A King who was now pushing through one corridor the companions had not gone down, the one that stemmed from the back of his castle wall, directly into the ground—one that led straight to the holding cells. As he crept, trying to make sense of what the dark was distorting, he could already feel the nervousness slithering up his stomach and towards his head. This was not what he was expecting. When he pushed the mock wall aside and saw the blood on the floor, his breath held almost painfully in his throat.
There he saw three Kremises lying on the floor, another with a terrified look, stretching its arm out of the cell. In its shaking hand was a note, held towards the King, while the creature’s eyes did everything they could not to look at him.
Idimus approached, still confused by what he was looking at—troubled as he tried to figure out what happened. But he took the note, one with his name written on it. With trembling fingers he broke the seal and pulled it open. His vision went blurry, then tunneled in, the last thing he saw before he was so overwhelmed with panic he could not even focus were those words scribbled on the inside:
You’re in my seat.
Below it, a symbol—sharp lines that curved horizontal, others that stemmed straight vertically, the entirety of it covered by flames. A mark that he had not seen in over three hundred years.