He walked through the battle as if unbothered by the bloodshed surrounding him, a long black coat billowing slightly behind him. His golden eyes carried the majesty of a king, even in a place like this. Even as men died all around him, none of it touched him, his clothes remaining unmarred in the face of the great battle, as if the world itself were bending to accommodate his passing as he calmly walked forward. I knew what he was: a Sovereign, a wielder of magic.
Magic was heavily restricted in every kingdom known to man after the Great Culling. Any child with a spark of magic was taken away to be trained in secret for the safety of all humanity. Many did not survive the training, and so those who remained were truly exalted and terrible in their power. The terror that had been gripping me released slightly as I saw the insignia on his arm: a crown wreathed in flames. He was a member of our kingdom. I watched transfixed as he strode through the battle towards the enemy's leaderThen suddenly he stopped, and the world seemed to hold its breath. His eyes locked onto mine, and the fear returned, immobilizing me as he shifted his course.
He was on me before I could draw a full breath, a movement so fluid it seemed to transcend the chaos of the battlefield. His coat whispered against the trampled grass, the sound impossibly clear amid the clang of steel and screams of dying men. The scent of night-blooming jasmine and something metallic, like fresh blood on cold iron, washed over me. Up close, I could see the faint, intricate patterns that shifted like living smoke across the fabric of his coat, patterns that weren't thread but woven shadow.
His gloved fingers were gentle, almost reverent, as they tilted my chin up. The touch was electric, a jolt that had nothing to do with fear. "You," he said. His voice was not what I expected. It wasn't a king's booming command, but a low, resonant murmur that vibrated through my bones, a sound meant for empty cathedrals and private confessions.
"What are you doing in a place like this?"
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I couldn't answer. My tongue had turned to lead in my mouth, and the words tangled somewhere in my throat before they could form. The Sovereign studied me with those golden eyes, and I felt as though he were reading something written beneath my skin, a text I had never known existed.
"Sixteen winters," he said, not a question. "Perhaps seventeen. They've dressed you in armor two sizes too large and handed you a sword you barely know how to hold." His gaze flicked to the blade hanging limp at my side, and something shifted in his expression. It wasn't pity, exactly. Pity would have been easier to bear. This was something closer to recognition, as if he were seeing an old wound reflected back at him.
The battle continued to rage around us, but it felt distant now, muffled like sounds heard through deep water. I realized with a start that the air itself had changed. Where moments ago the stench of blood and churned earth had overwhelmed everything, now there was only that strange jasmine scent and the cool stillness that seemed to emanate from him.
"You shouldn't be here," he continued, and his hand moved from my chin to rest on my shoulder. The weight of it was grounding, an anchor in a world that had been spinning since the horns first sounded at dawn. "You shouldn't be anywhere near a place like this. Do you understand why?"
I shook my head, not trusting my voice.
"There's magic in you." He said it simply, the way one might observe that the sky was overcast or that rain was coming. "Dormant, unformed, but present nonetheless. I can see it the way you might see a coal buried beneath ash, waiting for the right breath to catch flame."
"That's impossible." The words came out cracked and hoarse. "They test everyone. When I was seven, they tested the whole village. I wasn't..."
"The spark doesn't always show itself on command. Sometimes it sleeps for years, waiting for the right catalyst." His eyes swept across the battlefield, taking in the carnage with an expression of weary familiarity. "War has a way of waking things that would rather stay dormant. Trauma. Loss. The moment when the body understands, truly understands, that it might cease to exist." He looked back at me. "What happened today? Before I found you. What pushed you to this edge?"
The memory rose unbidden: Tam's face, his eyes going wide with surprise as the spear took him through the chest, his hand reaching for mine as he fell. Tam, who had been beside me since we were children, who had taught me to fish and lied to the recruitment officers about his age so we wouldn't be separated. Tam, whose blood was still drying on my sleeve.
The Sovereign watched the grief move across my face, and he nodded slowly as if I had spoken aloud.
"Loss," he said quietly. "Always loss. The cruelest teacher, and the most effective." His grip on my shoulder tightened briefly, not painful but present, reminding me that I was still alive when Tam was not. "What's your name?"
"Edrin." My voice was steadier now, though I couldn't have said why. "Edrin Vale."
"Edrin." He repeated it as though testing its weight on his tongue. "I am Caelan Ashford, Third Sovereign of the Burning Crown." The title rolled off him like water, meaningless ceremony compared to the intensity of his focus. "By law, you must be taken for training. A spark like yours, left untended, will eventually consume you from the inside out, or it will lash out at those around you when you least expect it. Either way ends in tragedy."
He paused, and something complicated moved behind his eyes.
"I remember what it was like," he said, his voice dropping lower. "Being found. Being told that everything you thought you knew about yourself was wrong, that your body housed something dangerous and valuable in equal measure. I was not much older than you are now." His hand remained on my shoulder, steady and warm through the ill-fitting armor. "The training halls are harsh by necessity, but they are not cruel without purpose. You will learn to master what lives inside you, and you will emerge stronger than you can presently imagine."
I thought of Tam, cold and still somewhere behind me. I thought of my village, of my father's flour-dusted hands and my mother's voice calling me in from the fields at dusk. Everything I had known was already gone, scattered by war and conscription and now this revelation that felt like the ground splitting beneath my feet.
"I don't feel any different," I said, and the words sounded foolish even as they left my mouth. "I don't feel magical."
"You wouldn't. Not yet." A ghost of something that might have been a smile crossed his features. "The feeling comes later, once you've learned to listen for it. For now, you'll simply have to trust that I know what I'm seeing." He released my shoulder and extended his hand, palm up, waiting. "Come with me, Edrin Vale. There's nothing left for you on this battlefield but a meaningless death, and I find myself unwilling to allow that."
The sounds of battle were fading now, the clash of steel growing more distant as one side or the other began to break. I looked at his outstretched hand, at the faint patterns of shadow still coiling across his coat, at those golden eyes that held neither warmth nor coldness but something more unsettling: certainty.
I reached out and placed my hand in his.
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His fingers closed around mine, and the world lurched.
I had no other word for it. One moment I was standing on the churned and bloodied grass of the battlefield, the screams of dying men still echoing in my ears, and the next I was somewhere else entirely. The transition wasn't violent, but it was disorienting in a way that made my stomach heave and my knees buckle. Caelan caught me before I could fall, one hand steady against my back as I gasped for air that suddenly tasted clean and cool.
"Breathe," he said. "The first time is always the worst. Your body doesn't understand what happened to it."
I managed to lift my head and take in my surroundings. We were standing on a ridge overlooking the battlefield, high enough that the soldiers below looked like pieces on a game board. From here I could see the full scope of the conflict: the broken lines of infantry, the cavalry wheeling on the flanks, the scattered pockets where men still fought and died in desperate clusters. The banner of our kingdom flew above a shrinking knot of defenders near the center, surrounded on three sides by enemy forces.
We were losing. Even I could see that, with my limited understanding of tactics and strategy. The enemy had more men, fresher troops, and they were pressing their advantage with methodical precision.
"Stay here," Caelan said, releasing me once he was certain I could stand on my own. "Watch, if you wish. This is what a Sovereign is for, Edrin. This is what you may one day become, if you survive the training."
I stared at him, not understanding. "You're going back? Alone?"
"I was never meant to interfere unless the battle turned against us." He looked down at the carnage below with an expression I couldn't read, something caught between resignation and resolve. "It has turned. So now I will do what I was sent to do."
"But there are thousands of them." The words came out high and thin, edged with a hysteria I couldn't quite suppress. "Even if you're... even with magic, how can one person..."
He looked at me then, and for just a moment I saw something ancient in those golden eyes, something that had witnessed horrors I could not begin to imagine.
"Watch," he said again, and then he was gone.
I saw him reappear at the base of the ridge, a solitary figure in black standing between our failing army and the enemy advance. He looked impossibly small from this distance, a single dark stroke against the mud and blood of the battlefield. The enemy soldiers nearest to him hesitated, perhaps recognizing what he was, perhaps simply confused by the appearance of a lone man walking calmly toward their lines.
Then Caelan raised his hand, and the world came apart.
I don't know how else to describe it. The air itself seemed to ignite, not with fire but with something more fundamental, a light that burned without color and a sound that wasn't quite sound but rather a pressure against reality itself. The enemy front line simply ceased to exist. One moment there were hundreds of men advancing with spears and swords, and the next there was only empty space and drifting ash.
He walked forward into the gap he had created, and death walked with him.
I watched him carve through an army the way a scythe cuts through wheat. Arrows turned to cinders before they could reach him. Cavalry charges broke against invisible walls and scattered in panic as their horses screamed and threw their riders. Men who tried to flee found the ground beneath them turning to quickite, pulling them down into darkness. Men who tried to fight found their weapons shattering in their hands, their armor crumpling like parchment, their bodies lifted and thrown aside by forces they could neither see nor comprehend.
It wasn't a battle. The word felt obscene even in the privacy of my own mind. Battles implied two sides, implied contest and struggle and the possibility of either outcome. This was something else entirely, something that belonged to the old stories my grandmother used to tell, stories of gods walking among mortals and reshaping the world according to their whims.
The enemy army had numbered perhaps eight thousand when I first climbed this ridge. Within minutes, half of them were dead or dying. The rest had abandoned any pretense of military discipline and were running, scattering across the field like mice fleeing a fire. Caelan did not pursue them all. He let the runners go, focusing instead on any pocket of resistance foolish enough to stand its ground, methodically erasing each one until there was no organized force left to oppose him.
The whole thing took less than an hour.
I sat down at some point during the slaughter, my legs no longer willing to support me. I couldn't look away, even when my stomach heaved and my eyes burned and every instinct screamed at me to turn and run as far from this place as I could possibly get. I had been afraid of Caelan when he first approached me on the battlefield. I had felt the terror of standing before something vast and unknowable, something that could end me as easily as I might crush an insect beneath my boot.
Caelan appeared beside me without warning, and I flinched so violently that I nearly toppled backward off the ridge. He caught my arm and steadied me, his grip gentle despite the destruction those same hands had wrought moments before. His coat was still immaculate, unmarred by blood or dirt or any evidence of what he had done. Only his eyes had changed, the gold dimmed somehow, as though the act of wielding so much power had cost him something I couldn't perceive.
I looked at him, then down at the battlefield where the survivors of our army were emerging from their defensive positions, staring at the carnage around them with expressions of stunned disbelief. Somewhere down there, Tam's body lay cold and still, one casualty among thousands, a death that had seemed so devastating an hour ago and now felt almost insignificant against the scale of what I had witnessed.
"I could do that?" My voice didn't sound like my own. "One day, I could..."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not." He released my arm and stood beside me, looking down at the field of ash and bodies. "Power manifests differently in each of us. You may become something like me, or you may find your gifts lie in gentler directions. Healing. Warding. The magic takes many forms." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. "But yes. The potential for this lives in you now. The training will teach you to wield it responsibly, to understand the weight of what you carry."
I thought about my village, my parents, the simple life I had expected to live before the war took everything. I thought about Tam, who had died trying to protect me, who would never know that his death had somehow awakened something monstrous and miraculous in his closest friend.
"I'm afraid," I said, because it was the only honest thing I could offer.
"Good." Caelan placed his hand on my shoulder, and I braced myself for the lurching sensation of being carried through space. "The ones who aren't afraid are the ones who don't survive. Fear will keep you careful, keep you humble, keep you human even when the power tries to convince you that you're something more."
The world folded around me once more, and the battlefield disappeared behind us like a nightmare fading in the light of dawn.