Two days after the high arcanists isolated the foreign ether inside Liam’s channels, he had decided that being forbidden from using his own ether was intolerable.
Apparently, this was not persuasive enough to make anyone change the restriction.
The corruption had been contained, surrounded by several layers of formations designed to prevent it from reaching deeper into his channels or interacting freely with Arik’s ether through their bond. Every few hours, another arcanist arrived to inspect it. Every few hours, Liam asked whether they could remove it yet.
The answer remained no.
So Liam had found something else to do.
He sat sideways on a couch in Arik’s dressing room with one leg tucked beneath him, a tablet resting against his thigh and a stylus moving steadily across the screen while attendants prepared the adjoining chamber for the oath.
Arik stood several meters away while Kamal inspected the ceremonial coat being fitted over his shoulders. The oath would not make him emperor—not yet. That would come only after the sovereign bond fully settled, perhaps a year from now—but it would formally begin the process and grant him access to parts of Nuria that had remained closed even after the Gate recognized him.
Liam should probably have been paying attention.
Instead, he drew another wall.
"No. Too narrow."
He erased it.
Rubis entered carrying two garment cases and stopped when he noticed the increasingly complicated floor plan covering Liam’s tablet.
"What is that?"
"Felix’s private wing in Wrohan."
The room became noticeably quieter.
Arik turned his head.
They had spoken extensively about Felix since arriving in Nuria. His poisons, his connection to Goliath, the fragment that had crossed the Gate, and whatever he had attempted to accomplish decades ago.
They had never discussed the rooms Liam and Arik had searched in Wrohan.
Liam enlarged the drawing.
"Felix maintained a private wing in his manor. We searched it after everything was secured."
Rubis set the garment cases down and came closer.
Liam began reconstructing it properly, starting with the corridor and Felix’s study before adding the rooms surrounding it. His memory was annoyingly precise once he forced himself to concentrate. Tall shelves. Narrow windows. Old furniture that had remained almost completely untouched. Ether seals were added later by Wrohan’s investigators. The circular remains of a transportation formation burned into the floor.
Then the books.
Liam wrote several categories beside the shelves.
Genealogies.
Ether inheritance.
Fertility.
Rare secondary genders.
Poison tolerance.
Transmission of ether through bloodlines.
Rubis leaned slightly closer.
"We have books concerning all of those subjects."
Liam looked up. "Here?"
"In the imperial library. Some are common medical references. Others belong to the restricted historical collections."
That caught Arik’s attention completely.
Liam tapped the stylus against the screen. "The books in Wrohan did not seem unusual individually. It was the collection that bothered me. Felix had assembled too many texts concerning inheritance mechanisms for it to be casual research."
Liam added another section to the floor plan.
"The important part was hidden."
The wall had looked ordinary. Mezos had found no active mechanism in it, and the Wrohan security teams had already swept the wing before Liam entered. Yet something about the structure had bothered him enough to keep investigating.
Eventually, blood had opened it.
Liam’s stylus slowed.
"At the time, we assumed Felix designed it to recognize me because of what he had done to my ether."
Arik’s expression changed.
Liam noticed.
"Yes. I know."
He wrote three possibilities beneath the hidden wall.
BLOOD.
MARK.
ARIK’S ETHER.
The room stayed silent.
"Behind the wall was another access to the Gate," Liam continued. "I don’t think it is another Gate itself. Maybe the structure connected back to the original one beneath Lab V."
Rubis stared at the drawing.
"You found a second entrance to Nuria’s Gate in Wrohan?"
"Essentially."
Kamal had stopped pretending he was only listening because he happened to be standing nearby.
Liam added the tall doors he remembered from the concealed room, then marked the transportation formation farther back in Felix’s wing.
"I thought this was separate."
"The transportation ward?" Arik asked.
"Yes. But perhaps nothing in those rooms was separate."
That was the part bothering him.
Felix had studied how ether passed through families. He had studied fertility and unusual secondary genders. He had somehow gained access to a Gate created around Goliath’s ether. Years later, something bearing his signature had crossed that same Gate inside Liam and immediately begun pushing him toward stronger connections with Arik.
The consort ceremony.
Pregnancy.
Felix’s palace.
Liam pressed the stylus harder against the screen.
"I need copies of the books from the imperial library."
"You are not using ether," Arik said.
"I said books."
"You have a remarkable talent for turning books into dangerous activities."
"That happened once."
Arik merely looked at him.
"Several times," Liam amended.
Rubis was already entering the titles and subjects into his own tablet. His expression had become increasingly displeased, though Liam suspected only part of it concerned Felix.
Arik straightened one gold cuff and stepped down from the platform, looking over Liam’s notes.
"He wants to imitate what Goliath did," Liam mumbled.
Arik stopped.
There was no question of what Liam meant.
His gaze dropped immediately to the words Liam had written beside the reconstructed shelves.
"He wanted to be reborn."
Liam looked up at him. "Yes."
The answer sat unpleasantly between them.
Liam stared down at Felix’s collection.
Suddenly, the emphasis on fertility made considerably more sense.
"He wasn’t studying how Goliath’s ether passed into you," Liam said, stylus moving slowly beneath the list. "He was studying how Goliath arranged for there to be a you."
Arik crossed his arms, jaw clenched and eyes burning with rage at the idea of Felix using his mate to get reborn. "Felix makes the same mistake Olivier did. He is trying to do it without a core. I could do it because my ether was bound to the core and became sovereign."
Liam’s stylus stopped.
"So even if he copied every other condition perfectly, he would still fail."
"He should fail." Arik’s voice had gone dangerously quiet. "But Olivier proved that someone can force an imitation far enough to cause damage before it collapses."
That was not reassuring.
Liam looked toward the diagram again, tracing the line between Felix’s research, the Gate, and the foreign ether sealed inside him.
"Then maybe he doesn’t need a successful rebirth."
Arik’s attention sharpened.
"Maybe he only needs something alive long enough to reach the core."
The room went silent.
Arik’s pheromones turned cold.
"No," he said. "He will never reach it through you."