I snapped my fingers.
The demon units on the walls disintegrated. Not dramatically. Not with sound or light or any of the visible spectacle that magic usually produced when it wanted to be noticed. They simply stopped existing between one breath and the next, the formations at the ramparts going from occupied to empty in the same instant, the dark mana that had been holding them together releasing into the air and dispersing like smoke in wind.
The human soldiers on the walls stood in the gaps where the demon units had been.
None of them moved.
The gates opened on their own. Not because I had opened them. Because the mechanism that had been holding them closed was attached to a demon unit that no longer existed and the gates had reverted to their natural state, which was open.
I walked through them.
•••••••
The capital's interior was the capital I had grown up in.
The same streets. The same architecture. The same layout that I had memorized at twelve years old and that had never left the part of my memory where things went that the body learned rather than the mind. The demon occupation had changed the atmosphere of it but not the bones. The bones were the same.
The demon units in the streets felt my aura before they saw me.
I walked and snapped my fingers and they disintegrated in sections as I moved through the streets, the clearing happening around me in a radius that matched my pace, each group of units becoming nothing before they had finished processing what was walking toward them.
No fight. No resistance. Just absence.
The Emperor's voice reached me from somewhere ahead. Not words yet. Volume. The particular pitch of Karvian Von Medalline when something was not going according to his understanding of how things should go, a sound I had heard directed at me more times than I had counted over eight years and had learned to register without response.
It was directed at the royal knights.
"Kill him. That would be the order. Kill Crescentine Fleur. Kill him properly this time."
I turned the corner into the palace approach road and found them.
The royal knight formation. Full strength, assembled in the approach road in the configuration that said they had been given a target and positioned to address it. Armor, weapons drawn, the formation that the captain had drilled into them for years.
Standing completely still.
Not advancing. Not retreating. Standing in the formation and not executing the order.
At the head of the formation, the captain.
I knew him before I was close enough to see his face clearly. The posture. The particular way he stood when he had made a decision and was standing in it. I had seen it from the other side, him standing in it while giving me orders, and now he was standing in it while not giving orders, and the quality of it was the same.
The emperor was behind the formation, visible at the palace steps, flanked by advisors who were trying to make themselves smaller without moving. His voice was at full volume now, the words reaching me clearly.
"Kill him. Kill Crescentine Fleur. He is a traitor and an enemy of this empire and I order you to-"
The captain unclipped his sword from his belt.
The sound of it, the specific sound of a sword being removed from its fastening, carried in the silence of the approach road.
He held it at his side for a moment.
Then he set it on the ground.
He turned away from the palace.
He walked toward me.
Every knight in the formation watched him come. Nobody moved to stop him. Nobody moved at all.
The emperor's voice reached a register it didn't usually reach.
The captain stopped in front of me.
He was older than I remembered. Or the same age and I was seeing him differently now than I had seen him at twelve, which amounted to the same thing.
The man who had put a sword in my hands before I was tall enough to hold it properly. Who had drilled the forms into my body until they were the body. Who had stood in the throne room through every command the emperor had given me and had said nothing.
He went to one knee.
The sound that moved through the knight formation behind him was not a sound exactly. More the absence of sound, the collective held breath of men watching something they had not expected to see and did not have a context for.
The emperor's voice stopped.
The captain looked up at me from the ground.
"I trained you." He said. "I put that sword in your hands. I watched what they made of you and I said nothing." He paused. "I have no excuse for that."
I looked at him.
"Get up." I said.
"Not until-"
"Get up." I said. "I didn't come here for apologies."
He stood. Slowly. The movement of a man who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and was finding his balance with it still on him.
"Don't call me Crescentine." I said. "That's not who I am anymore. I'm Leigh."
He looked at me.
"Leigh." He said. Testing it. Finding it strange in his mouth and accepting the strangeness.
"I'm here for the children." I said. "The ones the demon lord took from my road. That's all I came for."
He nodded.
"Then I'll help you get them." He said simply.
Behind him, the emperor had recovered enough to produce words again.
"Traitor." Karvian's voice, carrying the full weight of imperial authority and the particular fury of someone watching their authority produce no result. "Captain Morgan is a traitor to the crown. Anyone who does not cut him down where he stands is also a traitor. I order-"
The arrow came from somewhere in the palace's upper windows.
Poison-tipped. The slight discoloration of the head visible even at the distance it crossed.
Aimed at the captain's back.
My aura stopped it.
Not a spell. The aura itself, the weight of the mana I was putting into the surrounding air, dense enough at this point that a physical object moving through it at arrow speed encountered the same resistance as moving through stone.
The arrow dropped at the captain's feet.
He looked at it.
Then at me.
"I was the best fighter in Medalline before you." He said. "Before I put that sword in your hands."
"I know." I said.
"I've spent all those years watching what I made get used for things it shouldn't have been used for and doing nothing about it." He said. "I'm done with that."
I looked at him for a moment.
Then I reached into my item box and took out my sword.
I held it out.
He looked at it.
"You said you didn't come to fight." He said.
"I said I came for the children." I said. "There are things between me and the children that need to be moved. That sword will help you move them."
He took it.
The weight of it registered in his hands, the rune work along the fuller, the balance that I had carried for eight years.
"The children." He said. "The demon lord has them in the lower palace. The sacrifice chamber." He looked at me. The word sitting between us with everything it implied. "He's been doing it for months. Medalline's children. The commoners' children. He uses them to maintain the working that keeps his human form stable. Blood sacrifice."
The aura that had been radiating from me found a new floor.
The temperature in the approach road dropped.
"Torra." I said. My voice came out even. The way it came out even when what was underneath it was too large for the voice to contain and the voice had given up trying to reflect it and had simply become flat.
"Whoever he took." The captain said. "They'll be in the same place."
I looked at the palace.
At the demon units visible at every entrance, the formations the demon lord had arranged in the hours since I had arrived at the border, the layered defense of something that had known I was coming and had arranged accordingly.
The emperor at the palace steps, surrounded by the nobles who had not run yet, the court that had served Medalline through everything and was now standing behind the demon lord's protection and calling it loyalty.
I looked at the captain beside me with my sword in his hand.
"Move." I said.
We went.