The guards at Ashenmoor's gates did not see him arrive. They felt him.
It began as a pressure behind the eyes, then a silence that swallowed the night birds, and then every torch along the black stone wall bent toward the road as if bowing. Captain Harl, who had served the gate for three hundred years and feared nothing that walked on two legs, lowered his spear without knowing why.
A man stepped out of the dark.
He was tall, taller than any wolf in the garrison, with shoulders built for war and a stillness no soldier could imitate. His coat was black and worn at the cuffs, his hair darker than the road behind him. A scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw, pale and old, the kind that magic had refused to heal. He did not hurry. He did not slow. He walked the way a storm walks across a valley, certain that nothing would be foolish enough to stand in front of it.
His eyes were wrong. In the torchlight they shifted from wolf gold to vampire red, then to the cold silver of a witch's sight, and finally to a black that had no bottom at all. Harl's knees hit the stone before he understood he was kneeling. Behind him, forty guards did the same.
"Open the gates," the man said.
It was not loud. It was not even a command, really. It was a fact being stated, and the gates obeyed it.
Harl found his voice somewhere in his chest. "Who... who comes to Ashenmoor?"
The man stopped. He looked down at the kneeling captain, and something moved across his face that might have been pity.
"You know me," he said. "Your grandfathers taught you to fear my name. Say it."
Harl's mouth was dry as ash. The name came out as a whisper. "Daemon."
"Louder."
"Prince Daemon." The captain's voice broke. "The Abomination."
"Yes." The corner of his mouth lifted, and it was not a smile. "Tell your master that the abomination has come home. Tell him I have not come to ask for my throne. I have come to take it, and I will rule every one of you cruelly."
He walked through the open gates. The torches stayed bowed until he had passed.
The streets of Ashenmoor were not as empty as they looked. Behind every shuttered window, a candle had been snuffed in a hurry. He heard the creak of floorboards, the hush of a mother's voice telling a child to stay down, the quick wet breath of a baker's apprentice pressed against a door. Word of his arrival was moving through the city faster than he could walk.
He did not mind. Let them look. Let them whisper the old stories, the ones about the boy who burned a castle wing and the monster who came back for blood. A feared king was an easy king to hide behind.
At the corner of Tanner's Row, a small girl in a nightgown had slipped out of her door and stood barefoot in the road, staring up at him. She could not have been more than six. Her mother lunged out of the dark to snatch her back, white with terror, but the child had already lifted one hand in a small, solemn wave.
Daemon stopped.
For a moment, something in his chest forgot to be cold. Then the mother hauled the child inside, and the door slammed, and the bolt slid home with a sound like a verdict.
He started walking again. The wolf in him wanted to turn back, to say something, anything. The demon in him said that kindness was a currency, and that he had not yet decided what to spend it on.
Above the rooftops, at the crest of the hill, the castle waited with its lights burning. Somewhere inside it, a man he had not seen in nine hundred years was sitting in his father's chair. And somewhere else, in a part of the castle he could not yet name, was a scent he had never forgotten.
Pine smoke. Wild honey. Crushed moonroot.
He closed his eyes against it, and kept walking.
Inside the walls, the city of Ashenmoor lay asleep beneath the wolf moon, its slate roofs shining, its towers crowned with the old banners. Daemon looked at it for a long moment. Nine hundred years had passed since he had last seen it, and it was smaller than he remembered. Everything was now.
He lifted one hand and flexed it. Beneath his skin, four bloods turned in their slow, ancient circles, wolf and vampire and witch and demon, four rivers forced into a single bed. They had never agreed with one another. He had spent most of a millennium teaching them to be quiet.
The wolf in him wanted to run. The vampire wanted to feed. The witch wanted to understand what had changed in these streets, and the demon, the oldest and most patient of the four, wanted to rule them all.
"Soon," he murmured, and walked on.
Year of Exile 0
He was ten years old the night the east wing fell.
It was supposed to be an ordinary night. His mother had been dead for two winters, and his father, King Aldric, had taken to reading to him before bed from a book of old wolf stories. They were silly stories, mostly. A fox who stole a crown. A moon that wanted to be a sun.
Daemon had fallen asleep with the book open on his chest. And then the dream came, the one he always had, of a place with no walls, of four voices singing in four different keys, each one pulling him in a different direction.
He woke screaming.
It wasn't a child's scream. It was the sound of something tearing. His bed split down the middle. The window glass bowed outward, hung there for one impossible breath, then exploded into the courtyard. Fire rolled out of his hands, though he had not asked it to, black fire that ate stone as if it were paper. His eyes burned. His teeth hurt. Fur crawled over his arms and then retreated, and his canines lengthened, and something in the air began to chant in a language he had never learned.
He remembered the roar of the ceiling. He remembered a guard named Edric, who ran in to carry him out and was crushed by a falling beam.
He remembered his father's face in the smoke, soot-streaked and white with horror, but his arms were already open.
"I've got you," King Aldric whispered into his hair. "I've got you, my son. It's over."
It wasn't over. It was only beginning.