There was no anger on Black Bolt's face at the meeting being abruptly interrupted.
He had already received the report from the royal medical department. The words and figures in it were far more precise than Crystal's sobbing, stammering account. Black Bolt knew that although Richard very much did not want him to learn that telepaths could protect Medusa's mind and brain, Richard was not in charge of the royal medical department. Crystal's parents were. However, he knew that now was not the time to allow Maximus to return to Attilan society, even if Maximus was the most powerful telepath in the royal family aside from Crystal, even if the Inhumans of Attilan stood at the brink of life and death.
If Maximus gained his freedom, it would mean betraying his parents—the previous King and Queen Regent of Attilan—as well as the royal family members who supported him. If he did so, it would be easy for other royal family members and even other clans to see him as a ruler who valued personal feelings over public duty. It would also be a betrayal of the principles he had always championed—the reason warriors and scientists from other clans had joined the Clan Allied Forces under his command was because the governing philosophy he had publicly proclaimed was "uniting all Inhumans": abandoning clan identity and returning to the identity of Inhumans, creating an imagined community and a sense of belonging within it. Black Bolt had no idea that part of the reason the emperor in Golden Armor was willing to make an irrational decision and grant him, the King of Attilan, a dignified death was that this ideal, which transcended narrow racial concepts, closely resembled certain aspects of the emperor's "Unified Truth." The difference was that the emperor had left no