POV: Belathriel
Belathriel of the House of Beleth had desired a rest from those labors of the mind which, because they produced no visible exhaustion in the body, were considered by his less reflective kind to be no labors at all.
Instead of remaining in the capital city Sheol, where every conversation returned by some artful and wearying path to rank, inheritance, marriage, blood, faction, and the delicate insult which one house imagined it had received from another, he went, toward the end of the week, to stay for some days in the rural territories where Sairaorg Bael kept his training grounds, his peerage, and those rougher habits of life which many devils of high birth praised in public and avoided in private.
In Belathriel's judgment, there was no life more wholesome for a devil of the old blood than the life lived at a certain distance from the great cities, provided that one came to such a life with a disciplined mind and a proper understanding of its usefulness.
The domains of the great houses, with their halls, traditions, and histories, were necessary, and he never doubted their necessity, since without them devil society would dissolve into the crude appetites that its enemies had always been eager to attribute to it. Yet precisely because those courts were necessary, and because one could not leave them without eventually returning to them, it seemed to him that an occasional withdrawal into a harsher and simpler region had almost the character of a moral exercise.
One perceived there, more clearly than in the cities, the foundations on which power rested.
Sairaorg established his household in the rural territories of House Bael, even though his position as the heir demanded that he reside in the capital to fulfill his duties as a Bael heir. The reason was simple: Sairaorg had long been at odds with his family. House Bael, as the leading power of the Great King Faction, stood among the most conservative houses in the Underworld, and its rigid defense of hierarchy had become intolerable to him.
This was especially true in matters concerning Low-Class Devils, whom Sairaorg believed deserved greater rights and dignity, and Reincarnated Devils, whose uncertain legal and social position placed him in constant opposition to the views of his own house.
For that reason, Sairaorg had deliberately built his household far from the Bael capital. Its distance was itself a declaration. He went even further by turning the household into a living political statement, making it known that any reform-minded devil, regardless of class or origin, would be welcome under his protection.
As a result, his estate became a gathering place for devils from every level of society: minor nobles with their own peerages, Reincarnated Devils, Middle-Class Devils, Low-Class Devils, and others who had entered Sairaorg's service because they found in him a lord worthy following. Among the traditional nobility, his estate was mockingly called "the anarchist's household."
Sairaorg was glad to see him, as he always was, for he had an affection for Belathriel which, in men of less restrained character, might have shown itself in embraces, exclamations, and other demonstrations of intimacy. Sairaorg expressed it in practical arrangements.
He gave Belathriel rooms near the eastern section of his palace, where the noise of training could be heard without becoming oppressive, and he ordered that no formal reception be held, knowing that Belathriel had come to escape the ceremonial admiration with which noble houses exhausted one another.
Between them there existed a friendship of the sort that is possible only between men who admire one another without wishing to resemble one another too closely.
They were both Pure-Blooded devils, both conscious of their lineage, both dissatisfied with the stupidity of those nobles who mistook ancient descent for personal achievement, and both, in their own way, committed to the reform of the Underworld. Their friendship was made stronger by rivalry because neither man wished to flatter the other, and because each believed that the other, when mistaken, was mistaken in an intelligent and therefore interesting manner.
The great question of their age, which returned in every public debate and in every private conversation in different forms, had arisen little more than five centuries earlier, when Ajuka Beelzebub's Evil Pieces system had answered a demographic and military crisis by creating a new form of devil existence.
The Reincarnated Devil, made from human, youkai, dragon, fallen creature, or some other being through the magical and legal act of a King, had first appeared as a solution, then as an instrument, then as a class, then as a problem, and finally had become a second foundation of devil society.
The first foundation were the pure-blooded devils, those created by Lucifer directly and the descendants thereof, from the first houses, from those lines whose abilities had become inseparable from their names.
The second foundation was conversion, through which beings of other races were remade into devils and bound into the service of a King. Between these two foundations there lay a crack which every statesman of intelligence could see and which every statesman of cowardice pretended was merely decorative.
The central question seemed simple when stated in the language of public controversy: were Reincarnated Devils truly devils, or were they instruments that resembled devils closely enough to be useful?
But the simplicity vanished the moment one attempted to answer it. If devilhood came from origin, as the conservative claim, then the Reincarnated remained artificial and subordinate, however impressive their achievements were. The conservatives admitted that the Reincarnated could fight, serve, reason, marry by permission, bear children in certain arrangements, and even rise in public fame through Rating Games or military service, yet they insisted that these facts did not alter the foundation.
The Evil Pieces system, they said, had been designed to restore strength after a catastrophe, and therefore it was a military system rather than a charter of citizenship. A pawn could become powerful, a knight could become celebrated, and a queen could become indispensable, but the piece remained a piece, and the hand that placed it upon the board remained the hand of a King.
The vulgar conservatives disgusted Belathriel, although many of them, hearing only his caution and not the principle beneath it, sometimes mistook him for one of their own. He regarded the belief that Reincarnated Devils were mere tools as intellectually lazy, politically dangerous, and morally indecent.
So he sought an answer to a fundamental question: what makes a devil? What does devilhood consist of?
If devilhood came from function, power, and allegiance, then many Reincarnated Devils had already exceeded the Pure-Blooded scions who looked down on them.
If devilhood came from the soul, then the entire system opened into a theological abyss, for one had to ask whether the soul was transformed, harnessed, awakened, damaged, or in some sense placed under ownership by the act of reincarnation.
That last question was the one most devils avoided with the greatest elegance, since it led backward toward Lucifer's rebellion, toward the meaning of free will, and toward the uncomfortable possibility that devil society, which congratulated itself on ambition and self-assertion, had built part of its modern strength upon metaphysical slavery.
But, in spite of Belathriel's respect for Sairaorg and in spite of the comfort he found in the directness of his host's manner, he was from the first day conscious of an uneasiness which he did not at once name.
Belathriel watched Sairaorg among his household, and among that household were Pure-Blooded nobles, Reincarnated Devils, half-breeds, and some of mixed or uncertain histories which the old genealogists, had they been present, would have found either fascinating or offensive according to their temperaments.
Sairaorg treated them all equally regardless of their social status. He rebuked a Pure-Blooded youth with the same public severity he used on a Reincarnated pawn, and he praised a Reincarnated knight in front of pure-blooded observers with no concern for the social unease it produced.
That was admirable. The problem was that Sairaorg only spoke of the reincarnated devil insofar as those whom he personally knew, but when asked his opinion of what he thought of the reincarnated devils as whole, he never gave a clear answer.
Sairaorg would say that he knew Reincarnated devils, that he trusted some of them, that he distrusted others, that some were vain because they had acquired power suddenly, that some were humble because they had once been weak, that some possessed a fiercer hunger than any Pure-Blooded youth he knew, and that others, having received a second life too easily, did not understand the gravity of the gift.
However, from these observations he drew no single flattering conclusion and no single condemnatory one, and it was this attitude that troubled Belathriel most.
Sairaorg would say that Reincarnated Devils should be free, and when Belathriel asked what institutions would sustain that freedom, Sairaorg would answer first with the name of a person who had earned it.
Belathriel held reformist views and had defended them before men who considered any concession to Reincarnated Devils the beginning of civil decay. He had argued for legal protections against abusive Kings, for clearer consent procedures, for education suited to those who retained memories from former lives, for defined rights in matters of family, property, testimony, and bodily autonomy.
He had even offended several of the Pillar houses by saying that a Reincarnated Devil who had served the Underworld with distinction could not be treated indefinitely as a piece of living equipment.
Yet he had also argued, with equal force, that reform without form was destruction disguised as generosity.
He wanted regulated contracts, graduated autonomy, courts of appeal, institutional oversight, and a long transition away from absolute ownership. He wanted to examine whether the Evil Piece system itself required redesign, because he doubted whether consent was clean when resurrection, power, survival, and belonging were offered through submission to a King.
Sairaorg, who was also called radical liberal by his enemies and dangerous by his relatives, considered this position humane in language and timid in substance. To him, lifelong servitude remained servitude even when wrapped in regulations, and the Reincarnated Devil who possessed memory, will, loyalty, love, anger, pride, and the ability to form a family was already a person before any council granted him the courtesy of recognizing it.
However, Sairaorg did not wish to abolish the Evil Pieces, for he regarded them as a neutral instrument whose morality depended on the circumstances of use, the presence of real consent, and the right of the servant to seek release from the bond.
He believed that merit should weigh more heavily than blood, and he pointed, often with irritation, to figures such as MacGregor Mathers, Souji Okita, and Tannin, whose existences made nonsense of the comfortable assumption that conversion produced a lesser kind of devil.
This disagreement was sharpened by the fact that both men opposed the same conservative camp. Both rejected the old argument that Reincarnated Devils were necessary assets without political standing. Both despised the view, still held in most great houses, that ownership was safer than chosen loyalty because a bound servant could be managed more efficiently than a free ally.
Both regarded as unserious the third position, held by a few mystical lunatics and bitter purists, that the Evil Piece system had created a class of soulless imitations whose apparent personality was a magical echo. No one of consequence could maintain that doctrine after five centuries of experience, after seeing Reincarnated Devils love, betray, grieve, reproduce, and found households of their own.
The dispute between Belathriel and Sairaorg began after that crudest error had already been set aside. It concerned the next question, the more difficult question, the question of what justice required when justice itself threatened to reorder the society that had to enact it.
On the second evening, after the training grounds had emptied and the wind had begun to move through the dark banners above the eastern wing, Belathriel and Sairaorg sat beneath a stone arcade overlooking the lower yards.
Their meal had been cleared away, and below them a few late fighters continued their exercises in the violet dusk. Belathriel had been speaking with one of Reincarnated devils belong to one of noble who joined Sairaorg in his household, a former human scholar whose reincarnation had preserved nearly all the habits of his previous life, including a tendency to quote human philosophers at inconvenient moments.
The conversation had pleased Belathriel, and it had also irritated him, since the man's intelligence had been both genuine and socially unplaceable.
"You see," Sairaorg said, after the retainer had gone, "that he cannot be answered by calling him an asset. He has his own views, history, ambition, and enough stubbornness to exhaust a committee. If he had been born into one of the smaller houses, the same men who now debate his legal standing would call him promising."
Belathriel looked toward the yard below, where two young devils were circling one another with wooden weapons.
"I have never called such men assets in the sense used by the conservatives," Belathriel said with a sigh. "I have opposed that language more often than you have had to listen to it. My difficulty is that your conclusion moves too quickly from the dignity of the individual to the collapse of every inherited category that makes the foundation of our civilization. I accept that he is a devil in law, in body, in duty, and in much of his soul's present orientation. But I will not pretend that his route into devilhood has no lasting significance."
"It does," Sairaorg said, leaning back and folding his arms. "and I have never said otherwise. A man who remembers being human, or dragon, or spirit, or something stranger, carries an inward double history that those born as devils rarely understand. That's why I think your regulated integration is insufficient. It feels as though you want to fit them into an outdated system, instead of the other way around. The old system must learn to stand in the presence of lives they did not create and can't entirely define."
Belathriel heard in this the tone that always disturbed him in Sairaorg's radicalism. It was moral, direct, and grounded in anecdotes, and therefore difficult to answer without seeming evasive.
"You mistake caution for evasion, as usual," Belathriel said. "The old system you so despised makes up our rule of succession, duty, territorial rights, military obligation, and the authority of Kings over those they reincarnate. If we alter them through indignation, we shall produce injustices faster than we correct them. A Reincarnated Devil who earns autonomy must be protected from his King, yes, but the King must also be protected from a political system that takes his household apart after encouraging him to build it."
"A household built upon an unbreakable bond of servitude deserves to be taken apart in part, if the persons inside it never had a meaningful right to leave." Sairaorg turned his head toward him. "I'm not speaking of vengeance against Kings, nor am I insulting those bonds that are honorable, affectionate, and freely sustained. But an honorable bond should survive the possibility of refusal. A loyalty that requires metaphysical captivity in order to endure has already confessed its weakness."
Belathriel's fingers tightened slightly on the arm of his chair, because the argument was powerful and because it stated too cleanly what he himself feared about the system.
"What if the evil pieces themselves are fundamentally coercive?" Belthriel said plainly. "You treat the Evil Pieces as a neutral mechanism that may be regulated by consent, appeal, and dissolution. But could the very moment of reincarnation can ever contain true consent when the candidate is often dead, dying, desperate, defeated, ignorant of devil law, or overwhelmed by the offer of a new life and power? If a drowning man signs a contract while a hand holds him above the water, I don't call that contract free merely because he moved his hand across the page."
The problem of the Evil piece was in Belathriel's opinion a metaphysical one, and there he found the question most disturbing, because no law could be just if it misunderstood the soul upon which it acted. Ajuka Beelzebub remained silent on his creation, thus the underworld had to make their own conclusion on how they functioned.
Was the soul of a Reincarnated Devil changed, overwritten, bound, or merely embodied anew?
Did the Evil Piece convert the being into a devil as wine becomes vinegar through transformation, or did it clothe a prior essence in a demonic form while leaving identity essentially continuous?
Did loyalty to a King arise from gratitude, law, magic, social dependence, or some admixture so subtle that no testimony could isolate it?
If the soul was enslaved, then the Underworld had reproduced in technical form the very domination against which Lucifer's rebellion had once defined devil pride.
If the soul remained free, then the legal ownership of such a soul became even more monstrous, since it placed a free will under hereditary convenience. If the soul became truly devil, then the refusal to grant full devil status became a political lie.
If it remained originally human, youkai, or dragon beneath a devil's body, then the entire society had filled itself with beings whose identities could not be contained by its laws.
Sairaorg's expression changed, and Belathriel knew he had reached the point where their positions crossed in an inconvenient way. Sairaorg wanted full emancipation for the reincarnated, but he was less hostile to the technology itself.
Belathriel favored slower political reform, yet he disliked the evil piece technology more deeply. That was the reason despite having many opportunities until now, he hadn't recruited anyone into his peerage.
"You're not entirely wrong," Sairaorg said slowly. "I've seen gratitude turn into obedience before the servant has discovered his own will again. I have seen men mistake rescue for ownership and women mistake power for debt. Yet I cannot condemn the system as such, because I have also seen it return futures that death had already taken. I have seen those who chose reincarnation with open eyes, and I have seen them become more themselves afterward than they had been before. The moral answer can't be to abolish the road because many have been driven onto it badly."
"The moral answer may be to rebuild the road so thoroughly that it ceases to be the same road."
"That may be so," Sairaorg admitted slowly. "but you would place judges, and frightened nobles across it for two centuries before allowing the living to pass. You have a talent for compassion expressed through law, and I don't mock it. Law saves many who would otherwise be crushed by the strong. Yet there are moments when the soul in chains doesn't require a commission to describe the metal. It requires the chain to be opened."
"That's exactly what alienates you from every old house." Belathriel looked at him sharply.
"Then I know I'm doing at least something right."
"No, you have achieved the pleasure of feeling right," Belathriel said unimpressed. "That's a different temptation. The old houses fear you because you speak as if freedom were a blade, and because they know that many young Reincarnated Devils will hear in you a language more honest than anything offered by the councils. But if the blade is swung without a due process behind it, the result will be broken authority, rival loyalties, unregulated households, and a class of newly freed devils whose status no court can define quickly enough to protect them."
Sairaorg did not answer at once. He watched the two fighters below finish their bout. One bowed correctly, the other poorly, and a senior attendant struck the second lightly on the shoulder with a staff to correct the angle.
The scene was small, almost ridiculous in relation to the size of their subject, yet both men watched it as though it contained some clue.
"When you speak of them as a class… as groups," Sairaorg said at last, "you become more eloquent and less accurate. That is the root of my objection. I know a Reincarnated Devil who would collapse without the support of his King's household, and I know another who is being slowly diminished by the same structure. I know one whose former human pride had to be broken before he could become honorable, and I know one whose former human dignity must be defended against devil arrogance every day.
"I know one who serves from love, one who serves from fear, one who serves from habit, and one who serves because no one has shown him that service can mature into partnership. It's easy to speak of people in the abstract, the difficult matter is knowing these people personally. Only then can I prepare myself to do justice."
"Justice must be dispassionate," Belathriel smiled faintly, although the smile was tired. "I want to protect those whose names you will never know. You may do justice to the one before you, because he trains in your yard, eats at your table, and has the good fortune to be seen by a lord who dislikes cruelty. The Underworld must govern thousands who stand before no Sairaorg Bael. A system built from noble exceptions is merely another form of aristocratic vanity."
"Well said," Sairaorg accepted the point with a nod. "I know that personal honor can't replace institutions. I know that a good King is a poor answer to the existence of bad Kings. But I refuse to ask the wounded to wait until the institution becomes conscious enough to recognize their pain. A law that arrives too late may be intellectually superior to a rash decree, yet the dead do not admire its balance."
Belathriel was silent for a time. He had often thought something similar, though never with Sairaorg's impatience. His own mind was methodical, and in method there was safety and a certain cold temptation.
He liked distinctions because they prevented lies from dressing as moral fervor. He liked gradualism because civilizations could be ruined by good men who had never administered anything larger than their own outrage.
Yet he knew that gradualism also permitted comfortable men to praise tomorrow what they refused to do today.
"What do you want then?" Belathriel said. "Give them full freedom at once? That would be anarchy."
"I believe," Sairaorg said calmly. "that every Reincarnated Devil should possess recognized personhood from the moment of conversion, should possess a protected will, should possess a path to dissolve or transform the King-servant bond, and should possess the right to family, property, testimony, and political representation.
"I believe the Rating Games should cease treating them as extensions of a King's prestige and should recognize individual achievement as belonging first to the one who earned it. I believe exceptional service should create autonomy, and I believe even ordinary service should never erase the self. I don't believe this can all be done in a week, but we must state the end honestly before we begin debating the pace."
"We are on the same page on that," Belathriel said.
"But?" Sairaorg said amused. "There is always a but following that."
"But," Belathriel enunciated the word clearly. "I also believe that the King-servant structure can't be dissolved into ordinary contract without altering military organization, household law, succession expectations, and the magical architecture of the Evil Pieces themselves. The Reincarnated Devils require political representation, but I fear representation through independent councils will create a second political body defined by grievance and separated from the houses into which they have been reincarnated. I prefer advisory chambers first, mixed courts second, and political standing tied gradually to service, education, and household integration."
Sairaorg gave a low sound that was almost laughter. "You have built a staircase."
"Yes," Belathriel said. "Because cliffs are poor instruments of social ascent."
"And I say that some are already hanging from the cliff while you are measuring the stone."
"That sentence will be quoted by irresponsible people."
"Then quote yours beside it and make them tired enough to think."
This time Belathriel did laugh, because the irritation between them had found its old familiar shape. They were friends enough to wound one another only where the wound might clarify.
The next morning, Sairaorg took Belathriel through the lower compounds where the Reincarnated members of his household lived and trained. He did not parade them, which Belathriel would have found intolerable, and he did not arrange sentimental scenes.
They simply walked, spoke with those who approached, observed drills, listened to petitions, and passed through the ordinary life of a great martial estate. That ordinariness affected Belathriel more than any theatrical appeal could have done.
A former human swordsman complained about the rationing of practice blades. A young woman who had once been a stray magician asked whether her child would be eligible for instruction in Bael legal history.
A quiet Reincarnated bishop requested permission to travel to the capital to testify in a case involving an abusive peerage. A Pure-Blooded youth, not yet wise enough to hide his resentment, muttered that the household was becoming a school for filth, and Sairaorg corrected him with a severity that made even Belathriel feel the air tighten.
Afterward they walked beyond the yards, where the land sloped toward red fields of mineral dust and black grass. Belathriel knew that Sairaorg had shown him nothing false, and that was precisely what troubled him. False displays could be dismissed. Reality required rearrangement.
"You wished me to see them as you see them," Belathriel said.
"I wished you to see them when no one was making an argument out of them."
"That itself is an argument."
"Everything is an argument to you when it threatens to become evidence."
Belathriel considered this and found it unfair, though usefully unfair.
"You think my mind turns people into categories," Belathriel said. "There is truth in that, although less than you suppose. I turn persons into categories because law can't hold each face in memory. The danger in your position is that you would make policy from moral recognition, and moral recognition is unevenly distributed. The sentimental lord emancipates those he admires and forgets those who bore him. The martial lord values strength and overlooks the weak. The refined lord values intellect and neglects the simple. I don't trust virtue without law."
Sairaorg walked several steps before answering.
"I don't trust law without virtue," he said. "A law can be written with perfect balance and administered by men whose hearts are empty. A council can grant a Reincarnated Devil advisory standing and still look through him as though he were furniture that had learned to speak. A contract can say that consent is required, while every pressure of survival teaches the candidate that refusal is death, exile, or helplessness. I fear your reliance on laws that can be exploited through a loophole while the original injustice remains intact."
Belathriel felt again the peculiar discomfort Sairaorg produced in him. It was not the discomfort of being refuted. Belathriel had been refuted before and had survived it with composure. It was the discomfort of seeing an argument fail to reach what it most needed to reach.
"You speak as if I don't care for them," Belathriel said.
"I know that you care," Sairaorg said. "That's why I argue with you seriously. The conservatives don't trouble me in the same way, because they often reveal the poverty of their thought before one has spent much energy answering them. You trouble me because your caution has conscience in it. That makes it useful, and it also makes it dangerous, since decent hesitation is more persuasive than open cruelty."
Belathriel received this without visible offense, though inwardly he thought it as unfair criticism.
"In my view," Belathriel said, "your radicalism has honor in it. That also makes it dangerous. Cruel men discredit themselves by their appetite for domination. Honorable men discredit prudence by making it appear cowardly. When you say that a bond must survive refusal in order to be honorable, I agree in spirit. When you say that every Reincarnated Devil must be recognized as a political person, I agree in principle. When you move from agreement in principle to a program that could provoke the Pillar houses into unified obstruction, I see the reform itself endangered by its own moral purity."
Sairaorg's face darkened at the mention of the Pillar houses, and because he was Bael, the darkness had a particular significance.
"The Pillar houses have used the threat of backlash as a veto for five hundred years," he said frustrated. "They accepted the Evil Pieces when they needed soldiers, champions, servants, and heirs of convenience. They praised Reincarnated Devils when their victories elevated a household in the Rating Games. They welcomed their fertility when dying lines required renewal through indirect means. Then, when those same beings asked what place they held in the hierarchy, the nobles remembered purity with miraculous speed. I'm tired of treating their discomfort as a law of nature."
Belathriel did not answer at once, because this was the kind of speech that was perfectly true but also useless for any kind of progress.
"You're right about their hypocrisy," he said. "You are wrong if you think hypocrisy deprives them of power. A statesman must count even the forces he despises. The Bael, the Amon, the Phenex, the Agares, the remaining houses, and the extra lines don't cease to matter because their reasoning is self-serving. If they are frightened into an alliance against reform, they can delay recognition for another century. If they are divided, shamed, accommodated, and made to see advantage in change, they may grant what justice alone has failed to extract."
"That's your genius," Sairaorg said. "You know how to make justice palatable to men who should have swallowed it already."
"You know how to make delay feel like disgrace," Belathriel replied.
They had reached a training field where several Reincarnated Devils were practicing formation work with Pure-Blooded officers. A mistake occurred in the third line, and the formation opened at the center. The instructor halted the drill and began again from the beginning.
No one watching from a distance could have distinguished origin by movement alone. Belathriel noticed this and distrusted the thought because it was too easy. Bodies in formation proved very little. Yet they proved enough to unsettle those who relied on visible differences.
"The matter of descendants," Belathriel said, "will become more destabilizing than the matter of servants. A Reincarnated Devil who remains attached to a King can be placed within household law, however imperfectly. A Reincarnated Devil who marries, produces children, transmits traits, accumulates property, and forms a recognized line presents a deeper challenge.
"After three or four generations, what does one call that family? Converted? Naturalized? Inferior? A new branch? A subordinate line? If fertility among Reincarnated Devils continues to exceed that of many Pure-Blooded houses, the demographic argument will finish what the moral argument began."
"Yes," Sairaorg nodded. "That's why I favor integration into devil society without permanent stigma. Their children shouldn't be made to live forever beneath the anxiety of their parents' origin. If they are devils in body, in culture, in loyalty, in law, and in inheritance, then the old houses must accept that devilhood has expanded. A lineage that begins through reincarnation is still a lineage once it begins producing children who know no other life."
"And what of their first life?" Belathriel looked at him curiously. "What of those who insist that their human, dragon, or yokai origin remains part of them and should not be dissolved into our culture for the comfort of old genealogies? I understand the need for integration, but I fear that full integration may become assimilation enforced by generosity. We shall say, 'You are one of us now,' and then require them to forget the selves whose survival made the question meaningful."
"That is a real danger," Sairaorg admitted, his expression softened at that. "I don't want them stripped of their history to make nobles comfortable. A former human should be allowed to remember humanity without being treated as less devilish. A former dragon shouldn't have to flatten himself into aristocratic manners in order to be recognized. When I say integration, I mean equality of standing, not erasure of origin. You know what I mean."
Belathriel inclined his head. He valued such moments in Sairaorg, because they showed that his friend's radicalism was not mere impatience. He could revise without surrendering the moral center of his view.
For Belathriel, however, the point confirmed one of his own deepest anxieties. A society that moved too quickly to erase legal inferiority might accidentally erase historical differences. He believed Reincarnated Devils required institutions of memory as much as institutions of protection.
They needed the right to speak of former lives, to preserve customs that were harmless, to educate their children in the complexity of their origin, and to have representation that did not pass entirely through the Kings who had remade them.
But he feared independent councils because councils could become factions, factions could become parties, parties could become rival sovereignties, and rival sovereignties within the Underworld had a habit of ending in blood.
In discussions that arose during the remainder of the visit, Belathriel often gained the upper hand at first. He had more definite ideas regarding the Reincarnated Devils as a historical force, their legal disabilities, their demographic role, their philosophical significance, their danger to hereditary legitimacy, and their possible incorporation into a revised hierarchy.
Sairaorg had fewer settled presumptions, and because he refused to speak of Reincarnated Devils apart from those he knew, he was more easily accused of contradiction. One day he defended the King-servant bond as capable of honor, and the next day he denounced lifelong servitude as morally intolerable.
One hour he praised merit as the proper solvent of inherited arrogance, and another hour he admitted that a society based entirely on strength would abandon the weak.
Belathriel could point out these contradictions with surgical efficiency, and Sairaorg would sometimes concede them, though never in the spirit Belathriel expected.
"You call these contradictions," Sairaorg said during one evening's dispute, when light had been lit and rain struck the stone outside. "But that's simply the way things are. The bond can be honorable in one household and degrading in another. Merit can expose false nobility and become cruel when worshiped alone. Integration can heal stigma and threaten memory. Autonomy can liberate one Reincarnated Devil and terrify another who has known only dependence since rebirth. I will accept the charge of contradiction if the alternative is to speak smoothly about lives that don't move smoothly."
"Sure, it's complex," Belathriel answered with equal seriousness. "But I don't want complexity to paralyze legislation or sanctify impulse. Every law simplifies. Every reform draws lines where life has gradations. If we wait for policy to match the soul, we shall never write a statute. If we write statutes without regard for the soul, we shall create another species of injustice. My position exists between those failures, and I confess that it is less inspiring than yours."
"It may be less inspiring," Sairaorg looked at him across the table. "and it may save more lives in the first decade. I don't deny that. My fear is that, after saving lives in the first decade, it will become satisfied with itself and spend the next century explaining why the second step must wait. Your staircase is useful only if someone is forced to keep climbing."
Belathriel had no immediate answer, since this was precisely the accusation he made against his own caution in private. In Belathriel's eyes, Sairaorg was a man whose heart had chosen before his mind had finished arranging the matter, and this seemed to him both dangerous and enviable. He himself rarely chose in that way.
His mind moved by distinctions, comparisons, and consequences, and when he cared for something, he often discovered that he cared for it most strongly after proving to himself that it deserved to be cared for. He had sometimes wondered whether this was a higher discipline or a deficiency of character.
Watching Sairaorg's household, with its Pure-Blooded scions, Reincarnated servants, he felt again that uncomfortable suspicion that the intellect, when too pleased with its own balance, can become a graceful form of evasion.
On the final night of Belathriel's visit, the two men stood again beneath the eastern arcade. The rain had cleared, and the lower estate shone under the lamps.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a group of Reincarnated Devils were singing in a language that was not demonic, and the tune, carried faintly by the wind, seemed to Belathriel to belong neither wholly to the Underworld nor wholly to the world from which it had come.
He found the sound strangely moving, and because he distrusted moods that arrived with music, he said nothing of it.
"That's also part of the answer," Sairaorg, who had heard it too, spoke first. "They bring songs we did not compose, memories we did not authorize, griefs we did not cause, and loyalties we did not inherit. If they are devils now, then devil society must become large enough to contain those things. If it refuses, then it is smaller than the beings it claims to rule."
"I don't dispute that," Belathriel said, looking out over the wet stone. "But if you demanded full emancipation as a principle. You would provoke a coalition against reform. The pillar houses, and every minor noble terrified that his dignity depends upon someone else's subordination would unite if you demanded full emancipation as a principle.
"They would say that you had made common cause with the dissolution of devilkind, and they would frighten the uncertain houses by pointing to fertility, inheritance, and the possibility of Reincarnated lineages multiplying beyond the governance of the old blood. A wise reform must move in such a manner that each concession becomes less terrifying after it is granted, because the next concession then seems administrative rather than apocalyptic."
"That's the most Belathriel sentence you have spoken since arriving."
"It is accurate."
"It is," Sairaorg said. "It's also incomplete."
"Then complete it."
"The Reincarnated Devil shouldn't have to prove that his soul is real in order to be spared ownership," Sairaorg said, though his voice had lost its debating edge. "He shouldn't have to surpass a Pure-Blooded noble in battle before being treated as a person. He shouldn't have to become exceptional before the law discovers him. That is the point I want stated before every gradual measure, every council, every contract, and every compromise. If we begin there, I can listen to your staircase. If we don't, your staircase leads to a room whose door remains locked."
Belathriel received the words with the gravity they deserved.
"We both agree that the present state is intolerable," he said. "I still maintain that the transition from possession to citizenship must be made carefully, and defended against both aristocratic sabotage and revolutionary simplification."
Sairaorg turned to him more fully. "Then why are you the gradualist? You know they will never stop sabotaging it."
"Because a rotten pillar may still hold a roof while one builds its replacement."
"That sounds like wisdom until one remembers who is forced to stand under the roof."
"It's wisdom precisely because I remember them," Belathriel answered, with more heat than he had intended. "A collapsed order doesn't free the weak. It delivers them to whoever has enough force to seize the ruins. If we abolish the current king peerage relation without designing a stable system in place, we risk creating a society our fathers fought a civil war to end."
Sairaorg was silent for some moments, and Belathriel understood that he had made an impression. He also understood that he had not convinced him.
"You think I worship strength," Sairaorg said at last.
"I think you trust it too readily when it appears as earned capacity."
"Power earned triumphs power given," Sairaorg said with conviction. "I prefer a society based on that principle than what we have."
"That's the beginning of a meritocracy," Belathriel said calmly. "A society where power is the only determinant of worth. That's something my brother would celebrate, but not you, I think. A meritocracy can easily become another aristocracy with a shorter memory and harsher manners."
Sairaorg's expression changed slightly, and Belathriel knew that this argument had weight for him, since Sairaorg had seen weak devils treated with contempt by those who had transformed effort into a moral weapon.
The radical reformers who admired Sairaorg often misunderstood him on this point. They supposed that because he had made himself powerful through discipline, he wished the Underworld to rank all beings by achievement.
In truth, his sense of justice had been formed partly by his knowledge of humiliation, and he did not wish to create a world in which the weak were merely insulted by a different class of victors.
"I didn't say power is the only measure," Sairaorg said. "I say blood cannot be the first one."
"Then we agree again in words and divide again in application."
"That's because your application keeps bowing to the people we both claim to oppose."
"That's called a compromise, you brute" Belathriel said dryly. "I'm aware you're allergic to the concept. A defiance alone does not a society make. Thus one must implement change gradually."
"Then let your change begin with the least corrupt belief," Sairorg said definitely.
"Which is?"
"That no conscious being should belong absolutely to another."
Belathriel inclined his head. "That principle I accept."
"Then accept its consequences," Sairaorg insisted stubbornly
"I accept its consequences as aims," Belthriel said coolly. "I don't accept every immediate measure proposed in its name."
"You always place a bridge between the truth and the act," Sairaorg said annoyed.
"And you sometimes step into the river because you dislike bridges built by cowards."
The song beyond the wall continued for a little while, then faded. Belathriel knew that he would return to the capital with no settled peace.
He would still argue for gradual reform, because he believed the Underworld too old, too armed, too proud, and too internally wounded to survive moral haste without consequence. He would also argue more openly that any reform which failed to begin with full personhood had already surrendered the central question to the conservatives.
He understood, with some irritation and some gratitude, that Sairaorg had changed him less by defeating his arguments than by making evasion harder.
He did not believe that the mere possession of lived contact made a man wiser, since fools lived in contact with reality every day and learned nothing from it. But it was still a convincing argument.
Sairaorg, for his part, would remain among his household, training Pure-Blooded and Reincarnated alike, offending old nobles by treating earned dignity as visible before permission, and offending cautious reformers by speaking of emancipation before the committees had finished defining autonomy.
Yet he too had been changed, Belathriel thought, though perhaps he would admit it only years later. He had conceded the danger of erasure through integration, the insufficiency of virtue without institutions, and the need for law to protect those beyond the reach of honorable lords.
They parted the next morning with little ceremony. Such men rarely say the most important things at departure.
As Belathriel's carriage, pulled by exotic beasts, left the Bael estate and the training grounds receded behind him, he looked once toward the lower yards, where figures had already gathered for the morning exercises. From that distance they were only moving points against black stone, indistinguishable by blood, origin, rank, or memory.
He used the carriage to travel like most of his kind because there was no need to hurry and use a teleportation circle. Devils had a lot of time after all.
As the carriage entered a quieter stretch of road, and the noise of the wheels over the dark stone became regular and almost soothing, the great question of the Reincarnated Devils, which had occupied him so completely an hour earlier, began to withdraw from the front of his mind, and another thought, far less dignified and far more tyrannical, advanced into its place.
He had not asked Sairaorg what he had intended to ask.
He had meant to ask about Sona Sitri. Sairaorg, through his distant cousin Rias Gremory, had some acquaintance with the Sitri household and perhaps with Sona herself. Rias and Sona were known to be close friends, or at least close enough that inquiries might be made without impropriety if handled by someone of tact.
House Beleth and House Sitri were not on the best political terms. Under ordinary conditions, therefore, it would already have been difficult for Belathriel to seek the acquaintance of Sona Sitri in a manner that did not invite interpretation.
He had meant to ask whether she was well, whether she still kept the same disciplined habits, her likely judgment of him, and whether he existed in her mind at all beyond the memory of those two years when he had been fostered in her house.
Nothing could be more reasonable, and nothing had proved more impossible.
Belathriel leaned back in the carriage and closed his eyes, though not to sleep. He saw at once, as he had seen too often in recent weeks, the Sitri house as it had appeared to him when he first arrived there, ten years old, watchful, proud enough to conceal terror and intelligent enough to know that concealment did not cure it.
He had been sent there by his mother, the second queen of House Beleth, who had done it under the appearance of improving political relations with a house whose temperament differed usefully from their own. All those reasons had been true, and because they were true, they had made the deeper reason easier to hide. The honest truth was that his mother had feared for his mental state.
She had feared what the air of House Beleth was doing to him, feared the way he measured his father's approval like a ration, feared above all the influence of a household in which love was never safe from comparison, and comparison always ended at Meruem.
Their father loved all his children, or at least would have said that he did, and perhaps in some austere and princely chamber of his heart the statement was true. But his admiration went where brilliance made admiration easy, and Meruem's brilliance had always been of the most offensive kind, the kind that seemed to cost nothing.
Belathriel had not been without talent. But in House Beleth, where every achievement arrived already measured against Meruem's effortless ascent, effort itself became faintly humiliating. To be told that one had improved was to be reminded that one had once been behind. To be loved conditionally upon competence was to learn to fear incompetence as though it were a moral disgrace.
The queens made this atmosphere worse in ways that only a noble household could make worse. Meruem's mother, the fourth queen, power hungry, and tireless in the art of making other women's lives narrow without ever appearing publicly crude, had made the existence of Belathriel's mother and the other queen a contest before their sons and daughters had been old enough to understand the rules.
She had insulted with smiles, delayed with etiquette, and poisoned with questions. Belathriel had grown up in a house where affection might be watched, where a servant's loyalty might have two meanings and where a father's praise might be repeated by evening as evidence against another child.
It was into this that his mother had quietly intervened. She had sent him away.
At first he had taken the sending away as a kind of defeat. He remembered the shame of it more vividly than the details of the journey, because at that age he had been unable to distinguish rescue from exile. He had imagined Meruem hearing of it and smiling, had imagined the fourth queen finding some delicate phrase by which to imply that the second prince required softening elsewhere because he could not bear the atmosphere of serious power.
He had been certain that his father would miss him only when some formal occasion required the count of sons, and this certainty had wounded him because he had no proof of it and yet could not stop believing it.
By the time he reached House Sitri, he had already resolved to be cold, perfect, reserved, and impossible to pity.
He had failed almost immediately.
The Sitri household had astonished him. It was not without politics, because no Pillar house was without politics, and only a fool would imagine that affection abolishes rank. Yet the inner life of that family possessed something which Belathriel had never before encountered in sustained form - warmth without calculation.
Sona's parents loved her, and the love was not suspended each time she failed to excel. They praised her intelligence without making it the price of tenderness. They corrected her without converting correction into humiliation. They listened to her questions with the patience of people who found her person more important than her performance.
Most extraordinary of all, Serafall, already exalted, already bearing the impossible distance of a Satan's title, returned again and again to her younger sister with a devotion that seemed to Belathriel at first theatrical only because he could not believe such demonstrations were real.
He remembered one evening in particular. Sona had been bent over a chess board, refusing with childish stubbornness to accept that her position was lost, while Serafall, who had arrived late from some matter of terrifying importance that no one at the table wished to name fully, sat beside her in ridiculous domestic ease, encouraging her, teasing her, and finally allowing herself to be defeated through a transparent blunder that Sona seemed not to notice.
Belathriel, watching from the opposite side of the room, had felt something in himself give way. It had not been jealousy, or at least not jealousy alone. It was wonder. A Satan had time for her sister. A powerful elder did not need to crush the younger in order to remain powerful.
He had fallen in love then, though he had not known with whom or with what. Like a person raised in a country of drought who first sees rain, he did not at once distinguish the water from the sky. He loved the Sitri household before he understood that he loved Sona.
He loved the sound of measured conversation at dinner, the way the servants moved without fear and the way books were left in rooms because no one suspected knowledge of being an instrument of rivalry. He loved Serafall's absurdity because beneath it he saw an invincible loyalty. He loved Sona's seriousness before he knew he loved her face.
At that age, Sona had been neither the child others sometimes thought her nor the completed woman she would become, and Belathriel had seen in her something that immediately drew his own wounded pride out of hiding. She was exacting with herself, ambitious, controlled, and possessed of a mind that liked order. And unlike Meruem, she did not shine by humiliating others with light. She worked. She studied. She lost patience with foolishness, then regretted the manner of her impatience.
She wanted to be recognized, and because Belathriel understood too well what it meant to hunger for recognition without wanting to beg for it, he felt toward her first a kinship, then admiration, then that more dangerous tenderness which makes every ordinary gesture memorable.
During the two years he spent there, he convinced himself many times that his attachment was gratitude, then friendship, then intellectual sympathy, then the natural loyalty of a fostered guest toward a house that had treated him well. He had been too young, too proud, and too bruised by his own family to admit more. When he returned to House Beleth, the departure from Sitri hurt more than he had expected.
It seemed to him then that he was returning from a world where family had a meaning to a world where family was a battlefield made respectable by ancestry.
In the years that followed, Sona remained in his imagination surrounded by the whole atmosphere of her house. He could never think of her merely as a young noblewoman of the Sitri line, suitable or unsuitable according to alliance, temperament, and rank. She came to him with the rooms in which he had seen her, the voices of her family, the evenings of study, the glances of Serafall, the calm approval of her parents, the sound of water in the inner gardens, and the terrible discovery that love could exist without becoming a weapon.
Strange as it might have seemed to anyone else, and as it sometimes seemed even to him, he had been in love first with a way of being loved, and only afterward with Sona herself.
The carriage jolted slightly, and Belathriel opened his eyes. The road ahead was empty. His attendants rode at a proper distance, and within the carriage there was no one to see the expression which had come over his face, an expression he would have controlled instantly had anyone been present.
He had wished to ask Sairaorg for help, and had been unable. He was the second prince of House Beleth, not a child trembling in an antechamber. He was of excellent blood, educated, politically serious, and neither poor nor obscure. He examined the reasons, as he examined every weakness once he could no longer prevent it from existing.
First there was politics. Any approach toward Sona would be read through this context. Was Belathriel seeking alliance? Was his mother moving through him? Was House Beleth trying to soften Sitri resistance on some council matter? Was the second prince compensating for Meruem's dominance by building an independent bloc?
Every honest feeling in a noble heart had to pass through such questions before being allowed to appear in public, and by the time it emerged it often looked guilty merely from the inspection.
Then there was Meruem. Even after the recent change in him, even after those startling weeks in which his older brother had seemed subdued, or perhaps awakened to some knowledge of what he had been, Belathriel could not separate his own hopes from the old habit of comparison.
He remembered Meruem had asked Sona to a dance and he had feared if Meruem perhaps knew of his feelings for her and was doing it to hurt him deliberately. If Meruem had wanted Sona, Meruem would have known how to appear before her. Or so Belathriel imagined, though perhaps falsely. Meruem would have entered the matter with that effortless command of attention which made others feel chosen when he merely noticed them.
Belathriel, by contrast, could imagine himself being respectful, serious, and entirely unmemorable. He could imagine Sona listening to him with courtesy and feeling nothing. This last possibility tormented him most because it contained no injustice. He could endure being opposed by politics, delayed by family, or misrepresented by rivals. What he could hardly endure was the thought that Sona might judge him kindly and without love.
To be rejected by contempt would at least permit anger. To be refused by gentleness would leave him nowhere to stand.
He tried to laugh at himself, but the laugh failed. He was not a boy in the Sitri library anymore. Sona herself was no longer the girl bent over a chess board while Serafall pretended not to lose. She had grown, as he had grown, and he knew enough of her reputation to know that her mind had sharpened rather than softened. She would not be impressed by lineage alone, and he would have despised her if she had been.
She would not be won by vague devotion, nor by the romantic melancholy that lesser men mistake for depth. That question, which he had often avoided, returned now unpleasantly. Did he love Sona, or did he love what Sona represented?
Did he desire her as herself, or did he desire entrance again into the moral climate of House Sitri, where affection had appeared to him like a law of nature rather than a rare and revocable mercy?
He could answer the question in several ways, each sincere and none complete. He loved her seriousness, her restraint, the clear ambition she tried to subject to principle, the way her intelligence did not glitter for admiration alone. He loved the way she had once, during their foster years, argued with him for an hour over a minor point of administrative fairness, then later brought him a book she thought would strengthen his side of the argument.
He loved that she had no need to appear gentle in order to be kind. He loved that she made him want to become less defended. But he also loved, inseparably, the house from which she came. If this mingling made his love impure, then he did not know what purity in love could mean for a man as he had been formed. No one loves from nowhere. Every heart carries its education into its desire.
The carriage passed beneath an arch of dark stone marking the older boundary road, and Belathriel recognized the route toward his own house. At once his thoughts turned unwillingly toward home.
House Beleth would receive him with its usual magnificence and its usual guardedness. His mother would see, perhaps before he spoke, whether the visit had strengthened or wearied him. His sisters would ask after Sairaorg with varying degrees of curiosity and irony. His younger brother would genuinely listen to him.
Meruem would be there, or perhaps absent on some errand of his, and if present would speak with that new familiar friendliness which unsettled Belathriel almost more than the old cruelty. It was easier to fear a fixed enemy than to understand a changed brother.
Meruem's change had complicated everything. Had he remained simply abusive, brilliant, and favored, Belathriel could have continued arranging his own life in opposition to him. He could have pursued Sona as one pursues a separate future, a bond outside the poisoned geometry of his birth house.
Suffering, once endured, asks for the stability of meaning. It does not enjoy seeing its authors revise themselves.
Perhaps this, too, had prevented him from speaking to Sairaorg. To ask for help with Sona would be to admit that he wanted a future as a man who could be loved. That admission was more frightening than any political debate because it placed him in the position he had spent years avoiding: the position of one who asks.
Belathriel could argue for the rights of Reincarnated Devils because the argument, however morally serious, allowed him to stand upright. He could speak of consent, law, soul, and hierarchy with perfect composure.
Yet the simple words, "I wish to see her again," seemed to expose some younger self still standing in the Sitri corridor, holding a book he had already read, waiting for Sona to pass because he had not yet invented a better reason to be there.
He imagined, how the conversation with Sairaorg might have gone had he possessed the courage for it.
"Sairaorg," he would have said, perhaps after dinner, "you are acquainted, through Rias Gremory, with Sona Sitri, are you not?"
Sairaorg would have answered, "I know something of her, and Rias knows her well. Why do you ask?"
At that point Belathriel's dignity would already have been endangered. He might have spoken of politics, of the need to improve relations between houses, of shared reformist interests, of Sitri's administrative seriousness and Beleth's need for reliable intellectual alliances.
Sairaorg would say, "Do you want a meeting with the house, or do you want a meeting with Sona?"
He could not decide whether he most feared Sairaorg's amusement, his sympathy, or his help. Amusement would wound his pride. Sympathy would expose the wound beneath it. Help would make the matter real.
It was absurd. He knew it was absurd. He had faced men who would have gladly used his hesitation as a weapon in council, and he had not feared them as he feared the possibility of a friend's kind understanding. The renowned Beleth pride, which served him well against enemies, became almost useless before friendship. One may defend oneself against malice. It is harder to defend oneself against being seen.
What would she think of him?
Would she remember him as the fostered Beleth prince who was too easily startled by kindness? Would she remember the day Serafall had found them both asleep over separate books in the same room and had declared them the most tragic children in the Underworld because they had turned leisure into homework?
He remembered Sona's embarrassment then, and the rare quick smile she had tried to hide. The memory struck him with such force that for several moments he forgot the road, and even the approaching atmosphere of House Beleth. There was only that smile, not even directed entirely at him, yet more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. He had loved her then, he thought. He had loved her before he learned the meaning of love.
And now, after all his reasoning, he remained uncertain whether he had the right to act. A man of another temperament would have written immediately to Sairaorg upon arriving home, or directly to Sona, or to Serafall if he were reckless enough to invite disaster in ribbons and laughter.
Belathriel could not imagine doing any of these things without first arranging the proper conditions. But he saw at once that if he allowed such considerations to multiply unchecked, they would serve the same function as cowardice while wearing the robes of prudence.
This recognition angered him. He had spent the previous day arguing that reform must not become delay disguised as wisdom, and now, in his own heart, he saw the same mechanism operating with exquisite efficiency.
He could build commissions around his own fear. He could regulate his longing until longing lost the will to move. He could name every obstacle except the central one, which was that he feared not being wanted.
By the time the bridge was crossed, Belathriel had made a decision, although it was not the bold decision a poet would have demanded. He would not write to Sairaorg that night in a rush of feeling, because such theatrical courage would be untrue to him and therefore unlikely to endure.
He would speak first with his siblings, and learn how far House Beleth's present tensions with Sitri might obstruct a private approach. Then he would write to Sairaorg, plainly enough to be honest and formally enough to survive being read twice, asking whether, through Rias Gremory, an informal meeting with Sona Sitri might be arranged under circumstances that would not burden her with public expectation.
He would not hide entirely behind politics. He would not expose her to gossip. He would give her the dignity of refusal before anyone else presumed expectation. This decision did not bring him any peace, but it brought a kind of order, and order was the form in which Belathriel's courage most often first appeared.
As the towers of House Beleth began to show themselves far ahead, bright and magnificent against the underworld sky, he felt again the old tightening in his chest that came whenever he approached home.
But it was not quite the same tightening. Something from Sairaorg's domain and something from the memory of House Sitri accompanied him now. The first reminded him that principle without action becomes vanity. The second reminded him that love without courage becomes memory.
Belathriel sat upright as the carriage entered the road of his ancestors. He had returned from Sairaorg's house without saying the one thing he most wished to say, and still, for the first time in many months, perhaps in many years, he felt that the unsaid thing had begun to move toward speech.
AN: This chapter was extremely self-indulgent on my part. I love it when characters just talk; debating anything, even if it isn't terribly important to the plot. It helps flesh them out and explore the world.
I believe that for a fictional world to feel lived-in and realistic, it needs to have its own societal issues and debates, whether political, social, or economic. And the best way to reveal that is by having the characters care about these issues in the same way we do. Even if they don't take major action, letting them discuss these topics adds depth.
Another important principle I try to follow is writing each character as the protagonist of their own story, with their own past, strengths, and weaknesses. Their goals and lives shouldn't revolve around the main character. That's why, in the first half of the chapter, there is almost no mention of Meruem.
One of the things I find especially interesting about High School DxD is how much there is to explore. The concept of reincarnated devils, in particular, is fascinating. Imagine if we could turn animals into humans using chess pieces. Our society would need to fundamentally change, and there would be countless discussions to be had.
Naturally, since this is Meruem's story, these elements will mostly remain in the background or in subplots for other characters, so you don't need to worry about them overshadowing his journey. I just thought it would be interesting to explore them.
And you also don't need to worry about drama arising from Bekathriel's feelings for Sona (since there was some implication that Meruem might like her) turning into a love triangle or anything like that.
Advanced chapters are available on my Patreon, so if you want to read ahead or support me so I can focus more on writing, check out my Patreon: patreon.com/abeltargaryen?