Deus Necros

The Emperor took a second glance at his hand. He didn’t lift it high or display it like a trophy, nothing that theatrical. It was a small, instinctive check, the kind a man makes when something feels wrong even if it doesn’t look wrong.

His fingers flexed once, slow and controlled, and the smear of blood across his skin caught the chandelier light in a dull, wet sheen. It didn’t drip. It didn’t run. It just sat there, stubbornly present, and the skin beneath it felt wrong in a way that didn’t require a wound to announce itself. The hall noticed anyway.

Bodies stiffened in place. Breath paused in throats. The nobles’ eyes tracked without tracking, glancing and snapping away, all of them aware that the Emperor was feeling the aftertaste of contact with something that wasn’t supposed to be handled casually.

“No one shall ever request, ask, order, command or find any way or mean to attempt to obtain your heart. This heart is hereby banned by the Empire of Lufondal for use to anyone under its sky that is not Ludwig Heart.” The emperor’s words were clear, a testament, an imperial decree, a command and at the same time a threat.

His voice didn’t need volume. It had the kind of authority that made the air in the room feel narrower. The phrasing itself was brutal in its completeness, request, ask, order, command, closing loopholes with the bored efficiency of someone who’d spent a lifetime watching people wriggle through them.

Every noble in the hall understood what that meant: the Emperor wasn’t just outlawing an action, he was outlawing the attempt, outlawing the angle, outlawing the thought that one could wrap in polite language and pretend it wasn’t predatory.

The meaning of those words was that the Empire would treat any attempt to obtain Ludwig’s heart as an act against the crown itself.

“Bu-” The Second prince couldn’t even finish his words when the Emperor’s eyes locked with his.

Call it fatherly love, call it anger, but the eyes of the Emperor had both fear for his son’s life and anger at how foolish he was to not see the danger that Heart possessed.

“It has been ordered, it shall be followed.”

The Second Prince’s syllable died before it became a sentence. He hadn’t even gotten far enough to make it disrespect, just the beginning of something instinctive, an impulse to object, to negotiate, to soften the edge of what had just been declared.

The Emperor cut it off with a look that made the entire hall feel suddenly exposed, as if the walls themselves had moved closer.

That gaze didn’t carry one emotion. It carried two at once, and that made it worse. Fear, sharp and genuine, because the Emperor understood with brutal clarity how quickly a foolish step could turn into a corpse when powers like Ludwig’s were involved.

Anger, controlled, heavy, because the Prince had failed to see the danger until blood had made it undeniable.

The Second Prince drooped his head, “Yes, your Imperial Majesty.” He said.

His shoulders sank in a way that wasn’t dramatic, just tired, tired in the particular way of someone forced to swallow pride in public. His chin dipped, gaze falling to the floor as though the polished stone might offer some mercy that the room wouldn’t.

The words came out properly, the title intact, the obedience clean. But the hall could read the tension anyway: the Prince was obeying because he had been made to understand he didn’t have a choice.

The Emperor didn’t indulge him further.

The Emperor’s steps were measured, each one echoing softly off stone and high ceiling toward the throne. He sat with practiced control, settling into the throne as if the seat itself were an extension of his spine.

The Queen leaned in immediately, not with panic, not with performance, but with a kind of precise care that came from having lived beside power long enough to recognize real risk when she saw it. Her fingers took his hand gently, turning it just enough to see the smear and the subtle change in the skin beneath it.

The hall watched without watching, eyes flicking like nervous birds. No cut. No torn flesh. No obvious wound.

And still the hand looked wrong, the skin tight and faintly darkening as if bruising were about to bloom from the inside out. The contact had left an impression deeper than blood should. The Queen’s touch lingered, careful, as though she were afraid to press too firmly and find something breaking underneath.

The Queen however didn’t have any hate in her for Ludwig. Her expression never twisted toward blame. There was no sharp glance thrown Ludwig’s way, no flaring of resentment for the spectacle or the discomfort.

The Queen had heard the warnings. She had seen the lines Ludwig had drawn, once and then again, each time with enough clarity that ignorance could no longer be claimed honestly. If anything, the pain sat elsewhere: in the knowledge that her husband had been forced into this moment, that her child had been foolish enough to walk into it, and that the lesson had been delivered in front of the entire upper spine of the Empire.

The word “injured” hung in her mind like a bitter taste. Not because she thought Ludwig had done wrong, he hadn’t, not by her measure, but because seeing the Emperor touched like that made the world feel less stable for a second. Like her sky and heaven was harmed and made to feel mortal.

Still, she understood the truth that power often requires: some warnings only become real after they strike. Some people only learn when consequences are loud enough to drown out pride.

“I apologize for the discomfort, your majesty,” Ludwig said as he placed a hand on his chest.

The room tasted the words in silence. Apologies in a throne room weren’t just manners; they were weapons, shields, declarations of intent. Ludwig was making it clear, out loud, that he recognized what had happened, that he wasn’t pretending it was nothing, and that he wasn’t challenging the Emperor further.

He was also making it clear that the discomfort had not been his goal. The nobles absorbed that nuance the way they absorbed everything: as information to be filed, cataloged, and later used.

“There was none, though I have to admit, that’s something even I wouldn’t want to dabble with. It is by no means evil, I can see that,” he said. “But it’s too angry, too vengeful. How are you able to maintain rationality with something like that pumping through your veins?”

The hall leaned into that question silently, because if the Emperor needed to ask it, then no one else in the room knew the answer either.

“Even I have my limits your majesty, I’ve been feeling rather irritable lately. So I hope I didn’t come off as rude. As for me… Well let’s just call it a dullness of sense and emotion. If there is too little emotion to amplify, I’d suppose even with all the power of Wrath it might just barely reach normal levels.”

Ludwig didn’t rush the answer. He didn’t show fear, but the careful structure of his reply carried its own caution. He admitted irritability, not as an excuse but as a fact, the sort of honesty that could either earn trust or make people nervous depending on what they were already inclined to believe. The nobles swallowed at that, because it was not comforting. It was simply consistent. A dangerous thing made manageable by an equally strange constraint.

“Enough of that subject,” The Emperor said. “I called you here for a reason.”