Free Web NovelChapter 15: Chapter 15: The Terms
Celestia sat in her chair with her legs crossed, fingers absently threading through her red hair, her ruby eyes steady on Drazeil.
He was standing exactly where he had been standing since she sat down, looking at her with the expression of someone who still didn’t like the fact that he had a Master now.
"Terms," she said quietly, breaking the silence first because she had decided she was tired of it. "You go first."
Drazeil looked at her for a moment. Then he straightened — the particular straightening of someone shifting from one mode into another — and the temperature in the room dropped by approximately two degrees.
"First," he said. "You cannot wish for anything that directly interferes with my goals. That is non-negotiable and not subject to discussion."
"And what exactly are these goals of yours?"
"Do you really want to know?" He looked at her steadily. "You should be able to figure it out by now."
Celestia put two fingers to her forehead, thinking. What could his goals possibly be? She looked at him — at the cold fury that lived permanently behind his heterochromic eyes, at the centuries of something dark and unresolved that radiated off him like heat off a flame — and arrived at the most obvious answer.
"Your goal is to kill all Celestial beings," she said.
"Not only that." Something shifted in his expression — brief, controlled. "I want my realm back. The Infernal Realm. What was taken from me."
"Wow," Celestia said, in a tone so dry it could have started a fire.
She was tired. She was genuinely, thoroughly tired — the kind of tired that settled into her bones after a day that had included a Royal Court execution, a grandmother’s reunion, an ancient lamp, a Pact she hadn’t agreed to and a man who had just told her, very calmly, that he intended to end her entire species. All she wanted was for this to conclude so she could sleep.
Although —
Her eyes drifted briefly to his lips before she caught herself.
Not yet, she told herself firmly.
"Is she alright?" Drazeil thought, watching her. I have just informed her of my intention to eliminate her kind and she is sitting there with that expression on her face.
Celestia snapped back to attention.
"But I am also a Celestial being," she said, bringing her eyes back to his face with the focused calm of someone returning to an important point. "Does that mean you intend to kill me? Kill your own Master?" She put a deliberate emphasis on the last word — quiet, precise, intentional.
Something tightened in his jaw.
"Once I find a way to unbind this Pact," he said, "that is precisely what will happen. So rest assured — for now, you are safe."
"Hmmm." Celestia tilted her head slightly. "Then I will make sure that never happens."
"We shall see about that." Drazeil said.
The corner of her mouth curved.
"I’ve noted your first term," she said. "Next."
His eyes narrowed slightly at the speed of her response — like he had expected an argument and was mildly disoriented by the absence of one.
"The Pact stays between us," he continued. "You do not tell anyone of its existence. Not your guards. Not your grandmother. No one."
Celestia thought briefly of Angelina and Jake and the way they noticed everything about everything always.
"Fine," she said.
"Every wish beyond your first three carries a price. You agree to the price before I fulfill the wish. No exceptions."
"What kind of price?"
"That depends on the wish."
"That is not a satisfying answer."
"I don’t care," he said flatly. "In public — our dynamic stays private. You do not command me. You do not reference the Pact. As far as anyone else is concerned we are simply two people who happen to cross paths." freeωebnovēl.c૦m
"And the fifth?"
Something moved almost imperceptibly across his expression.
"You do not make wishes designed to use the Pact against me," he said. "The Pact exists between us. It is not a weapon."
Celestia studied him for a moment, then she nodded once.
"All right," she said. "My turn."
Drazeil said nothing. Which she took as permission.
"You cannot harm anyone I consider under my protection," she said. "I don’t care what they have done or what your reasons are. If I have extended protection to someone, that is final."
His jaw tightened. "That is an unreasonable condition."
"It is my term," she said pleasantly.
"Second — you answer my questions honestly. No deflecting. No half truths. No technically accurate responses designed to mislead. If I ask you something directly, you answer it directly."
The look he gave her suggested he found this particular term personally offensive on a deep and fundamental level.
"Third," she continued, "you cannot use the Pact against me in any way. Not as leverage, not as manipulation, not as a tool. Whatever this is between us —" She gestured loosely at the space between them. "It does not become a weapon pointed at me."
"Fourth." She met his eyes steadily. "You do not disappear without telling me where you are going. I am your Master. I need to be able to reach you."
"I am an ancient King," he said. "Not a —"
"Fourth term," she said again, in exactly the same tone.
His mouth closed.
"And fifth." She paused. Letting her pause do its work. "You call me by my name. Not Celestial being. Not girl. Not any other cold dismissive thing your extensive vocabulary might produce. My name is Celestia. You use it."
The silence that followed was extraordinary in its quality.
Then Drazeil did something she did not expect.
He laughed. Not loudly — not the way most people laughed, filling rooms and joyous.
Just a quiet exhale of something that was genuinely, reluctantly amused.
The sound of someone who had not expected to find anything funny and was mildly irritated that they did.
"Ordering me around, Celestia," he said...
Oh.
The way her name sounded in his voice was entirely unreasonable.
Low and deliberate. It moved through her chest before she could stop it, and her heart did something it had absolutely no business doing — beating faster, quicker, louder, like it had suddenly remembered it existed and wanted to make a point of it.
She kept her face perfectly composed.
"I’m your Master, I’m sure I do have the power to order," she replied calmly.
Drazeil looked at her with the expression of someone counting internally to a very large number.
"These terms," he said carefully, "are —"
"Reasonable," she said. "Completely reasonable. More reasonable than yours, I would argue."
"You think so?"
"Yes. They involve basic respect and communication. Practically nothing."
Another silence. The specific silence of someone who has lost an argument and is in the process of deciding not to acknowledge it.
"Fine," Drazeil said. freёwebnoѵel.com
"Fine," Celestia agreed.
Neither of them moved. But something else in the room did — something unspoken, still unresolved, sitting between them with the particular patience of something that knew its moment was coming.
"My first wish," Celestia said.
The air shifted immediately. That particular shift that happened every time either of them came near the subject — charged and complicated and not entirely comfortable for either party.
"Does it need to be fulfilled before I can make any other?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "That is the nature of the Pact."
"And I have other wishes I need to make." She looked at him steadily.
"Important ones."
"I am aware."
"So." She looked at him. He looked at her. The space between them was very quiet and very small. "It needs to be fulfilled."
"When you are ready to —"
Celestia stood up.
She crossed the space between them in four steps — unhurried, deliberate, with the calm of someone who had made a decision and was not going to second guess it — and before Drazeil had fully processed that she was moving, she was standing directly in front of him.
Looking up at him.
He looked down at her.
Neither of them spoke.
Then Celestia rose onto her toes, closed the remaining distance between them, and kissed him.
It was not a long kiss. It was not a tentative one either — it was the kiss of someone who had decided to do something and was doing it fully, without apology, without hesitation.
Her hand had found the front of his garment without her quite realizing it, steadying herself, and for exactly three seconds everything including centuries of ancestral enmity ceased to exist entirely.
It felt like magic. The real kind. The kind that didn’t ask permission.
Then she pulled back.
Stepped away.
Smoothed the front of her dress with one hand, composed as anything.
"Wish fulfilled," she said simply.
And turned to go back to her chair.
Drazeil stood exactly where he was.
He did not move. Did not speak. Did not — for the first time in longer than he could clearly remember —
He did not know what to do with himself.
Something had happened in those three seconds that his centuries of careful, absolute, ironclad control had no existing framework for. Something that had moved through him like the crack of a seal — quick, total, and impossible to unfeel.
He breathed. Once. Slowly.
"Strawberries", that scent was more stronger now.
"You seem quite out of breath,"
Celestia observed from her chair, in the tone of someone making a casual remark about the weather.
He said nothing.
"If my kiss affected you that much —" She touched her lips lightly with one finger, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "Would you like another?"
Something moved in his expression.
Something that would have been dangerous on anyone else’s face and was considerably more dangerous on his. He opened his mouth —
A sound.
Footsteps in the corridor outside. Slow. Deliberate. Unhurried in the way of someone who had no reason to hurry because they were in their own home and every room in it belonged to them.
Growing closer.
Celestia’s eyes snapped to the door immediately, sitting upright in her chair, the teasing expression dissolving into something considerably more alert.
Drazeil didn’t move, didn’t turn. Simply stood exactly where he was with his hands at his sides and his expression returning to that flat, unreadable thing it did when he had decided the some things were not worth reacting to.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
And then the door handle moved.
