The silence that followed the wagon's departure was worse than the screams. Kaelen remained motionless in the shadows, his hands buried in the cold earth, feeling the pulse of his own impotence. Each beat of his heart struck like a hammer driving a nail: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
He closed his eyes, and the Academy returned as a fevered nightmare. He saw himself in the training yards of Vallenburg, sweating beneath a pale sun, steel clashing against the sons of other nobles. He had been average. Never the best with the spear, never the fastest with the dagger. He had waited for time to grant him glory—but time had given him only debt.
If I had stood out… The thought was a dull blade sawing at his sanity. If he had won the Winter Tourney, if he had earned a commendation on the border patrols, perhaps the Crown would have granted an exemption. Perhaps the name Valerius would still have carried enough weight for Marshal Vorn to hesitate before demanding the tithe of blood.
But Kaelen had not been a hero. He had been an expense. An investment with no return. While his father twisted himself into pleas and watched his harvests seized, Kaelen ate the Academy's fine bread and polished armor that was never truly his. The ruin of the house was not merely an accounting error; it was proof of his insufficiency as an heir.
He was the son who did not save his father.
The brother who stood still while his own flesh was taken.
The Judgment of Nature
A harsh sound above him broke the cycle of self-loathing. In the beams of a partially collapsed barn to his left, a smaller drama unfolded.
A raven's nest was wedged between rotting timbers. A black serpent, thick as a man's wrist and scaled like charcoal, climbed in silence. It moved with methodical hunger, its forked tongue tasting air heavy with despair. Inside the nest, the chicks—gray down and open beaks—trembled in absolute vulnerability.
The serpent struck, its neck coiling back, ready to swallow its first life.
But the air split with a hoarse, furious cry. A larger raven, its body marked by scars and missing feathers, dove like a bolt of onyx. There was no hesitation. The bird did not weigh odds or venom; it simply collided.
Talons pierced the snake's hide, the beak hammering at the predator's eyes with suicidal ferocity. The serpent hissed and writhed as the bird beat its wings in a frenzy of pure, protective rage. The raven did not fight for glory or tithe; it fought because it was the last line between its bloodline and oblivion.
Even wounded, the bird did not retreat. It tore a strip of flesh from the serpent and forced it to fall from the beams into the mud below—defeated, confused.
The Awakening of the Predator
Kaelen watched the raven land on the edge of the nest, panting, wings smeared with reptile blood. The bird expected no medal. It simply remained, guarding what was its own.
Below, on the dirt road, the tracks left by Inquisitor Malphas's wagon were still fresh in the mud. The carriage of iron and suffering was heading south, toward the mists of Ostrava.
Kaelen rose. His knees cracked, and the pain in his shoulder—where the insignia had been torn away—throbbed with a new heat. Hatred began to fill the space where shame had lived.
He was no longer a cadet.
No longer a noble.
He was only what remained after a fire.
— I failed to be the shield — he murmured, his voice rough and unfamiliar to his own ears. — So I will be the knife in the back.
He had no Vallenburg steel, but as he looked around, he saw his father's body on the butcher's table. He walked toward it with heavy steps. He ignored the ruined face of the man who had sired him and focused on what mattered: a butcher's cleaver, long and stained, forgotten by the peasants in their cowardly flight.
Kaelen took the weapon. The weight was wrong, the balance poor—but the steel was cold.
He looked to the horizon, where the dust of the royal escort still lingered. Ostrava was a den of pirates, slavers, and shadows—a place where Church law was merely a mask for depravity. If his mother and sister were to be sold as flesh, he would ensure the buyer paid with every drop of fluid in his veins.
With his torn cloak snapping in the wind, Kaelen Valerius began his hunt. He did not move like a soldier; he moved like the serpent he had watched earlier—sliding along the edges of the world, ready for the strike the Academy's walls would never have dared to teach.