Isla has been gone for three weeks.

  And true to my word, I’ve not stepped beyond the walls of the estate.

  Not the outer gate. Not the carriage path. Not even the far edge of the west orchard, though I’ve paced the perimeter more than once, my hands behind my back and my thoughts crawling like frost over glass.

  Yaerith has kept me informed. Dispatches from the Office of Strategic Planning arrive each morning, couriered in thick packets bearing wax seals and carefully annotated summaries. I read them at the long table in the sunroom, where the light’s good and Clara is usually nearby, halfway up a tree or halfway into another question.

  She asks a lot of them.

  Why do leaves fall? Why do stars twinkle? Why are some people cruel and others kind? Can wolves be friends? Can ghosts dream? Do flowers know they’re pretty?

  And once, curled up on the bench beside me with a half-eaten apple in one hand and her cheek pressed against my shoulder, she asked softly, “Why did the Founder help everyone?”

  I look up from my reading. “What do you mean?”

  “He came from the sky, right?” she says, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Because the first people cried out? That’s what the Temple says. But… why did he come? Why did he help?”

  I set the papers down.

  “The Temple teaches that when the people of Elessia cried out, the Founder heard them. That he crossed the void between worlds to save them. He gave them magic, and the titles, and a path to follow.”

  “I know that part,” she says, brow furrowed. “But why did he help?”

  I hesitate. Then, “No one really knows. Maybe the people’s call didn’t just reach him. Maybe it pulled him here. Maybe he couldn’t leave.”

  “So he was stuck?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And he just… decided to help anyway?”

  I nod slowly. “Maybe he looked around and decided—if he was stuck here—he might as well make it better than he found it.”

  She thinks about that for a long time.

  “That’s kind of lonely,” she says.

  “It probably was.”

  “But… kind too.”

  She looks down at the apple, then took another bite, more thoughtful than hungry.

  She looks up at the gray sky.

  She’s quiet for a long time.

  Then, soft as breath, “Do you think he missed his home?”

  “Every day,” I say.

  She doesn’t ask how I’d know.

  That was yesterday.

  Today’s questions are louder, faster. Fired like arrows, barely pausing for breath, never doubting that I’ll have an answer. And I do, though not always the one she expects. I tell her stories instead. Parables and half-truths dressed as fantasy. Legends of worlds far from this one. Of machines that sing, and cities made of light. Of people who fly, and kings who weep, and little girls who carried nations on their backs.

  She never asks where I heard them, never questions how I know.

  She just listens, rapt, chin on her knees, her eyes wide with that brilliant, fearless kind of wonder children wear like armor.

  And I let myself be soft. Be the age this body is.

  Around her, I don’t have to wear the crown of expectation. I can laugh. I can chase her around the wild old tree in the center of the garden, where the branches twist like reaching hands and the roots rise from the earth like something ancient trying to wake. I let her braid wildflowers into my hair once. I told the guards not to comment. They didn’t.

  But not every hour belongs to gardens and laughter.

  Each morning still begins in the study, beneath tall windows and the ever-watchful eye of Lord Merrow. My lessons have shifted in recent months. The lectures have grown quieter—less spoken instruction, more time spent in shared silence, broken only by the turning of pages and the scratch of quills. The old dogkin doesn’t pace as he once did. These days, he spends most of the lesson seated behind his wide oak desk, quill in hand, parchment arranged in meticulous rows like a general’s campaign notes.

  His fur, once a deep charcoal, has silvered with age, softening into a mottled grey that catches the morning light through the study windows. It’s always well-groomed, brushed smooth from the crown of his brow to the neatly buttoned collar of his coat. His long ears droop at the ends, lending him a look of perpetual disapproval, but his eyes are sharp, watchful, and too intelligent to be mistaken for soft. When he’s thinking deeply, his muzzle twitches slightly, as though some debate is always being waged between instinct and intellect.

  Each morning when I enter, he greets me with a nod, says nothing, and gestures toward whatever book he’s selected. The volumes are always marked with velvet ribbons, color-coded in some private system I’ve never bothered to decipher. Once I’m settled, he turns back to his own work, checking on me only occasionally with a grunt or a flick of his ear. It's a quiet rhythm we’ve both fallen into, not companionable, not quite warm, but practiced, like two instruments in parallel keys.

  But it’s not just me anymore.

  Clara has started attending lessons.

  She’s only five, and still trips over certain sounds, but her mind is quick, and her curiosity relentless. I bring her with me now in the mornings, despite Marla’s arched brows and Havish’s barely-veiled sighs. They’ve both warned me, in their own ways, that this isn’t proper, that I shouldn’t blur the lines between staff and household. But I don’t listen.

  Lena, for her part, doesn’t protest. Not really. I think she worries Clara is being elevated too far above her station, that there will be consequences down the line when someone decides to remind her where she came from. But she also stands a little straighter when she sees her daughter tracing letters on parchment. She asks questions, how Clara is doing, if she’s polite, if she listens. Pride and fear war behind her eyes. But the pride wins more often now.

  At first, Lord Merrow resisted. He scoffed—actually scoffed—when I brought Clara in the first time, dragging a stool twice her size behind her like a conquering hero. “This is not a nursery,” he muttered, ears twitching with irritation. “Nor a remedial barnyard school.” I said nothing. Just handed Clara a slate and placed a primer on her lap.

  For the first week, he ignored her entirely. Clara didn’t notice. She was too busy copying every curve and dot of her letters with the solemn intensity of a knight preparing for battle. And when she asked a question, it was always to me, usually something like, “Does an R always curl that way?” or “Is it true Y is the sneaky one?”

  Eventually, Alistair, he stopped being Lord Merrow around the time Clara mispronounced his name as “Murmur” and refused to call him anything else—grumbled that if I insisted on splitting my attention, then someone should teach her properly. “You’ll never finish The Treatises on Principled Strategy if you’re busy correcting her vowels,” he snapped one morning, snatching the slate from Clara and writing out a proper lowercase G with firm strokes.

  He’s been her reluctant teacher ever since.

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  Only the basics, letters, counting, the kinds of history that can be told without revealing too much of the ugliness behind it. But he corrects her now when she fumbles her posture. He comments when she writes too large. And sometimes, when he thinks I’m not watching, I catch the faintest wag of his tail when she gets something right on the first try.

  Training with the estate guard continues after lunch, as it always has, but lately, it’s different.

  Sharper. Quieter. More real.

  Since turning seven, something in the air around the ring has shifted. The guards no longer approach me like I’m a child to be humored. They don’t half-commit or feint with generous windows for recovery. They come at me like professionals tasked with shaping something dangerous. Or at least, testing the edge to see if it’s begun to bite.

  The long afternoons of drills and formwork—the endless repetition of stances under the sun—haven’t vanished completely. The bones of our routines are still there, woven into warmups and cooldowns like a familiar rhythm. But the heart of each session is now sparring. Duels, not dances. Real, rapid exchanges where footwork slips and instincts sharpen, and nothing unfolds exactly the way you practiced it.

  They still land hits. I still bruise. But less than before.

  At first, I could feel them compensating, subtle tells in the shoulder, the hesitancy in follow-through. These were grown men, seasoned fighters, unused to squaring off against someone half their size. They pulled punches, shifted their weight too late, second-guessed a strike just before impact. And it made them predictable. Easy to read. Easy to punish.

  But that’s changing.

  They’ve started treating me like a proper opponent. Not because of my strength, I’m still small, still light, but because they’ve begun to realize I don’t need protection. I need resistance. And when they underestimate me now, I make them pay for it.

  More and more, they lose.

  Not because I overpower them. But because I know things they don’t. My body is finally catching up with the knowledge I carry. Faster, leaner, more precise. Strong enough now to handle techniques from other lives—forms not taught in Falkensgrave, nor even this world. Stances with unusual weight distribution. Bladed angles borrowed from stone arenas and jungle clearings. Footwork that circles, then folds, then strikes from below like a springtrap. Movements that shouldn’t work, until they do.

  Yesterday was proof of that.

  Tholen—one of the older guards, built like a cart ox with a crooked nose and thick wrists from decades of real fights—stepped into the ring after the midday bell.

  He didn’t smirk. Didn’t offer a wink like some of the others still do. He just rolled his shoulders, drew his practice blade, and nodded to the line of watching guards. There was no posturing. No pretense. Just a quiet ritual. A man testing steel, and whatever I’ve become.

  We opened with form, traded strikes like old friends exchanging courtesies. He tested my timing. I tested his reach. He moved well. Controlled. No wasted effort.

  But I saw the scan in his eyes. He was reading me, trying to decide who he was fighting today. The boy. The heir. Or the thing behind the eyes of both.

  So I changed the rhythm.

  Dropped my stance. Led with my left. A stance from another life, one spent under low suns and red sky, where fighters carved each other up for breath and bread in sand pits, not marble courts.

  He came hard. Three quick cuts from high guard, meant to force me back.

  On the fourth, I didn’t retreat.

  I stepped into the swing. Dropped under it. Switched my grip mid-motion and drove the flat of my blade into the back of his knee. Twisted, let his weight do the rest.

  He hit the ground hard. Not injured. But surprised.

  For a breath, the courtyard held its silence.

  Then Tholen rolled upright with a grunt, shook out the leg, and gave a single sharp clap. “That one again,” he said. “Slower this time.”

  It wasn’t praise. It was recognition.

  I see that look more often now. When I switch grips mid-duel. When I pivot into a strike they’ve never seen. The confusion. The wariness. Sometimes even a flicker of fear—not of me, but of what they don’t understand. That same expression has followed me through many lives. It means the same thing every time:

  I’m beginning to outgrow my teachers.

  Still, I don’t win every match.

  There are guards here who’ve been fighting longer than I’ve been alive, men whose reflexes were shaped in real war, not just training yards. They prove, often and painfully, that I am still small. Still young. Still learning.

  And that’s fine.

  Because the bruises fade. But the shape they leave behind does not.

  That’s the rhythm now. A pattern carved into these days of waiting. And though I keep my promise to Isla, I feel the city’s pulse even here, like I’ve got my ear pressed to the earth.

  But on the morning of the second day of the fourth week, something shifts.

  I enter Lord Alistair’s study after breakfast, Clara already there and seated on a stool by the hearth. The window is open, letting in the crisp bite of early light, and the scent of cedar and ink hangs thick in the air.

  He’s already at his desk, pen moving across a page in neat, efficient strokes. He doesn’t look up when I enter, just gestures toward the side table.

  A single book waits there.

  Its cover is dark blue, worn at the corners, unmarked by title or emblem. A velvet ribbon juts from between the pages—precisely placed.

  Alistair doesn’t look up. He simply gestures toward the book with one ink-stained hand.

  “Read this,” he says. “Start on page thirty-four. Out loud.”

  I pause. “Page thirty-four?”

  Still, he doesn’t meet my eyes. His quill resumes its steady, deliberate scratching, as if the act of writing is more important than the answer.

  I glance across the study. Clara is seated cross-legged by the hearth, dutifully copying letters onto a slate, tongue poking from the corner of her mouth in concentration. She hums quietly to herself—off-key, but earnest.

  Alistair’s ears twitch. He sighs. Then finally speaks.

  “Clara,” he says, not unkindly. “That’s enough for today.”

  She looks up, surprised. “But I haven’t finished—”

  “You’ll finish tomorrow.” His tone brooks no debate. “Go on. Your mother’s likely waiting.”

  Clara glances at me. I nod, and she sighs dramatically, hopping down from the stool. As she passes, she gives me a theatrical whisper: “I think Lord Murmur is hiding secret treasure in that book.”

  I manage a faint smile.

  The door clicks shut behind her; just like that, the softness slips from me.

  I don’t know which is the mask anymore, the youthfulness, the quiet laughter, the easy stillness of a child, or the calm, calculating weight behind my silence. Neither feels entirely real. But both are mine.

  This body is seven, restless, quick, full of breath and marrow. But behind my eyes, centuries. Millennia. Lives stretched across worlds, cast in fire and starlight.

  The warmth Clara brings lingers, just for a breath. The sister I never had. The daughter I didn’t get to raise. Her humming. Her questions. The light, unfiltered joy she drags into every room. But it drifts now, receding like the echo of a dream.

  Because this moment asks for something else.

  Something older. Sharper. The quiet in the room isn’t stillness. It’s weight. And I can feel it pressing in from the edges of Alistair’s silence.

  He leans back in his chair, folding his hands atop the desk. He doesn’t speak. Just waits.

  I pick up the book. It’s heavier than it looks—old in the way that sinks into the grain of paper, old in the way dust still clings to the edges no matter how many times it’s wiped clean.

  I carry it to my usual seat by the window, the one that catches the morning light. I flip to the marked page and clear my throat.

  The print is small. Precise. Written in the old Dominion High Script—a formal dialect crafted to be both technical and inaccessible. The kind of language meant to keep outsiders away.

  Still, I begin:

  “In times of great peril, when the balance of power falters and the Dominion’s light is threatened from beyond the veil, the Summoning of Heroes may be lawfully undertaken by a High House in good standing, provided the rites are observed and the child is deemed suitable…”

  I stop.

  Blink.

  My voice falters. I look up.

  Alistair’s expression doesn’t change, but I see the twitch of his muzzle, hear a swish of his tail against the floor. He is not as calm as he looks.

  I return to the page.

  “…Such summoning shall be sanctioned by the Dominion’s Crown Council and recorded in the Founder’s Second Codex. The title of Summoned Hero, validated by a Founder’s Tome, to be matured through training and trial before full recognition. Once matured, the Hero shall be presented before the Council and prepared for Ascension…”

  My pulse climbs.

  My mouth feels dry.

  I read slower now. Each phrase lands like a pebble dropped into still water, rippling out, unsettling what lies beneath.

  “…and once presented, the Hero shall be sent to the Front.”

  The Front.

  Not a place. Not a nation. Not a name.

  Just capitalized. Final. Ominous.

  I know the Dominion has been at war since before I was born. Distant. Abstract. A thing in maps and speeches. But this—

  This suggests something older. Deeper.

  A war so vast, so permanent, it’s carved into law. Into ritual. Into children.

  I lower the book into my lap. My hands are steady. But only because I make them be.

  Inside, something turns.

  They summon children. That’s what the book says without saying it. “Deemed suitable.” “Matured through trial.” “Prepared for Ascension.” And then what?

  Then they’re sent to the Front.

  Across worlds. Ripped from their homes, whatever shape those might take. Turned into weapons for a war that has no face, no name, just a title with a capital letter and silence wrapped around it.

  Why?

  Why is it still going?

  Why has no one stopped it?

  Why do they still pull strangers through the void, like sacrifices offered to something they won’t even name aloud?

  The air in the study is too still. Too clean.

  I breathe slowly. Once. Then again.

  Alistair finally speaks, his voice low, measured.

  “You weren’t meant to read this until your tenth year. It’s Archduke Sven’s place to explain it fully, when the time is right.”

  I look at him. My voice is calm, but my stomach is twisting.

  “Then why now?”

  He folds his hands tighter.

  “Because the world isn’t waiting for you to turn ten. You’ve already begun pulling at threads that lead here. If you find this buried in a ledger or half-named in a field report and chase it... the Crown will not take it lightly.”

  “So I’m being warned?”

  “You’re being prepared,” he says. “Because if you uncover it on your own, you’ll ask the wrong questions. Public ones. And someone will make sure you never ask another.”

  He lets the weight of that settle before continuing.

  “You’re not just the heir of House Larkin anymore. You’re part of this city’s spine. If you press too hard, you won’t just crack the truth—you’ll break the wrong bones along the way.”

  I say nothing.

  Because if I open my mouth now, I might not stop.

  And I don’t know who I’d be angry at first.