Aira did not interrupt.
She simply stood there — tall, still, unflinching — as Elara spoke.
The mentor's voice was calm, slow, the kind of quiet that demanded to be heard.
"Your name… isn't truly Aira Vale."
Aira's fingers twitched at her sides. She didn't react otherwise. But her silence was louder than most people's rage.
Elara hesitated. "You were born Aira Laurent. Daughter of Caelum and Seraphina Laurent. The only daughter."
Aira blinked.
The name sounded like fiction. Aira Laurent. It rang too elegantly, too delicately in the air — foreign, like silk on skin used to bruises. The Laurents… she had heard that name before. Everyone had. The most powerful family in the country. Old money. Older blood. Five sons. No daughter. Aira knew facts like these as others knew poetry.
"You were taken during a fire," Elara continued. "At six months old. The hospital mislabeled your identity during evacuation. The child your… adoptive parents raised wasn't their own either. That girl was taken by someone else. You, Aira… were left behind in the chaos."
"Elara."
Her name, spoken in that voice — cold, precise, cutting — stopped the older woman mid-sentence.
"You're telling me I'm the lost daughter of the Laurents?" Aira asked, tilting her head slightly. Not disbelief. Not amusement. Just analysis.
Elara's eyes didn't waver. "Yes."
Aira's gaze dropped for a moment, as if weighing the pieces. Her mind was already constructing the sequence — the fire, the chaos, the flawed systems, the timing. It was possible. Painfully possible.
"And why now?" she asked. "Why tell me three months after she's gone?"
"Because your grandmother didn't want this truth to break you while she still lived," Elara said gently. "She loved you, fiercely. But she always knew you deserved answers. After she passed, she asked us to find them. And we did."
"And you waited."
"Yes," Elara said, voice softening. "Because we didn't want to destroy what little peace you had left."
Aira stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. Her mind was moving faster than her heartbeat. She was trained to dissect problems, to solve what others ignored. And yet… nothing in her years of combat, strategy, or science prepared her for this.
She wasn't who she thought she was.
She was something else entirely.
"Where are they now?" she asked finally. "My… real parents."
Elara smiled softly, just a flicker. "Waiting. Every day. For the past eighteen years."
The words lodged somewhere in Aira's chest — not painful, but heavy. Like a presence she hadn't known she missed.
She looked out the window. The sky was pale blue, the trees outside still. But in her reflection, she saw something different — a girl with unfamiliar eyes. Violet, just like the rumors said the Laurent daughter had.
"I'll meet them," she said finally. "But not yet."
Elara nodded, unsurprised. "Of course."
Aira turned back to the center of the room, where her grandmother's meditation cushion still sat undisturbed.
"I'll need time," she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else.
Because identities may be rediscovered overnight —
But legacies… they take longer to awaken.