SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 718: The Dead Meridian

It was Seraphine who spoke first, the first wife's voice smooth and practiced. "And what is it you wish to tell us, husband? Is there anything you need to hear from me about the goings-on while you were away?"

Valttair looked at her. "There is no need. I have been kept informed the entire time. Everything each of you has done reached my ears while I was shut behind that wall, so I was never as absent as some of you may have hoped." His attention moved down the table without hurry. "It also let me weigh your reports against the truth, and see which of you chose to embroider. I will grant you this much. A few of you have done a great deal more than you cared to admit."

As he said it, his grey eyes came to rest on Trafalgar, and Trafalgar met them with his own, navy-dark and unmoved. Tension drew taut between the two of them across the length of the table. The patriarch had a question in him, plain as day.

"Is there something you want to ask me, Valttair?"

"There is, in fact, son."

The word son passed between them and changed nothing. Trafalgar had never once called the man father, and Valttair went on calling him son all the same, as though the word could cover what lay under it. Neither of them was fooled.

"I have noticed you have drawn close to your next core," Valttair went on. "That is news a man might think to mention, the same as he might mention he is about to become a father. I only meant to congratulate you."

For a beat, no one at the table moved. They only stared at Valttair as though he had risen from his chair, dropped his trousers, and begun pleasuring himself across the tabletop in full view of his own children.

There were two shocks folded into that, not one. The first was the fatherhood. Trafalgar had kept the news close, and not every branch of the family had known Mayla was carrying his child, though he had walked into this hall fully aware it would surface before the day was done. The second, and the larger by far, was that Valttair had congratulated him at all.

Valttair, offering congratulations. Now that was worth writing down.

His wives plainly did not share the sentiment. Both Maeron and Helgar had children of their own, and neither the first wife nor the second looked remotely pleased to watch the bastard son handed a warm word their own sons had never pried out of him so easily.

There was more under their irritation than that, besides. Their sons had never been permitted to choose the women they married. Trafalgar had. That freedom had come out of the arrangement between him and Valttair, the one where Trafalgar served the family's interests and the patriarch, in return, kept his nose out of Trafalgar's private life, and Valttair had judged the trade more than fair. It had already bought House Morgain a strong alliance through the Rosenthals, after all, even if two of the three women Trafalgar had married were common-born.

"In any case, let us move on." Valttair's tone slid back to business. "Now that the Academy is behind you, Trafalgar, you will start taking on missions along with the rest."

Trafalgar inclined his head.

"With that out of the way, we come to what actually brought us here." The patriarch let the name drop into the room. "The Dead Meridian."

Helgar leaned forward. "That is the border that runs up against the beyond, is it not, Father? The one with the barrier. What does that have to do with anything right now?"

"A fair question." Valttair laid it out plainly. "The Void Creatures have grown restless out there, and worse things alongside them. I sent Moses to look into it, and it cost him years of his life. The trouble is that we came to it late. We were not the first."

That pulled the table's attention in tight.

"Another of the Great Families reached the Meridian ahead of schedule. We do not yet know why. But set it beside the rumors that have been drifting lately, and I believe we can put a name, or several, to whoever is out there."

Lysandra spoke up. "You think it could be more than one family, Father?"

"It is possible." Valttair's voice cooled a degree. "And whatever they are doing on that side of the line, you can be certain it is nothing good."

Down the length of the table, a glance passed between Rivena and Maeron, and from the two of them to Seraphine and back. It was there and gone in an instant, a thread of understanding strung between three people who had no business sharing one, and not a single soul in the hall caught it. Not even Trafalgar.

He had missed it because his mind was somewhere else entirely. The Dead Meridian was a name he had never heard before tonight, and while Valttair spoke, his thoughts had already snagged on the one piece that pulled at him: a barrier, sealing off a stretch of the world that no one had explored.

A Great Family creeping out to the edge of it, in the same breath as rumors of Void Creatures learning to think and to speak, was not a coincidence he had any intention of filing away and forgetting. Somewhere under all of it the pieces wanted to fit together. He simply did not hold enough of them yet.

Which left one question louder than the rest.

'Is that where the Primordials are hiding?' The thought came quiet and certain. 'The ones that are left, tucked behind a wall the whole world has been taught to leave alone. It would explain a great deal.' He kept his face empty and set the name beside the others already waiting there. 'I need to put this to Dravok the next time I see him.'