"What is the meaning of this, Zeji?"
Aquila's lips trembled. Her chest felt like it was collapsing under the weight of too many emotions—confusion, betrayal, grief. She didn't know who to trust anymore. All she wanted was to run, to get away from this suffocating truth that was cornering her.
Zeji only looked at her, silent for a moment, before exhaling softly.
"Are you… betraying Feltogora?" she whispered, disbelief cracking through every word.
He didn't answer right away. When he finally spoke, his tone was stripped of its usual lazy indifference.
"Do you think… Feltogora is still worth saving?"
The question struck her like a blade.
"What? Of course! It's our home!" Aquila's voice rose in frustration, her fists trembling.
"Is it? Really?" Zeji's reply was calm, too calm, almost cruel in its detachment.
"I don't understand! Why are you doing this? WHY ARE YOU HELPING THE REBELS!?"
"Helping?" His eyes locked with hers, unflinching. "You're mistaken, Aquila."
Confusion tangled her thoughts. She staggered back half a step, watching him approach with a slow, deliberate stride. Despite his cold expression, she could feel it—he was measuring his words carefully, as though afraid they would cut her.
"They are the ones helping me," he said at last, his voice like iron.
Her breath caught. Helping him? The rebels? To what end? Then the pieces shifted in her head, and horror clawed at her throat.
"You… you're going to destroy our Empire?"
Her heart dropped into her stomach. Her mind spun back to that day, to Hans's words when she had been abducted during Althurd's birthday—Revazkerio will fall by one of their own blood.
Her voice cracked, raw. "Do you really hate the Empire that much?"
For the first time, the mask of indifference shattered. Zejidiah's composure bled away, replaced with a fury so sharp it made Aquila's body seize with fear. His face twisted, his voice tore through the silence.
"I do."
The words trembled, not with doubt, but with rage so deep it made Aquila's nerves scream.
"I hate it, Aquila." His mouth curved into a smile, but it was broken, trembling, nothing like joy.
"I have lived every day in the cage of this bloodline. Pretending. Smiling. Serving the very Empire that took our mother from us!" His hand rose, covering his golden eye, leaving only the silver one exposed—her mother's eye.
Aquila's breath hitched. Her pulse roared in her ears.
"What do you mean by that…?" she whispered, her body trembling violently.
A chill raced down her spine.
"Wasn't Mother killed by the one she trusted most? That commoner?"
Then Aquila froze, staring, as tears fell silently from Zejidiah's silver eye.
"Aquila…" His voice broke completely.
"Mother was killed by Althurd."
Her stomach twisted violently. Her chest tightened until breathing felt impossible.
Then her body betrayed her. She turned to the side and vomited, the taste of bile burning her throat as her world shattered around her.
Six years ago — Zejidiah's POV
I was only sixteen when the news reached me. Mother was dead. Worse—she was killed. And not just anywhere, not in silence, but right before the eyes of my little sister.
My dearest sister, Aquila.
Gods above… how could you allow this? How could anyone be so cruel? That girl… she was only a child. How could you let her bear such a sight, such a weight, and expect her to carry that trauma for the rest of her life?
I was mad. No—furious. So consumed by rage that I didn't even know what to do with myself. And then, when I was told how she died—slain by the very commoner she trusted most—the anger curdled into something darker.
When Aquila returned, escorted by knights, dragging with her our mother's lifeless body… she was a ghost of herself. Her eyes, faint red from weeping, crushed me enough. But it was the other thing, the one thing that shattered me completely—her silver eyes, our mother's eyes, looked empty. Hollow.
I ran to her, desperate to pull her into my arms, to tell her it wasn't her fault, that I was still here. That she wasn't alone.
But what comfort could a sixteen-year-old boy give when his whole world had just been ripped apart too?
That night, and every night that followed, I passed her chamber and heard her cries echo through the silence. I would slip inside, sit by her bed, and stay until her sobs slowed, until her breathing steadied. Only when she finally drifted into a fragile sleep would I leave. And every time, my feet carried me to the garden, to the cold stone marking our mother's grave.
"Mother…" I whispered into the darkness, voice trembling, body trembling. "Was your decision really worth your life?"
I asked again and again, as if the dead could answer. As if the stars might whisper her voice back to me.
The more I asked, the angrier I became.
"How dare they…" The words scraped out of me, half snarl, half sob. My fists clenched until my nails cut into my palms, tears streaming freely down my face.
"How dare the commoners betray you? How dare they stain your name with their filth?"
My chest heaved, my throat burned. I sobbed like the boy I still was, but a boy who had already lost everything.
"Mother…" I begged, voice breaking, knees pressed into the damp earth. "How could we ever get over this? Tell me… please, tell me."
But only silence answered me. Silence, and the cruel truth that no matter how much I pleaded, I would never again hear her laugh at our tea table, never again see her smile while Aquila pouted over something trivial.
That life was gone. And so, piece by piece, something inside me began to break.
Every day that passed, something in me felt smaller — a muscle that withered from disuse. Grief calcified into a single, constant ember: anger. It smoked behind my ribs, hot and patient. I would see Aquila sometimes, ghosting through the garden my mother loved, and my chest would lurch at the sight. She was the one who had loved Mother most, and the way she carried that absence wounded me anew each time.
Months became a blur. Days folded into one another until the calendar meant nothing; the only measure left was the hollowness inside my throat. I stopped asking how long. I stopped expecting answers. I would go to Mother's grave and stand there until the sun set, asking the same useless questions into cold stone.
"What do I do now?" I whispered to the night, to no one. "To whom do I turn this?"
There was never an answer. Only more silence. That night I did not cry — my chest had nothing left to squeeze out. I felt exhausted in a way that was not merely tiredness but the absence of feeling itself. I had become a thing emptied of softness, held together by a single raw intent: the need to make someone pay.
I tried to walk into the commoner district once, at dusk, the way Mother used to go — partly to taste the world she had defended, partly because I thought throwing myself among them might unload some of the acid in my veins. The streets smelled of damp and smoke and the stubborn life of people who had no idea how easily the world could be stolen from them. I felt nauseous, retched into the gutter, and for a second, I wished I could tear myself away from being who I was.
That was when I saw him: a boy, maybe my age, sitting on a splintered bench. His hair was dark; his clothes were ragged. When he spoke his voice was quiet, not pleading, not coaxing.
"You're not from here."
I'd expected insolence or fear; instead his eyes — scarred and sightless — looked like two closed doors. There was a steadiness in them that made my armor scrape.
"Who are you?" I asked, the question sharp with command rather than curiosity. He smiled as if I'd asked the weather.
"Someone who could change your life," he said.
I laughed, a brittle sound that surprised me. "Are you dumb?"
He didn't answer in jest. He said, instead, my mother's name. He said she had been killed by the same blood that ran in my veins.
Something in me went thin and dangerous. I should have left. I didn't. I slapped him — then harder — until his face was wet with my fists. The world reduced to the rhythm of my anger. I beat until my knuckles stung and tears I hadn't expected to have began to fall, hot and stupid.
Between blows, he steadied himself and looked up at me, unafraid of the blood on his lips. "Will you hear me out?" he asked.
Don't you want to avenge Empress Athena?"
"You're a criminal's son," I spat, each word a stone. "Take her name out of your mouth."
He only let out a small, tired laugh. "It will be worth your time."
The words — the implication — were a match to the dry tinder in me. I struck again, until I couldn't breathe for the wrenching, until my hands trembled and my fists fell away. My rage, all the rehearsed fierceness, collapsed into something else: exhaustion, raw and heaving. I realized then with a sickness that I was crying, because I could not keep myself small enough even for the rage to live in.
He reached up, the movement gentle as if toward a wounded animal, and placed his hand at the back of my head. Not to mock, not to steady for a fight, but like someone trying to hold together something about to break. His touch was a paradox — foreign and oddly anchoring.
"I understand your pain," he said, voice low. "It must be so confusing for you."
He didn't know what my family meant. He did not owe me any consolation. Yet his presence, the bluntness of his claim, cut through my defenses like light through a cracked door. For the first time since the funeral, the dam under which I had sealed everything trembled. I let go: wrists slack, shoulders folding. I buried my face in his shoulder and wept, the sound small and ridiculous, the worst of my boyhood spilling out.
It was humiliating. It was necessary.
He held me while I crumpled — no promises, no sermons, only the steady weight of a shoulder beneath my face.
And in that strange, shameful moment, something quiet as a plan began to form at the edges of my grief: someone who knew how to hurt the world that had hurt us. Someone who did not flinch at naming the guilty.