The quiver of our hero’s sleek, lissom throat under the Kingbreaker’s pluming breath is not so interesting nor disquieting as his other stillness- one the Kingbreaker suspects more and more and more of being intrigue, not fear. It is not that Rehoboam does not fear him- his tension and the overbright shine in his wide eyes; the swelling size of his pupils and the strain of his slender ear to the monster’s mouth working by his carotid artery; even the sharp, metallic scent under the aroma of his sweat and the smell of cold crushed pine needles worked into his flesh all speak of a familiar sense of preylike distress. And if that were all, the iron creature would not flee his space so easily. Even if it were a noble, chivalrous sense of struggling bravery that Rehoboam pitted against his fear enough to keep his place, the Kingbreaker would not lay low his last proud chess piece for it.

-No, it’s something else the beast sees in our soft silvern hero that makes him recoil and surrender the game. Something that makes Rehoboam consider his question for too long, with too intent a stare in his shadowed-grove gaze. Something that, for the second time, makes him shift the willowy boughs of his legs a little nearer, rather than away. A body like so much fine ash and bone; the remnants of death and fire, and however soft and quiet it is now, the Kingbreaker has seen the heat of that cremating flame behind those resonant eyes, where the shimmers of golden apples float alluringly in dark, rippling waters of unknown fathoms. The monster tilts his massive head in his direction, only a little, but Rehoboam hardly needs theatrical displays now to find something to pick apart in the Kingbreaker’s cold, calloused palms. As is his wont, our hero speaks despite, it seems, a hesitance and uncertainty- or perhaps to spite it, the words sparking like embers in his mouth, a swan song of a flaming sunset spilling from his proud, prescient lips.

“I have your love, as you say. What more can someone truly ask of another?”

The question comes, not with sarcasm or a blatant needling of the glaring dishonesty between them, but with a strange, beaten resoluteness, and the Kingbreaker’s laugh is a loud, abrupt, humourless crack of splitting stone, joyless and so out of practice that the sound is an eldritch horror of writhing, grafted body parts, clumsily and awfully playing an out of tune instrument for an audience of no one.

‘You said you’d visit,’ he’d said, with a twitch of a smile painted just so to be cocky, knowing this was the wrong answer- eager, perhaps, to see what the wrong answer would bring upon him. The iron beast closes his eyes and tilts his head away from him, into the diffusing sunbeams, a distant and muted warmth that seems unable to find purchase on the metal of his weathered, vast body.

“My darling. Rehoboam. Yes, I love you. In spite of you, and in your honour. I will find you again, and in all my terrible undying care for you, may you find a legion more to demand of me than this when next you best me.” Cold and controlled again, he twists, all bulging muscle and standing tendons across great bones, and bows, deeply, his bulk straining against the pitted iron of his flesh in the act, and from near the ground his rusted stare shifts up to Rehoboam’s siren silhouette, flickering with ghoulish, unsaid contemplations. “May you win freedom from this, my awful adoration, the next time I follow your call. My beloved Rehoboam.”