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“Will fall just like any other animal under the right amount of tamers. We outnumber them ten to one. A witch with quite a few tricks up her sleeve is on our side. You won’t win, sweetheart.”

“I…” Salsa blinked, his mind swirling as his well of thoughts depleted. All he could feel was dread. Dread, and a heavy loss, as though he were about to be forced to give something that meant everything to him, yet had no name for what that might be.

“Come to Suscon to be Jovack’s bird, and there will be no more war,” the man murmured, as though cooing to a frightened animal, the first bit of gentleness in his tone, though Salas feared it was just an act. “The witch will place a spell on the land so that the Diagorians won’t be able to cross over. There will be no battle. But if they come for battle,” he warned, “she’ll trap them. Freeze their bodies so they can’t move. Then we’ll kill them all. I’ve seen it.”

“I…” He repeated. Before he could continue, he caught the sight of movement over the man’s shoulder. It was a dark shadow, a skulking mountain in the dark corner, that moved forward, filling the corridor with its massive form.

It was King Jareth. Salas wasn’t sure how much the King had heard from the quiet conversation, but it appeared to be enough. The King’s dark eyes were murderous as they pressed down upon the intruding man with all dark intent to kill. He was shifting. His body expanding, fur bursting from corded arms, he became a great demon from the dark in which he lurked, his viscous anger towards the Malthenian showing that he desired, at the moment, nothing more than tearing flesh from bone.

The King roared and bounded, all intention to strike and kill the Malthenian emissary, as though he were a lesser, threatening predator and the King would stake claim on his territory by turning the man inside out.

Moving like a hulking shadow, Salas was reminded of the day the Diagorians had claimed Suscon, moving against the torchlight in their massive forms, and the screams that followed. Salas never wanted to hear screams like that again.

In a split-second decision, he took a single step to place himself between the man and the rushing king.

Jareth, noting Salas in his path, came up abruptly short. The look of pure scorn and rage, eyes glittering with wrath at the disruption, let Salas know that there was very little of the human Jareth left within the beast at the moment.

For a moment, Salas thought the once-man beast would lift one of its great claw-tipped hands and swipe him down. He waited for it.

But the blow didn’t come.

Instead, the half-beast stood straight before him, panting, his eyes viscous with their bloodlust as they leveled upon their obstacle, Salas. The beast snarled, and then outright roared at Salas until all he saw was a mouth of shining sharp teeth.

But then the beast, in an incensed huff, turned, and was gone.

The King had pushed through an open arched window, and disappeared into the night.

Salas let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d kept stored near his heart. But the relief that he was still alive only lasted a moment before his concern turned to the angry king, alone and out of his mind, in the dark.

He raced to the nearest door that led to outside, yet paused.

He’d not yet been outside since being dropped into an icy well, nor was he in any way equipped to handle a taxing, cold traipse through the natural obstacles of Diagor.

By this time, a set of disturbed guards had rushed into the corridor, hearing the roar, and their questions, though Salas’ mind was too far elsewhere to translate at the moment, came quick and snappish. The Malthenian man said something obscene about Diagorian beasts, and he was promptly hit over the head by a guard, where he crumbled squarely to the floor.

“Where did he go?” It was Tarick who came up beside Salas, his voice gently as he questioned the situation.

Salas blinked, pulling his eyes away from the darkness that lay beyond the threshold at his feet. “I don’t know,” he answered softly.

“What happened?”

Salas swallowed. “The Malthenian man, he said…” Salas shook his head. With a deep breath, he stepped outside. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get Jareth.”

Salas could hear the distress in Tarick’s next protest. “But Salas, he’s—”

“I’ll get him!” Salas shouted back, already racing out into the cold, hoping he was too far away to be stopped for his recklessness, yet knowing far too well that Tarick could very easily physically halt his advances if he wanted to.

But Salas wasn’t chased down, and with this freedom he ran faster.

It was cold, yes, but his panic for the wellbeing of the King kept him warm enough. It helped that the outfit he wore included Diagorian finishes that battled the frigid weather.

Racing through snow and slipping more than once as he craned his neck every which way to spot the location in which the King had vanished, he quickly realized that the palace area was far too great for him to cover every space. He could spend the entire night looking around every bend and stone archway.

He decided to head further away from the palace, to claim a vantage point and study the palace at a distance to see it in full. He knew to the North of the palace was a flat, barren iceland spotted meekly with tented hamlets. But to the south, there was the naked, snow-covered woods.

Since he was further south already, he headed to the forest.

Once he’d made his way there, he looked around the building from where he had come and spotted…nothing. There was no large, shadowy movement that he had been expecting.