After the lesson Andreas returned to his room, calling it a room was perhaps an understatement, though by archdemon standards it would be considered modest. Seven chandeliers lit the space, and the bed was large enough that Andreas could roll across it many times before reaching the edge. The room had its own bathroom, quarters for servants, and a private study. Normally he would have gone to bed like any other night, but tonight he sat at his desk instead and ordered the attending maid to extinguish the chandeliers.
As the darkness settled over the room Andreas drew the curtains open.
Up until today the night sky had been exactly what it always was, stars and a moon illuminating the world in pale silver. Something familiar and unremarkable. But when he applied the technique Barderossa had shown him he could see it. He could see all of it. A magnificent and incomprehensible spell covering the entirety of the heavens, vast beyond any scale he had words for, beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when they are so far beyond you that you cannot even locate the beginning of them.
He could not begin to understand its structure. Mana flowed from the moon to the stars, from the stars to the spell's runes, and from the runes back to the moon in a cycle that had perhaps never stopped since the moment it was first cast. Every single one of its millions of runes was powered by a star. He tried to draw what he was seeing onto paper. The paper was far too small. Even if he used the entirety of the Valekor territory as a canvas he suspected he would not be able to capture all of its intricate details, every line and connection and layered intention woven into something that held the heavens in place while the world below it went about its small and ordinary business completely unaware.
Andreas spent the night drawing fragments of the spell onto paper after paper, trying to capture pieces of something that could not be captured. As the night deepened the drawings became slower, the lines less precise, and somewhere between one fragment and the next Andreas drifted into sleep at his desk, cheek resting on a page covered in incomplete runes.
---
"We will begin the successor training when Andreas reaches ten."
"My lord, do we not usually begin successor training when a child reaches twenty five?"
Successor training was a structured program covering etiquette, territory management, and the practical common sense required of an archdemon taking on genuine responsibility. The concern it addressed was a familiar one, an archdemon raised entirely within a palace tended to grow dangerously removed from the realities of common demonfolk. Left unaddressed this produced lords who made decisions that seemed reasonable from inside their estates and were catastrophic outside them. Quadrupling taxes without understanding what that meant for a family that had just emerged from hibernation with empty stores. Exterminating slimes because they were technically monsters, without understanding what that meant for the streets and the health of the territory.
In this particular sense Andreas was not lacking. His territory visits had seen to that. He knew what slimes were used for. He knew what the great hunt meant to the demons who prepared for it. He had walked those streets enough times to understand that the territory was not an abstraction.
The problem was something else entirely.
Andreas quite literally did not know what mothers were. He did not know how heirs were made. Successor training covered these things as a matter of course, as basic realities of archdemon life and responsibility. It would reach them inevitably, which meant inevitably Andreas would learn the truth, and all of Arden's careful efforts to preserve just a little more time, just a few more years of that open and unguarded face, would be undone by a curriculum.
Arden was genuinely surprised at his lord's decision. By demon standards Andreas was still far too young for this.
Khalid said nothing for a moment. He looked at Arden with eyes that held more than they said, more than they had said in a long time, more than Arden knew quite what to do with.
"He needs to be ready."
Arden did not know what to say to his lord.
---
As Arden left the lord's office he made his way to Andreas's room. He knocked and spoke through the door.
"It is me, young Master. Arden. May I enter?"
Twenty full seconds passed with no response. Arden slipped into the shadows and entered without opening the door.
'It seems the young Master was very tired.'
Andreas had fallen asleep at his desk, exactly as Arden had half expected to find him. Papers covered in drawn rune fragments spread across the surface around him, the candle burned low, one cheek pressed against an unfinished sketch of something vast.
The sight reminded Arden of Khalid. His lord. Son of his lord before him. Brother of his heart if not of his blood.
Andreas's ebony dark hair had grown long again, the bangs falling across his eyes the way they always did when too much time had passed since anyone thought to trim them. His blood red ridged horns caught the dim candlelight, and Arden's eyes rested on them for a moment longer than he intended.
Those horns. Double the size of his own. So long he sometimes wanted to curse them for existing.
They had taken everything from this child and the child did not know it. He still did not know.
Arden gathered Andreas carefully and moved him to his bed, settling him against the pillow with the practiced gentleness of a man who had done this before, with another child, in another time.
"I hope you always have
a smile upon your face, young Master."
'I truly do.'