Chapter 118: Golden Lion vs. Purified Water

The sewers of Sapphire Port were not the kind of place anyone chose to be voluntarily. The water running through the side channels carried colors that didn’t exist in nature, the stone ceiling absorbed sound in uneven patches, and the smell was exactly what you’d expect from a drainage system built several centuries ago by people who never anticipated that someday someone would need to hide in it.

Ebony lit the lantern clipped to her belt and pushed Kanary forward. "Walk."

Kanary walked. Four steps. Then she stopped and let go of her hand.

Ebony turned around with the lantern raised. "What are you doing?"

"This isn’t right." Kanary didn’t say it as a complaint. She said it with the steadiness of someone who has been processing something in silence and has reached a conclusion she isn’t going to walk back from. "Pretending I disappeared, running away from the city, leaving everything the way it is — that has consequences. Consequences I can’t just ignore because it’s more convenient."

Ebony looked at her for a moment, the lantern casting uneven light across both their faces. Then she asked, "Did you choose to be born?"

Kanary blinked. "What?"

"Whether you chose to be born. Yes or no."

"No, obviously, but that has nothing to do with—"

"It has everything to do with it." Ebony lowered the lantern slightly. "The responsibilities of a people belong to the people themselves, not to you just because you happened to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t sign anything. Nobody asked you." She started walking again and gestured for Kanary to follow. "And besides, we’re not even talking about an entire country. Your family governs one city. A single city, not a kingdom."

"A city that now has a foreigner sitting on top of it."

"A city that now has a foreigner sitting on top of it who just came out looking very good in front of the public." Ebony kept her eyes on the corridor ahead. "Listen. Regulus’s plan was to marry your mother, get rid of her after the wedding, and pin it on you. Then you’d show up from wherever he had you held, and that would create two legitimate rulers at exactly the same time. Do you know what that produces?"

"A civil war," Kanary said quietly.

"A civil war inside the city, exactly. His plan was to destabilize this place from the inside. Divide it, wear it down, let the factions do the bloody work, and step in once there was nothing left worth fighting over." She paused to step around a puddle of something she preferred not to identify. "But that didn’t happen. What happened instead is that he saved the city from a dangerous impostor — at least that’s what everyone standing in that square saw. There won’t be any immediate conflict. The public won’t push back against someone they just cheered for. And if Regulus doesn’t want the entire kingdom starting to ask him uncomfortable questions, the smartest thing he can do right now is play along with the role he ended up starring in."

Kanary walked in silence for a few seconds, her boots making quiet sounds against the wet stone. "How do you know all of that?"

"It’s a classic tactic for destabilizing regions." Ebony said it with the ease of someone describing something they’ve read about many times and found predictable. "Regulus’s country has probably been watching this territory for years. These things don’t get improvised — they get planned slowly, tested in pieces, adjusted. But they also execute slowly, and until they do, the kingdom will have time to respond." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"I don’t care how long it takes." Kanary stopped again. "I’m not running."

Ebony closed her eyes for one second. "Kanary—"

"It’s still abandoning my people." Her voice didn’t rise in volume but it became more solid, like something that has decided not to be moved and means it. "Call it whatever you want. The result is the same. I leave, they’re on their own with someone who was never supposed to be there."

"The result of staying is that Regulus finds you before you can do anything useful, and this time there won’t be anyone nearby to intercept the dagger." Ebony turned toward her fully, the lantern hanging between them casting both their shadows long against the tunnel wall. "Do you know what it cost to get here? Not just me. Everything that Lucian, Daniel, and Veronica put into this from the beginning. Veronica is still in bed recovering because she nearly died doing her part of it. Not figuratively. She nearly died."

Kanary held her gaze but didn’t answer immediately.

"Regulus didn’t have any of what happened today planned," Ebony continued. "The ceremony got interrupted, the public narrative flipped, and he ended up holding a position he didn’t choose. That means he’s improvising now, working with what’s in front of him instead of what he prepared for. And someone who improvises under pressure looks for fast solutions to clean up what went wrong." She let that land before finishing it. "You are the fastest solution he has available right now. You’re the loose end that connects everything."

"That doesn’t change the fact that I can’t leave."

"Mmm." Ebony looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone reassessing their approach. "Fine. Then don’t think of it as leaving. Come with us."

Kanary frowned slightly. "What’s the difference?"

"Everything." Ebony resumed walking, slower this time, with the lantern raised to light the next stretch of corridor. "Running away means disappearing without options, without information, without a direction. Coming with us means moving with time on your side — time to think, to plan, to understand what’s actually happening before you try to do anything about it. From a position like that you can figure out what you actually want to do about your city, without Regulus getting to decide how that story ends before you’ve even started."

"And if at some point I want to come back—"

"That’s entirely your call." Ebony shrugged without looking back. "Nobody holds you to anything. You’re not a prisoner, you’re not obligated to go wherever we go forever. But at least you’d have a real chance of returning with something behind you, instead of getting picked up in an alley before noon and disappearing somewhere no one will think to look."

Kanary considered it. The silence in the tunnel held for longer than usual, with only the sound of water moving somewhere below the walkway and their own steps filling it. Her expression didn’t change entirely, but something in the set of her shoulders shifted in a way that was small and easy to miss and meant more than anything she’d said in the last five minutes.

She opened her mouth.

She didn’t get to use it.

The sound arrived from behind them — steady footsteps on wet stone, evenly spaced, with the unhurried cadence of someone who isn’t in a rush because they already know exactly where what they’re looking for is going to be. And then, layered over the footsteps, the deliberate sound of two palms meeting slowly, one against the other.

Applause.

"Interesting analysis." Regulus’s voice came before his light did. The golden glow rounded the curve of the tunnel ahead of him, warm and sourceless, and then he followed it into view. "Fairly accurate on the details, I’ll admit. More than I expected."

He looked exactly as he had upstairs. Composure intact, clothing unaffected, no sign that anything about the last hour had cost him anything visible. Behind him the golden energy moved with the patient rhythm of something that had been waiting and was no longer waiting.

"I left a clone on the surface," he said, with the ease of someone noting something they consider self-evident. "They’re still celebrating up there. It’s been quite the spectacle." He stopped at a distance that gave the space between them its own particular weight. "But loose ends bother me. I prefer to close them properly."

Kanary took a step back without deciding to. Ebony didn’t move.

The energy came off Regulus like something exhaled and found its shape quickly — one lion first, materializing from nothing with the now-familiar compression of golden light into form and mass, and then a second beside it. They filled the width of the tunnel completely, their heads nearly brushing the ceiling, their ember eyes fixed forward without blinking.

Ebony looked at both of them.

Then she looked at Regulus.

Then she smiled — not the polite kind, not the nervous kind, but the specific kind that belongs to someone who has been holding something back for a while and has just been given a reasonable excuse to stop.

She shook out both hands once at her sides. When she raised them in front of her, the fire that appeared around her knuckles and up across her fingers wasn’t any color fire is supposed to be. Green at the core, white at the outer edge, with a steadiness and clarity that normal flames don’t have — the kind of heat that doesn’t consume indiscriminately but selectively, that burns through what shouldn’t exist and leaves everything else exactly as it was.

{{Magic Type: Purification}}

"Well," said Ebony, closing both fists slowly with the fire coiling tight around them, "at least this time I don’t have to pretend I showed up late."