"How fares my boy today?"
Arthur didn't flinch beneath the touch. He held his breath for half a beat, locking his gaze onto hers with absolute, luminous cheer.
"Never better! I was just reminiscing about the home the three of us lived in, in the Southern Plains. Did you need an extra hand dragging in the split logs for the hearth?"
His voice rang out light and clear, perfectly masking the acid churning at the back of his throat.
His mother didn't answer right away. She stood over him in her worn wool tunic, the leather straps of her tracking bracers stained dark from years of rain and monster grease. Her gaze—honed by decades of scanning tree lines for charging beasts—did not sweep across his face. It bored straight through it. She looked at the frantic pulse throbbing beneath her thumb. She tracked the unnatural, rigid symmetry of his grin, drifting down to where his knuckles were tucked out of sight, trying to hide the crimson smears staining his homespun trousers.
Her fingers slid up to the cartilage of his ear.
She twisted.
"Ow! Ow—hey!" Arthur hissed, his immaculate posture disintegrating instantly as he craned his neck to follow the pull, his hand flying up to swat uselessly at her wrist. "Mom, what was that for?!"
"A fine attempt," she said dryly, releasing the pinch but keeping her hand resting against his shoulder. "Truly, Arthur. If you put half as much effort into your footwork as you do peddling falsehoods beneath my roof, you'd have felled this entire grove by noon."
Arthur rubbed his reddened earlobe, his chin dropping against his chest. The false smile dissolved, leaving behind the pale, gaunt exhaustion he had spent the last hour trying to bury. He stared at his boots, feeling humiliatingly transparent.
"I wasn't lying," he muttered, the syllables falling flat and childish into the dead pine needles. "I'm fine."
She didn't chide him again. Instead, the brisk, no-nonsense edge melted from her posture, replaced by a quiet, devastating tenderness. She gathered the rough wool of her skirt and lowered herself onto the damp bark of the fallen hemlock beside him.
Without a word, she reached out and took his right hand, pulling it from his lap.
Arthur tried to curl his fingers inward to hide the shredded skin, but she was an active mage; her grip was supple, deceptively ironclad, and entirely immovable. She turned his palm upward. The knuckles were purplish-black with bruising, the raw tears packed with forest loam.
She sighed—a quiet, tremulous breath that rattled softly in her throat. Raising her other hand, she traced a calloused thumb across the back of his bruised wrist, right where an elemental crest or a divine patron seal should have bloomed months ago.
"Arthur," she murmured, her voice stripped of every defense. "Look at me."
He swallowed hard, fighting the sudden, hateful sting behind his eyelids, and forced his head up.
Her gray eyes were luminous in the twilight, reflecting neither disappointment nor pity, but a profound, aching understanding that made his throat ache twice as much.
"You possess courage that frightens your father and me," she said softly, holding his battered hand between both of hers, warming the numb flesh with her ambient body heat. "And you possess a mind sharper than any scholar our family has ever bred. Do not do this to yourself, Arthur. Never weigh your worth against another over circumstances outside your command."
The words struck like physical blows, vibrating against the iron wall of his 14th-quotient ceiling.
"It isn't fair," the words slipped past his guard before he could bite them back, ragged and thin. "Cedric didn't even train. He woke up, and the heavens just… handed him the sky."
"The heavens are capricious, and gods care nothing for our tears," she answered, her voice dropping into an unyielding whisper. "A blessing is a gift, Arthur. It is not an identity. It is not character. Magic can be granted in a heartbeat, but discipline must be forged in the marrow of your bones. So long as you pour your blood into the effort—so long as you refuse to surrender your dignity—no soul living has the right to shame you for the outcome. Least of all yourself."
The cold wind rustled the pine needles above them. Arthur sat perfectly still, listening to the steady cadence of her breathing.
No soul living has the right to shame you for the outcome.
The words washed over him, but as they settled into his core, his mind seized them, twisting them through the furnace of his relentless pride.
Dignity?
What dignity exists for an unblessed commoner?
To watch Cedric ascend the imperial towers while I rot behind a plow? To stand by while Mother sells her body to the guild for twenty coppers a contract, dragging her knees through frozen mud until a beast rips her open because her sons couldn't carry the weight?
No.
The dull, vacant haze bled from his irises, instantly replaced by a spark of pure, predatory iron. It was cold. It was terrifyingly sharp.
The Human God forged magic long before blessings ever existed—yet he still stood as the greatest mage in creation.
If he carved miracles from the void without a patron's mercy, I can accomplish at least a tenth of that.
Arthur leaned forward. Before she could read the sudden shift in his eyes, he threw his arms around her neck, burying his face into the worn wool of her shoulder and squeezing with enough ferocity to make his forearms ache.
She stiffened in surprise for a fraction of a second before melting into the embrace, wrapping her arms around his small back and stroking his unkempt hair with a soft, trembling chuckle.
"My sweet boy," she whispered against his ear.
Arthur pressed his eyelids shut, inhaling the scent of her hair—pine smoke, rain, and the faint, bitter tang of dried herbs.
Thank you, Mother.
He committed every seam of her worn coat, every rough ridge on her knuckles, to the deepest archives of his memory.
I will repay every drop of sweat you gave for us. Every single drop.
No more dangerous hunting contracts. No more tracking horned predators through waist-deep snow for tavern bounties. A manor in the capital. Retainers to carry your burdens. Silk dresses and warm hearths that never burn low—whatever you point toward, I will buy it all.
Arthur pulled back. When his eyes met hers again, the mask was gone, replaced by a fierce, incandescent grin—not of hollow cheer, but of absolute, unshakeable hunger.
"Understood, Mother," he said, his voice ringing crisp and resolute in the twilight. "I won't peddle falsehoods. And I won't lose."
Before she could speak, he pushed off the log, snatching his notched wooden practice blade from the roots. He offered her a crisp, theatrical salute with the flat of the ash-wood timber, turned on his heel, and bounded into the darkening canopy, his boots eating up the hemlock loam with renewed, terrifying focus.