The kitchen was dim, lit only by the faint orange of coals hidden deep in the oven's belly. Syaoran sat by the wall, arms folded, eyes on the sleeping courier. Teren's breathing was shallow but steady now, his wound cleaned and bound with strips of linen boiled in feverroot tea.
Madam Rinna worked in silence, crushing herbs in a stone bowl. Her hands, wrinkled and thin, moved with the quiet precision of someone who had seen too much blood and sorrow in her lifetime.
Syaoran finally broke the silence. "The Watch is hunting him."
Rinna didn't stop grinding. "They hunt everyone."
"He's lightning-born. They'll kill us just for housing him."
She placed the pestle down gently, then turned to face him. Her voice, though soft, carried weight. "And what would you have me do? Leave him in the snow? Let him die in the gutter like a dog?"
"No," Syaoran said without hesitation. "But I need to know what this is. Why now? Why him?"
Rinna looked toward the sliver of sky through the cracked window, where smoke still curled like a serpent above the city. "War comes like winter. Slowly. Then all at once."
---
Later that day, when Teren stirred, he awoke in a fevered panic, his hand clawing for the parchment.
"It's safe," Syaoran said from the doorway. "No one's seen it."
Teren's wild eyes locked on his. "You don't understand... it has to reach her... the letter… it's not just words... it's a map."
"A map to what?"
Teren opened his mouth—but then clenched his jaw and turned away.
He didn't trust Syaoran.
Not yet.
---
The streets outside were beginning to shift.
More guards. More Watchmen in dark armor, marked with the sigil of the Obsidian Hawk—the personal emblem of King Valcheiros. That meant direct orders from the capital. From the throne.
Velmire was no longer just another broken city.
Syaoran stood near the back window, watching from behind a sack of flour.
Then he saw them.
A patrol of five, dragging a woman through the street. She was bloodied, her clothes torn. Accused of harboring rebels. Accused of feeding them.
Rinna came up beside him silently.
"She didn't," Syaoran said. "She owns a fruit stall. She has two sons."
Rinna only looked at him. "And what will you do?"
Syaoran didn't answer.
Because he didn't know.
He was a baker. A quiet boy with fast hands and sharp eyes. He could lift crates, knead dough, and move through the alleyways unseen. He knew the weight of knives, not swords. Of silence, not war.
And yet…
He could still hear the sizzle of lightning in the boy's hands. He could still feel the pressure in his chest—the same pressure that had erupted the day the bakery was attacked. The day his magic was born in fire and thunder.
"Magic doesn't choose," Rinna had once told him. "It finds. And it waits."
Syaoran stepped back from the window. "If they come here…"
"They will," Rinna said softly
He turned toward the hidden oven hatch, where the parchment still lay.
And as the evening bells rang—three times, then once more—he realized something:
This wasn't just a boy's burden anymore
It was the beginning of something else
A war
A reckoning
A path