[POV: Caia Voss]
Forty-three dead at the riot. Seventeen confirmed Sparkweave members. Twenty-six "associates."
Caia stood in the armory, sword cleaned, armor polished, and counted. The numbers came easily. They always did. Numbers didn't have faces. Numbers didn't scream.
The armory smelled of oil and leather, the familiar scent of a room she had known since childhood. Racks of swords gleamed dully in the torchlight—her father's collection, each blade worth more than a common soldier earned in a year. Some of them had names. Some of them had histories. All of them had killed.
Guards trained in the courtyard below. The clang of practice swords drifted up through the window, distant and rhythmic. Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound of men preparing for violence they hoped would never come. Routine. Predictable. Safe.
The youngest was fourteen.
She traced her finger along the edge of her blade and felt nothing. The calluses on her palm were too thick now—years of training had armored her hands the way her father's conditioning had armored everything else.
I've killed more than forty-three in a single night. This shouldn't bother me.
But the riot was different. She hadn't swung the blade that killed most of them. She hadn't been the one to stand in the plaza and watch their bodies fold like paper, hadn't heard the wet crunch of bones shattering inside their own skin, hadn't seen the blood pour from their eyes and ears and noses as her father's Anchor Heart crushed them from the inside out.
"Associates." That's what the report called them. It means we don't know if they were guilty. It means we killed them anyway, just in case.
She didn't flinch at the thought. She had stopped flinching years ago. Flinching was weakness, and the Steel Warden did not show weakness.
Her reflection stared back at her from the polished blade—distorted, stretched, barely human. A stranger she didn't recognize.
She set the blade down.
A portrait hung on the far wall.
Varis Calder, younger, in ceremonial armor. The painting had been commissioned when he first became Regent—back when his hair was still dark, his jaw still sharp, his eyes still bright with the ambition that had carried him to Stoneveil's throne. The artist had softened those eyes. Made them look paternal. Kind. The kind of man who would shelter a frightened child, not the kind who would order forty-three people crushed in the street.
Caia's gaze drifted to the portrait without meaning to. She had seen it a thousand times. It had never bothered her before.
"You have my brother's eyes."
Voss's dying words. The words she couldn't shake. The words that had followed her through the night and into this afternoon like a ghost she couldn't exorcise, whispering in the quiet moments between thoughts.
"You're not Caia Calder. You're Caia Voss."
The torches flickered. The portrait seemed to watch her—the painted eyes of her father tracking her across the room, patient and accusing. As if he could see what she was thinking. As if he had always known.
It doesn't make sense. It can't make sense.
Voss was a coward. Cowards lied to save themselves. That was the rule. That was what she had always believed. But Voss hadn't been begging when he said it. He hadn't been trying to bargain for his life or buy himself another minute. He had been looking at her like... like he knew her. Like he had been waiting fifteen years to tell her something, and he had finally run out of time.
"My brother's eyes." Whose brother? Voss said "my brother." If Voss was my father's brother... that would make me...
She met the painted eyes of Varis in the portrait.
She looked away first.
She had been eight years old when it happened.
That day's memory surfaced on its own—sharp and bright and unwanted, rising up from the place where she had buried it for fifteen years. She tried to push it away. It pushed back harder.
Before the closet. Before the silence. Before everything changed.
They had been eating dinner. Her mother had made lamb stew—her father's favorite—and the three of them sat at the small table in the kitchen because the dining hall was too cold in winter. Her father was telling a story about a hunting trip, gesturing with his spoon, and her mother was laughing, and Caia was trying to sneak a piece of bread to the dog under the table.
Then came the knock at the door—three sharp raps that silenced everything.
Her father's face changed. The laughter died. He looked at her mother, and something passed between them—a conversation without words, the kind parents had when they didn't want children to understand.
"Caia." Her mother's voice was too calm, too controlled—the voice of someone pretending not to be afraid. "Go to my room. Hide in the closet behind my dresses. Don't come out until I call for you. Do you understand?"
"But Mama—"
"Now, Caia."
Her mother's hands were shaking as she pushed Caia toward the stairs. At the top, Caia looked back. Her father was walking toward the door, his hand on the sword at his hip. Her mother stood in the center of the room, watching the door like it was a snake about to strike.
That was the last time she saw them alive.
She remembered the closet behind her mother's dresses. The smell of lavender sachets and cedar wood. She had pressed herself against the wall, knees to her chest, hands over her ears. But she could still hear them.
Voices. Boots on the floor. Men she didn't recognize. Her father's voice, defiant, demanding to know what they wanted. A question she couldn't make out—something about documents, about loyalty, about a name she didn't recognize. Then came the sound—a wet, crunching finality that she would never forget. Her mother's scream cutting short, replaced by a silence that was somehow worse.
After the silence, she had crawled out.
Her parents lay in the center of the room. Bodies twisted at angles that bodies weren't supposed to twist. Blood pooling from their eyes, their ears, their noses, their mouths—dark and thick and wrong. Their armor had crumpled like tin. Their bones had shattered inside their own skin.
Just like the bodies at the riot.
She crawled to her mother. Shook her shoulder. "Mama? Mama, wake up." Her voice was small. Scared. The voice of a child who still believed that if she asked nicely enough, the world would give her what she wanted. "Mama, please."
No response. Her mother's eyes stared at nothing.
She tried to wipe the blood from her mother's face with her sleeve. "I'll clean it. I'll make it better. I'll fix it, Mama, I promise." But the blood just smeared, spreading across her mother's cheek in a red-black stain. It was still warm. It soaked into the fabric of her dress.
She sat between them. Held both their hands—her father's already cold, her mother's still cooling. The dog lay by the fireplace, still and silent. She didn't look at it. The silence stretched on and on and on. Then she started to cry—quiet at first, hiccups and sniffles. Then louder. Then screaming. Screaming until her throat was raw and her lungs burned and there was nothing left inside her but emptiness.
She heard footsteps in the doorway.
She looked up, expecting another soldier. Expecting to die the way her parents had died—bones shattered, blood pouring from every opening, crumpled on the floor like a broken doll.
Instead, one man stood in the doorway. Unarmored. Without a weapon. Fine clothes—the kind nobles wore to court, silk and velvet and silver thread. He looked at her with something that might have been pity. Or might have been calculation. She was too young to know the difference.
"The Crown is cruel," he said softly. "They take without mercy. Your parents... they wouldn't give them what they wanted. They protected something precious."
He knelt in front of her, bringing himself to her eye level, and his voice was gentle—the kind of gentle that adults used when they wanted children to trust them.
"I can protect you from them. I have influence. But you'll need to be strong."
"You survived because you're strong. I can make you stronger."
She didn't know his name. She didn't know what he wanted. She only knew that he was the first person today who hadn't hurt her. The first person who had looked at her like she mattered.
She took his hand.
He raised me. Trained me. Made me the Steel Warden.
I owe him everything.
I hated the soldiers who killed my parents. For fifteen years, I trained to kill soldiers like them. Varis gave me that purpose. Varis gave me my revenge.
But the way those people died at the riot... the blood from their eyes... I've seen that before. I know what that looks like.
The armory.
Present.
The torches seemed dimmer now, their light weaker, their shadows longer. The armory felt smaller—the walls pressing in, the ceiling pressing down, the air pressing against her lungs like a weight she couldn't shift.
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Too fast. Too loud. The rhythm of a body that knew something was wrong before the mind caught up.
The bodies at the riot. The blood from their eyes. The way they folded.
Just like my parents.
Her hand trembled. She steadied it. The sword in her grip felt foreign—heavy and awkward, as if she had never held a weapon before in her life.
The soldiers who killed them... they didn't have that power. Ordinary soldiers can't make blood pour from eyes. Ordinary soldiers can't crush bone without touching it. Ordinary soldiers can't do what was done to forty-three people in the plaza yesterday.
The pieces connected. One by one. Slow and terrible and undeniable.
Only one person in Stoneveil can do that.
Her grip on the sword hilt tightened until her knuckles went white.
He was there. The day my parents died. He walked in without armor, without weapons, dressed in fine clothes. The soldiers were already gone. Because they weren't soldiers at all. There were no soldiers. There was only him.
The sword clattered to the stone floor. The sound rang through the empty armory.
He killed them. My parents. He killed them himself. And then he took me.
Voss was my uncle. My father's brother. Varis killed my parents. Then he raised me to kill for him. He made me his weapon. He made me love him.
And yesterday—
He made me kill my own uncle.
Her stomach lurched. She pressed a hand to the wall to steady herself. The stone was cold beneath her palm.
I didn't know. I didn't know.
Her jaw tightened. Her hands shook.
Does it matter?
She didn't know how long she stood there.
The torches burned lower. The shadows stretched longer. The sounds of the courtyard below faded as the guards finished their drills and returned to their barracks, leaving only silence and the distant creak of the palace settling into night.
Caia stared at the sword on the floor. Her sword. The blade she had carried for seven years, since the day Varis had presented it to her on her sixteenth birthday. He had called it a symbol of her purpose. A reminder of what she was meant to be.
His weapon. His tool. That's all I ever was.
She knelt. Her fingers found the hilt—cold now, the leather grip familiar beneath her calluses. She lifted it. The weight felt different than it had this morning. Heavier. Or maybe she was just tired.
She walked to the whetstone in the corner of the armory. Sat on the wooden stool. Drew the blade across the stone in a long, slow stroke.
Shhhhk.
The sound filled the silence. Rhythmic. Meditative. The motion she had performed ten thousand times, until it required no thought at all.
Shhhhk.
Her reflection moved across the blade with each stroke—fragmented, distorted. A monster sharpening its claws.
Shhhhk.
I want to kill him.
The thought was simple. Clean. Undeniable. But the execution...
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of "Father." Fifteen years of orders, of obedience, of killing for him. Can I point this blade at him? Can I stand in front of the man who raised me and watch him die?
Shhhhk.
He made me. He gave me purpose. He gave me a name.
He also murdered my parents and raised me on their blood.
The steel gleamed in the torchlight. Sharp enough to shave with. Sharp enough to sever bone.
I don't know how. I don't know when. But I know what I'm going to do.
She held up the blade. Her reflection stared back—steady now, cold, resolved. The Steel Warden. Her father's creation. Her father's mistake.
He made me to kill his enemies. He never considered that one day, I might decide he was one of them.
The torches guttered. The armory fell into darkness, lit only by the faint glow of moonlight through the window.
Caia sat alone with her sword and waited for dawn.