Angmar was restless. Mordred could feel him at the back of his mind shifting listlessly on his piles of gold and gems. The dragon snarled, a note so low that it manifested as a rumble that sent vibrations through the floor. The boy stopped reading. He kept his face tilted downwards, his eyes still flicked back and forth across the page, to an outward observer it would seem as if nothing had changed. Mordred however was listening. It was unwise to ignore a dragon’s instincts he knew, and Angmar was particularly in tune with his faerie’s personal security. The familiar fell obediently silent without the need of any precise instruction from his master. It was still. He could hear the dripping of the taps in the bathroom, and on the floor above he fancied he could detect the sound of a maid moving through one of the rooms, but on his floor, in his chambers, there was apparently nothing.
It was strange then when the knock came. There had been no footsteps to indicate that someone had approached the door. Mordred finally raised his face from the book on his desk, and he reached for the red ribbon attached to its outer edge with long pale fingers. Carefully, he lay the ribbon down the centre of the book before closing it to. Instinctually his telepathy reached out to find the visitor supposedly waiting on the other side of the door, unseen tendrils slipping through the keyhole and through the small crack between oak and carpet. He had been right. There was no one there. As he withdrew his attention back from the empty corridor however, Mordred picked up on something else, another presence with him in the room. It was an unfamiliar mind, a guarded mind, but it was there. Whoever it was had the capacity to block invading minds but had little practice at doing so. The boy remained at his desk, but turned in his chair to look out across the room, in the direction the thoughts were coming from.
Power, he could sense that much, it crackled from the thoughts like small jolts of static. There was something else though, something the mind wanted to keep from him, from everyone...a bird’s name, black feathers and a merciless eye...crow? No...Croe. It meant nothing to him. Mordred had a mind for remembering details, once he was told a name he never forgot it. If he didn’t know the name, then he had never met the person to whom it belonged. More curious still was the second name, bound up with the first...Mallos. Curious. “There is a lot to be learned,” Mordred told the empty room, a smile forming on his lips and lending a borrowed sweetness to the angelic doll-like face, “when you can pass them by unseen.” His voice, caressing, lulling, each word laced with an enigmatic gravity, magnified by its simple unassuming ease, spoke unto the empty air. “I do not know you, but you stalk the halls of my family with unfriendly thoughts, and that I cannot allow.” Mordred stood slowly to his feet, his smile deepening a little, and then, he too vanished. He cloaked himself in the air about him, as invisible as the intruder. “I have some tricks of my own,” his disembodied voice purred, “what now?”
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