The nightmares always began with the witchlight.Caelum knew, in the dreaming, that he was dreaming. This was the cruelest part—the awareness that his infant body lay safe in the nursery while his mind returned again and again to the throne room, to the moment of his death, to the cold.He stood in obsidian glass. He wore his own face, his true face, gold eyes and horns and the weight of eight centuries of rule. The Abyss answered his call. Power flowed through him like breath, like blood, like life—Then the dagger.Malphas emerged from shadow, smiling, the blade entering his back, the power fleeing, the seal closing. But in the dream, Malphas did not speak. He only smiled, and withdrew, and let Caelum fall.Seraphina wept. Pressed her forehead to his. Whispered I'm sorry and check the grave and words he could not hear.Caelum woke screaming.The nursery was dark. His throat was raw, his small body drenched in sweat, and his hands—he looked at them in the moonlight—were clenched so tightly that his nails had drawn blood from his palms.Four years old, he reminded himself, forcing his fingers to open. I am four years old. I am Caelum Valorian. I am not there. I am here.The nightmares were not growing worse. They were constant, familiar, the price of memory. He had learned to pay it, to control his reactions, to hide the aftermath from the nurses who would worry, the physicians who would medicate, the mother who already looked at him with strange recognition."Caelum?" Mathilde, the night nurse, appeared with her candle. "The dream again?"He nodded, accepting comfort he did not need, performing childhood he had never fully inhabited.Mathilde lifted him, rocked him, murmured the usual comforts: only a dream, the Demon King can't hurt you, he's dead and gone. Caelum let her believe he was soothed. Inside, he was planning.Not for confrontation. Not yet. Not for years. But for capability—the slow build of strength, knowledge, alliance that would one day, someday, perhaps, allow him to matter.He returned to his cradle. Waited for sleep. When it came, it was dreamless, or he did not remember.He began training in earnest at four.The meat cellar was his discovery, made during daylight explorations with Mathilde, memorized for later private use. The beam overhead, perfect for pull-ups. The stone floor, forgiving of falls. The cold, which taught endurance.He started as he had before—push-ups on his knees, planks held until his core shook, hangs from the beam until his grip failed. But now he was systematic. Documented his progress in a hidden code, pressed into candle wax that he melted and remade each morning.Five pull-ups. Ten. Fifteen. His small body responded to demand, building strength that no one expected, that no one noticed.He was five when he first beat Gideon in a race.The challenge was casual—last one to the oak tree is a demon's servant—and Caelum won by three lengths. Gideon stared at him with something like recognition, and they became something like friends.Not allies, not yet. Not the covenant that would come. But brothers, competitors, two boys finding each other in the spaces between their family's expectations.Caelum told Gideon about his training, in part. I run when I can't sleep. I practice being strong. He did not say why he could not sleep, what he practiced strength for. Gideon did not ask. They were five and six, and the future was distant, and the present was enough.At six, Caelum found the book.Not the banned book, not yet. That would come later, through Milo, through the network he had not begun to build. This was a children's book, approved and published, The Hero and the Demon King: A Tale for Young Patriots.He read it in the nursery library, sitting in afternoon light, and he felt the familiar numbness of seeing himself through enemy eyes. The lies were obvious to him—tall as a tower, eyes of fire, heart of ice—but he read carefully, noting what the lies concealed, what truth they distorted, what purpose they served.The Demon King fell, and with his dying breath, he tried to curse her. But her heart was pure, and the curse turned back upon him, sealing him and all his wicked kind in the Abyss forever.Caelum read this three times. The curse that turned back. The sealing that was his own doing. The story that made him architect of his own prison, Seraphina sole actor in her own legend.He closed the book. His hands were steady. He had learned this discipline in the meat cellar, pulling himself up on the beam until his grip failed, learning that pain could be endured, that rage could be transformed, that the body was a tool that obeyed the mind.He would find other books. Older books. Books that told different stories, or fragments of stories, that might lead him toward truth. But for now, he had this: knowledge of the lie, understanding of its shape, certainty that something was wrong beneath the polished surface of history.He was six. He had twelve years before the Academy, decades before any confrontation. He had time to learn, to build, to become.And he had his nightmares, his training, his small secret strength. The shadow that would one day search for him was not yet searching. The void in him was not yet resonating with anything external. He was hidden, safe, free in ways he did not fully appreciate.He wrote his first letter to Seraphina that year. Not a real letter—no address for the dead. But words on paper, questions, accusations, the beginning of a conversation with absence that would continue for years.Why did you weep? he asked the marble woman. What did you see? What did you try to tell them, that they called madness?The statue did not answer. But Caelum felt something—not power, not magic, just presence—in the space between his questions and her silence. The possibility of being heard, eventually, by someone who understood.He was seven when he first felt the possibility of allies. Not yet Milo, not yet the network. Just the abstract sense that he could not do this alone, that the king who had been betrayed had been betrayed partly because he had been alone, isolated by power and responsibility and the inability to trust.He would not make that mistake again. He would learn to trust, slowly, carefully, with people who saw him and did not turn away.But that was future. For now, he was seven, small and strange and secretly strong, practicing being human in a house built on his tomb, waiting for the world to reveal what he needed to know.The nightmares continued. The training continued. The letters to Seraphina accumulated, buried beneath loose stone, evidence of a conversation with a dead woman that only he believed possible.And time passed, as time does, carrying him toward the Academy, toward the discovery of his void, toward the slow revelation of what he was and what he could become.He was not ready. He would never be ready, fully, completely. But he was becoming, and that was enough.
End of Chapter 3