The Royal Training Grounds were a sprawling expanse of white stone and sand, usually vibrant with the shouts of the King's Guard and the rhythmic clang of steel. But today, the world had gone still. A localized, unnatural frost had crept over the arena, turning the summer air into a brittle, frozen cage. Rime coated the weapon racks, and the sand beneath Auther's boots crackled like broken glass.
At the center of this silent winter stood Queen Elizabeth. She was draped in heavy, obsidian silks that seemed to swallow the light, her back to the world as she stared out over the cliffside overlook. To the rest of the court, she was a statue of grief—a mother who had forgotten how to love. To Auther, she was a tear in the tapestry of existence.
Auther stopped ten paces behind her. He felt the familiar, sickening pressure in his chest—the same discordant hum he had first encountered at the Cathedral during the high mass. It was an ache in the marrow of his bones, a frequency that made his skin crawl.
"I've come to formally request your tutelage," Auther said. His voice was small, but it did not carry the high-pitched urgency of a child. It was the voice of a soul that had been forced to mature in the dark. "I need to understand the resonance within me. My core is changing, and you are the only one whose presence matches the weight of it."
Elizabeth did not move. She didn't even seem to breathe. "Find a master in the capital, Auther," she said, her voice a low, melodic chill that felt like a razor across the skin. "There are knights there who have spent decades perfecting the art of the blade. I have nothing to give you but silence."
"The masters in the capital feel human," Auther countered. He took a step forward, his boots crunching loudly on the frozen ground. The "wrongness" emanating from her was a physical wall, pushing against his chest. "I don't care who you are supposed to be. Since the day at the church, I've known. I don't care who you are. You felt wrong."
He choked back a shiver, his eyes narrowing as he stared at her retreating back. "Your mana… it doesn't flow like the others. It curdles. It feels foreign. Even when I was in the womb, I remember the cold. You feel like something from beyond the veil trying to wear a woman's skin."
Finally, Elizabeth turned.
The movement was too fluid, too precise to be natural. When her gaze met his, Auther felt the air leave his lungs. Her eyes weren't the warm, honeyed brown of the Royal portraits hanging in the gallery. They were a shimmering, unsettling silver, swirling like mercury in a bowl. There was no spark of life in them, only the vast, terrifying depth of a starlit void.
"That is because I stopped being human long ago," she said, her voice flat.
She let the silence stretch, letting the weight of the frost settle into Auther's bones.
"Your mother is dead, Auther. She has been for a long time."
The revelation hit Auther with the force of a physical blow. He recoiled, his breath hitching in the frozen air. The rage he had been nursing for years—the resentment of a neglected prince—suddenly flared into something white-hot and jagged.
"Then who are you?" he demanded, his voice cracking with a sudden, raw grief. "A ghost? An impostor? If she's dead, why are you standing here in her palace?"
"I am the shell that remains," Elizabeth explained. She didn't move to comfort him. She stood like a pillar of salt. "When you were conceived, the Heavenly Demon saw an opening. He didn't just want a vessel; he wanted a bridge. Because of the bond of our blood, he used your very existence to torment me. Every time I held you, every time I let my mana brush against yours, he used that link to destabilize your soul. He was trying to crack your spirit open from the inside out, using my love as the hammer."
Auther felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. He remembered the faint, blurry memories of his infancy—the way his mother would look at him from the doorway but never enter the room. He had thought it was hatred.
"My absence was the only shield I could give you," she continued, her silver eyes fixed on his. "I stayed away to collapse the bridge he was building. I let you grow up alone because the alternative was watching you vanish into the Demon's maw. If erasing myself made your life quieter, I would have done it a thousand times."
She turned her gaze toward the distant, jagged peaks of the Dragon Spine Mountains, where the shadows of ancient powers stirred. "But the world has grown greedy. The Dragon Clan smells the god-seed waking within you. Up until now, my distance kept the Demons at bay, but the Dragons are far more reckless. They intend to forcibly snatch you. They want to agitate the Heavenly Demon within you—to let the two powers duke it out so they can scavenge the divine remains from your corpse."
Auther looked at the woman who had traded her humanity for the strength to stand between him and the end of the world. He saw the logic of the soldier and the sacrifice of the martyr.
"You chose strength over being my mother," Auther said, the words falling with a hollow, cold clarity.
"Yes," she replied. No denial. No comfort.
Auther took a long, shuddering breath. He looked at his hands, then back at her. "As long as my mother is in there somewhere… I'm willing to trust you. Teach me how to survive them."
The sun finally dipped below the horizon, leaving the training grounds in a bruised purple twilight. There was no grand reconciliation. No hug followed the truth. Auther simply turned and began the long walk back to the palace.
He didn't forgive her. The void of his childhood was a wound that hadn't healed; it had simply been recontextualized. He wasn't a rejected son; he was a protected asset. The realization brought no warmth, only an exhausting sense of duty.
Auther reached the heavy oak doors of the palace. He stopped and looked back at his hands—small, yet containing the seed of something that terrified gods.
"If everyone is afraid of me," he muttered to the darkening hall, his voice hardening into something iron-clad, "then I'll decide what I become."
Behind him, still standing on the frozen overlook, Elizabeth watched his retreating figure. The silver in her eyes flared, consuming the last of the human brown. The mask of the distant, mourning Queen shattered, replaced by something ancient and fiercely protective. She felt the eyes of the hidden Dragon scouts in the distance, their greed pulsing like a heartbeat in the dark.
She reached out, and the frost on the stone pillars didn't just grow; it sharpened into crystalline blades. The air groaned under the weight of her true power, a force she had suppressed for years just to keep her son's soul from shattering.
"It's time for this stupid little charade to end," she whispered into the wind, her voice carrying a promise of total annihilation that echoed against the palace walls. "My boy will not be anyone's plaything."