Daniel found himself in a dim room. It was large, too large for a casual meeting yet too small for any court function. It had yellow ornamented walls, though it seemed like it was some mass-produced paper plastered on the walls in repeating patterns instead of true artistry. The floor was a tired and ancient wooden floor, crumbling away into dust revealing ancient slabs of flagstone underneath in thin places. There were doorways, but they led into nearly identical rooms.

There were no windows outside.

And there was no Law of Fae.

Daniel stood still, but inside he was reaching for the ever-present, ever-familiar touch of the Law of Fae.

The Law of Fae gave power to promises. The Law of Fae revenged oath-breakers. The Law of Fae remembered words, actions, and deeds.

And it was gone.

The Law of Fae was constant. It was not always attending, but it was always there. Its absence was as disturbing as if the color blue just stopped existing and in its place was void.

If not for his battle training, he would have fallen to the floor in a stupor.

He tried walking backward, to leave the flickering lights of this unimaginable deep place in the Stable, back to the rim where the aquatic creatures dwelt.

The floor beneath his feet squealed, but nothing else changed.

The lights flickered for a beat, then went dark as if just now noticing him.

"Get a weapon, Elswith," he whispered to himself like he used to in the early days of the campaign. "Get a weapon and find a place to hide."

The name Elswith was dead on his lips, but he didn't know if that was because Elswith was a bankrupt name or if the Law of Fae was gone.

He sprinted away from the middle of the room, toward a wall. At least he needed one solid object at his back.

He felt the papered wall to his back, considerably more flimsy than any wall he had experience with. But it was better than nothing.

If he had come from the height of his power as Lordling Elswith and then lost all connections to the Law of Fae and its power, the sudden absence may have been too much. Just the absence of the little bit of power he had smuggled throughout the day was enough to shake him.

The lack of the Law of Fae meant that he had to see exclusively with his eyes, listen only with his ears, and feel the coming events only with his mind.

This was nearly as terrifying as when his own designs to be free from the Influence of the Red Lord failed as enemies, both within and without his faction, colluded against him. Where he found himself without support while trying to both do the right thing for Witness and save the rural places of Dragon Scull. Where he lost everything. Where even the Red Lord watched in amusement as Elswith's existence was degraded, as Elswith's position was given to an outsider. An outsider who would seek Daniel's death. That was the only sure way. Or worse. Seek for Daniel to remain a bondservant serving the new Heirling of the Red Sword forever.

The lights flickered back on. But this time, only a few of the rods in the ceiling lit up. Like a trail. Daniel traced it with his eyes, mapping it. The lights led to the next room, where a similar set of lights continued.

It was a path.

To stay, or go?

As his teacher said, do not remain still for longer than seven heartbeats if in the presence of the unknown. He was already in someone else's power. He was outside his knowledge, but staying still was not helping him.

So he followed the trail through the dimness of the strange world. There were no epic stories naturalized on the walls. Unlike the other places in the Citadel where there were thousands of years of hidden secrets and stories legendized and immortalized upon the walls and monuments, it was completely...commercial.

The dry wood cracked and crumbled beneath his boots. Daniel looked through different doorways as he traveled, but found nearly identical dim rooms beyond each. There was not much to see.

Stolen story; please report.

What if this was the death of the Game? Was he out? Was the Game, the contesting zone of the High Lords of Fae, extinguished so easily by a single misstep in the Grant Stable?

Was he still in the Stable?

Was this part of a trap? Had the Sky Court planned this?

But if he disappeared, they would lose their reputation. It was one thing to humiliate and destroy the pawn. It was another to smuggle them away to some unknown place where the ever-reaching Law of Fae was not present. While Daniel's cause would not win unless he won, the other parties would not necessarily win if the former Heirling lost either.

In fact, many of them would do their best to ensure his survival until the very end of the Game.

No one would be so brazen. No one except the Eastern Court. But they were not involved directly. They barely attended the Red Sword function events, and this matter was nearly completely external. And he had not insulted the Eastern Court. And he would not. So he would be free and safe from their clutches.

Yes, he had overcome an entire squadron of their elite soldiers. But that was an entire month ago, and those soldiers had been drunk. And he had used the High Lord of Knowledge to do it, so that shouldn't count against him as Servant Branch.

Dark musings aside, this was not the Eastern Court's style. There were too few pointy stabby things.

Coming to this place had not felt like a trap. More so that the Stable decided to change hallways right where he was walking and he accidentally walked into somewhere he had never been before. But he would not rule anything out. It could be a trap, or he was about to find the Lost Lordling.

If it was a trap, Kenton was clearly suspect, but ultimately it could have been anyone at the Stable who arranged a wild goose chase to isolate the Servant Branch.

And if it was the other option, he would need to find a way out and back into the shallow parts of the Stable before the ancient building decided it liked him and kept him.

He continued walking, keeping his steps light and his ears sharp. But he heard nothing in the backrooms of the Stables. Nothing at all. Not even the sound of a creature.

It left him time to ponder, fruitlessly yet again, how the situation of a month ago had spiraled so far beyond his control. He had sought to be free of the mind-altering Influence of his Lordly Father. He succeeded when he, at last, earned his True Name. All it had cost him was everything.

He had misunderstood several relations and had underestimated their reactions to Lordling Elswith's attempt to play the game. All he had tried to do was allow the Shantytown, growing like a weed outside the City below the Citadel, some small protection. Yet that action had drawn the Sky Court and the Walsa Alliance's rage and fury and prompted them to seek Lordling Elswith's removal. Meanwhile, agents within the Red Sword Faction had similarly reacted upon his request for additional support from Dragon Scull. The Red Sword Faction would lose respect if that region was damaged, he had argued. Yet that had drawn their ire.

Daniel passed by a doorway that had identical chairs aligned around a long and cheap table. But the lights were dim in the room, and Daniel did not wish to stray from the lit path. So he kept walking.

He pondered why the Sky Court was even involved beforehand. The Walsa Alliance had been against Lordling Elswith long before the former Heirling had defeated Lordling Parcel in a very public duel; the faction had been vocal against him for many years before that point.

Why was the Sky Court so involved? Adding protection for the Shanty Town would have no impact on the Court. Their faction was strong. Besides, unlike many Fae Houses and Courts, which struggled to produce new Lordling offspring, the Sky Court always had new younglings to take on the needed mantles of leadership.

Some courts had no children at all for decades at a time. Regis had been the only Lordling child produced by his Court in over seventy years. Many courts had children in clusters, then nothing for many years. Not that there weren't children, but the children produced were unable to inherit positions to generate power.

What had Daniel stumbled into, he wondered, that brought the wraith of the entire Sky Court and their connected faction?

He entered a new room, and then the dim lights were shut off. He had yet to find a weapon but held himself in a ready stance.

Then all the lights came on, fully illuminating the new space.

He could see the details of the wall again, but this room was much less identical than the others. Yes, it was still similar, the yellow papered walls bearing mass-produced repeating ornamentation murals, but over that were garish paintings of disturbing images of tortured creatures. For example, there was an image of a young cat, clutching a rope desperately over the empty void. The vivid picture proclaimed 'hang in there', cruelly taunting the small feline with the inevitable reality of falling into the abyss with no chance of rescue. There were others, but Daniel turned his eyes around the room.

This room had furniture. There was a desk, made of some kind of composite wood and glue. So much work, when it was relatively easy to just grow wood into the shape one needed, with the correct training. There was a couch, though of a different design than Daniel had ever seen before. There was a large bag filled with some kind of strange bean shape material that was not beans. It appeared someone had sat in it like a chair from how it was slouched and positioned.

But that paled in comparison to the new arrival that appeared in the opposite doorway.

"Hello!" said a logarithmic feminine voice.

A phantom stood in the doorway. She was blue and translucent. Shaped as a woman, but with a vague impression of clothes, like a griffin riding closer fitting outfit. She also floated in the air.

Phantoms normally did not have much use for words, nor were they blue. But they did float.

"I am very sorry that you are here. I regret to inform you that Magic is real."