The full moon hung over Floria like a silver coin, banishing any lingering darkness with its pale light. It was the kind of night that left no room for secrets, in which every shadow stretched and thinned as the fates commanded.
Nick stood on the balcony adjoining his quarters, the night wind tugging at the hem of his coat. He rested his hands on the balustrade, listening to the distant sound of the town watch making their rounds.
A soft rustle broke the quiet.
Talbot dropped from the eaves, landing silently on the railing beside his hand. The spirit cat’s blue fur was puffed out, making him look twice his usual size. His iridescent eyes were fixed on the sprawling expanse of the lower districts. Talbot let out a low purr, sending a spike of warning directly into Nick’s mind.
He straightened and expanded his senses, pushing his awareness out over the entire town, brushing against the wardstones he’d buried beneath the walls.
The magical perimeter hummed with undisturbed energy. No alarm was triggered. No spike of mana flared in the dark.
Yet as Nick swept his perception through the ether’s eddies, he sensed something, a chilling absence. A patch of space, slipping through the merchant district, absorbed the World’s natural hum, leaving a seamless void.
Ambient mana simply ceased to exist wherever the intruder walked, bending light and sound around it with flawless precision.
As prophesied, the King’s Shadow had arrived.
Nick reached into his spatial ring, his fingers curling around the Stillness's silk. He pulled the cloak free, draped it over his shoulders, drew raw ether into his lungs, and shifted his consciousness, stepping out of the physical world and fully submerging himself in the soul-scape.
The transition replaced the moonlit town with an endless expanse of swirling currents and bright spots of light he knew were souls. Floria was a constellation of sleeping minds, calm and sated in the warmth of House Crowley.
Tracking the spy in the physical realm was a fool's errand. The Shadow was a Prestige-tier assassin, the best of his kind, honed by the Crown’s resources over centuries to root out treason. Their stealth would be absolute. But in the ether, Nick could track the distortion.
Even here, the spy was incredibly hard to follow. The Shadow appeared as a faint, rippling blur, a cold draft moving through a warm room. Nick kept a safe distance, relying on the empathic tether he shared with Talbot to maintain a lock on the intruder's general direction.
After all, if he used active targeting magic, the Shadow would feel the pressure of his gaze, and he wasn’t willing to give up that advantage just yet.
Given where I’ll need to go after this, being able to track their movements will serve me well. And if they knew I could, I’m sure they’d devise countermeasures.
Thus, the game of cat-and-mouse began.
The void drifted through the lower districts, slipping through the locked timber doors of the Dunstonburough guildhall, while Nick floated high above, watching the faint outline move among the rows of wooden desks.
Fortunately, the Shadow was not here to slit throats as long as their assessment of House Crowley’s loyalty remained positive.
Through the spy’s cloaking magic, Nick watched them sift through the merchant ledgers at supernatural speed. The Crown wanted to know how Floria had grown so rich so fast. They were looking for evidence of stolen taxes or treasonous stockpiles of black-market ingredients.
Instead, the spy found only meticulously recorded trades in foodstuffs, vast shipments of lumber, the welcome arrival of loot from the North, and the lucrative sale of high-tier monster cores harvested from the Green Ocean.
Finding nothing but legitimate prosperity, the Shadow moved on.
It was hard to tell what they felt, such was the depth of their cloaking, but Nick was sure the spy couldn’t be disappointed. Mildly surprised, perhaps, but the absence of negative emotions was a relief, as it meant they didn’t come with ill intent.
As they glided out of the guildhall and drifted toward the newly erected barracks of the town militia, Nick followed, careful to keep his mana perfectly suppressed and his heart beating a slow rhythm in his chest, left behind on the balcony.
The spy entered the private quarters of a sleeping guard captain, and Nick watched with a surge of tension, wary of what they might do.
When the Shadow reached out, weaving a delicate yet insidious spell that lacked any visual flash, he knew it was a memory delve, designed to slip into a dreaming mind and sift through surface thoughts and impressions.
Though he strongly disliked the intrusion, Nick held his ground, choosing to watch rather than intervene. He trusted his father’s men’s loyalty, but seeing the Shadow violate the captain’s mind tested his restraint.
The edges of the captain’s soul vibrated as the Shadow drew forth echoes of the past few years. Nick caught fleeting conceptual flashes leaking into the ether—the roar of a Wyvern, the disciplined ranks of the militia holding the line, the sheer awe the men felt for their lord, and, eventually, for his youngest son. The spy was cataloging Eugene and Nick’s rise, measuring the devotion of Floria’s military.
When the last memory faded, the probe withdrew, and the captain slept on, undisturbed. The loyalty the Shadow found was genuine, born of shared survival and hard-won respect, and free of the artificial taint of compulsion that someone like Candra would have left.
They exited the barracks, resuming their silent patrol.
The Adventurer’s Guild got similar scrutiny, and though Nick sensed the Shadow take notice of a few people, they did nothing.
As they moved toward the center of town, Nick noted the careful path they carved, curving widely around the Temple of Sashara. In the ether, Marthas’s soul blazed like a sun, a pyre of holy fire that warned away any unwary eye.
The Shadow recognized the danger and gave the temple a wide berth.
Interesting. I suppose it’s not too surprising, since Marthas is a step beyond them, but I would have expected more arrogance. Or perhaps he is a known figure to them, and as such, they feel no need to check on him again.
As they entered the beastmen quarter, they slowed until they reached Elia’s house, where the spy slipped beneath the front door and slithered up.
Inside a dark room, Elia was awake, kneeling on the floor beside her bed, her hands clasped tightly as she stared fixedly at the blank wall. She was praying, her voice a barely audible whisper.
In the ether, her aura was erratic. It crackled with the constant, chaotic static of divination, a storm of probability and foresight that made her soul hard to look at directly.
The Shadow lingered near the doorway, and Nick saw the void shift, as if contemplating a memory.
Then they reconsidered. Delving into the mind of an active seer was a notoriously dangerous gamble. The chaotic currents of prophecy could ensnare even the best, dragging them into a labyrinth of fragmented futures and driving them mad. Furthermore, the girl was a known quantity and posed no threat.
The spy backed away, leaving Elia to her devotions, treating any anomaly as the eccentricity of the devout.
A few blocks later, the Shadow passed by the northeastern shops. To a mundane observer, Ogden’s lab was just another building, but in the soul-scape, ancient draconic power coiled beneath it.
They paused at the edge of the street, evaluating the faint signature, then deliberately chose another route.
They know exactly what they are doing, Nick thought, his respect for the Crown's hound growing. Or the last Shadow handed them a detailed map of threats. Either way, their knowledge of Floria’s players is precise.
As they finished their sweep of the merchant districts and turned south, they slipped over the quarried stone that would form the expanded set of walls they were building, heading toward the farmlands.
Nick followed, drifting through the silver currents as his tension spiked sharply. The Shadow was heading for Arthur’s farmhouse.
He didn’t allow himself to panic because it made perfect sense from a tactical standpoint. Arthur was a known Prestige-tier combatant, a retired legend living within the Barony's borders. The Crown would absolutely demand an assessment of his current state and his household.
Nick descended closer, weaving his presence even more deeply into the natural eddies of the ether, preparing to strike if necessary.
This, after all, was the moment when everything was decided.
The farmhouse stood silent among the moonlit wheat fields, and the spy approached the structure with great caution. They knew that waking an old lightning swordsman in the dead of night was a sure way to invite a violent death.
So Nick wasn’t surprised when they bypassed Arthur’s room, refusing to risk a direct confrontation with the veteran and only conducting a superficial analysis. Instead, the void slipped through a thin crack in the wooden walls into the adjacent guest rooms to check on the household's other resident.
Nick stopped moving. He hovered in the ether, a cold sweat breaking out on his physical body a mile away.
If the Shadow pierced the ink and recognized the runaway royal bloodline pulsing beneath the girl's skin, the Kingdom would descend on Floria with fire and steel.
Even if I managed to kill them, which isn’t guaranteed, it would still lead to the same consequences. After all, the death of a Shadow would invite much greater scrutiny. No, I need to trust that my work holds.
They paused beside the simple wooden bed, and Nick watched the girl's sleeping form, shining with a muted blue light in the soul-scape.
This time, the Shadow unleashed a far more invasive probe than the memory delve used on the guard captain. A wave of sharp intent washed over Rose, meant to strip away illusions and lay bare the fundamental architecture of her mana channels.
That was not good. It meant the previous Shadow had noticed something, though back then Rose hadn’t developed her powers enough for her bloodline to stand out.
With bated breath, Nick watched the magic collide against her skin.
The tattoos wrought by the Dragon Ink absorbed the scrying wave, redirecting its flow away from her true heritage, which remained buried, and reflected the rigid channels of [Adept Swordswoman].
It presented a soul with decent talent, refined by Arthur’s training and risen to a surprisingly high level, yet containing nothing out of the ordinary beyond sheer grit.
After what felt like an hour but was probably no more than half a minute, the Shadow’s probing magic receded, having found nothing of interest. They turned away from the bed, dismissing the girl as just another talented resident.
Nick let out a long breath as the tension broke, leaving a profound sense of relief. He could almost feel Elia's prophecy snap in the dark as the vision of doom, of the Crown discovering the princess and triggering a slaughter, was severed. The lie had held.
Satisfied that the farmhouse contained no hidden threats, the Shadow drifted back out into the fields, turning its attention to the true seat of power and heading for Crowley Manor.
Nick retreated, moving swiftly through the ether, racing the spy back to his home. He positioned himself high above the manor’s central courtyard, watching the void slip past the elite guards at the gates.
Showing they’d been chosen for a reason, the sentries shivered as the Shadow passed, pulling their cloaks tighter against a sudden chill, even though they remained oblivious to the predator walking among them.
They swept through the lower floors, inspecting the armory, the kitchens, and the quartermaster’s records, and found only more of the same prosperity they had seen in the merchant district.
The void drifted up the grand staircase, then entered the private wing.
Nick tracked the spy past his parents' chambers. Eugene and Elena slept soundly, their warded doors offering no obstacle to the Crown's agent. The Shadow checked the study, flipping through the correspondence on the desk and verifying the trade agreements with Alluria’s Houses and the southern vassals.
Then, they paused outside his door.
Nick remained suspended high above the manor in the ether, his physical body standing silently on the balcony on the other side of that door. The Shadow spent a long time examining the wards he had carved, tracing their elemental logic, analyzing the trap structures, and studying the raw power fueling the defenses.
Fortunately, they did not attempt to breach the room. They recognized the wards for what they were: the work of a Prestige-tier mage, lethal and unforgiving. Triggering them would wake the entire manor and force a confrontation the spy was not likely to want.
There was a long moment of stillness as the agent weighed his choices, until the silver hue of the full moon faded and the first streaks of false dawn touched the eastern horizon. The night was ending, and the Shadow’s time was up.
Soon, they faded into the rolling mist over the grasslands, retreating to regroup.
Not gone, not yet, but the worst of the danger had passed.