17th of September, 908.
The day.
I woke before the sun did, which was saying something because I hadn't actually slept. Not really. I'd spent most of the night lying on my back staring at the ceiling, running through the plan in my head like a general reviewing battle formations, except the battlefield was a courtyard full of children and the enemy was a five-year-old with superhuman hearing and zero respect for secrets.
Six. She was turning six today. Or whatever version of six we'd settled on, since I'd picked her birthday out of thin air based on the day I pulled her out of that cage. Close enough. It was hers now.
I rolled out of bed in the dark, pulled on my boots, and slipped out through the back door of the orphanage without making a sound. A Year of sneaking through Empire streets had given me exactly one useful life skill, and today it was being deployed in the service of pastry retrieval.
The streets were empty. Predawn mist clung to the cobblestones and made everything look soft and silver, like the whole city had been wrapped in cotton while it slept. My breath came out in little clouds. Autumn was settling in properly now, the mornings carrying that clean bite that made you walk faster whether you meant to or not.
Madam Corvel's bakery was already glowing from the inside when I arrived, warm yellow light spilling through the front window and the smell hitting me from half a street away — butter, sugar, vanilla, and something deeper and richer that I couldn't name but that made my stomach growl like a traitor. I knocked twice, and the door swung open almost immediately.
"Director!" Madam Corvel beamed, flour dusted across her apron and both cheeks, looking like she'd been at war with dough since midnight and was winning decisively. "Come in, come in. She's ready."
She led me to the back of the shop where the cake sat on a wide wooden board, and I stopped walking.
Three tiers. The bottom was vanilla with a thin honey glaze that caught the lamplight like amber. The middle was strawberry cream — Sylvie's favourite, because of course it was, the little dragon hoarded every strawberry at breakfast like they were gold coins. The top tier was something I hadn't seen before: a pale green layer with flecks of real mint leaf pressed into the frosting, delicate and bright, like a tiny forest had been baked into sugar.
"Mint and white chocolate," Madam Corvel said, watching my face with the satisfaction of someone who already knew the answer. "For her hair. Seemed fitting."
Tiny sugar flowers in green and yellow cascaded down the sides, and perched on the very top was a little fondant girl with wild hair and pointed ears, arms flung out wide, mid-sprint, mouth open in what was clearly a yell of pure joy. She'd even put a gap between the front teeth.
I stared at it for longer than I should have.
"That's her," I said quietly. "That's exactly her."
Madam Corvel patted my arm. "I know, dear. Now get it home before the sun gives you away."
I carried the cake through the streets like it was made of glass, both arms underneath the board, walking at the pace of someone defusing a bomb. Every uneven cobblestone was a threat. Every stray cat that darted across my path nearly gave me a heart attack. I have fought monsters three times my size without flinching, but the thought of dropping this cake made my palms sweat.
I made it. Kitchen door, counter, cake safely landed. I covered it with a cloth and let out a breath I'd apparently been holding for six blocks.
Phase one: complete.
By the time the sun crested the rooftops, the operation was in full swing.
Lea arrived at half past seven, right on schedule, looking entirely too composed for someone about to spend four hours entertaining a child who had once tried to interrogate a bird. She wore her long black coat, hair pulled back, and when she stepped into the courtyard Sylvie spotted her from across the yard and let out a shriek that probably registered on seismographs.
"LEA!" Sylvie launched herself like a small green-haired cannonball and latched onto Lea's arm with both hands, feet dangling a good six inches off the ground. Lea didn't even sway. She just looked down at the tiny creature hanging from her bicep and smiled that big-sister smile.
"Morning, little one. How do you feel about an adventure today?"
Sylvie's eyes went enormous. "What kind of adventure?"
"The kind with pastries and a bookshop and possibly a fountain you're not supposed to climb but probably will anyway."
"I'M READY." She hadn't even let go of Lea's arm. She just hung there, vibrating with excitement, legs kicking.
Lea glanced at me over Sylvie's head and gave the smallest nod. I nodded back.
Go. I'll handle the rest.
They disappeared through the front gate, Sylvie chattering at roughly nine hundred words per minute about a dream she'd had involving a fish that could sing, and the moment they rounded the corner I turned to face the courtyard and clapped my hands once.
"Alright. We've got four hours. Let's move."
The orphanage erupted.
Rena materialised beside me with her list — the same list, now annotated in three different colours of ink with timestamps and delegation notes. She was thirteen and she terrified me. "Streamers team is already on the east wall," she reported, scanning the courtyard like a field commander. "Banner team needs another twenty minutes for the paint to dry. I've stationed Clark and Tommy on lookout duty at the front gate in case Sylvie comes back early."
"Clark and Tommy? Together?" I raised an eyebrow. "They'll start wrestling within ten minutes."
Rena gave me a look that said she had already accounted for this. "I told them if either of them leaves their post, they don't get cake. They haven't moved."
Absolutely terrifying. I left her to it.
The courtyard transformed over the next few hours. Green and yellow streamers went up along the walls, crisscrossing overhead in drooping arcs that caught the breeze and fluttered like something out of a storybook. Paper flowers appeared on every table — some beautiful, some that looked like they'd been assembled by someone wearing mittens, all of them perfect because small hands had made them. The banner stretched across the far wall, enormous, painted in wobbly letters that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY SYLVIE with a lopsided sun in the corner and what I think was supposed to be a picture of her but looked more like a green blob with legs. It was the most beautiful banner I'd ever seen.
The kitchen staff worked miracles. Plates of food appeared in waves — sandwiches cut into little shapes, bowls of fruit, pitchers of juice, and a truly absurd quantity of strawberry tarts because someone had correctly predicted that Sylvie would lose her mind over them. I uncovered the cake and set it in the centre of the main table, and when the kids saw it a hush fell over the courtyard that lasted exactly two seconds before someone whispered "it has a little her on top" and the hush dissolved into barely contained screaming.
Jack took up his position near the gate. He'd been practising his surprise yell for a week. Miss Dena told me she'd heard him rehearsing in the bathroom.
Mia found me while I was adjusting the tablecloth for the third time, her fox ears flat with anxiety. "Mr. Xerlectus," she whispered, "Sylvie asked me yesterday if I knew why everyone was acting strange and I said 'I don't know anything about any parties' and she looked at me really weird and I think my ears twitched and I'm so sorry—"
I crouched down to her level. "Mia. Did she figure it out?"
"I… I don't think so? She just said 'okay' and walked away but she had her suspicious face on—"
"Then you did great."
Her ears perked up cautiously. "Really?"
"Really. You held the line, soldier."
She beamed so hard her whole face scrunched up, then darted off to help with the flowers. I watched her go and felt something warm settle in my chest. These kids, man, precious. Every single one of them.
I went to my office for the last piece. Bottom drawer. Under the paperwork Sylvie's tiny investigation hadn't reached yet. I pulled out the wrapped cloth and held it in both hands for a moment.
The carved wooden figure was warm from the drawer. The craftsman had captured her mid-stride, arms out, wild hair flying, that gap-toothed grin splitting her face. He'd even gotten the angle of her ears right — slightly forward, the way they tilted when she was excited, which was basically always. I ran my thumb across the tiny face and my throat did something I wasn't prepared for.
I wrapped it back up carefully and slipped it into my pocket.
A little before noon, Clark came sprinting around the corner at full tilt, nearly wiping out on a patch of wet grass, and screamed at the top of his lungs: "THEY'RE COMING! THEY'RE COMING! I CAN SEE MISS LEA'S COAT!"
Two hundred and thirty-five children scrambled into position behind tables, under streamers, beside the banner, crammed into every available hiding spot the courtyard offered. Some of them were hidden about as well as boulders in a bathtub, heads and elbows sticking out everywhere, but the effort was there and the silence was — for about fifteen seconds — genuinely impressive.
Someone sneezed. Someone else giggled. A muffled "shhhh" rippled through the crowd like a wave.
I stood near the gate, heart hammering harder than it had any right to. This was ridiculous. I'd fought a seven-foot armoured giant for four straight hours without my pulse climbing this high. But this was different. This was Sylvie.
I heard her voice before I saw her — that bright, unmistakable stream of chatter floating up the path: "—and THEN Lea showed me the book with the pictures of the ocean and she said fish don't actually sing but I think they do because why else would they open their mouths so much—"
She came through the gate holding Lea's hand, green hair bouncing, cheeks flushed from the morning's adventures, and she was halfway through her next sentence when she stopped.
Her eyes went wide.
She saw the streamers first. Then the banner. Then the tables loaded with food. Then the two hundred and thirty-five children who could not contain themselves for one more second.
"SURPRISE!!!"
The courtyard detonated. Jack, true to his word, delivered the single loudest yell I had ever heard from a human child — a sound so enormous it startled birds off the roof and made Miss Dena visibly jump. The other kids swarmed, cheering and clapping and bouncing, a tidal wave of noise and colour and joy.
Sylvie stood frozen in the middle of it all.
Her mouth was open. Her eyes were wet. Her hands had come up to her cheeks and stayed there, pressing in like she was trying to hold her own face together. She looked at the banner, at the flowers, at the cake with its little fondant version of her on top, and then she looked at me.
I was smiling. Couldn't help it. Didn't try.
"Happy birthday, bug."
That broke her. She ran at me full speed — Sylvie never moved at anything less than full speed — and hit my legs so hard I actually staggered. Her arms locked around my waist and she buried her face in my shirt and I felt her whole body shaking with the kind of crying that isn't sad at all. Just overwhelmed. Just too much feeling for a body that small to hold.
I put my hand on her head. That wild mess of green hair, warm from the sun.
"You knew," she mumbled into my shirt, voice thick and wobbly. "You knew the whole time and you didn't tell me."
"Course I didn't tell you. That's what 'surprise' means."
She pulled back just enough to look up at me, face blotchy and grinning so wide it looked like it hurt. "Papa, this is the best day of my whole life."
I had to look away for a second. Just a second. Because my eyes were doing something and I had a reputation to maintain around here.
"Come on," I said, clearing my throat. "There's cake."
What followed was three hours of pure, unfiltered chaos. The kind that only happens when you put two hundred and thirty+ children in a courtyard with unlimited food and zero adult supervision beyond me, Miss Dena, and Rena's iron-willed organisational presence.
Sylvie cut the cake with a wooden knife that was mostly decorative, holding it in both hands with intense concentration, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth. When the first slice came free and she saw the strawberry cream layer, she gasped so hard she almost inhaled a sugar flower. She ate three pieces. Then a fourth, smaller one that she claimed was "just a taste" while strawberry cream covered both cheeks and one ear.
Rena produced the crown — braided green ribbon, carefully woven into a circle with little yellow paper flowers threaded through it. She placed it on Sylvie's head with a solemnity that suggested she'd rehearsed this in a mirror. "For our princess," Rena said, and Sylvie touched the crown with both hands and didn't take it off for the rest of the day.
The kids sang. Badly. Beautifully. Forty-three voices that couldn't agree on the melody or the tempo or even all the words, belting out a birthday song that devolved into clapping and cheering before the second verse. Sylvie conducted them with one hand while eating a strawberry tart with the other.
Games erupted — tag, of course, with Sylvie as the dragon because dragons aren't nice. She chased the younger kids in circles while the older ones cheered from the sidelines and Jack somehow ended up on the roof again despite my explicit instructions.
Late in the afternoon, when the courtyard had settled into that warm, drowsy hum that happens after too much sugar and too much running, I found Sylvie sitting on the steps by my office. The crown was slightly crooked. Her dress had grass stains on both knees. She was holding Mister the rabbit in her lap and watching the last of the sunlight turn the courtyard gold.
I sat down beside her.
"Hey, bug. Got one more thing for you."
She looked up at me, eyes still bright, and I pulled the wrapped cloth from my pocket and set it in her hands. She unwrapped it carefully, the way she always handled things she sensed were important — slowly, with her whole attention.
The carved figure sat in her small palms.
Sylvie didn't say anything for a long time. She just looked at it, turning it over gently, fingers tracing the tiny ears, the outstretched arms, the face that was unmistakably hers. Her thumb found the gap in the teeth and stayed there.
When she finally spoke, her voice was very small and very steady.
"It looks like me."
"It is you."
She held it against her chest with both hands, like something precious and breakable, and leaned sideways until her head rested against my arm. The crown slipped further, nearly falling off. She didn't fix it.
"Papa?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for finding me."
The courtyard was quiet now. The sun had dipped below the roofline, leaving everything in that soft amber light that made the world look gentle. Most of the kids had drifted inside for the evening. Somewhere behind us, Miss Dena was supervising cleanup with her usual quiet efficiency. A few paper flowers had come loose from the tables and were drifting across the grass like slow, colourful ghosts.
I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her a little closer.
"Thank you for letting me."
We sat there on the steps until the first stars came out, the wooden figure pressed between her hands and her heart and the pendant, the ribbon crown finally giving up and sliding down over one eye. She didn't move it. She was asleep before the second star appeared, head heavy against my side, breathing slow and even, the faintest trace of strawberry cream still on her cheek.
I didn't move either.
Not for a long time.
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AN
Hoped you guys enjoyed this one. Had to give Sylvie her day.
Lmk how it hit in the comments
see you next chapter