Warm hug. Promises. Tender whispers.

He remembered the day like it had been carved into his bones. Kaelen was ten. Still soft in the face. Still small enough to be lifted.

His father—Sir Aldren Vale—had been in full armor, silver trimmed with the old royal sigil. A knight so tall and noble it made other men stand straighter when he passed. But to Kaelen, he was just Father. The man who taught him how to hold a sword, tie his boots, and sharpen his mind before his blade.

A promise was made. A promise to come home.

But a year later, a box arrived. It bore the King’s seal. Heavy wax, pressed with the lion rampant. Inside: velvet lining, royal red. And nestled within, the severed head of Sir Aldren Vale.

Kaelen didn’t scream. Not when he saw the slack in his father’s proud jaw. Not when his mother collapsed, the cry strangled in her throat. Not when the royal letter fluttered out, smelling of roses and ink, and declared with cold finality: “His sacrifice will be remembered as honorable.”

He didn’t cry. He only stared.

The world had promised him a father’s return. It gave him a trophy of death instead. Something cracked that day. Not enough to bleed. Not yet. But enough to doubt.

The first doubt whispered: Why send him? A decorated knight. The King’s most loyal blade. To a nameless land with no value and no threat. The orders had been vague. The purpose: Stabilization.

The second doubt came louder: Why silence everything after? No stories. No survivors. No battle songs. Just a box.

No one gave Kaelen answers. So the questions festered.

Eight years later, Kaelen trained alone, sword slicing the morning fog in slow, deliberate arcs. His breath steamed in the cold—steady and sharp—until it wasn’t. A tremor surfaced. Not from pain. Not from fatigue.

From truth. It slipped through an open window.

Their words rang in Kaelen’s skull like church bells—cruel, careless bells tolling for the dead. Eight years ago. A betrayal dressed in velvet and gold. This was no longer grief. It had evolved. Hardened. They called it treason, the thing that clawed inside his chest now.

But they called betrayal loyalty once, too. He would give their words new meaning. In silence, steel, and ruin.

His mother never saw the storm fully form. Or maybe she did—and had no strength left to stop it. As Kaelen rose to power, named strategist in a foreign court.

Fate took her first. No family. No home. Only purpose.

By twenty-four, Kaelen was two men. The golden general—respected, revered—standing at the King’s right hand, winning wars with clean hands and a colder heart.

And beneath, the traitor—the boy who still saw his father’s severed head every time he closed his eyes. Who smiled for the crown while plotting its ruin in silence.

He had mastered the lie. Perfected the mask. Until you. And suddenly, the control he’d built his life upon began to crack.

Kaelen arrived too late. Or perhaps, exactly when fate meant him to.

He stilled.

The high throne room of the Alpheus Court, once luminous with stained-glass light and polished grandeur, was a massacre in silence. Every sibling. The Queen. The guards. Slumped, sprawled, broken. Their blood had painted the floor into rivers—no strategic blowouts, no fires from a siege.

He had waited years—years—to see this man die. Had dreamed of it as a boy with blood on his hands and no father to hold him. Had tasted it in every campaign, every strategic lie he spun for the neighboring King who had welcomed him with open arms and sharpened ambition. Kaelen had been forged in that vengeance.

And now it stood before him… already done.

Kaelen’s gaze rose to the person beyond the corpse, blade slick with blood, attire torn and dark with battle. You. The exiled heir. The King's forsaken blood.

His fingers slipped from his sword hilt. A dry laugh escaped.

“Well,” he muttered, voice laced with bitter amusement, “seems vengeance runs in the family after all.”