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The next afternoon, Ace stood inside an air station, the familiar hologram screens projecting Howlite Castle, the base of the blue banner Opalian army, levitated all around him. On the ground and in the skies were the Parisoran army units, fighters, mechas, tanks and more. They were laying siege on Howlite Castle. Specifically speaking, they were waiting for an order to open fire.
Ace took a deep breath in and mentally prepared himself. “OPEN FIRE!” he ordered.
He knew well the consequences of his actions, but at the same time, he did not have much of choice. No one ever asked what he thought of the situation.
The units deployed all fired at the stone walled castle, Ace watched as the heat signatures inside the castles slowly decreased as people died, signalled by the blinking out of red specs to the bluish-green background. Opalian forces took to the battlefield for their last stand, but there was just too many enemies for them. This time, Opalian had their attentions split on two fronts. Whilst sudden as this attack had seemed, but Ace knew his father had been planning it since the end of the last war. Raynior was a petty king, he disliked being undermined, and for Opalian to invade, they had undermined him. As had his own sons when they spoke up repeatedly against him. Ace wondered what sort of clean up was taking place now in the Sparklieyr now that he was out of the way.
He felt a small hand reach into his, Ace looked down, it was Clay. Claude had insisted that he keep an eye on the young boy at all times. Ace would argue that war was not place for children, yet Claude seemed to think otherwise. As a result, Clay stood beside Ace, watching the destruction expressionlessly, as if he was used to it. Ace frowned, he thought he saw Clay’s eyes flash blood red for a moment there.
*
Claude ruffed his newly appeared short curls just to mess them up further. He strode down some corridor in Howlite Castle with confidence, and in a deep green Opalian intelligence officer’s uniform. Moments later, he stopped outside a cleaner’s closet, the ones that are in little corners of the castle, usually under staircases where cleaners store their equipment. The secret unused places that everyone forgot existed. They were good places for entrances into the realm, or for portals, hidden out of sight, where no mortal would easily stumble across.
This particular closet is different from normal ones, it was an entrance into a maze that connected all the realms in the Nine Rings, which was the present system of realms. As Claude opened in and stepped in, his eyes adjusted naturally for the darkness. A man with long black hair and gauged out bleeding eyes stood there with a sleeping baby in his arms.
“Teacher,” Claude smiled, “need help?” He was referring to the man’s eyes, it was clearly a recent injury.
The man shook his head, his eyes rapidly healed itself, the clotted blood eventually disappeared into gold catlike eyes, which then faded to black human looking ones. He was wearing tattered black robes, not unlike the ones that Claude had worn when he first arrived face-planted in the snow, only with different embroidered symbols and runes.
The man looked down at the baby in his arms with a sad smile, “His Highness started an uprising,” he began.
“Are you speaking to me as my Teacher, or as the Hands of Death?” Claude asked, stopping the man’s story, his expression was dead serious.
“Neither,” the man answered. “I’m speaking as Mystel, the man who raised you.”
Claude cracked smile once more. “Right, but ah, Her Majesty killed him? Prince Hades is her eldest child and her heir!”
“He broke the rules,” Mystel said. “If he succeeded, he would be the next ruling God of Death, Her Majesty was counting on that.”
“He’s also your apprentice, Mystel, he calls you Teacher the same way I do,” Claude pointed out, “so why are you here instead of six feet under? By Her Majesty’s orders, you would’ve sided with Hades.”
Mystel lowered his gaze at the baby once more. “Morrigan the 9th is as great of a Queen as she is a failure of a mother, but even she has love in her heart.”
“Hades’ son?”
Mystel nodded and went on. “She’s named Hades as the 10th ruling God of Death in retrospect, he’ll have tomb for his broken life stone in the Elysium Garden, where he will rest in eternal peace along with his predecessors.”
Claude clicked his fingers, Mystel’s tattered robes were gone, he was now wearing a deep green Opalian intelligence officer’s uniform. Mystel waved his hands over the sleeping baby and the child disappeared from view.
“Ready?”
Mystel nodded. “It’s what you do best, Prince.”
Claude smiled. “I learnt from the best, Teacher.” He looked down at the complicated looking watch on his wrist and counted the milliseconds. When that hand reached “9”, he pulled open the door and walked out into the corridor with Mystel behind him. Their faces were plain Opalian ones, the type that no Opalian would look twice at, the features evenly distributed and boring in general, it was a good disguise.
Ahead and behind, there were soldiers with their backs to the two Shadows, who strode down the corridor as if they too were soldiers. No one turned their heads, no one batted an eye. That was how Shadows operated.
“Can you tell me why I’m still around?” Claude asked quietly, but loud enough or Mystel to hear.
“Her Majesty has plans for the future,” Mystel muttered in response. “Just yesterday, she pulled Dark Cloud and Zombie, the best Pretenders off the frontline, the excuse was that Dark Cloud went berserk on the Sea Gods. Last I heard, his grandmaster Blood Cloud is currently bearing the brute of the consequences.”
Claude frowned, he knew those names well, Dark Cloud and Zombie were Shadows who were closer to him than family. Blood Cloud on the other hand, was less close for he was the Second Elder of the Vampire Tribe, one of the few people who held power in the tribe aside from his mother. “She’s preparing for her own end,” he was talking about Morrigan the 9th.
“Exactly,” Mystel said. “The Nine Rings are on path of destruction and I’m not sure that Shadows can do much to keep it together, not any more.”
Claude turned off onto another corridor and down a set of stairs, heading towards the dungeons of the Howlite Castle. “The Outer Ring is a step away, nothing comes out of there. Are you sure about this?”
“Yes, the Nine Rings knows me to have faded beside Hades. The only place they won’t look is in the land of eternal exiles,” Mystel explained. “The only reason Her Majesty has yet to send you there……”
“Is because my journey ends here,” Claude finished for him.
The dungeons of Howlite Castle’s west wing were empty, they had fallen into rubbles more or less due to disrepair as the cells in the east wing of the Castle were used more frequently instead after recent renovations. Claude opened the gates of one of the unused cells of the dungeon. It seemed random but it was actually a well calculated choice.
“I saw my fading,” Claude said as the iron barred door swung open revealing an endless stone walled corridor, with black flamed torches, in place of the rotten cell one saw from the outside looking in.
“This was temporary,” Mystel frowned, “may peace surround you soon.”
“The Battle of Inverness looked exactly like it,” Claude went on to say. “Her Majesty took advantage of that, she faked my fading.”
Mystel merely sighed. “Child, not many get a second chance at life. Live it to your fullest because you have never lived. You were born dead and it was always my deepest regret that you never knew what it meant to be alive.”
“Thank you, Teacher,” Claude reached out and hugged the man who had guided him through many painstaking nights of training and lecture. The man who taught him how to survive in the Nine Rings as a Shadow, how to follow orders but still make their own choices. Mystel was like a father to him.
“Prince, may we all find our peace soon,” Mystel said. “From this day forth, the Hands of Death shall cease to exist, I never regretted my choices and I hope you will not either.” Mystel had gotten his title as the Hands of Death for creating a form of magic that killed by painting. The subject of the painting would die in the same way shown in said painting the moment the last stroke of the brush is completed. His title and nickname was a reflection of his kill signature.
Claude watched as Mystel journeyed further into the darkness until he could see no further. He closed the somewhat unhinged cell door and the corridor disappeared from sight. He looked down at his watch, two minutes and thirteen seconds, he was on time.
Then, he pulled out his trusty rapier and made his way back to the livelier parts of the castle, his deep green disguise of a uniform turned magically into his usual black tattered robes. Finally, his eyes shone red as his thirst for blood took over. Any person crazy enough to stand before him would have a rapier through their necks, draining blood from their bodies, before they could even blink. That blood would flow up the blade of the rapier and into Claude to replenish his magic.
The second hand on Claude’s watch ticked by slowly with respect to the speed of his movements. He could feel the blood of his victims surge through his body as it gets transformed into a lasting supply of magic. Unfortunately for Shadows, they also use magic as fast as they gain it, if not faster, in a battle situation. Everything had its price and the price for being an overpowered immortal undead being was unimaginably high.
*
Thirty minutes later, Claude swept into the control room of the air station that Ace was at, his black robes dragging on the ground behind him. He had blank expression on his face and his dark eyes were out of focus.
“It’s done,” he muttered. The crowd of officers and soldiers inside the control room cheered as that knowledge was relayed to the units out on the battlefield.
Ace ran out and threw his arms around Claude in excitement. “We did it! You did it!”
Claude sighed, his mind casted back to an event known as Battle of Changping, he wondered if there was as much blood drawn today as there was then, when the General Bai Qi ordered the mass murder of all enemy troops who had surrendered. More so, he wondered if what he did today was really different to Bai Qi. They both killed a lot of enemy soldiers who did not necessarily need to die. Bai Qi had killed them because it was too costly to feed them and sending the enemy troop back the way they came was clearly leaving behind a deadly threat for the future, but he, Claude, did not really have a valid reason other than the King of some mortal realm willed it so.
“Ace, they’re all dead,” he told the excited young prince.
“And?” Ace did not quite get his point.
Claude did not expect him to understand, after all, he was a mortal. “Perhaps we’re too different after all,” he muttered.
Ace grabbed his elbow just as he was about to turn away. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” Claude lied. It wasn’t as if Shadows paid for their crimes tenfold in all strange manners. The Nine Rings keeps its balance and the Shadows paid the price.
“You can tell me, Claude.”
Claude reached down and picked up Clay who was standing patiently by his side, as if waiting for his turn to greet the hero. The young boy’s features had changed slightly, he grew to resemble their mother more every day. “Clay, what’s up buddy?”
Ace could hear the false optimism in Claude’s voice, but he could not quite pinpoint why it was there.
Clay shrugged, he seemed to have taken after his two older siblings in that regard, always shrugging. “I’m thirsty,” the young boy said.
Claude looked dumbfounded, “well, I’ll fix you up something.”
“I have water,” Ace offered.
“Thanks Ace, he meant blood,” Claude leaned over and whispered.
“Ah, I didn’t think…….”
“It’s alright, his dormant Vampire traits have only recently began awakening because I’m here,” Claude explained, “Mother usually try to hide it for as long as possible, she uses an old curse to make our Vampire genes dormant.” He pulled out a metal drink bottle from his robes, unscrewed the top, and a smell of calming chai tea filled the air. Clay grabbed the bottle hungrily with both hands and downed its contents in massive gulps.
“Chai?”
“Blood has a distinct scent and we try our best to disguise that,” Claude explained.
“But Chai tea?”
“It’s from Warlock, they like their flamboyant, dramatic, eleganza flourishes,” Claude said.
Ace laughed light heartedly, the tensions from before had already evaporated. “First of all, that is an awful description, secondly, Warlock?”
“One of my many older half siblings who became a Shadow. He’s non-binary, sorry, they’re, but point stands, Warlock likes luxuries and gifted me a supply of tea flavoured blood for my birthday a decade ago.”
It was at this point that Nyal came up to them, he greeted Claude with a deeply concerned expression on his face. In his hands, there was an expensive looking jewellery box decorated with gems. “His Majesty said to give you this when you succeeded,” he spoke with a light, well-hidden scorn in his voice, but it was obvious even to Ace that the older Major Nyal Sachley had a certain dislike of Claude.
Claude opened the box as it sat in Nyal’s hands and took out its only content, a gold chalice decorated with a ring of multicoloured gems, not unlike every other expensive looking chalice and cup that Ace had seen before.
“The Eternal Chalice?” Ace asked.
Claude nodded. “Gods used to fight over this thing, that is until they realised it was worthless to immortals.”
“Why do you want it now?”
“Not me,” Claude answered. “Morrigan told me to gift it to Summer.” He puts the golden, expensive-looking cup back in its box before taking the box off Nyal’s hands and hiding it in his robes. “When are we flying back?”
“Are you in a rush to get somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Now, then,” Ace decided on the spot. He told Nyal to prepare his private jet and left the Major in charge of the army. The only thing left was clean up really, the tedious clean up of the blood soaked battle field.
Very soon, they were on their way back to Sparklieyr.
*
On the lavishly furnished private jet, Claude suppressed his smile at the fact that anything royals owned were lavish and expensive. It was not unlike how mother travelled by a massive carriage drawn by an excessive twenty black Pegasi.
“Why do you keep pushing me away?” Ace’s voice cut through his thoughts. “It’s not like your mysterious treasure hunt is putting me in harm’s way.”
Claude sighed, here was this conversation again. He could recall the amount of times they have had repeats of this conversation, ever since that night three days ago, just before they left Sparklieyr to massacre the blue banner army. He would find some trash excuse, Ace would see through his lie then he would redirect the conversation and sometimes they ended up in bed again. He hated how he had little control over his own actions sometimes, but that same ability to be swept up in the atmosphere was also what he loved. Ace made him feel alive.
“Claude,” Ace grabbed Claude’s hands and intertwined his own fingers in them. “What are you not telling me!”
On the seat across from them, Clay stirred in his nap, his eyes snapped open and they flashed red temporarily before returning to its usual dark coloured iris. “Because he’s dying,” Clay answered in place of his older half-brother.
“Clay,” Claude’s voice shot up octaves. “We need to chat about privacy!”
Ace turned Claude so that the latter’s attention would be on him. “What’s he talking about.”
“It’s nothing,” Claude denied.
“NO! Tell me!” Ace had a sob choked up in his throat.
Claude took a deep breath in. “Shadows always see their deaths, well, fading technically speaking, before it happens.”
Ace looked confused.
“I thought I was going to fade at the Battle of Inverness because it looked exactly like the visions I were having previously,” Claude explained. “Time in your realm runs much slower than most of Nine Rings, centuries has passed since then yet a mere few months here. I’m sorry Ace, but I’m dying, I can feel my time coming to an end.”
Ace grabbed him tightly, his fingers unknowingly dug painfully into Claude, but the latter ignored it. The pain in their hearts were much greater than that.
“It makes sense now,” Claude went on. “My last mission was to aid Summer in her oncoming witch hunt, whatever Morrigan has planned for that girl will require all the contacts she can get her hands on.”
“But surely…….”
“I’ve outlived most immortals in my generation too, Ace,” Claude stopped him. “I walked the path of Shadows knowing the price, and now it’s time for me to pay what I owed.”
Suddenly, Clay’s obnoxious laughter pierced through the dramatically gloomy atmosphere. Ace turned and shot dagger-like glares at the young boy. “What’s funny here?”
Claude held back Ace as the young Prince looked as if he could easily punch the young boy. “Easy Ace, Clay’s clearly taken after mother.”
Clay shrugged without a care in the world. “Why so dramatic, you always knew the two of you wouldn’t be good together.”
“Clay,” Claude once again had a warning tone in his voice.
“Edith said that damned immortals and blessed mortals really don’t mix.”
“She also said that any child of Mary Tudor ought to die before they are even born,” Claude said sternly. “That includes you and I.” In his mind, he silently added, and her.
“When are you…….” Ace wanted to ask when Claude was going to fade, but he could not complete the sentence.
“Once I give the chalice to Summer,” Claude began, “I likely will be heading off for one final task.”
Ace looked devastated.
“For fuck sake,” Clay cuts in with language highly inappropriate for a child who looked no older than five at the very most.
“Language, CLAY WHISTLER,” Claude exclaimed with an overly dramatic expression of shock and disbelief.
Clay shrugged, his conscious and intelligence has also grown rapidly since his older brother had taken him in. To say his mind was now that of an unruly thirteen year old whilst his body was still that of a five year old would not be an understatement. “Point still stands, Ace is being dramatic. All good things come to an end. It’s not like you were planning on growing old together anyways, it was just a fling.”
Claude looked at him in dismay. “Is Blood Cloud your father or something or did you just inherit all of mother’s loveless genes? It doesn’t hurt for a Vampire to have compassion.”
“No one here knows who Blood Cloud is,” Clay chimed in.
“Beside the point,” Claude said sternly. “Before one learns to kill, they ought to first learn love.”
“But you were the other way round,” Clay muttered. As Claude glared at him, he explained, “Edith said that.”
“Can you two stop arguing for a moment, please?” Ace pleaded, he felt as if his whole world was crashing down around him for the second time in a mere few months.
The passenger cabin of the private jet went silent.
Then, Ace himself broke the silence. “Why did you give me hope then?” He was asking Claude, but he did not actually want to know the answer.
“I’m sorry,” was all Claude would say. The sound of his heart shattering and the pain that swiftly followed was unlike anything he had felt before, but he could not give a suitable answer. He loved the mortal prince, though he did not have the courage to say it, especially not now that he was at the end of his time.
*
Upon touch down at the private airport of the royal family, Ace was not surprised to see Edith and Summer waiting beside the runway. The younger brighter haired bounty hunter raced up excitedly to collect the box that contained the Eternal Chalice from Claude whilst the older brown haired woman immediately began another squabble. Ace thought they looked like a happy family of siblings, though the contents of their arguments tend to deter that feeling.
After a while, Claude walked back to Ace’s side, “I’m sorry, but I guess…….”
“So this is goodbye?” Ace finished for him.
Claude nodded as an awkward mixture of emotions flashed across his face. “I’m sure you’ll meet someone great.”
Ace shrugged, he was picking up that habit too. “Do you want me to?”
“I want you to be happy because I never was,” Claude answered, avoiding the question like usual. “And congratulations on becoming Crown Prince and Prince Regent.”
“What?” Ace’s brows became knitted.
“In the three days we were away, your brothers each planned an unsuccessful uprising, both quashed by your sister who was then murdered by your mother who then was killed by the King,” Claude explained slowly. “Raynior is now in a coma after suffering a complicated stroke.”
“I…WHAT?”
“There’s a price for hiring a Shadow,” Claude said plainly, “the chalice does not pay for the lives I took, so nature took theirs as payment.”
“Why did you not say anything earlier?”
“I did, they didn’t listen.”
“You can’t just leave me then!” Ace cried in dismay. “I don’t know how rule a country!” He had pleading look in his eye. “Please Claude, you put in this situation, you have to help me!”
Claude sighed, he could never refuse Ace. “Well, I don’t know when I’m heading off so I suppose I could stick around.”
Ace’s eyes lit up immediately with hope, he threw his arms around Claude in joy. “Please stay, for as long as you can.”
It was now that Edith came up and patted Ace on the back. “Good luck kiddo, I’m sure you’ll make a better ruler than Prince here, he never even bothered to show up to the Elders’ Council when it did convene.”
“Because I’m not an Elder,” Claude muttered under his breath. He pulled Edith aside. “We need to talk.”
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