The sea breeze tastes of iron.
It creeps into my lips along with the salt and leaves a metallic aftertaste, the sensation of a coin left on the table too long in the rain.
When I was a child, it smelled of summer afternoons along the cliffs, of fishwives' laughter and rope and the brassy clamor of an harbor dawn.
Now it tastes of broken promises turned to decay.
The Aurelian Empire is said still to exist. They write of the capital smoldering still but holding, of flags yet waving, of prayers not having been for nothing. We write of much to banish sleep. The window outside my own reports an easier truth: it clings close and heavy, burdened by the weight of a world which has begun to lose the memory of how to be put together again. Ships come in with too many vacant sleeves. They return with holes in them and with men's eyes who have already died somewhere beyond the horizon.
My father calls each postponement "temporary."
My mother prays more boisterously. My brothers iron their uniforms and say nothing of what is to come beyond the hills. My sister stuffs bread down the sleeves of her arms and smiles when servants walk by. I watch them and tally up how the house is falling apart like a tooth etched too slowly.
And then there is me Kaelen. Second son of Veal. The one that you forget when speaking aloud for grand names.
I learn how to become small for rooms that are made for giants. The yard gives me a wooden sword and a soft laugh.
My fingers are calloused from practice and chores, not the true steel of war. I am not brave. I am not crafty. I am soft like a child is soft
iam an ignorant and stubborn person and somtimes gentle where the world demands steel all of that because of one person Elyra
She is the reason that even my little heart once thought the world might be kind.
Elyra moves like a truth that pleads not. When she turns, the sun pardons the sea. She had spoken of a future in a whisper, the kind of whisper that makes a boy believe he won't be broken. She had spoken because her kin had brought our family a connection, a small, secure fortune beneath the falling sky. We had dreams: a small wedding, a humble house, children who would have names that meant something. I had let myself fold my life into that quiet blueprint. When they love you so, you go blind with hope; the future is as sweet as bread.
Hope wears off.
It wears off in the little ways that are most brutal: a return that's late, a hand that lingers on, a letter that's brief. My brother Lior begins appearing at the same locations as Elyra. He brings laughter into rooms where my voice once rang. The servants stop being sloppy and become exacting, and exactness is ever the spoiler. I instruct myself to hold on. The war distorts men; the hedges get away from us and then get clipped. This too will be put right.
I catch sight of them together one evening — not condemning, not incriminating. They stand close where the garden is dark, hands near, faces outlined by the same thin moon. He smirks, smiling as he never used to smile at me, a smile that takes the world for himself and leaves the rest behind. Elyra slips beside him as if she always had a place there. I do not stir up a scene. I stand on the path like a boulder and observe the place where my life is rearranged. To begin with, it is just coldness under my ribs, a small, extraneous frost. I go back inside and sleep like a corpse.
Whispers become a wave. At first, servants debate in corners and pass folded paper on my desk. Later, gazes in the hall stop encountering mine. My father says nothing at dinner. My mother tucks seams into clothing she will never be able to wear. There are a dozen ways in which the world prefers to let you know it has decided you are disposable; I master them over the next days.
And then the word comes. It is not a word I pictured men using haphazardly. They say it in cautious pity that makes the word more horrible than what they do: rape. The syllable opens up like a rotten sore and all comes out.
They march me in front of the house. There is Elyra. She won't look at me. She tells me in a voice firm enough to cut glass. She has practiced how much drama the right number of tears will pay her; she has practiced how to measure a quivering chin. My father is between them like stone and then he talks with a voice I scarcely recognize for belonging to him.
"You have shamed our house ,youre a shame " he says.
The words are incantation, a catechism of commands he had learned as a child.
"Father... you cannot believe this." i replied
"The belief is irrelevant and The evidence presented very clear and The consequence is required for the shame you brouth on us." he say in anger
"Evidence? Lior's lies? Elyra's performance? I loved her! I would never—"
A sharp, precise gesture cuts him off
"Love is a luxury for lesser houses but you have forced your hand on her trying to do a shamless act you basterd ."talking in a sad with an angry mood
My throat is dry.
There is a hollowness where there was once bravery. I tell them I am innocent. I tell them that I loved her. I tell them that I would not— My words sound like worn-out coins clinking against an altar. People desire stories, and they desire conclusions to be neat; I have become their villain.
Lior is there. Lior with the effortless smile and the always one shoulder downstream of harm. Lior who had shown me how to throw a knife and had laughed when it stuck. We had bled on foolish rides, had exchanged trustings when the moon was full. Lior moves forward as if to vow I will protect you, and I swallow like one who had lost the ability to breathe.
He does not stand for me.
"Drink," he tells me the evening before they call me to drink them. "You'll need rest." There's a way in which people place a cup against someone else's lips and make it an act of mercy, and there is a way that they place it as betrayal grinning on a friend's face. I drink out of the cup because my hands shake and a friend seems to be the only warmth left in the house. I lift it up like a child.
The blackness closes around me like a wave and wraps me under. It is not pure. It is a gradual slide of softness that bottoms in the world on its side.
My head is spinning. I awaken not from a single blow but from the sense that my own body has been replaced with another's, that my shape had been taken and debated like a goat in a bazaar.
When I wake, I glance at maika face and taste the iron flavor. The cup is empty on the floor beside his feet. He apologizes, practiced apology like a man who has wept practice tears. He stands among the others and relates a story that is so neat that it can be put on a board: I was in the guest chambers drunk; I was not coherent; I stumbled, I made a mistake. They discover me outside the door, they tell me. A drunken man, asleep, and then this. It is a play that hums with the comfortable lie.
I attempt to speak and it sounds like a rusty gate.
"Why?" I ask.
It is the only question I have. Maika's jaw throbs. He does not answer. He keeps his head down as if he cannot bear to look at the success of the trap he has set. There is not victory in his face, precisely.
Something chill — a handy, small thing. He does not hold up his hand and say, I am sorry.
My father's face is an arithmetic of reputation and bloodline. That is what I see of him now, what learned to subtract sons and calculate loss.
"There must be consequence," he says again.
His voice is the voice of a man who has been told that the law is a ladder and a ladder keeps you from falling if you are in the right place. He has taken sides.
They cut my sword arm first. I see torn brown leather strap, smell the scent of iron blood that fills the air. The blade glints like a promise. It kisses my skin and the world narrows to one scream that rises up from lower than the throat. The sound rips my chest open because I never thought I could produce such a noise. There are men standing there. Others flinch, not because it is a harsh thing to do, but because it is a glimpse into the weakness each hides. My dad watches like a judge officiating a ritual. The knifeman is careful. He talks to the hand as though it were something that still needed to be taught what to do.
they did not drag me.
I walked. My feet carried me to the center of the courtyard on the numb, automatic belief that a son following orders might yet find mercy.
The stones were cold beneath my thin boots.
My father stood on the balcony above, a silhouette against a bleached sky.
He was not looking at me, but at the ranks of household guards and servants he had assembled. This was not a punishment; it was a lesson.
The knifeman approached. He was not an executioner, but our stable master, Anric.
The man who had taught me to saddle my first pony. In his hands was not a sword, but a hatchet used for chopping wood for the winter hearths. The mundane horror of it stole my breath.
"Please," I whispered, the word meant for my father.
"I am your son."
The wind took the words and did nothing with them. My father's voice came down, flat and final. "The hand that committed the sin. It must be forfeit."
Anric's face was a grimace of pity and duty. "The block, young master," he murmured, so only I could hear. His voice was thick with shame.
They pushed me to my knees. Anric guided my left arm—my sword arm, the one that had held Elyra, the one that had clumsily practiced forms in this very yard—onto a chopping block still stained with the dark sap of old wood.
The grain of the wood pressed against my wrist. I stared at my own hand. I saw the callus on my thumb from holding a pen, the faint white scar from a splinter earned while mending the fence, the lifeline on my palm that a gypsy once told me was long and full of promise.
This is my hand. This is a part of my body. They cannot.
"FFFFFA ... FAT ....HER .... father" This time it was a scream.
His gaze met mine. For a single, heart-stopping fraction of a second, I saw it—a flicker of something pained, human. Then it was gone, walled up behind stone. He gave a single, sharp nod.
Anric raised the hatchet.
Time fractured. The world narrowed to the rising arc of the steel, catching the flat, grey light. I heard the intake of my own breath, a ragged, hopeless sound. I saw the muscles in Anric's shoulder bunch.
The impact was not a clean chop. It was a terrible, wet thud, followed by the sickening crack of bone that vibrated up through my arm, into my teeth. The pain was not immediate. First came the feeling of profound wrongness—a jolt that screamed through every nerve that something fundamental had been severed.
Then the fire came.
It was a white-hot agony that did not just reside in my wrist, but flooded my entire being. I screamed. It was a sound I did not recognize, torn from a place deeper than my lungs, a raw, animal noise of utter violation. I looked down.
The world tilted. My hand—my hand—lay on the block, separated, fingers curled in a final, pathetic twitch. The stump of my wrist was a grotesque mosaic of shattered bone, torn muscle, and pulsing blood that did not just flow, but pumped onto the stone in rhythmic, crimson gushes. The smell was overwhelming—the coppery tang of blood, so thick I could taste it at the back of my throat, mixed with the faint, shameful scent of my own voided bladder.
I stared, disbelieving. My mind could not connect the thing on the block to the part of me that was gone. I tried to wiggle fingers that were no longer there. The phantom command sent a fresh lance of blinding pain up my arm, and I vomited onto the cobblestones, heaving until there was nothing left but bile and tears.
I thought it was over. I huddled around the agony, cradling the ruin of my arm against my chest, sobbing like the child I suddenly was. The world was a red haze of pain. Let it be over. Let me be small now. Let them pity me.
But my father spoke again. His voice was closer. He had descended to the courtyard.
"The brand," he said. "So the world will always know the face of a dishonorable man."
They forced me onto my back. Four men held my limbs, their weight pinning me to the cold, unforgiving stone. I was spread-eagled, utterly vulnerable. Anric stepped away, his face ashen, and the blacksmith came forward. In his heavy gloves, he carried a brazier. In the coals glowed the brand—the Veal family sigil, a winged boar. It was meant to be a mark of pride. Now it was to be a curse.
The blacksmith did not look at me. He was a craftsman performing a task. He selected a long, iron rod, its tip now a cherry-red emblem of my house's wrath.
"Hold his head," my father commanded.
A hand, calloused and smelling of leather, clamped over my brow, forcing my head to the side, exposing my right cheek and
" N ...OOOO No not my evrything but my eye FATHER NO .... noooo N" i yelled :ike a madman
No. Not my eye. Not my sight.
The plea was a silent scream in my mind. I could only watch, my one good eye wide with terror, as the glowing sigil descended. It moved with a slow, inevitable horror.
The heat hit my face first—a wave of dry, blistering air that promised oblivion. I squeezed my eye shut.
Then it made contact.
The sound was the worst of it. The sizzle of my own flesh cooking, the smell of roasting pork that I knew, with nauseating clarity, was me. The pain was absolute. It was not fire; it was a sun pressed against my face, searing through skin, fat, and nerve. I convulsed against the hands holding me, my back arching off the ground, a guttural, choked shriek tearing from my raw throat.
But the horror was not over.
Through the agony, I felt an unbearable pressure building inside my eye socket. The brand was not just burning the skin; it was cooking the orb within. The liquid inside my eye began to boil.
My right eye burst.
It was not a dramatic explosion, but a soft, internal rupture. A pop, felt more than heard, and a sudden, shocking flood of hot fluid down my branded cheek. The world in that eye did not go black. It went null. A void. A perfect, silent, absolute nothingness where light and shape and color had once been.
The blacksmith lifted the brand. The pain did not recede; it changed, settling into a deep, throbbing, world-ending ache. The men released me. I rolled onto my side, curling around the twin voids of my hand and my eye, weeping from the one eye I had left.
The last thing I saw with both eyes, forever seared into my memory, was my father's face. He was not looking at my pain, or my ruin. He was looking at the smoldering brand, checking the clarity of the sigil on my flesh.
His work was complete. The ledger was balanced.
And in the new, half-darkness of my world, a cold, silent promise began to crystallize, harder than any bone they had broken.
They left me in the hay. The coarse stalks scratched at the brand on my face, a counterpoint to the deep, throbbing agony of my wrist. The pain was a living thing—a wolf chewing on the ghost of my hand, a fire smoldering in the socket of my eye. I drifted in and out of a consciousness that felt no different from unconsciousness. Both were filled with the same red-dark pain and the looping memory of the hatchet's fall.
Hours, or perhaps a day, passed. The stable door creaked open. It was not a guard, but the old huntsman, Garvin, a man who had taught me to track deer and said little. He did not speak now. He placed a waterskin by my head and, with startling gentleness, re-bound my stump with a clean strip of linen. He left a hunk of hard bread. His eyes, when they met my one good one, held a depth of shame that was the first human thing I had seen since the betrayal. It was not enough to warm me, but it was a data point. Not all of them were monsters; just the ones who mattered.
The next morning, the verdict was delivered not by my father, but by his steward.
"You are to be conscripted. The Frontier Legion." The steward's voice was bored, reciting inventory. "You will depart with the dawn levy."
The Frontier Legion. It was not a name, it was a death sentence. A refuse heap for the empire's criminals, cowards, and unwanted sons. They were sent to the breaches in the world, the places where the war was not a matter of strategy, but of raw, grinding consumption.
My father came to see me off. He stood at the courtyard gate, clean and whole, as I was shoved into a line of other broken men. The contrast was a deliberate cruelty. I was filth-smeared, my face a swollen mask of burned flesh and crusted bandages, my body reeking of pain and the stable.
He walked down the line, inspecting the chattel. He stopped before me. The air grew cold.
"The Frontier Legion will make a man of you, or it will make an end of you," he said, his voice low, for me alone. There was no emotion in it. It was a simple prediction.
"The House of Veal has written you off its rolls. Your name is struck. You are a non-person. If you die, no one will be notified. If you desert, you will be hunted not for treason, but for poaching the empire's property—your own body."
I lifted my head. The world was a narrow, lopsided strip of vision. I saw him through a haze of pain, a figure cut from stone. I tried to find words—a final curse, a plea, a question. But my throat was sealed with ash. All that emerged was a ragged breath.
He looked at my branded face, at the empty sleeve, with the dispassionate interest of a man examining a flawed piece of masonry. He leaned in, his final words a whisper that froze the last ember of my soul.
"Do not seek to come back. There is nothing for you here but a pauper's grave. The world will finish what your weakness started. Let it."
He turned and walked away. He did not look back. The gates of my home, which had once seemed to promise safety and legacy, swung shut with a final, resonant thud that was more devastating than the hatchet's blow. It was the sound of the world locking me out.
The levy was a procession of the damned. We were a column of ghosts, shackled by despair if not by iron. The conscripts were thieves, debtors, and madmen. The guards were brutes who saw us as walking corpses, already dead.
The world outside my home was a revelation of ruin. The stories of the war had been clean things, told with flags on maps. The reality was a festering wound.
We passed villages that were no more than blackened skeletons of houses, the air thick with the sweet-sick odor of death and old smoke.
Crows feasted in the fields, their fat, glossy bodies a perverse sign of plenty. The roads were not roads anymore, but churned mud-trails littered with the debris of an empire in collapse: a child's doll, a shattered cart wheel, a single, pristine leather boot.
My body was a cage of misery. The stump of my arm itched and burned with a phantom life, a constant, screaming reminder of what was gone. Every jolting step sent a fresh spike of pain up my shoulder. My branded face felt tight and hot, the skin pulling grotesquely, and my missing eye played constant, vicious tricks on me. My depth perception was gone. I stumbled over stones that weren't there, misjudged distances, and the world had a flat, untrustworthy quality. The empty socket wept a thin, constant fluid that mixed with the grime on my cheek.
The other conscripts shunned me. My brand marked me as more than a criminal; it marked me as kinless, a man with no tether to humanity. They feared my bad luck, my silence, the horrific story my body told. I ate alone. I slept alone, curled on the cold ground, the phantom fingers of my missing hand clawing at the dirt in my dreams.
Days bled into one another, a grey smear of pain and hunger. We ate thin gruel that was more water than grain. We drank from streams that sometimes ran cloudy with the upstream battles we could not see, but could taste on the iron-tainted water.
We saw the front long before we reached it. It was a stain on the horizon, a perpetual, bruised twilight of smoke and unnatural fire. The sounds reached us next—not the noble blare of trumpets, but a constant, low thunder of siege weapons, a distant, chattering scream of metal on metal that went on for hours, then fell into an uneasy silence that was somehow worse.
One night, we crested a hill and looked down into the valley that was to be our home, our battlefield, our grave.
The land was a churned morass of mud and bodies. The trenches were not neat lines, but infected scars across the earth. The air was a physical assault—a cocktail of latrine pits, cordite, and the high, sweet stench of rot so profound it felt like a taste at the back of the tongue. This was the Frontier. This was the mouth of the world, and it was eating men.
They unshackled us at the edge of the camp. A sergeant with a face like a cracked cliff looked us over. His eyes, dead and weary, scanned our line. They paused on me, on my empty sleeve and branded face. A flicker of something—not pity, but a kind of professional disgust at the waste of sending him such broken stock.
"You," he grunted, pointing at me with a grimy finger.
"The one-handed wonder. The quartermaster has a job for you. Latrine duty. The dead don't need two hands to shovel shit."
A few of the other new conscripts snorted, a brittle, desperate laughter.
I did not react. I looked past him, into the heart of the camp, into the smoke and the despair. I felt the cold, hard thing that had been growing in my chest since the courtyard finally settle into its permanent, glacial form. It was not anger. It was not hate. It was purpose.
My father had been wrong. The world would not finish me. It had simply provided the forge.
I was no longer Kaelen of House Veal. That boy was dead, his hand buried in the courtyard, his eye burst in the fire, his heart left to rot on the road.
As I was shoved toward the reeking trench, my single eye taking in the endless, brutal geometry of the war, the final, silent thought solidified, as sharp and real as the brand on my face.
I will kill them all.
It was no longer a boy's oath. It was the first law of my new existence. The Knight of Death had arrived at his kingdom.