The King's Queen | ✔

Chapter 77

Haunted by the dawn to becoming the hunter.

For over ten thousand years, I roamed the earth as the first Origin, Lyle.

***

This was unbelievably awful. The weight of the truth settled on me: Lyle had ulterior motives, and I had to stop him.

The sight of the incapacitated guard took us by surprise upon our return. Luca, who had accompanied me back, wasted no time scouring the surroundings for any sign of Lyle's whereabouts. But he was long gone. According to the guard, who woke up a day later, Lyle was more powerful than he let on and possessed multiple unique abilities.

Of all the things, I never expected to release a vengeful Origin into the world. Lyle never came across as a typical child, but he was a child. Origins aged slowly, but that was after they reached twenty years old. Lyle had to be as old as he looked.

"We're going to have to seal him away." Luca decided after he finished questioning the guard. "The question is how."

"I'm the one who set him free in the first place," I mumbled. "It's my fault. I'll find a way."

Lyle's location remained a mystery, but we couldn't divert our attention to him—not when Prinarch Cole's army had breached the Spade Kingdom border. The war had finally begun. The rescued Origins were on standby to fight whichever side emerged victorious.

I turned Lyle's words over in my mind. "Your mind is divided like this map. You see this as a war between Origins and Origens when it's not."

There was more to this war... more to Malekh... but what?

News of the war at the border soon arrived. We'd heard whispers of Malekh's plan - a classic envelopment maneuver, cutting off Prinarch Cole's supply lines and squeezing his army from behind.

We thought he had Prinarch Cole cornered. Malekh had executed the flanking maneuver perfectly, slamming into their rearguard with brutal efficiency. It was textbook, the strategic brilliance that had become Malekh's signature. But underestimating Prinarch Cole was a mistake we couldn't afford to make.

Prinarch Cole had grown up dissecting battle strategies since childhood. He wouldn't fall for the same trick Malekh had used once before. We received reports of Prinarch Cole's forces shifting, countering Malekh's attacks with practiced precision.

Our hope wavered. What was Malekh thinking? Every report that reached us bore the weight of the Spade kingdom's imminent defeat.

We would have to fight Malekh to end the war, but we needed him to eliminate Prinarch Cole from the equation first. If Malekh lost here, the Spade kingdom would become overrun by Crysauralia and the combined allied forces of the empire. He threw all our plans into chaos by betraying us and deciding to fight the prinarch alone.

Hours blurred into days. Prinarch Cole was winning, pushing back the Spade forces inch by inch with a methodical efficiency. Luca and Ezra, ever the pragmatists, started preparing the Origins for immediate deployment and our desperate stand against Prinarch Cole.

But then, something unexpected happened. A factor we hadn't accounted for disrupted the flow of the war. Lyle. He had decided Prinarch Cole's victory wasn't in his best interest and launched a surprise attack, striking the exposed flank of the Crysauralian army.

Luca and I had decided it would be best to keep news of Lyle under close wraps, so our enemies didn't become aware of him too soon. We expected Lyle to stay neutral for the rest of the war since he had no allies, but it looked like he'd been busy behind the scenes, building up forces for himself.