POV: Aphrodite
Thrones are built over secrets.
The King says it without preamble, the way he says most things that carry weight — directly, without decoration, as if the significance of the information is self-evident and anything he added around it would be less honest than the plain fact.
"The prison is beneath this court."
The throne room is quiet after he says it and the quiet has a different quality than the performed silences of the oath-bound nobles. This one is real. Even the court, with its emptied eyes and its compulsion-operated bodies, seems to register the significance of the King naming the thing that has been the silent organizing principle of his entire existence being put into words in the same room as the person who came to dismantle it.
I feel it the moment I know where to look for it.
