I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

With the heavy abyssal collar biting into the delicate flesh of her neck, the suppression runes pulsed with a steady, malevolent crimson glow.

Her connection to the world’s ambient mana was completely dead.

Her magic felt like a frozen, hollow pit in her chest, draining the strength from her limbs and leaving her physically weak, spiritually crippled, and defenseless before the three men looking down on her.

Jack mounted the shallow marble steps of the dais.

His pace was slow, each click of his leather heels against the stone sounding like the strike of an executioner’s hammer in the quiet hall.

He stopped two paces before the kneeling Queen, looking down at her with his hands resting loosely in his coat pockets.

His heterochromic eyes held no anger, triumph, or pity.

Only the cold, clinical detachment of an apex predator observing vermin that had outlived its usefulness remained.

Beside the central gilded throne, King Maelor remained standing.

The ancient monarch’s chest was broad, his knuckles white where his hands rested upon the pommel of his ceremonial broadsword.

For hundreds of years, Maelor had carried the burden of the Crown, enduring the insidious sneers of the pureblood factions, swallowing the quiet humiliation of keeping his bastard son in the shadows, all to prevent the realm from fracturing into civil war.

Jack did not look at the King yet.

His gaze remained pinned entirely to Morvana’s pale, sweat-slicked face.

He leaned forward slightly, his shadow falling across her trembling frame.

When he spoke, his voice was a low, intimate murmur, so sharp and quiet that it seemed to slice directly through the copper-scented air.

"Tell me, former Queen," Jack whispered, his lips parting in a razor-thin line of cold amusement. "The daughters of the crown. Miravelle. Elysanthe. Rosethiel."

Jack leaned down further, bringing his heterochromic eyes level with her dilated, bloodshot pupils.

"Are they Caspian’s... or are they Maelor’s?"

The words struck Morvana with the concussive force of a siege ballista piercing through castle walls.

Her breath seized violently in her throat.

Her pupils dilated into wide, black rings of pure terror, her mouth falling open as her jaw trembled uncontrollably.

The last remnants of her aristocratic arrogance fought to surface.

She pulled her chin upward, forcing a look of vicious, aristocratic hatred into her eyes as she tried to spit past the blood on her lips.

"Insolent dog," Morvana hissed, her voice shaking with desperate venom.

"You dare question the purity of the royal line? You dare cast your filthy human doubts upon princesses? They are royal blood! They carry the unbroken heritage of Caeloria’s founding houses! You have butchered my council, you have bound my throat, but you will not desecrate the sacred lineage of this crown with your vile slander!"

Jack did not blink.

Nor did he raise his voice.

He reached back into the inner pocket of his coat.

He withdrew a second crystal vial. Inside, the same violet-black, light-devouring sludge swirled.

The exact distillation that had just liquefied Caspian’s internal organs into a puddle of boiling sludge.

Jack held the vial between his thumb and forefinger, letting the dim torchlight reflect through the oily glass right in front of Morvana’s trembling eyes.

"You watched what happened to your lover," Jack said, his voice entirely devoid of inflection.

"His spine fractured in four places before his vocal cords melted. It takes approximately forty-five seconds for the venom to burn through the mana channels and begin dissolving the marrow in your bones. If you prefer to exit this world in the exact same manner, I will gladly uncork this vial and let Ren pour it down your throat."

Jack tilted the vial slightly, bringing the glass inches from her lips.

"One more time, Morvana. Are they Maelor’s daughters... or did you let Caspian father the princesses while you ruled from his bed?"

Morvana stared at the swirling violet sludge, her terrified, disheveled face reflected in the glass.

The memory of Caspian’s wet, gurgling screams echoed fresh in her ears. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps, her pride entirely collapsing into a pathetic, desperate whimper.

"N-no..." she wept, the tears carving clean lines through the dried blood and powder on her cheeks. Her head dropped, her forehead pressing against the cold marble of the dais as she broke completely.

"They are not his. None of them. They are Caspian’s. Every single one of them belongs to Caspian’s blood."

The confession dropped like a slab of iron onto the dais.

Behind Jack, King Maelor’s entire frame went rigid as stone.

A deep, volcanic rumble built in the ancient King’s chest, vibrating through the marble floor beneath their boots.

The golden brocade of his sovereign mantle strained across his massive shoulders as his jaw clenched with enough force to splinter bone.

A thick, violent vein along his right temple throbbed with sudden, murderous heat, his eyes blazing with a terrifying, ancient fire.

Five centuries of patience.

Decades of swallowing the insults of the Council.

Decades of watching his son, Rhys, beaten and marginalized in the lower wards of the Academy, forced to endure the brutal stigma of a Vileblood while Morvana paraded her three pureblood daughters before the high nobility as the only legitimate future of the realm.

It had all been an orchestrated, parasitic farce.

The three princesses he had raised, protected with royal legions, and endowed with ancient provincial titles were the illegitimate spawn of a traitorous dog who had been rutting with his wife in the dark catacombs while plotting his death.

Maelor took a heavy, shuddering step forward.

The marble beneath his right boot cracked under the sudden, uncontrolled surge of his physical strength.

His broad hand tightened around the hilt of his broadsword, the metal groaning under his grip, his gaze locking onto Morvana with a pure, primordial hatred that seemed capable of reducing her to ash where she knelt.

"Three hundred years," Maelor spoke, his voice trembling with a rage so profound that the crystal pendants of the chandeliers overhead began to chime in resonance.

"Three hundred years I defended your honor against the whispers of the court. I gave them provincial estates. I gave them regiments of the royal guard. And all the while, you were poisoning my house with the seed of that sniveling snake."

Maelor drew his broadsword three inches from its scabbard, the blade gleaming with golden mana.

"I will have their titles stripped before the sun sets. I will have them dragged to the courtyard and..."

"No, King Maelor," Jack interrupted smoothly, stepping between the King and the groveling woman.

Jack raised a single hand, resting his palm flat against Maelor’s tensed, armored forearm.

The touch was firm, steady, carrying the grounding, immovable weight of an absolute ally.

"Do not stain your crown with the blood of children who were merely pawns in their mother’s treason," Jack said, his heterochromic eyes holding the ancient King’s blazing gaze with unshakable composure.

"The princesses did not choose their blood, nor did they choose the lies they were raised on. Leave their fate to Rhys."

Maelor paused, his chest heaving as he stared at Jack. "To Rhys?"

"He is the one who suffered under their shadow," Jack continued calmly.

"He is the one who was forced into the mud while they wore silk. As the true First Heir to the High Crown, it is his prerogative to decide whether they are exiled to the outer provinces, stripped of their inheritance, or allowed to live as commoners under the new order. Let your son demonstrate his sovereignty through judgment, not your wrath."

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