Before Rodrik Vanhart cursed anyone, before he bent knee to shadows, before his name became something whispered with clenched teeth—
He was simply the first son.
The boy who stood beneath a banner that already frayed.
The old Vanhart estate had not yet fallen to the state Kel saw.
Its walls still held a muted dignity.
Not the splendor of central imperial houses, not the opulence of Rosenfeld's marble halls—
but a hard, northern grace.
Stone, blackened by generations of chimney smoke. Oak beams dark with age. Banners washed and repaired and hung again and again, the Vanhart sigil losing a little color each time but never removed.
The inland winds that swept the territory brought the smell of earth more than snow—soil that had once been praised for its yield. Harlroot fields that had fed frontiers. Villages that had stood through early frosts while other lands starved.
Rodrik grew up hearing those stories.
He did not live them.
He knew the Vanhart of echoes, not of height.
As a child, Rodrik was always dressed properly.
Even when the house could not afford truly fine garments, his clothes were worn to look like they belonged to a future lord.
Dark wool, well brushed.
Simple silver clasp at the collar.
Boots polished, though the sole leather had been replaced more than once.
He learned early that presentation was armor.
He bore it with rigid awareness—shoulders squared, chin lifted, hands folded behind his back when standing at his father's side.
At seven, he was already mimicking a man.
At ten, he had forgotten how to look like a boy.
His father, Count Vanhart of that time, was not a cruel man.
Cruelty requires passion.
Rodrik's father had something worse.
Resignation.
The old Count was a tall, faded figure with thinning hair and eyes that saw too much decline, too many compromises, too many years of "next season will be better."
He never struck Rodrik.
He never yelled.
He simply expected.
And when expectations weren't met, he did not rage.
He sighed.
Quietly.
Deeply.
That sound carved deeper than any slap.
"Vanhart stood taller once," he would say, staring not at Rodrik but past him, at the banner over the hall. "It is your task to raise it again."
Rodrik, as a child, would clench his small fists behind his back and say:
"Yes, Father. I will."
The Count never smiled.
He only nodded as if logging a debt.
Rodrik's earliest memories were filled with comparisons.
Not to other children.
To ghosts.
"At your age," an old steward once muttered, adjusting Rodrik's stance with a cane, "your grandfather could already ride for half a day without rest."
At ten, Rodrik's thighs burned after an hour in the saddle, but he said nothing.
"When the first Lord Vanhart claimed this ridge," an aging knight recounted during sword drills, "they said he could cleave a beast in two with one strike."
At twelve, Rodrik could barely stop his practice blade from shivering after repeated parries.
He heard it all. Carried it. Filed it.
Not as bitter seeds.
Not yet.
Just as… evidence.
Evidence that he was being weighed against the dead—and found lighter.
Then, when Rodrik was nine, his brother was born.
Elaine.
He remembered the day sharply.
The halls were usually quiet, the air heavy with dust and unspoken worry. But that day, before dawn, servants rushed like startled crows. The midwife's pacing echoed through stone. The old Count actually stood, not sat, in the corridor near the birthing room.
Rodrik, in his nightshirt, watched from down the hallway.
He did not understand yet how often the estate's healers had failed.
He only understood the sound when it came—
A thin, new cry.
The midwife's exhausted laugh.
The word: "Healthy."
His father's shoulders relaxed for the first time in years.
Rodrik remembered that detail.
Even as a boy, he noticed.
Later, when he was finally allowed to see, he approached the bed where his mother lay pale and exhausted, her hair damp at the temples. Something small slept beside her in a wooden cradle, wrapped tightly in cloth.
"Come, Rodrik," she whispered, voice hoarse but warm. "Meet your brother."
Rodrik had stepped closer.
He peered into the cradle.
Elaine's tiny fist flexed once, fingers curling around nothing. His eyes were closed, his face soft with that unmarked peace only newborns possess.
"Elaine," his mother said. "Elaine Vanhart."
Rodrik's father rested a hand on her shoulder.
"A second son," he said.
His gaze slid to Rodrik.
"Now you are not alone in your duty."
Rodrik's lips had parted.
He looked from his father—
—to his brother.
At nine, he didn't yet have the words for the strange mixture inside his chest.
Relief.
Fear.
And something other.
Something that would, over years, grow its own teeth.
Rodrik was still the heir.
That did not change.
Everything else did.
With Elaine's birth, the cold practicality of Vanhart blood surfaced. Tutors, once focused solely on Rodrik, now split their attention. Funds for instruction, already limited, had to stretch.
"Elaine will need education as well," the Count said, never in apology. In explanation. "A spare line. We cannot be blind to risk."
It was reasonable.
It was obvious.
It was a blade hidden beneath reason.
Because where Rodrik had once been the only stone on which the banner's survival rested—
He was now one of two.
Expectation did not lighten.
Fear did not soften.
They multiplied.
Rodrik's training only intensified.
Sword drills at dawn.
Estate management lessons in afternoon.
Political rhetoric and court manners by candlelight.
He bore it all, jaw set, refusing to show weakness.
And always, behind him, a faint echo would follow:
Elaine.
At five, Elaine sat still and listened to estate ledgers being read.
At seven, he corrected a miscalculation in grain storage projections with a quiet, embarrassed cough.
At nine, he asked questions.
Dangerous ones.
The sort that exposed rot no one wanted to name.
"Why," young Elaine had once asked their father, "do we keep repeating that the land is fine… if the numbers say otherwise?"
Rodrik had watched their father stiffen.
Silence.
No answer.
Elaine's eyes lowered, lips pressing together in apology.
Rodrik had wanted to shake him then.
Not out of anger.
Out of a desperate, irrational wish.
Don't see that.
Don't carry that.
It's mine to carry.
If Elaine did not notice the cracks, then maybe Rodrik could still be the one to mend them.
Alone.
The way a firstborn should.
But Elaine did see.
He always saw.
He just lacked the will to look away.
The years unfolded unevenly.
Rodrik grew into a man in the way northern heirs did—shoulders broadening, arms hardened by drills, the set of his jaw sharpening into something permanently tightened.
He wore dark coats, collars closed high.
He spoke with measured confidence before retainers.
He rode the estate perimeter with grim focus, memorizing paths, counting how many roofs now leaked, how many fences sagged from poor repair.
Elaine, in contrast, grew into a quieter shape.
He was broader than Rodrik expected. Not weak. Not soft. But his strength seemed to collect in stillness, not motion.
Books piled in his study.
Land charts.
Trade manifests.
He spent more time with scribes than with knights.
Yet when he did walk the fields, the farmers seemed oddly comforted by his presence.
He asked about their families.
He remembered their names.
Rodrik noticed.
He noticed how people's faces relaxed around Elaine in a way they didn't around him.
Around Rodrik, they straightened.
Around Elaine, they breathed.
He told himself it didn't matter.
Respect was more critical than ease.
But the thought lodged, a splinter under the nail.
The first real fracture came the year of the late frost.
It killed half the budding harlroot.
The very crop on which Vanhart had built its old pride.
They lost money.
Again.
Debts swelled.
Again.
Rodrik threw himself into negotiations, rode to minor houses, argued with merchants until his throat burned. He secured short extensions. Temporary reprieves. Slimmer margins.
He returned exhausted.
Fingers raw from holding reins too long.
Jaw locked from swallowing his frustration.
Elaine, then sixteen, had remained.
Studying.
Calculating.
Rodrik found him in the estate's small office room, hunched over spread sheets and ink-stained maps. Papers scattered around him like fallen leaves.
"What are you doing?" Rodrik asked, shrugging off his cloak.
Elaine looked up, surprised.
His eyes had shadows under them.
"Trying to find out," he said softly, "how far we can fall before we break."
Rodrik's temper flared.
"Useless," he snapped. "We don't have the luxury to sit and draw circles while fields fail."
Elaine flinched, but did not deny.
He only gestured quietly to one of the sheets.
Rodrik grabbed it.
He stared.
On the parchment, in neat but hurried script, Elaine had sketched projections—
lines representing yield decline, population strain, debt escalation, neighboring territories' potential moves.
At the very edge, in smaller writing, one phrase stood:
"If no external aid arrives, Vanhart will not withstand two more failed seasons."
Rodrik's throat tightened.
"Why would you write this?" he demanded, voice low.
Elaine's hands curled slightly in his lap.
"Because Father won't," he said quietly. "Because someone must see the numbers plainly."
Rodrik crumpled the parchment.
"Then keep them in your head," he hissed. "Don't put our humiliation into ink."
Elaine didn't answer.
He watched the paper ball in his brother's fist.
He watched the way Rodrik's hand shook.
Not from weakness.
From rage.
From fear.
He said nothing.
And in saying nothing, he made the space between them wider.
Their father aged quickly after that frost.
His shoulders slumped.
His hair thinned further.
He spoke less of raising the banner, and more of "holding until the next generation."
Rodrik was that next generation.
Elaine, the spare.
That was the script.
Then—
Illness took the Count down faster than anyone expected.
A winter fever, compounded by years of strain.
He did not leave a clear succession letter.
He had always assumed there would be more time.
The retainers gathered.
The advisors murmured.
Rodrik stood in the hall, hair tied back, coat pressed, jaw firm, prepared to claim what had been shaped around him since birth.
Then, from the side, the old steward spoke.
"Given the Count's… instability in later years," the man said carefully, "we should consider the one most suited to stabilize Vanhart's ledgers."
His gaze slid.
To Elaine.
The room shifted.
Whispers.
He was more popular with the people.
He was more level-headed.
He understood the numbers.
He had quietly soothed disputes that might have grown into conflicts—far more often than anyone had realized.
Rodrik's fingers dug into his own palms.
He said nothing.
He waited for someone to defend what was his.
No one did.
In the end, compromise came:
Elaine would take the title.
Rodrik would maintain military oversight, external negotiations.
A divide of realms.
Shared power.
It sounded, on the surface, reasonable.
Balanced.
Modern.
To Rodrik, in that moment, it sounded like theft dipped in diplomacy.
He bowed.
He accepted.
He did not forget.
So when Elira Malloren later refused him—
It did not strike a man secure in his place.
It struck a man who had been replaced in his own home.
When he looked at Malloren, he did not see just another house.
He saw a neighbor that had watched Vanhart fall and politely, carefully, not reached out.
"We must attend to our own sustainability, Lord Vanhart."
"Our sympathies, but your debt restructuring is not something we can endanger ourselves over."
Polite refusals.
Nicely worded self-preservation.
No one had quite dared say it aloud.
But Rodrik had heard the unspoken thought beneath it, in countless subtle negotiations:
"Vanhart is no longer an asset. It is a risk."
So when Malloren's elder daughter refused his hand…
She was not just refusing Rodrik.
She was refusing the future of Vanhart.
Dismissing his efforts to claw the house back uphill.
Dismissing all the nights he'd spent riding through snow to secure small contracts.
He had bled for this land.
She had not seen it.
Or worse—
She had seen.
And not cared.
Rodrik, the first son beneath a fading banner, stood on the ruin of old expectations and realized something simple:
The world did not owe him respect for surviving.
He would have to carve it out.
Even if it meant carving through others.
He did not become a monster in a single step.
He took a thousand smaller ones.
Averted his eyes one day.
Compromised on a principle another.
Ignored discomfort.
Silenced pity.
Each decision tightening something in him.
Each concession to practicality trimming away another piece of restraint.
By the time he stood in the market, staring at that pulsing vial in the cloaked man's hand, his path was already narrowing.
He chose the curse.
But the boy who made that choice—
had been shaped by a house that asked him to carry its weight, and then shifted the ground beneath his feet when it seemed more convenient.
The first son.
The overshadowed heir.
The man who learned, too late, that when banners fade, they do not fall alone.
They pull down those who cling too tightly.
Rodrik refused to fall.
So he grabbed for anything.
Even poison.
Even darkness.
So long as it promised, for a moment—
that he would be the one doing the dragging.