THE ALPHA KING'S BASTARD SON

🌒 THE EXECUTIONER - DANRIV

Not a single guard stepped forward toward the body of the dead old hag. To touch the beast was to step into the immediate physical radius of the sixteen-year-old boy who had just crushed a sixty-five-year-old legend with his bare hands.

"Commander," one of the senior alphas whispered, his uniform soaked in sweat despite the freezing storm rattling the windows.

"The boy... what do we do with the boy?"

The commander finally looked at Danriv. For three days, the guards had treated the fallen royal candidate like a dog, throwing him the worst rations and assigning him the most degrading labor. Now, looking into those silver eyes, the commander realized that Danriv had not been broken by his exile. He had simply been delivered to his destination.

"Leave him," the commander ordered under his breath, stepping backward toward the exit.

"Lock the sub-level hatches. Put the entire garrison on high alert. No one goes near the northern barracks tonight. No one speaks to him." the commander said.

By nightfall, the dynamic of the Mud Sump had completely shifted. Danriv was not put in solitary confinement, the guards were too terrified to lock him in a small room where he might decide to break the walls. Instead, they isolated themselves from him. When he walked down the narrow corridors of the barracks, the other inmates pressed themselves flat against the weeping timber walls, their eyes wide and wet with a submissive dread. The guards watched him from the high catwalks, their hands never leaving the triggers of their heavy ballistas.

Danriv sat on his low hammock, the sulfurous fog of the mire drifting through the iron bars of his window. He had no weapon, no armor, and no title. Yet, as he watched the guards pace nervously outside his door, he knew he was the true master of the garrison. After the first name on this place had been crossed out in blood.

Three hundred miles to the north, the cold rain polished the granite. Inside the high tower of the Chief Inspectors, Omega Garrick sat before the desk of petrified cedar. The room was dark, illuminated only by a single green-glass lamp, the shadows across the maps pinned to the walls.

Before him lay a single leather-bound folder, sealed with the red wax crest of the Southern Mire. Garrick broke the seal with a small silver knife. His fingers were perfectly steady, but as his eyes skimmed the frantic, ink-smudged lines written by the garrison commander, his hand stopped mid-motion.

Target dead on the third day.

Subject Danriv executed the prisoner known as the Old Hag using no weapons. Only his single blow to the thoracic cavity. Skull crushed against the stone, with minimal exertion noted.

Garrick slowly leaned back in his high-backed chair, the silver crescent pins on his collar clicking softly against his chest. For six years, he had watched Danriv like a hawk watching a hare. He had prided himself on knowing every metric of the boy’s potential, his heart rate under stress, his shifting speed his unusual patience. He had believed he was the architect of Danriv’s destiny, using the King's wrath to send the boy into the mud to harden his spirit.

He had been completely blind!

"He knew," Garrick murmured into the empty, dark office. His voice, usually so controlled, carried a rare, sharp edge of realization.

"The Eastern Gate... the rogue boy... it wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a failure of heart." Garrick picked up the report again, his amber eyes narrowing as he read the description of the dead beast.

He didn't need the garrison commander's brief notes to know who the Old Hag truly was. Garrick knew that monster intimately.

Twenty year ago, before Danriv was even a thought in his mother’s womb, that very beast had been the fierce rogue leader who had nearly burned the northern valley to the ground. He had been the commander of a massive, lawless army that had threatened the very foundations of the House of Alpha King Darius. He had been caught by Alpha King Darius, Garrick, and three full regiments of the Royal Vanguard to hunt the monster down in the deep jagged valleys of the Scarp. They had lost forty elite alphas just to put the heavy iron chains around his curved spine. The King had kept him alive in the Mud Sump as a trophy, a hidden reminder of the crown's ultimate dominion over the wild.

And Danriv had killed him in five seconds with his bare hands?

Garrick stand up and leave his chair immediately. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place with a terrifying precision.

Danriv hadn't been broken by his parent's death, he had been calculating. He had used the kingdom’s own administrative structure, its judicial punishments, and Garrick’s own inspection methods to guide himself directly into the one cage he needed to access.

Garrick grabbed the folder, shoved it into his coat, and blew out the green-glass lamp. He walked through the dark corridors of the palace with the silent, predatory speed of an inspector who had just found a leak in the kingdom's dam.

The doors to the royal bedchamber did not open for anyone after midnight, but the guards fell back the moment they saw the silver crescent pins on Garrick’s collar and the look in his eyes.

Alpha King Darius sat by the massive hearth, his bear-pelt cloak thrown over a low chair. He was cleaning a long, silver-hilted hunting knife, the firelight reflecting off the deep lines of his face and the gray streaks in his heavy mane.

The scent of cedar and old musk in the room was dense, but it soured slightly as Garrick stepped over the threshold without a formal announcement.

"Garrick," Darius growled, not looking up from his blade.

"The moon is already past its peak. Unless the southern borders are on fire, you have violated my privacy." Darius added.

"The southern borders are not on fire, Your Majesty," Garrick said.

He dropped the leather folder onto the table beside the King's blade. "But your wall has just lost its foundation."

Darius sharpened his gaze, his heavy brow furrowing as he reached for the folder. He tore the pages out, his eyes scanning the text with aggressive focus of a commander. As he reached the name of the dead prisoner, the King’s hand clenched, ripping the corner of the parchment.

"The Old Hag?" Darius lowered the report, his voice dropping into a register that made the logs in the hearth hiss and crackle.

"The rogue leader? The boy killed him?"

"He did not just kill him, sire," Garrick said, stepping closer into the firelight.

"He targeted him. We believed we punished the boy by sending him to the Mire. We believed we were teaching him the cost of mercy because he spared that rogue pup at the Eastern Gate. We were wrong."

Alpha King Darius rose from his chair, his frame casting a giant shadow across the stone walls of the chamber. His Alpha presence filled the room, heavy and suffocating, but Garrick stood his ground, his head unbowed.

"Explain," the King commanded

"Six years ago, Danriv’s family was one of the slaughtered people by an unregistered rogue. Maybe he saw that Old hag that time" Garrick stated, his voice was like a cold stream of facts.

"But how he was so sure that the beast is one of them, in fact he was locked on the darkest underground."

"With due respect your majesty! Lady Gladice can answer that." Garrick said.

"The records listed the perpetrators as unknown outlaws. But Danriv knew. He knew the leader of that raid was the very beast we captured twenty years ago, the beast we threw into the Mud Sump to rot. The boy has spent five years in our training grounds pretending to be a tool, waiting for the exact moment he could force our hand to send him to the one place the monster we kept."

Darius looked down at the torn report, his teeth baring slightly in a silent snarling expression.

"He used my judgment. He used my decree to execute his own personal revenge."