Coming for your soul

Chapter 5

Eren POV

He kept his eyes trained on the one man who gulped down some air, hands shaking and face void of all color. The others remained unmoving on the ground, their gazes never once meeting his, never straying from their feet. Eren moved back to his throne, sitting down and crossing his legs with his hands folded in his lap.

His intense eyes never moved too far from his silent unit of soldiers.

"What do you know about the conflict of Eldia and Marley? And about Grisha's involvement?" The name could as well have been acid on his tongue. He bit down the disdain that usually accompanied it – not that he was talking about the man if he could help it.

When none of the soldiers made a move to answer, he smirked down at them.

"Come on now, don't be shy.", he enticed them, his voice an immaculate sound of tranquility.

His little victim, with a trembling body and a white face, answered: "Your...Your Highness fought for the former king's throne."

Eren hummed, content to know that such a coward was brave enough to say something when everyone else seemed to deem it unnecessary to do so at his hidden command.

"And do you know what I did to get it?" Now his voice resembled the biting cold surrounding sharp daggers of ice. The soldier swallowed and lowered his gaze anew. Even from afar Eren could see the drops of sweat on the man's forehead.

He rose from the throne, the action alone enough to inflict fear in his victim, who instantly kneeled on the ground, eyes averted at all costs.

"If you want to reach your goals, sacrifices must be made.", Eren said and stalked forward, relishing in the wince of the soldiers in the first rows, whenever his heels made contact with the stone underneath him. "I sacrificed my family. My friends. And strangers who were willing to fight for me."

Coming to a halt in front of the small gathering, his gaze swept across the ducked heads and the unmoving mass of black clothing. They were listening, desperate to please him – even the most stoic, emotionless of them.

That's why he had chosen them for the Wings of Phoenix.

"Their deaths are the reason for your existence here. For your chance to participate in a project that needs to be kept close under covers." He didn't waste his time with useless threats about the consequences should even a single one of them dare to breath a word to an outsider. The prince had always preferred showing people instead of talking. "You are here, under my command, and have sworn to be loyal to me until you take your last breaths. And soon enough you will prove that this oath hasn't been taken lightly."

He stepped around his soldiers, eyes directed at nothing but the pictures of the past that his mind conjured up, quelching his heart and silencing his head.

The night went on.

And no one was awake to listen to the soldier's moans of exhaustion.

- - -

Zeke waited for him many hours later out in the hallways, when the sun already shone through the windows and the soldiers staggered back to their small barricades – far away from the rest of the army.

It had been Eren's wish to keep them separated from everyone else.

He couldn't have nosy questions about their whereabouts late at night when everyone else was dead asleep. It would only take a single one. A single person who trusted their lover enough to think that it wouldn't hurt to pass on the secret.

And since Eren had, rather unceremoniously, declared the love and marriage between people of the same gender as legal and valid, his apprehensions were justified.