Arik dressed in the formal clothing the Nurian palace staff had prepared for him after lunch because none of them had crossed the Gate with luggage, spare uniforms, or anything beyond what they had been wearing when they passed through the gate.
The attendants had worked quickly once the council summons arrived, taking measurements while the physicians replaced the seals around his hands and returning with an outfit that fit with suspicious accuracy.
The long coat was black, cut closely across his shoulders before falling almost to his knees, with dark green panels worked into the sides and restrained lines of old gold embroidery following the collar, cuffs, and fastening. Beneath it sat a high-collared shirt of softer black fabric and a narrow ceremonial belt bearing Nuria’s imperial crest.
There was nothing Agaronian about it.
That disturbed him more than it should have.
He fastened the gold-and-emerald cuff over his right wrist, although the bandages around his fingers made the small clasp unnecessarily difficult, and studied his reflection while an attendant adjusted the fall of the coat behind him.
His ether had stabilized enough that it was no longer escaping through every break in his skin, and the fractured pieces of his soul were no longer burning as though someone had poured molten metal between them.
Now they merely scorched him.
The physicians had called that improvement.
Arik considered medical standards alarmingly low.
The council had been waiting for nearly an hour, but half of that delay had been consumed by negotiations over who would accompany him. Cassian wanted Liam and Mezos confined to the guest rooms under medical supervision. Mezos had objected on the grounds that Arik was his responsibility. Liam had objected because he disliked anyone deciding where he would remain without first consulting him. Arik had objected because everyone else had begun speaking as though his own opinion were administrative clutter.
Eventually, he had won.
Or at least, he had forced them into an arrangement they were willing to describe as a compromise.
Liam and Mezos would remain in the guest wing, where both could recover without being placed before a suspicious council, while Severin would escort Arik to the Golden Court, the vast parliamentary palace where Nuria’s ruling council had gathered to decide what his return meant for the empire.
Arik knew what Cassian expected from the meeting.
Confirmation.
Recognition.
Perhaps submission, although Cassian was intelligent enough not to call it that.
The imperial office had accepted Arik’s ether, opened every sovereign ward, and extended authorization to Liam through their bond. There would be no returning to the fiction that he was merely a foreign prince carrying fragments of Goliath’s memories.
By the end of the day, the councillors would know that Goliath had returned.
What Arik did not know was whether they would allow him to leave afterward.
His fingers stilled over the second cuff.
He was Crown Prince of Agaron, the son of Damian and Gabriel, raised to inherit an empire that was his through blood, education, duty, and choice. His parents were beyond the Gate. His siblings were beyond it. The future he had been preparing for since childhood waited in a world Nuria had been severed from for decades.
Yet the thought of abandoning Nuria again caused something ancient inside him to rise with quiet, possessive fury.
His empire.
His people.
His capital.
The feelings did not belong solely to Goliath anymore. That would have been easier. Arik could have separated them, examined them as memories and instincts inherited from another life, and refused to let them determine his future.
But the boundaries between them were weakening.
Arik wanted Nuria too.
He wanted it with the terrible recognition of a man discovering that something he had mourned without understanding was still alive and waiting for him.
If the Gate could not be reopened, if Nuria could not be returned to the world and he was forced to choose between the empire that had raised him and the one that remembered his soul, Arik did not know what answer he would give.
That frightened him more than the council.
The attendant finished adjusting his collar and stepped back.
"Your Majesty."
Arik’s gaze hardened slightly in the mirror.
"Your Highness."
The attendant went pale. "Forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. But I am the Crown Prince of Agaron."
"Yes, Your Highness."
For now, Arik thought.
He dismissed the attendants and waited until the door closed before turning toward Severin, who had been standing beside the wall so motionlessly that the staff had begun unconsciously avoiding that entire side of the room.
"You are taking me to Goliath’s private rooms after the council."
Severin’s watery jade eyes shifted toward him.
"That depends on the council."
Arik let out a low chuckle. "Severin, we both know that you are interested to see if I can open that lock too." He brushed the oddly familiar material of his coat with the back of his right hand. "Plus I need to dispose of something from there before Liam sees it."
Severin raised a brow, not really against it.
"The mate collar."
"Ah. Right, that." Severin chuckled, although the amusement did not reach his eyes. "I had forgotten it survived."
"I had not."
The memory had surfaced with unpleasant clarity while Arik dressed: a black lacquered case resting inside the warded cabinet of Goliath’s private rooms, its interior lined with dark velvet and shaped around a collar of old gold and black ether metal. Every link had been crafted to recognize the sovereign’s power, tightening the bond between wearer and giver until distance became nearly impossible.
Goliath had commissioned it for Felix before the poison, before the massacre, and before affection had curdled into something Arik could barely examine without rage.
He had never placed it around Felix’s throat.
That distinction did not make Arik want it gone any less.
"Kamal preserved everything in those rooms," Severin said. "Even objects that should probably have been thrown into a furnace."
The door opened before Arik could answer.
Liam entered dressed in a white shirt, matching trousers, and soft house shoes, his long brown hair loose over his back and right shoulder.
Arik went still when he saw him.
His chest tightened before he could stop it.
In Goliath’s palace, white had been the color worn by consorts when they entered the imperial household. Not for purity, as outsiders often believed, but for erasure of judgment. Whatever past they carried, whatever name, grief, scandal, or ruin had followed them to Nuria, it no longer mattered once they crossed his threshold.
Liam paused, noticing the sudden change in him.
"You look like you are walking toward an execution," he remarked, his tone light, though his eyes searched Arik’s face carefully. "Ours or theirs?"
Arik swallowed the tightness in his throat and forced the ancient, possessive ghost of Goliath back down.
Liam had no idea what the color meant here.
Arik would not be the one to tell him.
Not yet.
"Neither," Arik said at last, crossing the room to adjust the loose fall of Liam’s collar with bandaged fingers. "A council meeting."
Liam’s brow lifted. "That sounds worse."
Severin made a quiet sound that might have been agreement.
Arik leaned down and brushed his mouth against Liam’s temple.
"Stay with Mezos."
"Return with answers."
"I will."
"And without new injuries."
Arik paused.
Liam narrowed his eyes.
"I will attempt it."
"That was not the promise."
"No," Arik said, turning toward the door. "But it is the only honest one."