POV – Arcturus von Rosenfeld
The door closed with a slow, final weight.
Its echo rolled through the study like a muted bell.
Then… silence.
Duke Arcturus von Rosenfeld remained seated behind his desk, hands folded loosely before him, gaze fixed on the dark wood where Kel had stood mere moments ago.
The room did not change.
The walls were still lined with high shelves of blackwood, filled with leather-bound tomes and scrolls sealed with wax so old the sigils had half-faded. The tall obsidian-glass window still watched the gray winter sky outside, moonlight staining the stone floor in muted silver. The air still carried the same scents: dust, parchment, ink, iron.
But something subtle had shifted.
Not in the room.
In him.
Arcturus lifted one hand, fingers pressing against his brow for a fleeting moment—not from fatigue, but to smooth away a line that hadn't been there before.
He let the hand fall again.
His eyes drifted to the door.
He has changed.
Not in the usual way nobles said it at social gatherings—empty, indulgent pride in a child learning to sit straighter, smile more convincingly, wield etiquette as a weapon.
No.
Kel had changed like metal under a forge.
Quietly, under pressure, in places no one had cared to look at until it rang differently when struck.
Arcturus leaned back in his chair, the leather giving the faintest sigh beneath his weight. He tilted his head, gaze shifting to the faint reflection of himself in the obsidian window.
A tall man stared back—broad-shouldered, draped in a coat the color of night, fastened at the high collar with a single silver clasp. The Rosenfeld crest embroidered over his heart was almost invisible, dark thread on darker fabric.
His face bore the marks of battles fought without ever drawing a sword indoors—sharp lines at the corners of his mouth, a permanent weight behind his eyes. His hair, once raven-black, had begun to gather threads of winter along the temples, like frost creeping over a blade left outside too long.
He watched his reflection for a heartbeat.
Then he looked away.
His gaze found the map hanging on the wall opposite him—drawn on monster-hide, stretched and pinned by dark iron studs. The Aurelia Empire sprawled across its surface in ink and pressure lines—mountain ranges like old scars, rivers like veins, cities like clustered marks of old decisions.
His eyes drifted to a point near the center.
Rosenfeld territory.
A name etched in tiny letters, surrounded by ink-lines marking borders that men bled to maintain.
You wish to leave this, he thought, eyes half-lidded, and walk into the cracks.
His fingers tapped once on the desk.
He remembered Kel's face as the boy had refused his conditions—calm, unflinching, voice steady. No trembling, no nervous shifting of weight, no careful glance toward the door searching for escape.
Just resolve.
Thin, steady.
Like a blade that had not yet seen battle but had already decided what it wished to cut.
"When," Arcturus murmured, voice barely audible in the empty study, "did you become capable of looking me in the eye like that?"
There was no anger in the question.
Only a quiet, reluctant fascination.
The boy had always been… quiet. Too perceptive for his years, too still for a child, his eyes always watching something others could not see. But for so long, he had been wrapped in a curse and the pity and contempt that followed it.
A fragile heir.
An inevitable tragedy.
A convenient shield for the whispers of lesser nobles.
Arcturus's hand curled slowly into a fist atop the desk.
He still remembered the first time he had heard them laughing.
In a distant hall, during a winter meeting of high nobles. Voices behind pillars, behind tapestries. Jokes about the Rosenfeld line. About a cursed child who would never stand, never bear a sword, never awaken.
About a Duke whose bloodline was "thinning at last."
He had not killed them.
Not all of them.
Imperial politics had demanded he bleed his fury into other veins—warfronts, campaigns, ruthless efficiency on battlefields instead of in banquet halls.
But he had remembered.
Every name.
Every crest.
Every smile that had lingered a second too long when someone mentioned his eldest son.
His knuckles whitened where they pressed against the dark wood.
"At least," he murmured, recalling his own recent words, "you shut their mouths tonight."
Kel had moved like someone not merely rehearsing sword forms, but like a person who had imagined defeat too many times to allow it easily.
Not graceful in the polished, theatrical way of court-trained heirs.
His movements had been precise, almost economical.
Every step as if he were counting how much strength he could afford to spend.
His eyes had not once looked toward Arcturus during the duel.
Not for approval.
Not for validation.
He fought for something else.
Himself.
And yet, ironically, he had done more for the Rosenfeld name in one night of calculated recklessness than some vassals had managed in years of obedient service.
Arcturus leaned forward, resting his forearms upon the desk. His fingers loosened, spreading slightly across the polished surface.
Two years, he thought. You ask for two years of freedom, with death at your shoulder and the curse gnawing at your bones.
If any other son in the Empire had made such a request, their father would have laughed, or shouted, or put them under stricter watch.
But Kel… had not asked to travel to the Imperial capital, to bask in its splendor or seek favor from princes and academies.
He wanted to walk the underside of the Empire. Roads where banners did not reach. Towns where law bent under hunger.
He did not ask for an escort of knights bearing his crest.
He wanted to disappear.
Arcturus's eyes grew distant.
Leave like a ghost that never existed… for everyone but me.
The Duke's hands stilled.
He let his thoughts drift—backward, to a time when these walls had seemed larger, darker, when he himself had stood where Kel did now… but on the other side of the desk.
A younger man had sat where Arcturus now sat. His father. Stern. Silent.
Arcturus had once wanted to leave these lands too.
Not from frailty.
From fury.
From restlessness.
From the choking sensation of duty binding skin and bone like tight bandages.
He had left for campaigns instead—wars that the Empire had needed. His road had been carved by orders, not by choice.
He had never had the luxury of disappearing.
Perhaps that is why I let you go, he thought. Not as indulgence. As correction.
He shifted his gaze to the side of the desk.
There, laid in a neat stack, were reports from various fronts—movements of minor houses, murmurs of cult activity near border regions, whispers of instability among distant noble factions.
He reached for one at random.
Unfolded it.
Did not read it.
His eyes remained unfocused, his fingers simply holding the parchment as if by habit.
"You are walking into this."
He knew better than anyone that the world did not limit its cruelty to courts and formal duels.
There were villages in the Empire that offered prayers to constellations older than Imperial law. There were forests where the killed did not stay buried. Towns where bribed officials turned justice into a game of numbers instead of truth.
Kel wanted to experience this.
To see.
To understand.
Arcturus's lips pressed into a thin line.
You will understand, all right, he thought dryly. Whether you still have any innocence left when you return… that is another question.
If he returns.
The thought came like an uninvited guest.
He did not push it away.
He had made peace long ago with the idea that no one in his bloodline was guaranteed safety. Not on battlefields. Not in bedchambers. Not anywhere.
Still.
He had not expected his eldest son—the cursed weakling everyone pitied or derided—to be the one who looked him in the eye and calmly suggested that if he died, he wanted it to at least be on a road he chose himself.
His throat moved with a slow, controlled swallow.
"Two knights…" he repeated under his breath.
The request had not been strategic.
It had been… personal.
The only concession he had asked.
My one request.
Kel had almost refused even that.
Arcturus allowed himself a faint exhale that might have been close to laughter.
Your spine surpasses your muscle, he thought. Reckless boy.
Not reckless, exactly.
Deliberate.
Just willing to bear increasing weight on that spine even as it cracked.
He turned his head, gaze drifting to a corner of the room where an old sword rested on a stand—a relic of an earlier campaign. The hilt was wrapped in dark leather, the metal aged but maintained, polished enough to catch the faint shimmer of lamplight.
An old companion.
Blade of his youth.
He remembered what it felt like to ride out with no certainty of survival beyond his own skill and the men he trusted at his back.
Those memories were colder than the stone beneath his boots.
He looked away from the sword.
"Companions…" he repeated quietly.
Kel would have to choose.
Arcturus had promised not to assign knights under his own command.
Not as Rosenfeld's eyes.
As Kel's.
Even so, there were… arrangements he could make that would not break his word.
He could ensure that certain individuals were made… available.
People suited for the kind of road Kel wanted to walk.
Men who understood how to vanish without leaving a trail, how to speak softly among strangers, how to break bones without making noise.
Not loyal to the crest alone…
But not disloyal to it either.
He reached for a blank sheet of parchment, the movement smooth, unhurried. The quill in the inkstand waited, its point black and gleaming.
He did not write.
Not yet.
His hand hovered.
If I interfere too much, he will feel the strings, he thought. If I do nothing, he may end up standing alone when his body fails him.
He had raised soldiers, commanded battalions, selected captains who lived or died on the sharpness of his judgment.
But this… felt different.
He was not appointing a commander.
He was deciding whether his son would walk into the jaws of the Empire with at least two blades held by hands other than his own.
He lowered his hand without writing.
Not now.
Not yet.
Instead, he leaned back again, letting the quill rest untouched.
"Choose well, Kel," he said softly, to a room that had already digested silence as its oldest resident. "If you choose fools, I will outlive you. I am tired of burying those who carry my blood."
His gaze drifted once more toward the door through which Kel had left, and beyond it—down corridors, through stairwells, across the estate.
He could almost see the boy walking now, steps measured, mind already turning over names, faces, categories.
Who was fit to follow a cursed heir into uncertainty?
Who was foolish enough?
Who was loyal enough?
Who was broken enough to understand him?
He turned back to the window.
Outside, snow had begun to fall.
Not heavily—just soft, scattered flakes, drifting past the obsidian glass like ghosts without voices. The sky above the manor was a muted, starless gray, the constellations hidden behind the weight of winter clouds.
The world was quiet.
Too quiet, perhaps.
He had long known the Empire's peace was a layered thing. To most, it seemed stable. To him, studying reports and listening to shifting rumors, it looked like a table of stone balanced on roots of dried wood.
Old cults moved.
Ambitious nobles plotted.
Princes shifted their factions like pieces on a game board.
And now, somewhere hidden in that vast field, a cursed heir had decided to walk.
"The world does not know it yet," Arcturus murmured, "but it just gained another variable."
The Emperor would not care—for now.
The princes would not notice—for now.
But the world was a strange creature.
It had a way of twisting paths so that the smallest, most overlooked pieces slid into dangerous places.
His fingers drummed once more on the desk.
"You truly wish to remain a ghost," he said. "Even to me."
He had agreed.
No alias.
No reports.
Only the knowledge that Kel had stepped beyond these walls, carrying his own death and life like equal weights in his hands.
Arcturus closed his eyes for a moment.
In the darkness behind his lids, he saw a younger version of himself—standing at the edge of a battlefield, sword dripping under a sky burning with constellations that watched like indifferent gods.
He saw himself kneeling beside comrades who would never stand again.
He saw his own father's face, distant and unreadable.
He opened his eyes.
The study remained the same.
Only the snow outside had grown thicker.
He sat in the silence for another long while.
Then, finally, he moved.
His hand reached for the quill again. This time, he did not hover.
He dipped it in ink.
Brought it to parchment.
The first line he wrote was not an order.
It was a single name.
Not Kel's.
Someone else's.
Someone who knew how to disappear.
Someone whose path Kel might cross… if the boy's instincts took him in a certain direction.
Arcturus knew this was as far as he could go without breaking his word.
He would not send anyone directly.
He would not arrange a leash.
He would simply loosen a few threads in the tapestry and see whether fate decided to knot them together.
If the world is going to test you, he thought, writing in neat, efficient strokes, I will at least make sure the arena is one in which you can move.
When he was finished, he let the ink dry, then folded the parchment precisely, sealing it with wax bearing not his ducal crest, but a minor sigil—a mark few outside his closest network recognized.
He placed it aside.
Someone would come to collect it later.
He would not say who.
He would not ask where they carried it.
He did not need to.
He sat back once more, exhaling faintly.
Kel's words echoed in his thoughts.
"For once in my life… I want the consequences to belong only to me."
The Duke's lips flattened, then eased.
"We shall see," he murmured.
Whether the consequences would belong to Kel alone…
Or whether, as always, the ripples of his son's choices would eventually wash back against the foundations of Rosenfeld.
Outside, the snow kept falling—soft, voiceless, covering the world in a thin, deceptive purity that hid the soil beneath.
Inside the study, beneath the quiet and the lamplight, a father watched the empty space where his eldest son had stood…
…and waited, in his own way, for the ghost he had just unleashed upon the world.