We set up waiting for the

  fiend in the training room exactly when he said we should meet,

  though it seemed utterly ridiculous given that he had be dragged down

  to the dungeons for torture hours ago. The idiot had better of made

  this a part of some elaborate plan or I was going to make sure I

  personally got in Rafe’s ear to ensure his torture and possible

  death were as drawn out and painful as possible.

  “He’ll be here,” Mistra

  said quietly as she adjusted the position of her bag on her shoulder,

  “he makes terrible choices sometimes, but they usually always have

  a point in the end. He would not have done this to himself without a

  purpose.”

  “How is he going to get out

  of the dungeon?” I asked, tapping my foot impatiently at the time

  slipping away that we could be using to march towards my kingdom.

  “Your father’s dungeon is well guarded when it needs to be and he

  is going to post every guard he can outside that idiot’s cell, they

  know he is a trickster.”

  “You have little faith in

  me.”

  Feros had some how managed to

  appear on the balcony above us, looking down with that big, stupid

  grin I was quickly coming to despise. “Also, ouch, I never go

  around calling you an idiot.”

  “That is because I am not

  one,” I countered. “On what realm was it a good idea for you to

  tell Rafe about Alice? The whole castle is going to be abuzz with

  people trying to solve the problem while we are trying to slip out

  unnoticed. You have just made it harder!”

  The fiend let out a short

  laugh and shook his head. “All this time you have been around me

  and you still have not caught on that I do not do anything without

  having things far planned in advance. My dear, I have had decades

  upon decades of experience with Rafe and I dare say I might be able

  to call myself an expert on how he thinks and operates. Come up here

  and follow me, we will make our way out as I explain.”

  Miffed, but just glad to be

  actually leaving, I ascended the stairs at the back of the room to

  the balcony area with Mistra in tow. Upon closer inspection, the

  fiend looked whole and unharmed, not a single sign that he had been

  in the midst of torture, it was suspicious since Rafe was not the

  time to be lenient, he must have ordered the torture to start as soon

  as he had been led to the cell.

  “You look well,” I

  commented.

  “Mm this body does, yes,”

  he replied with a sly grin. “It’s a very handy thing to be able

  to slip out when timing is convenient. I am afraid that we will need

  to take it slightly slower at the start here while I work out the

  joints in this body, they are always a bit stiff before I get them

  broken in.”

  “I always want to ask, but

  then I remember I am sure I do not actually want to know,” Mistra

  said with a shiver.

  “I think it’s an ingenious

  system,” Feros remarked, “I will show you both sometime when we

  are not on a deadline with places to be.”

  Feros marched us to the back

  of the room where a set of shelves had been placed against the wall.

  They looked out of place to me before it dawned on me that the reason

  why was they were not present in my version of the castle. With a tap

  of his knuckles on the front edge of the third shelf down, there was

  a brief click, then a grinding noise as the shelf sprung forward a

  bit, then slid open to reveal a dank, dusty passageway.

  “This is not a part of your

  castle system,” Feros explained, “Rafe has always believed in

  having escape routes and he did not want your family to know about

  this one in case things went a bit wonky and he needed a route out

  that you all wouldn’t know about.”

  “He thought my family might

  attack him?” The idea that the demon king feared me was laughable.

  It hurt my pride to think about, but I knew that I likely would

  never, ever be able to hold my own against the raw magical might he

  possessed. “That sounds absolutly absurd.”

  “My father is paranoid

  sometimes,” Mistra interjected, “it is one of the major things

  that I think make him a weak monarch overall. Everyone knows that he

  has little to fear from most any human, but he is never exactly

  convinced so he plans for strange eventualities and acts erratically

  in weird situations.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “I had noticed he seems to

  always think I was slinking in the shadows behind him ready to plunge

  a dagger in his back,” I commented.

  “Is he fully wrong on that?”

  Feros said with a giggle. “Would you not plunge a dagger in his

  back and take over if you had the chance?”

  He had me there, there was no

  way I could lie convincingly enough to answer that without admitting

  that I would indeed take that chance, probably with no hesitation.

  “Mistra as well,” he

  continued, stepping into the darkness of what lay beyond the hidden

  entrance. “I know that you do love your father my dear, but I dare

  believe that you would rather get him out of the way so you could

  take your seat on the throne. You might even consider slitting the

  throats of all your brothers along the way to ensure your seat was

  assured.”

  “That is so very crass of

  you,” Mistra muttered disapprovingly. Notedly, she did not argue to

  the contrary.

  “Crass perhaps, but not

  wrong.”

  The area inside the hidden

  passage were cramped and the air reeked of moisture that had sat

  around for far too long. My shoulders scrapped the walls as I tried

  to orient myself to the direction we were taking and both came away

  soaked with tepid water. We were not even but a minute into the

  journey and I already felt like I needed a hot bath.

  “Tap the wall next to the

  entrance, would you my queen?”

  I couldn’t see any obvious

  mechanism to press, so resorted to tapping the stone wall itself in a

  random area. Whatever the mechanism was, it worked and the shelf

  began to slide back into place and then clicked closed, bathing us in

  complete darkness. Before I could pull up the power from my core to

  try to coalesce a flame, a light twinkled into existence on the tip

  of Feros’ index finger. He held it in front of him like the most

  ridiculous rendition of a torch. Wordlessly he brought his other hand

  to his face putting a finger to his lips to indicate that we should

  not speak. He lead us for several minutes through the passage, the

  arms of my travel outfit becoming completely soaked by the time we

  reached what I assumed to be an outer corner of the castle. Feros

  swept his hand up and down to reveal there was a ladder that

  stretched up to higher floors and down to lower ones. He wordlessly

  brightened the point of light on his finger and slowly climbed onto

  the ladder, obviously having some trouble with the newness of his

  shell. Once securely on the ladder he began to climb down, looking

  back at us with a nod that we should follow.

  I withheld a groan of disgust

  when it was my turn to descend, the ladder was wooden and absolutely

  soaked through with moisture. It must have been treated to keep it

  from rotting completely, but the outside was coated with slime that

  squished between my fingers. I felt bad for Mistra who had gone

  before me, surely it had been even worse for her. At the bottom of

  the ladder, Feros continued on at a right angle to the direction we

  had been going before, only this time as we continued to walk, water

  began to impede our path. It started out as uncomfortable encounters

  with random puddles, but quickly escalated to us wading ankle deep in

  water, moving careful so as to not splash and make too much noise. By

  the time there was a crack of light in the distance we were up to our

  knees.

  “Almost there,” Feros

  confirmed in a hushed whisper.

  As we drew closer to the

  light, a door manifested out of the darkness, it was at a strange, 45

  degree angle to the ground, Feros had to hunched over and fumble for

  the handle before pushing with all his might against the door. After

  a moment of grunting and struggling, the door budged, dirt falling

  inward as it swung open. The cool night air rushed in and I took a

  large gulp of fresh air, between the stale, musty air and the rising

  water I had felt on the edge of suffocation.

  Peaking my head out of the

  door, I saw that we were just on the edge of the pond that lay next

  to the stable, a perfect place for us to find horses and ride off

  into the night. Rafe really had constructed the passage system as a

  way for him to flee if necessary. I was a bit miffed that he had

  neglected to build a similar system into the castle Yser, it would

  have made fleeing from the fae much easier and less messy.

  “Well that went well,”

  Feros said cheerfully as he helped pull me from the passage. “I am

  pretty sure we did not make too much noise and they are none the

  wiser.” He looked up the low overhanging moon and tilted his head

  like he was thinking deeply about something. “Just in time too, I

  think about now my old shell is probably about to give out and they

  will figure out that I am gone.”

  “Wait, wait, wait, your body

  was back there still being tortured and was alive?” I asked in

  horror.

  “Alive? That’s a funny

  term, what actually constitutes something being alive?” He asked

  rhetorically with a chuckle. “I suppose to your human terms it

  might indeed be considered alive in that it could feel pain, interact

  with the world and the like. Now that I think of it, it may be able

  to even think, I’ve only ever used it in situations where I have

  not been at liberty to stick around and ask it to know for sure. Oh

  well, if it is indeed sentient at least it did not have to live for

  long.”