Antonius woke to drowning.
Air tore into his lungs like knives. He jerked on instinct, hands clawing at his chest, but something heavy pinned him—his own body, leaden and wrong. The breath he'd begged for rattled out in a wet wheeze.
He wasn't in water.
Stone pressed against his back. Rough linens scratched his skin. The room around him was dark except for a strip of red light cutting across the ceiling, like a wound.
He tried to turn his head. Muscles spasmed, answering late, as if they'd forgotten how to belong to him.
Where—?
Memory hit in splinters.
A courtyard drowning in roses, petals like spilled wine.
The roar of a crowd.
A man he'd once called uncle, sword bared in the Emperor's blood.
Hands on his arms. Chains at his wrists.
The drop.
Antonius gasped again, the phantom rush of air past his ears, the sick lurch in his stomach as he fell from the battlements. Stone rising to meet him. The world tilting.
He should be dead.
He felt his heart hammer against his ribs, a wild bird caged. Pain flared in his shoulders and spine when he tried to sit up. His vision blurred, black creeping in at the edges.
"Easy."
A hand pressed gently against his temple.
Antonius reacted before he thought. Training burned deeper than exhaustion. He snarled, teeth grinding, and grabbed the wrist at his head, twisting, dragging the owner of the hand toward him with what little strength he could find.
The world spun. He nearly tore the bed from its frame.
The person he'd seized stumbled but didn't cry out. Long fingers braced against his shoulder—not striking, only holding, steady and unyielding.
"Stop," a voice said, low and calm. "You'll tear your spirit loose again. Breathe, human."
Human?
His vision finally snapped into focus.
A young woman leaned over him, caught half off-balance where he'd dragged her. Her ears were the first thing he saw—long and tapering, pushed back through a fall of dark copper hair braided with slivers of silver thread. Her eyes were the color of old amber, ringed by faint, luminous sigils that pulsed when she exhaled.
She was, he realized distantly, beautiful. Not in the fragile way of court ladies painted in rose and gold, but like a blade honed to a fine edge.
Her wrist lay in his grip. He could feel her pulse against his fingers, steady where his own raced.
Antonius tried to speak. The sound that came out was a croak.
"Wh—"
"Later," she said, cutting him off with a slight shake of her head. Her free hand settled more firmly against his temple, thumb brushing his hairline. Cool, tingling warmth spread out from her touch, chasing back the ice that had lodged in his skull. "You are safe. Breathe in. Now out. Again."
He didn't trust her. He did it anyway. His lungs didn't seem to remember how; the first breath hitched halfway, but the second made it farther, and the third stopped scraping so sharply in his chest.
With each breath the room came into sharper shape.
He lay on a narrow stone bed, carved directly into the wall, cushioned only by a thin pallet and rough-woven blankets. The walls around him were scribed with lines of script and circles of inlaid metal, dimly glowing like embers. Herbs hung drying from a beam overhead. Somewhere nearby, water dripped in a patient rhythm.
That red light on the ceiling came from a high, arrow-slit window. The sky beyond was the color of fresh-spilled blood.
Fall, he thought wildy. Harvest sky.
His last season.
He tightened his grip on the woman's wrist. "Who—"
"Gently," she murmured. She didn't try to pull away. "You're back in your flesh for the span of a few heartbeats, Prince. Don't spend them choking on questions."
Prince.
The title hit him harder than the stone had.
Antonius blinked up at her. "How do you—"
She smiled, quick and crooked, not quite kind and not unkind either. "Because you talked in your sleep. Loudly. And often. Now lie still."
He tried to push himself upright anyway. The world tilted; his stomach lurched. A line of lightning ran down his spine. He bit back a groan and failed.
The woman—Ghislaene, though he didn't know that yet—shifted, placing her shoulder against his. She was smaller than him, but the strength in her frame was unmistakable. Together they eased him back onto the bed.
"Better." The sigils at her eyes flared once, then settled. "Stay. I'm calling Father."
She raised her head and spoke in a language he didn't know, quick syllables running together like the murmur of a stream. The air in the room seemed to listen.
Footsteps answered.
A second figure entered from beyond the archway at the end of the room, ducking under a low lintel. He, too, had long ears, though his were edged with grey hair pulled back into a loose knot. His face was a map of fine lines, the sort made by worry more than age, and his eyes had the pale, sharp look of someone used to seeing things others missed.
He wore plain healer's robes, sleeves rolled to the elbow, exposing forearms inked with the same sigil-work that glowed on the walls.
The scent of fresh-cut herbs and bitter smoke swelled as he stepped close.
"Well." The man let out a slow breath, studying Antonius. "So the river runs back into its banks at last."
The young woman—his daughter, Antonius assumed—moved aside but stayed close, her wrist still resting within Antonius' loose grasp as if she'd chosen not to reclaim it.
"Father," she said. "His mind is clear enough to fight. That seems promising."
"It does," the older man agreed. He set a hand against Antonius' sternum, fingers splayed. A faint ring of light budded under his palm. "Don't try to throw me, boy. I am less gentle than my daughter."
Antonius's throat burned. "I have… no strength left to throw anyone."
"That will change, assuming you listen." The man's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Your heart runs fast but not wild. Good. The tether held."
"Tether?" Antonius rasped.
"You've been elsewhere," the man said. "Between. It's no easy trick to convince a soul to take up its broken shell again." He pressed slightly more firmly. The light beneath his hand seeped through Antonius' ribs, tracing old fractures, scars, and something else—cold knots he hadn't known were there. "You have done well, Prince of the Imperium. You found your way back to your body."
Prince of the Imperium.
The words rang in his skull like a struck bell. For a heartbeat he saw the throne hall again, blazing with banners and polished steel. His father on the high seat. The man at his right hand. The betrayal.
"You still haven't died," the usurper whispered in memory, breath hot against his ear as hands dragged him through the streets. "Stubborn to the last, Antonius."
Then the battlements. The crowd. The red sky.
The fall.
Antonius's fingers spasmed around the girl's wrist. Her other hand tightened at his temple, grounding him.
"Breathe," she reminded him quietly. "Stay here."
The older man watched them both, eyes narrowing slightly, then nodded once.
"He will want answers," the girl said.
"And he will have them." The man looked back to Antonius. "But not all at once. Minds crack under the weight of too much truth. Bodies follow."
Antonius swallowed against the dryness in his mouth. "At least… tell me your names." His voice sounded thin, distant to his own ears. "And where I am."
"Of course." The man removed his hand from Antonius' chest and wiped it absently on his robe, though there was no visible residue. When he spoke again, his tone carried the precise cadence of a formal introduction. "I am Elionnor of the Third Circle, once of the Court of Branches. This is my daughter, Ghislaene."
Ghislaene. The name fit her—sharp consonants, soft center.
She inclined her head in a small bow. "You were not easy to keep alive, Prince. Try not to undo five years of work in five breaths."
Five.
The number snagged in his mind like a hook.
Antonius frowned, every wrinkle of his brow feeling like it might split his skin. "Five… what?"
Father and daughter shared a look across him. A conversation passed in that glance, quick and wordless.
Ghislaene's jaw tightened. Elionnor sighed.
"Years," he said. "Five autumns since you fell from your emperor's walls."
The room went very still.
Sound dulled, as if he were sinking underwater again. Five years. The words had no meaning at first; they were simply noise. Then they unfolded, layer by layer, into everything they implied.
His father, dead and gone for half a decade.
His sister. Gods, Enora. A child when he last saw her—what was she now?
The Imperium. His Imperium. In another man's hands for five whole turns of the seasons.
Antonius' heart lurched. He tried to sit up again, panic surging, but his body rebelled. Pain roared through his ribs and spine. The world swam.
"Stay," Elionnor said, voice suddenly iron. His hand descended like a weight on Antonius' shoulder, pressing him back against the stone. "You cannot help anyone from the grave, Prince. You have already learned that lesson once."
"I have to—" The words shredded in his throat. "My sister. The throne. The—"
Ghislaene leaned in closer, so he could see nothing but her eyes and the faint glow of her sigils.
"Antonius," she said, and it startled him enough that she had used his name. "Listen to me. The empire will not rise or fall in the space of one night more. But your body might. You have been gone a long time. You are back only because the tether held, and because we would not let go. Do not repay that by dying on the first day you bother to breathe."
He stared at her, chest heaving, every instinct he possessed screaming to move, to run, to ride, to do something. But his arms shook with the effort of even that small resistance. His fingers were white around her wrist.
Slowly—like prising open a hand frozen in winter—he let go.
"Good," Elionnor said softly. Some of the iron left his tone. "There is the first victory. Over yourself. The rest will come in time."
"Time," Antonius repeated hollowly. Five years of it, stolen and spent without his consent.
"You will sleep again soon," Elionnor went on. "Not for so long, I promise. A few hours. Your soul must settle fully. When you wake, we will speak of what has passed beyond these walls. Of your empire. Of your enemies. Of what it means that you still live under this red sky."
The red sky. He could see it through the narrow slit, darker now, bruised toward night. The same color it had been when he fell. The same color, he thought, it had been ever since.
Ghislaene's hand slid from his temple to his forehead, fingers threading gently through his hair. There was power in her touch, but it wasn't the sharp, commanding force he associated with Imperial mages. It was quieter. Older. Like a lullaby sung by the bones of the earth.
"Close your eyes," she murmured. "If you sleep, you will wake. If you wake, you can fight. That is the order of things, Antonius Kaimon."
His name in her mouth sounded like a promise.
His body was already surrendering, treacherous thing that it was. The weight of exhaustion rolled over him, deep and irresistible. He let his eyes flutter shut, though the image of the red sky burned behind them.
As he drifted, he heard Elionnor one last time, distant as if at the end of a long corridor.
"Welcome back to the living, Prince," the healer said. "The world has changed while you slept. Whether it will fall or rise now… that is no longer for us to decide."
Antonius tried to answer, but sleep took the words, and he tumbled down into darkness that wasn't empty anymore.
This time, he did not fall alone.
The next days—weeks—were a slow drowning in reverse.
Antonius rose from the depths not all at once but in ragged lungfuls, snatching moments of clarity before the dark pulled him back under.
Sometimes he surfaced to find the room quiet, lit only by the dull glow of sigils on stone. Ghislaene would be there, cross-legged on a low stool, a book open on her knees. She never seemed surprised when his eyes opened. She would mark her place, close the book, and lean forward.
"Back again," she'd say. "That makes… eight times today. Perhaps you simply like the sound of my voice."
He'd try to answer and find his tongue thick, his words slurred. She didn't seem to mind. She would coax him through breathing, through swallowing water, through flexing fingers that felt like someone else's.
Other times he woke to Elionnor's measured presence. The healer's hands were always warm, his touch firm but not cruel as he mapped out the broken geography of Antonius's body.
"Raise your arm," Elionnor would instruct.
Antonius would try. The limb rose a thumb's span and shook as though lifting a warhammer.
"Again tomorrow," Elionnor would say, as if that failure were simply another kind of practice. "Two thumb-spans, perhaps. Your spirit remembers how to move. It is your muscles that sulk."
He drifted.
Sleep took him in mid-word, mid-breath, mid-thought. Sometimes he dreamed; often he didn't. When he did, the dreams were jagged, broken glass memories cutting his mind.
A throne room washed in gold.
The weight of a ceremonial sword in his hand.
His father's voice: You must be better than I was, Anton. Softer in some things. Harder in others.
Enora laughing as she ran through rose gardens, her red scarf trailing like a comet's tail.
The usurper's shadow falling over them both.
He never saw the man's face clearly in those fragments, only the glint of eyes like steel and the line of a mouth that had once smiled kindly.
When he woke from those dreams, his heart thudded against his ribs as if trying to escape. Once, he shouted. The word tore from him before he knew it was there.
"Enora!"
He lurched upright, vision white with panic. His legs tangled in the blanket; his feet hit the cold floor. They did not hold him. The stone rushed up.
Hands caught him before he could fall.
Ghislaene swore in her own tongue—astonishment, not anger—bracing his shoulders. Her strength belied her slight frame. She hauled him back onto the bed with a grunt.
"Fool," she hissed, hair half out of its braids. "You'll crack your skull and save our enemies the trouble."
"Enora," he said again, because the name was the only thing that mattered in that heartbeat. His vision was a blur, his chest on fire. "Where—where is—"
"Not here," Ghislaene said, more gently. "And neither are they. Breathe, Prince."
He obeyed, because breathing was the one command his body seemed willing to listen to. In… out. In. Out. The burning eased by degrees.
When he had enough air to think, he realized his fingers were twisted in the fabric of her sleeve. He let go, muttering, "Forgive me," out of old habit.
She arched one long brow. "You were dying on my floor a fortnight ago. I think we are past the point where tugging on my sleeve offends."
"Fortnight?" he echoed.
"Nearly two weeks since you first opened your eyes," she said. "Time moves even when you do not, Antonius."
Two weeks. On top of five years.
The numbers piled up, one atop the other, weight pressing down. He closed his eyes against it.
"Drink," Ghislaene said.
He felt the rim of a cup against his lips. The water was cool and tasted faintly of mint and some bitter root. He swallowed, throat working around the unfamiliar motion.
"Better," she approved. "Again."
By the end of that waking, he could sit propped against the wall without swaying. That was, apparently, a victory.
The days—the fragments of days—began to take on a loose pattern.
Elionnor would test his reflexes, his strength, his memory. Sometimes he'd ask simple questions.
"Your name?"
"Antonius Kaimon," he'd answer, slow but steady.
"Your house?"
"The line of Kaimon, keepers of the Meridian Throne." Saying it felt like pressing on a bruise.
"Your empire?"
"The Imperium under one sky." His jaw clenched. "Or it was."
Elionnor would make a thoughtful sound, as though Antonius were a riddle in a language he half remembered.
"Good. Some stones remain where they were set." The healer would tap the side of his own head. "Your mind is rebuilding its roads. Do not run down them too quickly."
Other times, Elionnor would ask stranger things, watching Antonius closely as if weighing something more than words.
"What color was the sky the day you fell?"
"Red," Antonius would say at once. Of that, at least, there was no doubt. "Like it bled."
Elionnor would nod slowly. "It has not changed."
When Antonius slept again after those questionings, his dreams were full of crimson.
On the days when his strength allowed, Ghislaene turned his waking into work.
"Bend your knees," she'd say, hands at his ankles, her grip unshakeable. "Good. Now again. If you can stomp across a floor, you can stomp across a tyrant's throat later."
He snorted at that, surprising both of them. The laugh came out rough but real.
"I thought healers frowned on threats of stomping."
She shrugged. "I am only half healer. The other half is very interested in seeing whether you are worth all this trouble."
He studied her then, in a clearer moment.
She moved like someone who had trained with weapons: balanced, compact, wary without seeming so. Her hair was usually tied back in practical braids, but wisps escaped to frame a face that could look severe or amused with the smallest change.
"Worth it by whose measure?" he asked.
Hers, he wanted to say, and bit back the thought before it could form fully. He had known her for days, or hours, or years, depending on how one measured time in half-sleeps and delirium—yet she was one of the few fixed points in this new life.
"By the sky's," she said instead, as if the question were obvious. "It has watched you. It does not watch lightly."
"The sky," he repeated. "You speak of it as if it were a god."
Ghislaene's mouth twisted. "In this land, it might as well be."
He filed that away. Another piece of a world that was not the one he had left.
Occasionally, when he woke in the small hours, he would hear Elionnor and Ghislaene speaking softly beyond the archway.
"…too soon," Elionnor would murmur.
"…not a child," Ghislaene would answer. "He deserves to know what's become of his line."
"…deserve is not the same as endure."
Their words would blur as sleep pulled him down again. He clung to fragments the way he clung to memories of Enora's laughter.
Once, fully awake and more alert than he had been since that first panicked gasp, Antonius asked outright.
"Is my father dead?"
Elionnor did not flinch. He sat on the edge of the stone bed, folding his hands in his lap.
"Yes," the healer said. Simple. Unadorned. "He died on the day you fell."
The words did not break him. They merely settled into place beside all the others, heavy but expected. The image of his father crumpling beneath the usurper's blade had been etched into his mind for so long it might as well have been carved in stone.
"And my sister?" This was the question that mattered, the one that scraped his throat on the way out.
Ghislaene, arranging jars on a shelf, paused. Elionnor's gaze flicked toward her before returning to Antonius.
"Alive," the healer said. "As of the last whispers that reached us, Enora Kaimon lives."
A breath punched out of Antonius's lungs. He hadn't realized he'd been holding it for five years.
"Where?" he demanded.
Elionnor lifted a hand. "That, Prince, is a longer tale. One I will tell when you can walk the length of this room without clinging to my daughter."
Antonius opened his mouth to argue and realized he was, in fact, leaning slightly against Ghislaene's shoulder. When had she moved to his side? He stepped away, heat pricking his face.
She smirked faintly. "You heard him. If you want stories, you had better learn to stand on your own legs."
So he did.
Not in a day, or three, or ten. But slowly, stubbornly.
He stood first using the wall as a crutch, fingers digging into ancient mortar. His knees shook so badly that sweat ran down his back in cold rivulets. Ghislaene hovered a handspan away, close enough to catch but not touching.
"One step," she said.
He took it.
The second nearly spilled him. His vision went white at the edges. But he didn't fall.
"There," Elionnor said quietly from the doorway. Pride warmed his usually cool tone. "The first of many."
By the end of the second week, Antonius could walk from his bed to the narrow window and back. It felt like crossing a battlefield.
He would stand there, palm braced against the cold stone, and look out at the slice of sky.
Always red. Sometimes brighter, sometimes bruised to a deep wine. But never the clear blue he half remembered from childhood.
"Has it been like this," he asked once, "all five years?"
Ghislaene followed his gaze. Her reflection in the arrow slit glass was a blurred ghost behind his shoulder.
"Since the day the Emperor died and his son fell," she said. "The old priests say the sky wept and then refused to stop. That it turned the color of grief and will not fade until the debt is paid."
"And what debt is that?" he asked.
She glanced at him sidelong, amber eyes thoughtful.
"That," she said, "is what you will have to decide."
He let the words settle. Another weight. Another promise.
His memories still came only in shards and flashes. Names without faces. Faces without context. He knew the shape of a sword hilt, the cadence of a legion's march, the taste of sweet wine on the night before everything broke. He did not yet know the usurper's new title, the borders of the shattered Imperium, or how far the rot had spread.
But he knew his own name.
He knew his father was dead.
He knew his sister lived.
He knew the sky was still red.
And with each small step across the healer's stone floor, Antonius felt a thin, hard line of resolve forming, piece by painful piece, beneath the fractures.
Fall had taken everything he was.
Whatever came next, he would meet it on his feet.
On the fifteenth day, he made it to the far wall.
It wasn't much to look at. Just stone, carved ages ago, the script along its base worn faint by fingertips and time. But getting there meant crossing the whole length of the little chamber without using Ghislaene's shoulder or the bed for support.
He stood there, one hand flat against the cold rock, breathing hard.
"Better," Elionnor said from behind him. The healer's voice carried the faintest thread of approval. "You walk like a newborn stag, but you walk."
"Careful," Ghislaene added dryly. "If you praise him too much, he'll try to run next."
Antonius allowed himself a thin smile, then turned to make his way back.
That was when he saw it.
There, in shadow near the archway, propped neatly against the wall between two hanging bundles of herbs, rested a sword.
Not just any sword.
An ornate hilt meant for one or two hands, wrapped in dark leather worn smooth where his palms had gripped it a thousand times. A short, sturdy winged crossguard—functional, but shaped with the elegant sweep of a falcon's spread wings—guarded the mouth of the scabbard. The knuckle bow spiraled down in gleaming gold, looping to meet the pommel. And at that pommel's end sat a gem the size of a quail's egg, faceted and deep ruby red, catching and throwing the sigil light in bloody sparks.
Encarmine.
Antonius froze, hand still half raised.
For a moment, the little healer's chamber vanished. He stood again in the palace armory, a boy of twelve watching the sword's lacquered case open for the first time. His father's hand on his shoulder. The weight of responsibility and steel laid across his arms together.
"My line carries the Meridian Crown," his father had said. "Yours will carry Encarmine. May neither fall from weak hands."
"Prince?" Elionnor said behind him, tone sharpening. "Sit. You've gone pale."
But Antonius didn't move toward the bed. His feet carried him, slow and stubborn, toward the sword.
Each step sent a complaint up his legs, but he ignored them. His fingers closed around the spiraled knuckle bow. The metal was cool, familiar, like the touch of an old friend and an old wound.
He lifted it from the wall.
The scabbard had been cleaned. Whoever had done it had worked with a soldier's respect; the leather was oiled, the fittings polished but not gaudy. Encarmine was lighter than he remembered and heavier all at once.
His thumb found the rise of the guard by instinct. It pressed, pushing the blade a finger's width free of its sheath.
Steel whispered.
The light in the room bent along the revealed edge. The ruby pommel flared.
And something in Antonius's head snapped into place.
The world around him fell away.
He stood again under a sky the color of fresh blood, but now it arched high above the Meridian Court, not framed by the narrow healer's slit. Roses lay crushed underfoot, mingled with blackened patches where fire had scorched the flagstones. The air stank of smoke and iron.
The Emperor—his father—was on his knees.
A hand like an iron band wrapped around the older man's throat, lifting him a handspan off the ground. The man holding him was taller than any two soldiers side by side, broad-shouldered in gleaming golden armor chased with lines of white fire. A cloak hung from his pauldrons, white as winter snow, clasped with the sigil of a lion rearing—its threads darkened at the edges with someone else's blood.
Getorix.
Antonius's instructor. His mentor. The man who had taught him to break a man's stance with a twist of the wrist and to hold the sword like a promise instead of a club. The man his father had once called brother in all but name.
Golden hair, trimmed close now instead of loose to his shoulders. Sun-kissed skin, lightly tanned, crosshatched with old scars. One new scar that hadn't been there when he'd last seen him in peace—a line angling across his brow, white against tanned skin, just brushing the outer edge of one eye. It made his face look permanently tilted toward a frown, even as he smiled that familiar, easy smile.
Except there was nothing easy in it now.
"Still got your sword arm," Getorix said lightly.
He had the Emperor lifted in that one hand as though the older man weighed nothing. His own sword—Encarmine's twin in length, but brutal and plain beside it—hung at his hip, forgotten.
Antonius could see something leaking from his father where Getorix's fingers dug into the flesh at his throat. Not blood. It was subtler, stranger than that—a thinning, like sand pouring through a glass. The Emperor's shoulders shook with the effort to breathe. His eyes, once bright as polished coin, had gone dull like smoke-stained glass.
"If I hadn't learned the old ways," Getorix continued, "this duel might've gone differently. You always did have the better hand with steel, old friend."
The Emperor's fingers clawed at Getorix's gauntlet, trying to pry it loose. It didn't budge.
Antonius screamed.
He didn't remember deciding to. Didn't remember starting to run, or the first man he cut down to get there. He only knew Encarmine was in his hands and its blade was already bloodied, and when he reached the foot of the dais he swung with every shred of strength he had, the sword a silver arc aimed to carve through Getorix's exposed side.
The world narrowed to a point.
Getorix dropped the Emperor.
His free hand came up, fingers splayed.
The air between them rippled.
For an instant, Antonius saw symbols—circles inside circles, lines intersecting at impossible angles, drawn in light and in something older than light. They flared, then sank into Getorix's skin, etching glowing bands along the veins of his wrist.
Antonius's blade met that hand.
It should have taken the fingers. It should have bitten deep.
Instead, Encarmine struck invisible stone. Power shrieked along the steel. The impact sent a shock back up his arms, jarring his shoulder. He stumbled, teeth clacking together hard enough to draw blood from his tongue.
Getorix caught the sword with that bare, glowing hand, stopping the killing stroke as if halting a child's branch.
"Good," Getorix said quietly, eyes meeting Antonius's over the arrested blade. "You came to me with your teeth bared, not your knees bent. For that, I will make your death quick."
Antonius roared, shoving, trying to force Encarmine forward those last inches. The usurper's grip didn't move.
The light crawling under Getorix's skin shifted, flowing from his hand and back up his arm, down into his chest. From there it pulsed outward again, into the ground, into the very stones of the court. The air thickened. The hairs on Antonius's neck rose.
Old words, whispered at the edges of bedtime tales, brushed the back of his mind.
Old Magic.
He never saw the counterstroke. Only felt the world buck.
Steel rang.
And then—
He was back in Elionnor's chamber, breath tearing ragged in his throat.
Encarmine shook in his hands, half drawn, the bare thumb-width of blade catching the sigil-light. His arms trembled as though he had just tried to cut down a mountain.
Antonius stared at the sword, chest heaving.
He was too weak to even draw it fully. That realization burned like humiliation.
Slowly, with care, he pushed the blade back into its sheath. The whisper of steel on leather sounded far too loud.
His legs chose that moment to remind him they were tired of being ignored. The strength bled out of them in an instant. He staggered.
"Prince?" Elionnor's voice.
Antonius had not heard the healer come back in. A hand caught his elbow before he could topple, guiding him down to sit on the bed. Encarmine remained in his grip, resting across his thighs like a sleeping serpent.
"What did you remember?" Elionnor asked.
Antonius swallowed, throat tight. The memory of Getorix's calm, almost fond smile hung in front of his eyes.
"Getorix," he said hoarsely. "I saw… the duel. My father. The court. The… the thing he did."
Elionnor had been holding a cup in his free hand, steam curling from it in thin threads. At the name, his fingers spasmed. The clay tumbled to the floor and shattered, hot liquid splashing across the stone.
He didn't seem to notice.
"Impossible," the healer whispered.
Antonius blinked. "What is?"
Elionnor's eyes snapped to his, sharp and suddenly very old.
"Humans," the healer said, each word clipped, "are incapable of it."
"Incapable of what?" Antonius demanded.
Elionnor's grip on his elbow slid up, both hands settling on his shoulders. The older man's fingers dug in, not cruel but insistent.
"Sit," Elionnor said.
"I am sitting."
"Then stay sitting." There was no give in his tone. "And tell me. Detail by detail. What did this Getorix do?"
Antonius licked dry lips. "You seem more disturbed by him raising his hand than by him murdering my father."
"I have seen many men murdered," Elionnor said. "Very few have killed with what you just described."
"What I—" Antonius caught himself, forced his voice steady. "He held my father by the throat with one hand. Something… was draining out of him. Not blood. Like his strength, his… years. He said he had learned the old ways, that without them the duel would have gone differently. When I charged him, he caught Encarmine with his bare hand. There were… symbols. Lines of light under his skin. They moved. Into the stones. Into the air."
He closed his eyes, dragging the image from his mind piece by piece, laying it out between them like a grim offering.
"Circles?" Elionnor pressed. "Crossing lines?"
"Yes."
"Did he speak? Chant?"
"No." Antonius frowned, searching the memory. "It was… like breathing for him. As natural as drawing steel."
Elionnor's fingers tightened on his shoulders. His face had gone ashen beneath his weathered skin.
"This is not possible," he murmured more to himself than to Antonius. "Not after so long. Not in a human."
Antonius's patience frayed.
"You keep saying that," he snapped. "What is impossible? What exactly is it that has you dropping cups and squeezing my bones to powder?"
Elionnor's gaze cut to his, weighing, measuring. For a long moment, the only sound in the chamber was the slow drip of water and Antonius's still-labored breathing.
At last, the healer exhaled.
"Very well," he said. "You deserve at least the edges of this truth."
He released Antonius's shoulders and straightened, scrubbing a hand over his face. When he spoke again, his voice held the cadence of someone reciting a lesson he'd thought he would never have to teach.
"First: humans have no magic," Elionnor said. "None. Not the smallest spark. This is a fact every other race has taken for granted for more than a thousand years. You are creatures of iron and will, of stone roads and sharpened steel. Potent in your own way, but blind to the currents that run under the skin of the world."
Antonius opened his mouth, then closed it again. Memories of fireside tales whispered by nursemaids flickered—witches in the hills, men who called storms, bargains struck with unseen things.
"Then what," he asked slowly, "have we been telling stories about all this time?"
"Folktales," Elionnor said. "Misremembered history. Fear of what you cannot do turned outward into monsters you can blame. There are powers in this world, yes. Spirits. Old things. But they do not answer to human hands. Not anymore."
"Not anymore," Antonius echoed. "You make it sound as though once we—"
"That," Elionnor cut in gently, "belongs to a history older than your Empire, Prince. Older than the Imperium's first stones. What matters now is this: what you saw in this Getorix is not the hedge-charm of a spirit-dealer or the parlor trick of some city charlatan. From your description, it was Old Magic. The first language. The script under creation itself."
The words fell heavy in the air.
Old Magic. The term had lived at the edges of his life, a phrase in old prayers, muttered as a curse by superstitious soldiers. A thing of origin myths. The gods shaped the world in the Old Magic, the stories went, then broke it and hid the pieces when mortals reached for it.
"Old Magic is gone," Elionnor said. "Sealed. Choked. Lost. Call it what you like. No one has wielded it openly in an age. And no human has ever bent it and lived."
He looked at Antonius, eyes suddenly very, very tired.
"If your usurper can," he said softly, "then the fall of your Imperium is the smallest of the storms coming."
Antonius's hand tightened unconsciously on Encarmine's hilt.
"That makes no sense," he said. "Magic is…" He caught himself, hearing his old tutors scoff at peasants' superstitions. "Magic is for tales and for frightened villagers. For children. Not for emperors and generals."
Elionnor's mouth twitched, not quite amused.
"You say this while sitting in a room carved with binding sigils," he said mildly. "After waking from a five-year sleep you should not have survived, your soul tied to your flesh by rites older than your Empire. You say this while holding a sword that hummed when you drew it, yes? Encarmine was not forged in an ordinary fire, boy."
Antonius stared at him.
He wanted to argue. To push the word magic away like a child's toy, something beneath the dignity of a prince who dealt in legions and laws and supply lines.
Instead, all he could manage was a hoarse, "Magic is a folktale."
"And yet," a new voice said from the archway, "you are alive because of it."
Antonius turned.
Ghislaene stood there, one hand resting lightly on the stone frame. She must have come in while they spoke, silent as smoke. Her amber eyes were serious, the faint sigils around them glowing just a little brighter than the wall-script behind her.
She stepped into the room, the hanging herbs brushing her hair like a curtain.
"If there were no magic," she said, "your soul would have slipped loose the moment you hit the stones below your father's court. The fall broke you. The Old Magic in your usurper's hands tried to keep you broken. We used older words to argue otherwise."
She came to stand beside Elionnor, looking down at Antonius and the sword across his lap.
"So, Prince of the Imperium," Ghislaene said quietly. "You can cling to your folktales if you like. But if you mean to take back your sky from a man who wields the first language… you will have to decide what you're willing to believe in."
Outside, through the narrow window, the red sky brooded over the world, unblinking.