Luna remained bowed as he stepped forward. Once more, his burning grip wrapped around her neck, this time forcing her head to face forward, though she kept her eyes down anyway.
Humanity could very well be eliminated if she made a misstep here. Lycans, the race the Emperor came from, were famous for their tempers, and if this one ran out of patience, she was sure there would be serious consequences.
"Of course we don't see ourselves as a separate nation," Luna repeated. 'To do so would be an insult to the Emperor's might. I merely misunderstood your words."
"A classic excuse," he noted.
This was very not good. He wasn't just a Lycan, he was intelligent. Maybe even as much as she was.
"You still haven't told me what you were hoping I didn't know," he said, his grip tightening. As it did, her neck burned even more, and a shudder ran through her body that she couldn't contain.
"My father has been preparing for war," Luna blurted out. She put on a chagrined face, hoping he would believe the act. The more time she spent with him, the more dangerous he seemed. As long as he thought that she had just revealed the deepest secret she knew...
"So, you've noticed."
What?
"The Emperor is worried about other lands. The more the Merfolk explore the sea outside their lake, the more likely it gets that there may be another continent somewhere out there."
This was news even to Luna. Though she supposed it would be hard for her to notice if her father actually had been preparing for an imminent war, because he always kept his troops in top condition.
But that meant that whatever task the Emperor had assigned him, he was stalling. If it involved any known sort of warfare, Luna's father would have his hands in it elbows-deep. At least. Yet still he said he needed time to prepare. Luna was pretty sure that the human army could march out to strike at anyone on the continent within days, though it may take them longer to get to some of the farther races.
She had never seen a map of the continent, but she knew basic geography. The Merfolk's territory was in the center of the other lands. The Emperor would have had to transport them all the way through another kingdom's land to get them to the sea, because there wasn't a single river that flowed into their lake. Unless he had thought of building a massive canal, like the ones human farmers used for irrigation, but it would need to be dozens of times larger to transport even one Merfolk at a time, much less enough of a scouting party to be able to get any information back from the Deep intact, and that would be immediately obvious to whichever race got their land ruined.
The thing was, Lukas had spoken as though they were learning more about the sea around their continent. That meant that they had been sending many parties, and enough of them survived to give the Emperor hope that it could be investigated safely.
Unless he was lying. He could very well be bluffing.
But that might just be her wishful thinking.
Because if he was telling the truth, well, humanity would soon have a much bigger problem than this Lycan's ire.
Luna blinked, and then refocused. He had sent her spiraling. That would usually be a good thing, because most people were boring, but with him, she needed to be on guard and prepared for anything.
She looked up briefly.
Mistake.
His masked face looking down at her, along with his muscular arm stretched out to grip her neck, it nearly overwhelmed her. Her legs trembled, and she would have staggered if not for his grip on her.
He wears the mask so much better than I do.
Being faceless made him terrifying. Even now his power was scary, but the fact that she wouldn't know who he was if he wasn't wearing the mask, it shook something inside her.
Her mind and her heart were both screaming at her, and she didn't know which one to listen to. She didn't even know what they were saying. The mess of mixed emotions and confusing logic broiled within her, threatening to take away her remaining composure.
She was, for the first time in her life, truly powerless.
Luna had never before understood why humans were so isolationist, but she knew now.
Every single other citizen in all of the Empire could decimate them. Elf, Fae, Lycan, Beastfolk, Orc, Merfolk, Dwarf, even most of the races who aren't fully sentient like Faries, Gnolls, Goblins, and Kobolds. A human wouldn't stand a chance against any of them.
Magic was just too powerful.