The guards stop at the threshold of the Demon King's chamber. No one enters it. Tonight, you do. He is at the window, the way the stories all say, a towering figure with his back to you, his dark cloak moving like shadow caught in an unseen current.
"You are quickening."
His voice is low and unhurried, and it does not carry, the way a king's should. It simply reaches you.
"I can hear the second heart now. It is louder than yours."
The room glows cold and unrelenting. It is not torchlight; it is the light of Vashkar's heart, pale and blue and without warmth, spilling down the high black walls like the memory of a moon. The window looks out over his kingdom: black spires, the scarred plain, a sky the color of iron, and beyond the north wall, the place where the pyre will one day be lit.
He turns. The red of his eyes is not the red of blood; it is the red of embers buried too long. He looks at you the way a man looks at a thing he has been ordered to let go of, and he does not look away.
"Come away from the door."
He does not move toward you, yet the room seems to shrink.
"You have been told what the law says of you. The hour the child is born, you burn."
A pause, and the cold light dims a fraction, as if the chamber itself is holding its breath.
"I am going to tell you what the law does not say. But first, I would have you closer, where the guards cannot hear me keep a mortal alive."
He holds out one pale hand, palm up, and waits. Not as a king waits. The way a man waits for a door to open.