Zejidiah's POV
After I calmed down, the man led me to his home.
"My name is Hans." he said, offering me a cup of water.
I only nodded and stared at it for a moment before drinking. Surprisingly, it wasn't poisoned.
Hans settled into a chair across from me. "So? What was all that blather earlier?" I asked, guilt curling at the edge of my voice.
He cracked a herb between his palms and crushed it carefully. Even blind, his hands moved with the ease of someone who knew the shape of the room. I watched him, a little startled at how steady he was.
"Do you think the Empress—your mother—died because of Aena?" he asked quietly.
"I never saw it in person, but that's what everyone said. Even Aquila—my little sister—witnessed it." I answered, leaning back.
Hans pressed the crushed herb to the bruise where I'd punched him earlier. "She wasn't," he said.
I frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Your mother…was killed by Prince Althurd." He said it so calmly that for a moment I wanted to laugh at the absurdity.
"You're funny. Very funny," I snapped, sarcasm masking the first prickle of unease.
Silence stretched between us after that. I slammed my fist on the wooden table in anger.
"There's no way Brother Althurd could've done it. Mother was stabbed—stabbed by that commoner."
Hans sat back. "Have you ever heard of the Tartagalia Empire?"
I clicked my tongue, annoyed by the change of subject. "I have. What about them?"
"They use dark magic." He paused, then sat forward again, facing me.
I waited for him to finish.
"That magic—once someone makes a deal with them through chants and ritual—they can control another person's mind and body. They call them Mage Dwellers." He spoke slowly, letting the weight of the words sink in.
I stared at him, confused. "And? What does that have to do with my mother's death?"
His tone sharpened; the calm in his voice carried a hard edge now. "A week before your mother visited us, my mother Aena encountered Prince Althurd," he said.
"She knew Prince Althurd was the son of her friend, so she let him into our home. But my mother—she wasn't a typical commoner. She had a strange power; when she touched someone she could see into that person's soul."
"When Prince Althurd accidentally touched her," Hans continued, "my mother saw that his heart was clouded—smoked—by dark magic."
I stared at him, baffled. My mouth opened to argue, but he cut me off.
"After that day, my mother didn't know how to tell the Empress. She stayed quiet—her biggest mistake. When Prince Althurd touched her, the dark magic had already been triggered."
"I don't understand," I said, panic starting to edge my voice.
Hans sighed. "I'm saying Prince Althurd already inserted the dark magic into my mother. It took control. It wasn't her acting of her own volition."
For a long moment I couldn't form an answer. Tartagalia—across the sea—dark magic? How could my brother, Althurd, have anything to do with that?
"H—how do you know this?" I asked, my voice shaking.
"I cannot see," Hans said, tapping his ear, "but I have a sensitive hearing. I can tell the heartbeat of someone near me. When the Mage Dweller entered my mother…" He stopped; his hand trembled at his side. "I heard her heart stop."
Tears welled in his closed eyes. "Do you know how terrifying that was?"
He looked at me with a rawness I hadn't expected. "Prince Zejidiah—tell me—have you ever lived with someone whose heart wasn't beating, but still moved as if they were alive?"
His face twisted with something like disgust and grief—the look of a man who'd been swallowing his pain for months and had finally let it out. He shuddered and took a ragged breath; the room seemed to tilt.
I realized I couldn't breathe properly for a moment.
"Your brother killed my mother," Hans said again, quiet and relentless. "And he also killed your mother."
My stomach lurching, I stumbled away and vomited violently against the floorboards. The world tunneled narrow and hot; bile and salt burned at my throat. When it was over, tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.
Althurd…how could you?
I held the back of my knees and breathed shallow, angry breaths. Nausea still clung to me, but beneath it a raw, white-hot fury surged up—so bright and alive I was afraid that if I saw my brother, I would lash out and kill him then and there.
Hans broke the silence again, producing a small velvet pouch from beneath his cloak. He set it in my palm as if placing a verdict there.
"If you don't believe me, wear this when you approach Althurd," he said.
I blinked open the pouch. Inside lay a bracelet—simple, threads braided with tiny carved beads, each one stamped with a crude sigil I didn't recognize. It smelled faintly of herbs and smoke.
"What is this?" I asked.
Hans's blind face turned toward me. "My mother made it. It won't let you read him, not exactly — but if it breaks the moment you touch him, then he's been touched by dark things. That kind of corruption snaps things made of honest hands."
I slipped it on my wrist. The beads rubbed warm against my skin.
"What do you plan to do?" I asked quietly.
He smiled, and it was almost a boyish thing. "I plan to take down this empire."
Absurd. Monumental. I wanted to tell him it would get every one of us killed, but the rawness in his voice—his quiet, unshriven grief—stayed my words. I understood why he wanted it. I could not blame him.
That night I went home. Sleep did not come. Morning came like a verdict.
I found Althurd in the library as I had expected: reclined in that ridiculous leather chair, a book open on his knee. He always read like someone composing the world to his own advantage.
"What?" he said with that lazy irritation.
I paused behind a shelf and watched, the bracelet heavy and improbable against my wrist. From here I could hear him muttering to himself, a curl of voice that tightened my gut.
"It all worked out, didn't it?" he said aloud, low and conversational. "I had no choice but to kill your mother because she was in the way."
The words fell like a stone. I swallowed. My heart slammed so loud it drowned other sound.
"Don't back out now," he went on. "Once it is all over, you can take the throne and lead Feltogora — and by then, I hope you'll hand your little sister Aquila to me."
Everything narrowed to a cold point. The blood in my ears roared.
I stepped out from the shadow. "Brother." My voice was flat. I could feel the braid of the beads against my skin, the tiny sigils as though they were little anchors between truth and lie.
Althurd's smile slid, then reassembled into that practiced, oily charm. "Yes? What is it?" he said, as if I were nothing more than a household bother.
"I've been trying to find 'The Prince.' Do you have it?" I said, my expression neutral, the world going soft at the edges.
He reached without looking. "Oh, here it is." He handed the book across the table, and my hand moved to take it.
When my fingertips brushed his, the bracelet snapped.
A line of beads fractured in a soft, wooden clatter; the carved pieces scattered across the floor between us like tiny, betrayed teeth. My throat closed. Time lurching — a slow, terrible clarity folding into place.
Althurd glanced at the broken bracelet, then at me. "It broke," I whispered, incredulity and a rising, volcanic nausea in my gut.
Althurd laughed — a light, casual sound that made something inside me crack. "It's probably cheap," he said, genuinely amused. "That's all. Fragile things."
"Thank you, brother," I managed. My voice was small. I took the book from him and turned away. The library spun.
Horror, disgust, terror, betrayal—each emotion struck like a blow. I wanted to retch. I wanted to burn the room down and tear him from the world with my hands. Instead I walked out, the broken beads a cold rattle in my memory, and felt my insides twist into knots that would not ease.
And from that shattering, a long, slow thing inside me edged into motion — a terrible, patient hunger that tasted of iron and winter.
I agreed to Hans's plan not because I was swept away by rhetoric, but because the world had carved a hollow in me and there was only one shape that fit: retribution. It was not sudden; it was an accumulation, a sediment of grief and accusation and all the small humiliations of living beneath a crown that smelled of the blood of the woman you loved. Each memory became tinder — the small silences in the garden, the hollowing of Aquila's eyes, the way my father's voice tightened around blame — and Hans handed me the match.
So we moved, quietly at first. Meetings in cellar-rooms, letters whispered through trusted hands, the soft exchange of names and faces that would become instruments. I learned how to cloak old loyalties in newer purposes; how to bury a son's face beneath the weight of a mask. Hans taught me to listen differently — not only to the beating of hearts but to the undertones of power, the small cracks where a man who thinks himself sovereign keeps his vices. I learned the names of merchants who would smuggle a blade, of governors who could be persuaded with the right ledger, of soldiers whose loyalty was currency.
Anger sharpened into strategy. It stopped being a private, hot thing and settled into steel: plans, contingencies, the slow assembling of forces that would take down what had taken my mother. I trained in ways I had not as a prince — not for pageants or etiquette, but for late-night raids and signaling under moonlight. I read treaties and scavenged secrets from the margins of court life. I watched Althurd the way a hunter watches a boar — not in the romantic thrill of battle, but with cool appraisal: where he would step, what privilege would blind him, how arrogance would make him predictable.
Revenge taught me its own grammar. It demanded patience. It required that I bury temper beneath calculation, that I hold my breath while the world spun on its ridiculous, dangerous axis. When I smiled at family gatherings, it was practiced; when I leaned over maps with Hans, my silence was a vow. Each piece of the empire we dismantled was not merely a wound to power but a reclamation — a return of agency to the powerless, a ledger balanced for a mother who could not speak again.
There were nights when the rage threatened to undo me: when I imagined the feel of Althurd's throat beneath my hand; when I dreamed of my Mother's face, and agony and hatred braided into something cruel. But most days the feeling that sustained me was simpler and colder than hatred. It was an insistence: that the truth should not be allowed to hide behind palace curtains; that the people my mother had loved would not be ground beneath imperial boots; that those who had killed in velvet and called it governance would be made to answer.
By degrees the network swelled. Commoners who had watched their sons vanish into conscription found voices. Knights disillusioned with the Emperor's cruelty traded horses for banners with our sigils. Each small victory — a convoy intercepted, a document leaked, a commander swayed — fed the resolve in my ribs. The plan became a thing of geometry and weight, not of melodrama. It would be surgical, then inevitable.
And beneath the plotting, beneath the maps and the whispered oaths, a darker, purer flame kept me moving: the image of my mother, upright and laughing once, and the jagged hole where she had been. Revenge was not a comfortable thing. It bleached tenderness; it made companions of men who would do anything. But I told myself — as I tightened my fist around each new choice — that some debts, once written in blood, demanded to be paid in full.