Kael did not sleep.
The promise Eron made still echoed inside him not as comfort, but as pressure. Trust was fragile, and dangerous. It created vulnerabilities no seal could suppress.
And the gods would exploit it.
He sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor of the chamber they had confined him in after the interrogation. The chains were gone for now but the walls were thick with suppression runes, layered and rewritten so many times that the air itself felt bruised.
Kael closed his eyes.
Think like a king, he told himself, not the tyrant they remembered, or the strategist they feared.
Countermeasure One: The Seal
He turned inward first.
The demonic core was no longer dormant. It pulsed beneath layers of divine restriction, like a heart wrapped in barbed wire, alive, aware, and inc
