Four months of silence.
Four months of listening, of catching syllables in the dark, of piecing together meaning from tone and context like a madman assembling a puzzle with no picture. For sixteen weeks, Noah had been a prisoner in his own skull, understanding nothing but the raw emotion behind the sounds: Isolde's weary affection, Theo's guarded tension, Seraphine's distant melancholy.
Then, as winter's first frost painted the windows of the estate, the lock clicked.
It started with a word. "Alaric." They said it when they fed him, when they changed him, when they gazed at him with eyes that held a thousand secrets. He came to understand it was his name—this new body's name. The name of a child who had died, perhaps, so he could take his place.
From there, the language unraveled like a tapestry pulled at a single thread.
Isolde—his grandmother, though her face held none of the softness he associated with the word—spoke it most clearly. She used simple phrases, as if addressing a simpleton. "Drake blood," she would whisper while rocking him, "holds the mark. Always has. Always will." The name Drake echoed through the manor like a curse. It was a name that had once commanded armies, once held estates that spanned provinces. Now it clung to a crumbling manor house on the edge of Valerion's western frontier, a forgotten chapter in the kingdom's history.
The Drake family was ruined nobility. Alaric understood that now, though no one had said it outright. He saw it in the threadbare carpets, the empty rooms where furniture had been sold, the way Theo—his father—disappeared for days to "manage holdings" that clearly produced nothing. He saw it in the way Isolde's fingers trembled when she wrote letters to creditors, her pen scratching out promises soaked in pride.
Then there was Seraphine.
His mother.
She was even more beautiful up close than through the veil of incomprehension. Her violet eyes—those damned purple eyes—held galaxies of sorrow. When she held him, which was rare, she did so as if he might shatter or cut her. She would speak in that lilting, otherworldly voice, saying things he only half-grasped until one afternoon when the fog finally cleared enough for him to understand.
"The Sovereign's line must endure," she murmured, staring at the fire. "Even here. Even now."
The Sovereign.
The word that had haunted him since death.
Isolde had spoken it too, always with a capital letter in her tone. "The Sovereign's will," she would say, or "The Sovereign's price." But last night, during a hushed conversation in the library (Alaric couldn't walk, but he'd learned to roll his crib near doors), he'd heard the connection that turned his blood to ice.
"They say Prince Varyan Duskveil manifests the mark at thirteen," Theo had said, his voice low and bitter. "The king celebrates. Meanwhile, our Alaric was born with it burned into his flesh, and we hide in exile."
"The king fears what he doesn't control," Seraphine had replied, her voice hard as diamond. "He fears a true sovereign."
Varyan Duskveil. King's son. The name from the throne room. The man—or boy—who could erase existence. And they were comparing him to Alaric.
To him.
The power in this world wasn't just strange—it was hereditary. A birthright that manifested as marks on the skin, as eyes that glowed with violet light, as abilities that could make the dead rise or the living kneel. Alaric had seen it already: Isolde lighting candles with a flick of her finger when she thought no one watched. The way shadows pooled at Theo's feet like obedient dogs. The faint shimmer around Seraphine when she was angry, as if reality itself recoiled from her.
He had the mark. The sigil. The violet eye on his palm that had killed him once already.
Today, as Isolde dressed him in a coarse woolen tunic—the best they could afford—she finally spoke the truth he'd been waiting for.
"You're four months old, little Drake," she said, tying the laces with arthritic fingers. "The Sovereign's magic awakens at the turn of the seasons. We must be ready. For when the king's hunters come—and they will—they'll test you."
She looked at him then, really looked, and for the first time, Alaric saw not the weary grandmother but the iron matriarch of a fallen house.
"Survive," she whispered. "If not for us, then for the blood that burns in your veins. The blood that screams you are more than this exile."
She set him down in his crib. As she turned to leave, Alaric finally managed to shape his infant mouth around the words he'd been practicing for weeks.
His voice was a fragile, warbling thing, barely a whisper. But it was clear.
"I will."
Isolde froze.
She turned slowly, her brown eyes wide with something that might have been horror or hope. She stared at him—the baby who had just spoken in perfect, fluent Valerian.
Outside, a raven landed on the windowsill, its eyes glowing the same violet as Seraphine's.
It watched him. It waited.
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