The castle had many places to hide. Most belonged to shadows. Some belonged to dust. The best belonged to silence. Seren chose silence.
After the sabotage in the kitchen and the boots, he understood: surviving was no longer enough. He needed to grow. Slowly, quietly, but with roots too deep for knives to cut.
---
It began at dawn.
The guards thought him asleep in Elara's chamber. Instead, Seren had left through the window, his feet wrapped in cloth. The courtyard was empty, dew coating the stones. He crouched in the far corner where the walls cast the longest shadow.
He pressed his palms to the ground, inhaled slow. Four in. Two held. Eight out. The same rhythm that had carried him through poison smoke.
One push-up. Two. Three.
By ten, his arms shook. By twenty, his breath hitched. He stopped, lay flat on the cold stone, and counted the hammer of his heart until it steadied. Then he began again.
The body learns by breaking. The mind learns by recording. Seren's mind was older than his years; his body was still a child's. He would force them to meet.
---
At noon, in the library, he traced diagrams from the slim manual Eldrin had lent him: stances of balance, breathing patterns stolen from forgotten knights. He whispered them as he drew them in the dust on the floor.
"Knee over toe. Exhale into contact. Root the spine."
The words became rhythm. The rhythm became habit.
Elara found him in the corner, sweat on his brow. She frowned, but her voice was low. "They will notice if you grow too quickly."
"They already notice," Seren answered.
She gave no reply. Only slid a piece of bread toward him, darker than usual. "Eat. Growth is noisy. Hunger must not betray you."
---
That night, he tested something new.
He sat cross-legged, eyes closed. The mirror's words echoed: Two seals. Two keys. He reached inside himself, not with hands, but with the calm he had learned in laboratories long gone.
At first—nothing. Only the throb of blood, the ache in his shoulders.
Then—a flicker.
Not mana. Not the golden fire his siblings wielded. Something quieter. A thread of thought that stretched beyond skin. He followed it until his skull tingled. His breath deepened.
The world sharpened.
He heard the drip of water three corridors away. The faint scrape of a rat's claws against stone. Even the slow grind of the Patriarch's breath in his distant chamber.
Psychic sense. Fragile, but real.
Seren smiled faintly. Calm, always calm.
---
Over the next days, the spiral of training widened.
Morning: push-ups, squats, running laps under the courtyard walls until his legs shook.
Afternoon: stances and staff forms, memorized and repeated until sweat slicked the flagstones.
Evening: readings in alchemy and herbs. How to distill poison into medicine. How to bind metals into alloys. Knowledge to be used when exile came.
Night: meditation. Listening to the faint whispers of thought that were not his. Expanding his psychic sense inch by inch.
Elara said nothing more. She only tightened his sleeves when bruises bloomed, and left bowls of broth thicker than the others. Eldrin pretended not to notice, though sometimes Seren caught the old man watching with eyes sharp as quills.
---
One evening, as he balanced on one leg in the yard, Aurelius passed. The eldest brother's gaze swept over him like a sword weighing a pebble.
"You train," Aurelius said flatly.
Seren did not answer.
The man tilted his head. "Good. Prey that grows stronger makes the hunt worthwhile." He left without turning back.
Seren held his stance until his muscles screamed. Only then did he breathe out.
---
By the end of the week, Seren no longer fell after twenty push-ups. He lasted fifty. His bruises hardened into calluses. His psychic sense stretched far enough to feel the guards before they turned the corner.
He was still small. Still fragile. Still nothing in the eyes of the house.
But inside, the spiral tightened. His body bent, but did not break. His mind stretched, but did not fray.
Growth was slow. Painful. Hidden.
Exactly as he wanted.
---
That night, he opened the mirror chamber again. The glass pulsed faintly, cracks glimmering silver.
Words appeared.
The first coil of strength is drawn. Continue. The spiral must hold.
Seren pressed his palm against the glass. His reflection stared back—smaller than the world, but calmer than the house that wanted him gone.
"I will," he whispered.
The cracks glowed brighter, then dimmed.
---
Outside, thunder rolled. In the west tower, a servant screamed as another heir collapsed over wine.
Sabotage had returned.
Seren closed his eyes. His spiral had only begun.