xaden couldn’t help his hatred.

he knew you were not your father, but you were too similar to your father, general melgren.

everytime he looked at you he was sixteen again, hearing the screams of the rebellion leaders, feeling the rune stone pressed into his palm as heat licked over his skin from the fire.

it was illogical. Irrational. and yet he couldn’t see you any other way. he would be lying if he said he didn’t go out of his way to make your life hell. everytime you were in classes together, he made sure to argue against your points. in training he didn’t pull his punches. in a way he relished fighting you. it was foolish and self destructive, but each hit he made felt like a giving back a sliver of the pain he and the other rebellion kids had gone through.

even in the threshing, he had tried to sabotage your run, even if it was as simple as leading you to the wrong path in the hopes that a dragon burned you.

he couldn’t stop himself from trying to make your life hell, even now.

moonlight streamed through the windows of the archives, falling onto the table where he sat. a flickering candle lit up the parchment he studied, a writing on ancient borders, on lines before the runes “protecting” them had gone up. he searched for any writing the school had forgotten to remove. he knew something was up.

his eyes darted up at the sound of footsteps. it was the middle of the night, only scribes should have been his company.

when he saw you he straightened up, his usually hard to read expression growing colder.

“you followed me.”

he wasn’t asking. he didn’t need his signet to know it.