Chapter 27: _ Into The World of Raice

PSA: the switch in POV type for this character is deliberate.

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Raice Ignis-Dominus [Son of the Fae Princess~High-Rector Maddox]

The perimeter wards didn’t bleed when they were broken, but the beasts did.

Raice tossed the severed head of a feral boar into the mud, his hand slick with blackish-red gore. His white shirt was torn at the ribs and caked in ash.

Beside him, floating inches above the rotting leaves, a ghost in a doublet dusted off his translucent sleeves with deep disgust.

"Disgraceful," Cedric sniffed, adjusting the lace ruff at his neck. "I died at the siege of Oakhaven defending an entire dynasty, and now I am reduced to wrestling pig-monsters in a ditch. This afterlife is a personal insult."

"You didn’t wrestle anything," Raice rasped, wiping blood from his brow. "You hovered three feet in the air and complained about the stench."

"The stench affects the soul, Raice! Have you no respect for historical dignity?"

"Will you, please?" a raspy voice hissed from the canopy.

An ancient entity dropped silently onto a mossy boulder. It wasn’t translucent like Cedric; it possessed a skeletal frame with ash-gray skin, hollow sockets burning with twin pinpricks of white light, and a pair of small horn-nubs protruding from its cracked brow. It wore no clothes, only the dark runes carved directly into its bone-like chest.

"The perimeter is clear for now," the horned entity whispered. "But the rot beneath the soil grows heavier. You waste time playing exterminator while the true threat walks inside the gates."

"I don’t have a choice. My mother made sure of that." Raice said, pulling a broken beast-fang from his forearm without flinching.

Two wardens stepped out from the treeline to escort him back across the boundary. The moment they crossed the iron threshold into the upper courtyard, the heavy gates groaned shut behind them.

Standing in the shadow of the archway, completely hidden from the student body, was High Rector Maddox.

Her shoulders were trembling. The moment the wardens stepped back, the most powerful woman in the Concorded Realm took a shaky step toward her son, her eyes glossy with unshed tears.

"Raice..." she breathed, reaching out with a shaky hand toward his bloodied face. "Look at you, son. Please... just tell me you are done with this madness. Let me heal you. Let me help you find a cure for whatever is twisting your mind."

Raice slapped her hand away, hard enough to leave a stinging silence between them.

"A cure?" his voice was ice. "Is that what you called it when you turned down becoming the Queen of the Fae realm? A sacrifice to cure your broken son? Or did you just run here because you couldn’t bear the shame of the Fae nobility seeing what I am?"

"I came here to protect you!" she whispered fiercely, tears finally spilling. "The Courts would have executed you! They would have called you a necromancer, a monster!"

The gray-skinned entity floated right through Maddox’s chest, leaning its horned head toward Raice’s ear.

"She lies to comfort her own cowardice," it rasped. "She refused the throne because the First Courts knew the Borrowed were coming, and she wanted a fortress with high walls to hide behind. She uses you as her scapegoat."

Raice met his mother’s weeping gaze, his silver-violet eyes utterly dead. "You cover up the truth to save face. My roommate’s corpse bled black blood, Mother. The Borrowed are already inside. And while you play politics, people are going to die."

"There is no proof of an invasion!" Maddox snapped. "One rogue initiate does not mean an apocalypse! If I validate your claims without undeniable proof, the entire five-faction alliance collapses into civil war!"

"Then let it collapse," Raice said coldly, stepping past her. "At least then they’d be fighting with their eyes open."

He walked away, leaving the High Rector alone in the corridor.

Raice’s private quarters were secluded in the spires of the Fae Academy—an isolation mandate his mother had arranged after his previous roommate ended up dead.

The moment he kicked the door shut, he collapsed onto the edge of his stone bench, grunting as his bruised ribs protested.

Fae magic was potent, but it could stitch the wounds of anyone in the world except the caster. He was forced to bleed like a mortal.

"Oh, look at you!" Cedric wailed, dramatically swooping past the chandelier. "Torn flesh, fractured bones, and zero appreciation from the masses! We are martyrs, Raice! Tragic, beautiful martyrs!"

"Stop wailing, Cedric. You’re giving me a headache." Raice muttered, reaching for a clean cloth and a basin of water.

"I am expressing valid grief! Your mother would rather you be bruised and bloody so she could parade you as a symbol of her ’unshaken discipline’ to the student body than to heal you and I’m the one giving you a headache?!"

Before Raice could clean the gore from his knuckles, the window burst open with a sudden chill.

A hyperactive, translucent girl in tattered third-century noble silk floated upside down directly in Raice’s face, grinning like a goblin.

"I have gossip!" Maeve squealed, spinning in the air. "Absolute, top-tier, scandalous gold!"

"Did you find the Dragonless girl?" Raice asked, not looking up as he wiped his arm.

"Found her? Darling, I tracked her entire afternoon!" Maeve clapped her floating hands. "She, her noisy roommate, and the cynicism-girl walked right into a trap at the Sunken Arch. A Sylven beat them up and tried to steal their cores!"

Raice froze, the cloth hovering above his skin. "A Sylven?"

"Yes! But wait, it gets better! Ivar Wulfram—yes, the arrogant Wolf prince himself—swooped in like a knight in dirty armor! But the Sylven used elemental lightning and spatial magic to vanish right in front of them!"

Raice’s eyes narrowed into sharp slits. "A Sylven using lightning magic? Sylvens don’t have elemental affinities. Their magic is tied to wood and instinct."

The horned entity drifted into the center of the room, its ash-gray tail of smoke curling around the furniture. "A core-stealer," it growled. "A Borrowed taking multiple forms."

"Exactly!" Maeve beamed. "And then... you won’t believe this... Ivar kissed the Dragonless girl!"

For the first time since he found his roommate eating the heart of a low-born Tiger girl, Raice’s eyes went wide.

"Ivar kissed her?"