daenerys doreah

After Cain’s fight, the seventh match proceeded without a hitch, and as always, Seraph stepped into the ring for the final battle of the round. Though his earlier wins had been desperate and narrow, the prince’s arrival brought a chorus of cheers from the audience. One might expect this noisy support to bolster his confidence and turn him back to how he was, but he remained humble, or perhaps ‘fearful’ would be a better word. Every win would plague him with doubts, doubts that he was really strong enough to have defeated his opponents. All of his accomplishments were surely due to plain luck, or maybe his enemies had been paid off to let him win.

“I’m surrounded by the foolish and weak. At least you’re competent, Strauss. Helping you climb the ranks of advisors to back up my plans has been monumental. If only you could deal with Noah. Every time I even think about him, let alone hear his name, I struggle to contain my hatred, and perhaps it is traveling down the line of control. I can also sense Galvin’s terror widening the cracks in his psyche. Two decades of work and planning nearly ruined because of that vile snake. I was betting on Seraph to be one of the foundations of my war against the Profane, to plant him on the front line with Adwith Tarnas and have them rack up victories while Galvin received the people’s adoration, and now he’s just a shadow of his former self.

But at that moment, a memory flashed through his mind, something Noah said to him after he lost his arm. ‘People don’t know how to fight someone with missing or prosthetic limbs. It throws them off balance, and he took advantage of that. No one expects to be kicked in the chest with a peg leg.’ He glanced at Ingram, focused entirely on the fall and keeping Roc restrained. From the look in his eyes, he was most worried about Roc’s free wing getting in the way or failing to pull away in time and crashing with him. For all of his focus, all of his determination, his guard was dropped entirely.