderly frame marked by decades of exposure to raw death magic. Unlike the bound souls that served in the main court, the ward-keeper was still technically alive, though the distinction had blurred considerably over his forty years of service.
"Show me."
Theron gestured to the largest map spread across the table. Red marks dotted the eastern territories. "Seventeen locks showing signs of failure in the past six months, my lord. The pattern is concerning."
Dante studied the markings. The failures formed a rough circle around the central ward-core, the massive nexus point that anchored all barriers in his domain.
Seventeen failures in six months. After an eternity of stability.
"Define failure."
"Energy fluctuations at first. Minor degradation in the binding matrices. Then, a complete shutdown." Theron picked up a piece of ward-stone, its surface cracked and lifeless. "This is from the Thornwick crossing. It stopped working two weeks ago."
Dante took the stone fragment, his gloved fingers tracing the dead runes carved into its surface. The locks were supposed to last millennia. They were built by the original architects, using magic that predated the current realm’s structure, to maintain the barriers between life and death until the end of existence.
They did not just stop working.
"How long from first fluctuation to complete failure?"
"Varies, my lord. Some took months to degrade completely. Others failed within days of showing the first signs."
"External cause?"
