My Taboo Harem!

His mouth, when he was not speaking, was too still. Lips perfectly composed, no small breath-movements at the seams, as though breathing were a voluntary performance he was currently choosing not to give.

His hands, resting on the dragon skulls, were immaculate — but the nails were a fraction too long, a fraction too pointed, and the fingers curled around the horns of the skulls with an articulation at the knuckle that was not quite human. He blinked. But only one eye at a time. Alternating. Left, then right, then left, in a measured rhythm that had nothing to do with the moisture of the eye and everything to do with the courtesy of blinking for a guest who might otherwise find it disturbing.

His eyes were red… a deep, rich blood-red while the pupils inside it narrow and perfectly vertical.

He was dressed for a century Phei had only read about.

A long high-collared coat of deep crimson damask, the fabric so richly worked that the embroidery — delicate black thorning, clustered into rose motifs — caught the red mist and seemed to writhe with a life of its own. Black silk cravat tied with precise formality at his throat, pinned with a single blood-dark gem. An embroidered waistcoat beneath. Black trousers.

High leather boots polished to a dark mirror gleam, unlaced only at the top.

He wore lace at his cuffs.

A signet ring on his right little finger.

The dagger and the pale throat and the lace cuffs and the blood-red eyes together spoke a long, cold word the Phei of three years ago would not have known how to read.

The Phei of now read it and tightened his jaw.

Kyle’s gaze drifted down from Phei’s face to Phei’s hands.

And Kyle’s smile widened, slow and knowing, the kind of smile a thing that had worn many faces across many centuries might offer a child who had just revealed its favourite toy.

“Shadow.”

His voice was different here, too. Older. Deeper. Grown into the full timbre of something that had once commanded empires and feasted on their ruins, every syllable chosen with slow, aristocratic deliberation that made the red mist itself seem to listen.

“Why the weapon, friend?”

Phei looked down.

He had not noticed.

His right hand was wrapped around the hilt of a dagger.

Not the Void-Ice dagger but something simpler like a lean black blade, perhaps eight inches long, edged with the faintest thread of violet glow that Phei recognised from his own System notifications.

It had manifested somewhere between Kyle’s chuckle and Phei’s turning.

He had not reached for it. He had not summoned it consciously. It had simply been there, the way breath was there, the way rage was there — a tool the realm had understood he would need and had provided without asking, as though the ossuary itself had decided its guest required a tooth of its own.

He looked at the blade.

Looked back at Kyle.

He did not answer.

He smiled.

Compared to this, the grin from the prison had been theatrical — a performance for a Legacy heir who needed to be shaken. This was smaller. Quieter. A smile that did not show teeth, that was barely a smile at all, and yet conveyed with complete, merciless efficiency that Phei had no intention of explaining the weapon to his host and that the host could draw whatever conclusions he found most amusing before they were carved into his soul.

Kyle’s own smile deepened, indulgent, almost affectionate.

He uncrossed his legs, recrossed them the other way, rearranged the fall of his long coat across his knee with the unhurried precision of a man composing himself for a portrait that would hang in the halls of the damned.

“Ah~”

“Ah, friend. Very well.”

He rose from the throne.

The rise was not a standing. Between one moment and the next he was on his feet in the air six feet above the bones — and then he was descending, a slow, regal fall, almost a drift, his crimson coat stirring around his knees like bloodied wings as he lowered.

His polished boots hit the bone-field a heartbeat before his full weight did, and the skulls and ribs and femurs beneath his feet dissolved.

A perfect circle several feet across, the ancient bones inside it suddenly reduced to fine grey ash that lifted, drifted sideways on a wind that had no right to exist, and blew away into the red mist like forgotten prayers.

Kyle landed at the centre of the circle on freshly exposed black stone that Phei had not realised was beneath the bone-drifts at all — a floor of obsidian veined with pulsing arterial red, as though the realm’s true skin had finally been revealed.

He straightened.

Adjusted one of his lace cuffs with a single elegant flick.

The red tendrils above them paused their drifting and angled, collectively, toward him — every strand of mist across the visible sky turning its attention the way sunflowers turned toward a dying sun.

A dozen skulls across the nearest drifts rotated on their own axes to face him. The continent-sized vertebral ridge on the horizon rippled along its impossible length as if something buried and vast beneath the drifts had, very briefly, stirred in acknowledgment.

The realm knew its prince was on his feet.

Kyle looked across the distance at Phei.

Smiled.

And then — because ceremony was, after all, a thing one offered one’s equals, and the realm had not yet decided whether Phei qualified — he took a single step forward, and the distance between them folded.

A mile of bones vanished around him in a single sweeping circle as his weight settled onto new ground. Everything within perhaps four hundred yards of Kyle’s landing point — human remains, beast skeletons, ancient drifts of fragmented ossuary, the dried fist that had still been dreaming of closing — all of it blew away into ash in one long continuous exhalation, leaving behind only that same black stone stretched in a perfect disc.

The disc expanded outward with every heartbeat.

Kyle was walking now. Unhurried. Almost bored. A ballroom crossing, a courteous courtesy to an acquaintance he intended to devour.

When he was ten paces from Phei, he stopped.

Tilted his head.

His smile did not waver, but something behind the wine-red of his eyes narrowed into a blade of ancient, aristocratic fury.

“How dare you.”

His voice was still quiet. Still precise. Still beautifully composed. But underneath the composure something had gone cold in a direction colder than the composure had room to hold — a primordial winter that had outlasted stars.

“How dare you try to instill an ever-living fear on my soul.”

Phei grinned.

It was the devil-grin again — wider this time, showing every tooth, the amethyst of his eyes catching the red energy and refracting it into something that did not belong on a human face, something that belonged in the dark between the teeth of the horizon.

“That’s not all, friend.”

He tilted his own head, a small mocking mirror of Kyle’s tilt, and his voice carried the easy warmth of a boy making dinner plans with an old acquaintance.

“I’m going to enslave you after I’m done.”