We set up waiting for the fiend in the training room exactly when he said we should met, though it seemed utterly ridiculous given that he had be dragged down to the dungeons for torture hours ago. The idiot had better of made this a part of some elaborate plan or I was going to make sure I personally got in Rafe’s ear to ensure his torture and possible death were as drawn out and painful as possible.

“He’ll be here,” Mistra said quietly as she adjusted the position of her bag on her shoulder, “he makes terrible choices sometimes, but they usually always have a point in the end. He would not have done this to himself without a purpose.”

“How is he going to get out of the dungeon?” I asked, tapping my foot impatiently at the time slipping away that we could be using to march towards my kingdom. “Your father’s dungeon is well guarded when it needs to be and he is going to post every guard he can outside that idiot’s cell, they know he is a trickster.”

“You have little faith in me.” Feros had some how managed to appear on the balcony above us, looking down with that big, stupid grin I was quickly coming to despise. “Also, ouch, I never go around calling you an idiot.”

“That is because I am not one,” I countered. “On what realm was it a good idea for you to tell Rafe about Alice? The whole castle is going to be abuzz with people trying to solve the problem while we are trying to slip out unnoticed. You have just made it harder!”

The fiend let out a short laugh and shook his head. “All this time you have been around me and you still have not caught on that I do not do anything without having things far planned in advance. My dear, I have had decades upon decades of experience with Rafe and I dare say I might be able to call myself an expert on how he thinks and operates. Come up here and follow me, we will make our way out as I explain.”

Miffed, but just glad to be actually leaving, I ascended the stairs at the back of the room to the balcony area with Mistra in tow. Upon closer inspection, the fiend looked whole and unharmed, not a single sign that he had been in the midst of torture, it was suspicious since Rafe was not the time to be lenient, he must have ordered the torture to start as soon as he had been led to the cell.

“You look well,” I commented.

“Mm this body does, yes,” he replied with a sly grin. “It’s a very handy thing to be able to slip out when timing is convenient. I am afraid that we will need to take it slightly slower at the start here while I work out the joints in this body, they are always a bit stiff before I get them broken in.”

“I always want to ask, but then I remember I am sure I do not actually want to know,” Mistra said with a shiver.

“I think it’s an ingenious system,” Feros remarked, “I will show you both sometime when we are not on a deadline with places to be.”

Feros marched us to the back of the room where a set of shelves had been placed against the wall. They looked out of place to me before it dawned on me that the reason why was they were not present in my version of the castle. With a tap of his knuckles on the front edge of the third shelf down, there was a brief click, then a grinding noise as the shelf sprung forward a bit, then slid open to reveal a dank, dusty passageway.

“This is not a part of your castle system,” Feros explained, “Rafe has always believed in having escape routes and he did not want your family to know about this one in case things went a bit wonky and he needed a route.”

“He thought my family might attack him?” The idea that the demon king feared me was laughable. It hurt my pride to think about, but I knew that I likely would never, ever be able to hold my own against the raw magical might he possessed. “That sounds absolute absurd.”

“My father is paranoid sometimes,” Mistra interjected, “it is one of the major things that I think make him a weak monarch overall. Everyone knows that he has little to fear from most any human, but he is never exactly convinced so he plans for strange eventualities and acts erratically in weird situations.”

“I had noticed he seems to always think I was slinking in the shadows behind him ready to plunge a dagger in his back,” I commented.

“Is he fully wrong on that?” Feros said with a giggle. “Would you not plunge a dagger in his back and take over if you had the chance?”

He had me there, there was no way I could lie convincingly enough to answer that without admitting that I would indeed take that chance, probably with no hesitation.

“Mistra as well,” he continued, stepping into the darkness of what lay beyond the hidden entrance. “I know that you do love your father my dear, but I dare believe that you would rather get him out of the way so you could take your seat on the throne. You might even consider slitting the throats of all your brothers along the way to ensure your seat was assured.”

“That is so very crass of you,” Mistra muttered disapprovingly. Notedly, she did not argue to the contrary.

“Crass perhaps, but not wrong.”

The area inside the hidden passage were cramped and the air reeked of moisture that had sat around for far too long. My shoulders scrapped the walls as I tried to orient myself to the direct we were taking and both came away soaked with tepid water. We were not even but a minute into the journey and I already felt like I needed a hot bath.

“Tap the wall next to the entrance, would you my queen?”

I couldn’t see any obvious mechanism to press, so resorted to tapping the stone wall itself in a random area. Whatever the mechanism was, it worked and the shelf began to slide back into place and then clicked closed, bathing us in complete darkness. Before I could pull up the power from my core to try to coalesce a flame, a light twinkled into existence on the tip of Feros’ index finger. He held it in front of him like the most ridiculous rendition of a torch. Wordlessly he brought his other hand to his face putting a finger to his lips to indicate that we should not speak. He lead us for several minutes through the passage, the arms of my travel outfit becoming completely soaked by the time we reached what I assumed to be an outer corner of the castle. Feros swept his hand up and down to reveal there was a ladder that stretched up to higher floors and down to lower ones. He wordlessly brightened the point of light on his finger and slowly climbed onto the ladder, obviously having some trouble with the newness of his shell. Once securely on the ladder he began to climb down, looking back at us with a nod that we should follow.

I withheld a groan of disgust when it was my turn to descend, the ladder was wooden and absolutely soaked through with moisture. It must have been treated to keep it from rotting completely, but the outside was coated with slime that squished between my fingers. I felt bad for Mistra who had gone before me, surely it had been even worse for her. At the bottom of the ladder, Feros continued on at a right angle to the direction we had been going before, only this time as we continued to walk water began to impede our path. It started out as uncomfortable encounters with random puddles, but quickly escalated to us wading ankle deep in water, moving careful so as to not splash and make too much noise. By the time there was a crack of light in the distance we were up to our knees.

“Almost there,” Feros confirmed in a hushed whisper.

As we drew closer to the light, a door manifested out of the darkness, it was at a strange, 45 degree angle to the ground, Feros had to hunched over and fumble for the handle before pushing with all his might against the door. After a moment of grunting and struggling, the door budged, dirt falling inward as it swung open. The cool night air rushed in and I took a large gulp of fresh air, between the stale, musty air and the rising water I had felt on the edge of suffocation. Peaking my head out of the door, I saw that we were just on the edge of the pond that lay next to the stable, a perfect place for us to find horses and ride off into the night. Rafe really had constructed the passage system as a way for him to flee if necessary. I was a bit miffed that he had neglected to build a similar system into the castle Yser, it would have made fleeing from the fae much easier and less messy.

“Well that went well,” Feros said cheerfully as he helped pull me from the passage. “I am pretty sure we did not make too much noise and they are none the wiser.” He looked up the low overhanging moon and tilted his head like he was thinking deeply about something. “Just in time too, I think about now my old shell is probably about to give out and they will figure out that I am gone.”

“Wait, wait, wait, your body was back there still being tortured and was alive?” I asked in horror.

“Alive? That’s a funny term, what actually constitutes something being alive?” He asked rhetorically with a chuckle. “I suppose to your human terms it might indeed be considered alive in that it could feel pain, interact with the world and the like. Now that I think of it, it may be able to even think, I’ve only ever used it in situations where I have not been at liberty to stick around and ask it to know for sure. Oh well, if it is indeed sentient at least it did not have to live for long.”