Elluvian panted. After his sisters got imprisoned for their attempted thievery, his remaining siblings had upped their game, and he had consequently worked further on strengthening himself and building connections, struggling to keep a lid on their increasing escalations,
As such, he now trained alongside the palace guards, especially as some of his siblings had begun targeting him. Previously, he had stayed under the radar by deliberately underperforming. Unfortunately, when his sisters were exposed the same night he attended dinner with his father, some had realized that he was the culprit.
He had also spent additional time meditating and cultivating the Nature’s Lord technique. He had long since decided that he wasn't interested in the competition for the Prince of Life techniques, so long as whichever sibling received it wasn’t corrupt.
He left the courtyard, returning to his chambers to get changed.
“Prince Elluvian!”
He started when he heard his name being called while he was still changing. He shrugged his shirt on, then yelled, “Enter!”
Carsen, his retainer and one of his closest friends, came hurrying in in a panic, “Your siblings have begun targeting your network! They’ve already eliminated two of our agents monitoring the kitchen.”
“So it comes to this. They’ve finally decided to throw away the last vestige of civility in this competition.”
“It seems so, your highness.”
“Then it is time to expose this scheming to my royal father. Arrange a meeting with him for lunch. If I can no longer keep a lid on this, then I must turn to him.”
“And the attacks?”
“Quietly tell our agents to lay low and keep an eye out. I expect that there will be more attacks once my siblings figure out what I’m doing. They’ve never known when to cut their losses.”
“Of course, sir.”
Carsen bowed and made his way out of the room. As he was about to go, Elluvian called out, “Carsen.”
He paused with one foot out the door, “Yes, your highness?”
“Do you know who has worked against us?”
“This was the work of your elder brother Malachai and your younger brother Ferth.”
“Thank you. You are dismissed.”
Carsen left, and Elluvian was left pacing the room, reciting what he would say to his father.
At noon, he left for lunch with his father.
Upon entering his father’s office, he bowed, as was customary, “Your Majesty.”
“Come,” the king said, “Sit with me. Have some steak. Why did you wish to see me?”
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“Father, I have come to tell you something I should have said ages ago.”
“What is it? Have you finally found a wife?”
Elluvian hesitated, then just spit out what he wanted to say. “For years, I have been sabotaging and foiling my siblings’s underhanded plans to claim great-grandfather’s inheritance.”
The king paused in buttering his toast.
“Were you the cause of your sisters being discovered?”
“Yes. My agents discovered their plot and tipped off the guards.”
“And why did you not come to me from the beginning?” the king inquired, turning most of his attention to him, “I was aware of scheming, but nothing to this extent.”
He thought for a second, eating a blueberry.
“I initially wanted to fix them. Get them to see reason. Then things grew bigger, and I felt I was in to deep to share.”
“So why have you come to me now?”
“Malachai and Firth have begun working against me directly. While I have built up a soft network, they are likely to be gone within a week of direct attacks. After that, I am likely to be gone as well. At this point, you are the only one able to stop this.”
“Very well, then. I will investigate this immediately.”
“Is that it?” Elluvian asked, standing up abruptly.
“Yes. There is a process to these things. You cannot simply accuse your siblings of treason.”
But Elluvian didn’t hear the last part. The poison that had been in his bloodstream since breakfast was just now taking effect. His last thought was, at least this evidence is undeniable.
He died two hours later, after the king’s best healers were unable to save him. The kingdom fell two weeks later, already too far gone from his siblings’ schemes.
----
Devikan first started being called Dev at nine years old, when his third-grade teacher started using it.
Dev had taken issue with the name at first, when she started using it during a demonstration on the expansion of the Imperial Federation. He wasn’t particularly involved in the demonstration, but for reasons unknown to any between heaven and earth, she had started calling him so, and it stuck long enough to grow on him.
“—as a group of sects in a nearby universe.” Ms. Poit said. She indicated the projector screen, which was layered to indicate different universes, stacked on top of each other, “The sects competed over resources in their own universe—” the center slice lit up “—until the Scarlet Sun Sect found a way to cross between universes.”
Another slice lit up.
“If they had been able to keep that under wraps, they may have dominated the war.” She sighed. “But the other sects had counterintelligence programs which discovered the project and enabled them to steal the technology. With everyone being able to access functionally limitless resources, competition dried up, eventually leading to the state things are today.”
The slide changed, showing the federation logo.
“The Imperial Federation was formed, unifying the sects under a single government. They designed a new banner for themselves, integrating the symbols of all the sects.”
In truth, the logo was something of a mess. Too many people had to integrate their own symbols, to the point of madness.
“They then began spreading ever outwards, until they reached the point they are at now, spread across millions of inhabited planets in dozens of universes.”
“Our planet is a part of the federation, and while we receive less traffic than most, we still have people from outside our planet arriving occasionally.” She was moving around the classroom, and ended up near him. “Take Dev, here. His parents came from another planet! Dev, do you know where your parents came from?”
“No. I didn’t know that they were from somewhere else,” he replied, surly over the nickname.
“Oh.” She responded, before moving on as if nothing had happened, realizing her blunder.
He didn’t remember the rest of the lecture, as he was lost in his own mind, caught up in the discovery that he was technically an alien.
He went home and confronted his parents about it, but they refused to give specific answers, only saying that they had decided to settle down somewhere relatively quiet to start a family.