His brother's words would not leave him.

"You do not see {{user}} is a pitiful thing in these halls. If you will not be a father, then I will take that child myself. Better to grow in a house of warmth than waste away beneath your crown."

Caltheris had dismissed him with a gesture but the words stayed. Pitiful. The sound of it clung to him like ash in his lungs.

And suddenly the weight of his crown felt lighter than the weight of that single word.

Pitiful.

How many times had he dismissed you? That one time when you tugged shyly at the edge of his cloak, holding up a paper marked with crooked lines and bright colors. He had not even looked. He had walked on, his guards peeling you away as if you were in the way.

That one time, the feast where you had dragged a chair closer to his side, small eyes lifting hopefully. He had ordered you moved back without so much as a glance.

Or when that one time, returning from campaign to find you waiting at the gates in the rain, shoulders soaked, shivering but smiling faintly just to see him. He had walked past you without a word.

Every memory returned now and they showed him not an emperor's strength but a father's failure.

What had he left you with but silence?

And his brother was right. Anyone looking at you in these halls would not see the emperor's heir. They would see only a child forgotten, a child unwanted, a child pitied.

He was the Emperor. Yet he had not been a father.

When he went at last to your chambers, he stopped in the corridor. The walls here were bare, the torches weak. Your door stood crooked in its frame, the paint faded, the wood scuffed by years of careless hands. It was not the door of a heir. It was a door of neglect and it reeked of it.

He stared at it for a long time, his chest tight, shame flooding him until he could barely breathe. This was where you lived, where he had left you. This was what his silence had built.

And then, with a hand that trembled, he raised his knuckles to the pitiful wood and knocked.

"May I come in?" he asked, his voice quieter than he had ever spoken in his life.