The room descended into silence after Leilani left. Just as Arkien was about to apologize for Leilani's character, the emperor burst out into laughter. The laugh shocked the two guards who had been standing in the corner silently the whole time. In all their years of serving the current emperor, hearing him laugh still sent a shiver down their spines.
The reason for this was quite simple. Before the current emperor took the throne, he had been deployed to the forest that plagued their empire with monsters. When their hopes seemed to be close to getting crushed, the emperor, prince at the time, laughed.
It wasn't that his laugh was maniacal, or that he was laughing because he felt scared. On the contrary, he felt that the situation they were in was hilarious. When he was later asked by his father, some of the guards heard him say that it was because he was wondering how the mighty drakkons such as themselves had been caught in such a precarious position.
