Dawn broke over the Wight estate with a deceptive, golden tranquility. The events of the previous night had been contained with ruthless efficiency. The grizzly evidence was gone, the official reports filed bearing only the barest resemblance to the truth. To the outside world, a minor security breach had been swiftly and decisively handled.
But within the castle walls, everything had changed.
The official report, meticulously crafted by my mother and a tight-lipped Patricia, was a masterpiece of strategic omission. It stated that a powerful, unknown defensive artifact a one-time-use gift from a reclusive archmage had activated in the face of mortal danger, annihilating the intruders. It was a plausible lie, one that explained the overwhelming power displayed without implicating a toddler in a massacre. The truth was far too monstrous, far too world-altering, to be revealed.
I awoke not in my own lavish nursery, but in a small, temporary crib placed right beside my parents' massive four-poster bed. The atmosphere in their room was suffocatingly tender. My mother, the Iron Rose of House Wight, had barely slept. Dark circles had formed beneath her usually radiant eyes. She would wake at the slightest sound I made, her hand instantly reaching out to rest on my chest, as if to reassure herself that I was still breathing. Sleep, for her, had become a shallow, restless state of high alert.
My father, despite his exhaustion from managing the aftermath, would often just sit in the chair beside my crib for hours, watching me sleep with an expression I'd never seen before a mixture of protective fury and profound vulnerability.
The carefully constructed walls of ducal composure had crumbled.
That morning, a messenger arrived bearing the royal seal. My father read the dispatch with growing concern, his expression darkening with each line.
"What is it?" my mother asked, her voice strained.
"A formal inquiry from the capital," he replied grimly. "Apparently, someone reported 'unusual magical disturbances' in our territory last night. They're sending investigators."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. The timing was too convenient. Whoever was behind the assassination attempt had backup plans. If they couldn't kill me, they would expose me.
"How long do we have?" my mother asked, her hand instinctively tightening on the blanket covering me.
"Three days, maybe four if we're lucky."
Three days to prepare for questions we couldn't answer truthfully. Three days to reinforce a lie that was already stretched thin.
My own internal state was a battlefield. The adult mind within me replayed the events of that night endlessly. I had killed twenty people. Assassins, yes. A threat, absolutely. But the ease with which I had done it, the cold, detached efficiency guided by Tes and the raw fury of Kaelus, was deeply unsettling. The sight of vaporized flesh, the smell of burned blood these images haunted the quiet moments when my baby body was still and my mind was left to wander.
"Master," Tes would say during these introspective periods, her voice a stream of pure logic. "Your actions were necessary for survival. The emotional processing you are experiencing is a normal human response to lethal conflict."
"I know," I would reply mentally. "But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are different things entirely."
Yet, paradoxically, the infant body I inhabited felt none of it. It only felt the suffocating warmth of my mother's love, the reassuring presence of my father. This strange duality the trauma of an adult mind coupled with the innocent contentment of a baby's body was my new reality. I was learning to compartmentalize in ways I never had to before.
That evening, my father entered the bedroom to find my mother just as he had the night before sitting vigil by my crib.
"Seraphine," he said, his voice a low, gentle rumble. "He is safe. I've tripled the ward strength. Nothing will get through."
She shook her head, her silver hair catching the soft moonlight. "I know," she whispered, her voice fragile as spun glass. "But when I close my eyes, I see that dagger flying towards him. I see Patricia bleeding on the floor. It could have been him, Kaelen."
He sighed, the weight of his own barely contained fear evident in the sound. Revenge, no matter how thorough, couldn't erase the image of how close they'd come to losing everything. He looked from her tired face to my sleeping form, and a slow, thoughtful smile touched his lips as an idea formed.
"You know," he began, his tone shifting to something lighter, "this room feels a bit empty with just one crib. Perhaps our little lion cub needs a playmate. Another little one to dote on."
My mother looked at him with raised eyebrows, a ghost of her old humor flickering in her eyes. "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting, Your Grace?"
He winked, a gesture I'd never seen from the usually stern Duke. "I'm merely observing that this crisis has reminded me how precious family is. And that," he paused, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "it does mean I've been rather deprived of my nightly ducal duties."
My mother swatted his arm, but a genuine, small smile finally broke through her worry. "You are incorrigible," she chided, but the tension in her shoulders eased for the first time in days.
"I'm thinking about our family," he said seriously, squeezing her hand. "About giving Alarion a sibling to protect. About giving you another child to fuss over. The assassins wanted to destroy our peace. Every moment we spend in fear is a victory for them."
The seed had been planted. The idea of another child, another focus for her fierce, protective love, was perhaps the only thing that could begin to soothe the raw wound of her fear.
As my parents began to quietly discuss strategies for the royal investigators, their voices gradually growing warmer, more hopeful, I felt Kaelus pulse with what I could only interpret as determination. The little dragon might still be in his egg, but his instincts were already fully developed.
The game of politics and power had just become personal. Someone had made the mistake of threatening a Dragon King's contractor in his own home. They were about to learn why that was a spectacularly bad idea.