Reed stood in the hall, gaze following the trail of destruction along the left wall. Now that he was away from Their Majesties and the suddenly sentient prince, the reality of the situation was starting to dawn on him. He’d been in the middle of helping hide the evidence that the Barracks was falling down around them when Lorrie had come running to the barracks. She’d been in such a panic that he’d thought someone was dying. Then, he’d laughed at her when she blurted that Prince Solace had spoken.

I need to apologize…

He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingers. This was too much. He was about at his limit for the day, and it was only eleven in the morning.

Down the hall, Marigold used a small broom to sweep up the shards of a broken vase, indicating that at least some of the mess had been dealt with.

“What do you think?” Reed asked his Vice-Captain, Sir Patrick Davis. He looked at his lieutenant to see if he’d recovered from the shock yet. He had not. His eyes were pointed forward with a thousand-yard stare. “Patrick.” Reed shook his shoulder. “Focus.”

Patrick slowly swiveled his eyes to Reed. “What is going on today?”

“I don’t know. But we’ll just keep doing what we always do: keep our heads down and stay under the radar.”

The use of that foreign word got Patrick to roll his eyes. “Your damn made-up words…” he muttered and slapped his face with both hands. “What’re we supposed to do?”

“Find out who put Solace in the pond,” Reed reminded.

Patrick’s cheeks were red from the aggressiveness of his slap, but it seemed to have brought him alert. He looked down the hall. "It… looks like he walked by himself."

“That’s what I was thinking,” Reed pointed at the wall.

Taking the lead, Patrick strode toward Marigold where she knelt on the floor.

"Hello, you two," Marigold greeted cheerfully as she straightened. "Quite a mess today. Guess one of those Eastern Barracks bastards threw a tantrum in here. At least this is the only thing broken."

"Did Prince Solace seem weird this morning?" Patrick asked. Reed continued looking down the hall in thought.

"Weird?” She looked up at Patrick again after straightening her skirt. The change of subject had startled her. Normally, she would have been right with her assumption that it was one of the high nobles who had caused the disturbance. “No. Same as usual." She shook her head.

"What would you consider 'usual' though?" Patrick pressed.

Marigold gave them a deadpan look. "Sitting there, blinking sometimes. He twitched something fierce last night. Kicked his foot right out of my hands." She giggled. The broken vase on her dustpan shifted. "Oop. I'd better get rid of this. See you later." She hurried away.

Reed turned a look on his second in command. "He's twitched before," he pointed out. While Prince Solace hadn’t reacted to outside stimulus, his body did have natural functions like blinking, breathing, and twitching.

Patrick folded his arms as he followed Reed into the prince’s room. It was empty as usual. Old still-life paintings hung on the walls, depicting tempting bowls of fruit and vases of flowers. They weren’t masterworks by anyone’s standards and were only there because Marigold or Lorrie decided to change them out occasionally, pulling other paintings out of the multitude stored in the unused rooms of the western wing. The only constant in the room was the massive grandfather clock that stood on the western wall of the room.

Marigold hummed cheerfully as she came in behind them. "His Highness isn't here right now. Their Majesties took him to the gazebo for lunch."

"We're not here to see him," Patrick said, pacing around the room. "Did you clean in here?" He opened the door to Solace’s bedroom and peered in. It only had a few pieces of furniture; the bed, vanity table with no mirror, and bench. The bathroom door on the opposite wall was closed, but Reed doubted there would be any answers there either.

"Oh, yes."

"What did it look like before you cleaned?" he asked.

Reed went to the windows. They were dusty and undisturbed.

"Well... His Highness's hairpin was on the floor. But that's it." Marigold said. She pulled her apron between her hands, starting to get nervous with Patrick and Reed’s serious tone.

"Hard to make a mess when he's the only thing in here," Patrick admitted as he turned slowly, looking around the room as well. “Has anyone else been to see him this morning?”

“No. Everyone’s busy getting ready for dinner tonight,” Marigold said.

“How long was he alone in here?” Patrick asked, pulling out a notebook to start writing her answers.

“Eh…” she shifted nervously. “We’ve left him alone before. Why is it suddenly a problem?”

Reed knelt to look at the floor. Patrick was a good investigator, but some things he just wasn’t going to think to look for. Although Reed wasn't sure what he was looking for either. Circles of salt? Candle wax? Mythiric was a world that had a rich history of magic and swords that could cut stone, but all that was in the past. They’d lost the knowledge about two thousand years prior when the first queen of Durshand had purged the corrupt priests of some demon religion. His history lessons had been over five years ago and his disappointment that he couldn’t sling fireballs or summon monsters as pets had caused him to lose interest.

“It’s not a problem,” Patrick assured. “We’re just… looking into something.”

Marigold fidgeted. "Reed? What are you doing?"

"I'd say it was witchcraft, but y'all ain't got that here." He got up, dusting his hands and pants. Ten years he'd been in this world, and all that time he'd thought soullessness was just this low-technology world's way of describing birth defects. Boy, was I wrong... Apparently, inert lumps of flesh can spontaneously become complete assholes.

"What?"

"Never mind," Reed said in English, then waved it off. Correcting to Durrish, he asked, “Can you answer the question, Marigold?”

“Maybe an hour. I had to go help in the kitchen, Lorrie was doing laundry.”

Patrick wrote that down. “Lorrie found him…” he turned to look at the ancient clock. “Just after eleven,” he muttered, writing. “Then came to get us. Anyone could’ve been in here in the hour before that,” he said to Reed.

“I have a suspicion no one was. He walked his ass out there on his own.” Reed picked at a smear of paint on his hand that he’d not noticed before. All this was a distraction he really didn’t have time for. He’d gotten night shift up to help clean but sent them back to bed an hour later. The rest of it was being handled by himself, Timmons, Avery, and Patrick. Day shift had been sent to their posts after they cleaned their rooms.

This situation wasn’t going to go over well. Local superstitions believed that demons were always inside people, waiting to come out. Idle people were susceptible to becoming demons, so the common man was worked as hard as possible. The nobility had the gall to overlook their own hypocrisy and say Ruling is hard work too! A body sitting vacant was just asking to get filled by something malicious. And thus soulless were immediately killed upon being identified. However, Prince Solace had been the queen’s only child and she was in a position with enough power to ignore local customs.

It really did seem as if someone had just been installed in Prince Solace's body.

This left only one other explanation for what had happened, though, but it wasn’t one Reed dared speak aloud. This guy's probably an Isekai too. Wonder how much of a dick he's going to be about it? Do I tell him that he really should chillax and see about running away? Whatever the plot of his story was, it’s not worth the politics.

That conclusion eased Reed’s disquiet about the situation, but no one else in Mythiric was going to take it well. Would this cause riots in the streets?

Looking from Patrick to Reed, Marigold stared in puzzlement. "Who?"

"His Highness," Patrick said. "Got up and walked outside."

Marigold burst into laughter. She calmed when they didn’t laugh too. “You’re not joking?” She waited a beat, then laughed again. “You almost had me.” Giggling, she left them to go change Prince Solace’s sheets.

Shaking his head, Reed went back into the hall, Patrick hot on his heels. Catching Reed’s arm, Patrick said, “What are we going to do about this?”

Reed shrugged helplessly. "I think this is beyond my pay grade."

“I’m serious.” Patrick gripped Reed’s arm tighter.

“I am too. This is going to be trouble. It’s only a few hours before the announcement. You know what she's gonna do."

Patrick frowned, going a bit pale. "She's going to insist he join."

"Regardless of whether he's capable," Reed agreed. “But it’s not our problem.”

"We're the knights assigned to the west wing,” Patrick pointed out. “We’re going to have to guard him.”