?Circe strived to gather every single fact before her that would help her in taking the next steps.

How they had been able to find the Crystal Leviathan inside the expansive tunnels and under the bloodied waters of the Crystal Lake was not so much a mystery when she considered how they had reached inside her Spatial storage, and retrieved materials from inside it, all while she was unaware.

She scanned her spatial ring with her Spirit and of all the treasures and weapons kept inside, the only thing missing was the report in the hands of the boy. This struck her as suspicious, and from that single thread, she began to dig deeper.

That report had been hidden deep inside her Interspatial Ring in her fear that if she was captured it would take a while for it to reach the light of day, enough for Rowan to be alerted if anything could incriminate him, and yet, it had been retrieved without her knowledge, something Circe had always considered impossible, but then a series of clues came together that almost made her cry and laugh at the same time.

Praying that she was right and not about to receive a spear through her neck, Circe took a step back, pressing herself against the bookshelf, cleared her throat, and whispered,

“Two sips and a tap.”

The woman holding the spear to her throat blinked, and Circe suddenly felt embarrassment flooding down her spine, but she stuck to her guns and repeated herself more loudly,

“Two sips and a tap!”

The boy looked up from his report and sighed, “Maeve, you can stop the charade, she already figured out who I am.”

“Really? Two taps and a sip?” The woman brought down the spear, placing the tip to the ground and holding the shaft with a lazy grace; she turned to the boy with a look of slight annoyance before eyeing Circe with a critical look.

“Took her long enough to figure it out. My Lord, do we truly need a former Child of Trion? Everything I have seen has left me less than impressed, quirky phrases included.”

Feeling awkward before her judgmental gaze, Circe bowed towards the boy and turned to the woman, whom the boy, undoubtedly Rowan had referred to as Maeve, “It’s two sips and a tap, and if you must know, it is how he drinks his wine, so it is not just a quirky phrase” she did an air quote with her fingers, “but a statement of fact.”

“You recover quite quickly after being scared to the brink of death a moment before,” Maeve folded her hands, “How would you know how he drank his wine, such a mortal activity is rarely performed by my master.”

Feeling suddenly energetic after leaving the shadows of death, Circe pointed out, “I don’t need your acknowledgment about how quickly I recover from the brink of death. My lovely master has made sure I die many times before. You mistake my fear for something else, and it is not death. Also, you are wrong about the things our master craves, for I knew our master when he was a mortal, and there I say it, I was the one who gave him the taste for fine wine. It would seem you don’t know him as well as you think.”

Maeve’s voice went cold, “So I should assume that part of his fascination for mortality came from your hands?”

Maeve sputtered, “Um, yes… I don’t think so, I feel you don’t understand the reason for…” feeling like a mouse before the gaze of a cat she turned towards the boy, shifting her eye from the woman to avoid this uncomfortable situation and was glad when Rowan pushed the reports aside and smiled at her,

“Good job Circe, you have performed far better than I thought. Although your situational awareness is lacking and leaves much to be desired, your intuition as always is remarkable. Good job for noticing the pattern I placed in front of you, Maeve does not play nice and you needed an advantage.”

Circe bowed again, and looked at Rowan, “My lord, your…”

She gestured at the body he was wearing, of all the images she had of Rowan in her head, none of them was as a child. She found the sight both appealing and incredibly frightening.

For a brief moment, she had a weird thought of bringing Rowan to her breast to suckle from it, and he did with pleasure, but then he refused to stop and she did not want him to. She died a few hours later with a smile on her face after her corpse drained of every single liquid collapsed.

Circe shook her head, banishing this thought to the darkness that it came from, she attributed such weird contemplations to the present atmosphere of Trion.

Rowan brought his small hands and looked at it with a weird look in his eyes, “Oh, this is just the Spirit Guise holding my body, it is still too weak to carry me so I have to be replacing it every three minutes for a new one. This size is what I get after disassembling the remaining nine hundred thousand Spirit Guises to increase their numbers sevenfold, to maximize the utility.

What he did not tell her was that this body was the only other clear memory of Rowan he had before he became someone else. He would be ascending to the Third Dimension soon, and this would be the last tribute he could pay to his previous self—

Romion, the Benevolent King Who Never Was.

“I have read through your reports, but it is time I see the current state of Trion for myself before I turn it to ash.”

Rowan stood up and Circe immediately felt the air charge up with electricity. Like a flash flood that emerged from nowhere, the energy Rowan gave had transformed in an instant, from relaxed to sheer focus.

“You have never seen me battle before Circe, so follow the lead of Maeve, she is to be considered one of my hands. You will soon be witnessing my other powerful hands coming into play soon, alongside my children. Firm your mind and steel your heart, and if it gets too much for your soul to handle, I give you leave to flee from Trion until the war is over and I have crushed them all.”

The body of Rowan unexpectedly split into seven parts, and six of them vanished, alongside Maeve. The only one remaining began to move below, towards the hall of ascension.

Circe wanted to protest that she would never flee this fight that was coming, but the thoughts of what she had seen that her mind had quickly had to forget robbed her of her tongue.

Whatever was coming was not for minuscule gods like her, it would be true horror, and she should be grateful that she had come to play a part in this affair.

Circe bowed deeply to Rowan, hiding her tears. She had never felt so small. She gritted her teeth and pursued the rapidly disappearing figure of Rowan. She would prove him wrong.

Unknown to her, the lips of Rowan bent in a smile.

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