The market reeked of smoke, sweat, and rotting fruit. Aiden slipped through the press of bodies, ribs gnawing at themselves. His shirt, thin and ragged, clung to his narrow frame. Each day blurred into the same pattern: avoid guards, steal what he could, and pray he survived the attempt.
"Out of the way, ghost," a fishmonger snarled, shoving him aside.
The name clung to him like mold—ghost—mocking how pale and frail he appeared, as if he were something less than alive. Aiden said nothing. Words wasted energy. He drifted instead toward the ruins at the city's edge, where silence buried cruelty. Broken stone and skeletal walls were his only companions, and he preferred them to jeers.
But that day, the ruins offered more.
Climbing through the husk of an old merchant's house, his boot struck something hard beneath the dust. He crouched, brushed away grime, and uncovered a small wooden chest with rust-stained hinges.
Treasure? Food? Anything at all?
He pried it open with a sharp rock. Inside lay a pendant.
Simple at first glance, it shimmered faintly in the gloom. A silver chain cradled a teardrop gem, dark as ink yet alive with inner light. The moment Aiden touched it, heat surged through his skin. He staggered back, gasping, but the chain coiled around his throat on its own—like it had been waiting.
Visions followed.
A tall man in black and gold armor loomed in Aiden's mind, his eyes burning with iron will. Then came books, maps, ledgers, walls of numbers and symbols. The torrent should have split Aiden's skull, but instead it sharpened him. He understood: the ledgers of merchants, the trade of grain for iron, the mathematics of fortifications.
"Father?" The word slipped out unbidden.
He had no memory of his parents. Yet deep inside, he knew the man was blood. The pendant pulsed once against his chest, as if in answer.
For the first time, Aiden felt alive.
That night, while Drosmere slept, he crouched beneath a ruined arch and scrawled figures in the dirt. Trade routes. Coin exchange. The rise and fall of grain prices. Concepts no urchin should know poured from his mind in ordered clarity.
Days slid into weeks. Aiden no longer scavenged—he bargained. With a single copper, he bought a baker's stale bread and resold it piece by piece to hungry dockhands, doubling his coin. He gambled on undervalued spices, hoarding them until caravans ran dry, then sold them back at fivefold profit. The ghost was becoming something sharper.
The pendant whispered of more—of a name once revered, of power that bent cities.
And Aiden's eyes turned uphill, toward the banners of House Veyra.
Their estate loomed over Drosmere, silk banners snapping high above clean streets. The Veyras embodied power: coin, soldiers, influence. At their center stood Lady Selene, the heiress, courted by dukes and princes alike. To win her hand was to seize an empire.
Aiden pressed the pendant against his chest, feeling its steady pulse. He whispered into the ruins, voice raw with hunger:
"One day, she will look at me and not see a ghost."
In the dark, the pendant gleamed—silent, approving.