I was born to the smell of sawdust and the sound of a hammer striking iron.
Kalton was a loud city, but my world was small. It consisted of my father's workshop, the smell of cedar, and the laughter of my two younger brothers. My father, Gillian, was a master carpenter. He was a man who could look at a rough, ugly log and see a throne hidden inside it. I idolized him. While other children played tag in the cobbled streets, I sat on a stool in the corner, watching his chisel curl ribbons of wood from a block of oak.
My brothers, Dax and Prim, were different. They were wild spirits. They didn't care for the precision of joinery; they cared for the thrill of the unknown.
Father was a hard man, but he loved us fiercely. He worked himself to the bone, taking commissions from the highborn, determined that his sons would be scholars, not laborers.
"You will have a better life than this apron, Roxas," he would tell me, wiping sweat from his brow.
I never had the heart to tell him that the apron was all I ever wanted.
The day the world changed, I was thirteen.
It was a crisp autumn evening. The three of us had ventured into the dense forests bordering Kalton. I was there to work, my axe biting rhythmically into a birch tree I had selected for Father. Dax and Prim, aged ten and eight, were there to play.
"Don't go too far out," I called out, breathless from the swing.
"We won't!" Dax shouted back, waving a stick he was using as a pretend sword.
Two hours passed. The sun began to dip below the tree line, casting long, skeletal shadows across the forest floor. I finished stripping the branches from the fallen birch and stood up, stretching my sore back.
"Dax! Prim! Time to head back!"
Silence.
"Dax?"
I walked toward where I had last seen them. I walked for five minutes, then ten. Annoyance started to curl in my gut. They were going to be late for dinner, and Father would be furious.
Then, I heard it.
A scream. High-pitched, terrified, and abruptly cut short.
Prim.
The annoyance vanished, replaced by ice-cold dread. I gripped the handle of my woodcutting axe and sprinted. I tore through the underbrush, ignoring the thorns that snagged my clothes and scratched my face.
I burst into a small clearing, a drainage ditch carved by years of rain. The scene before me stopped my heart.
Four wolves.
They weren't monsters, just timber wolves, but to a boy of thirteen, they looked like demons. Their fur was matted and grey, their lips curled back to reveal yellowed teeth. Three of them were circling something on the ground.
Dax was ten feet away, pressed against a tree, paralyzed with fear, holding his stick out with trembling hands.
But Prim...
One of the wolves had its jaws clamped around Prim's waist.
I didn't think. I didn't scream. A calm, cold rage took over my body. I wasn't a warrior; I was a carpenter. But in that moment, I was a butcher.
I launched myself into the ditch.
The wolf biting Prim didn't hear me coming until it was too late. I swung the heavy woodcutting axe with both hands. I didn't aim for the head; I aimed for the spine.
CRUNCH.
The sound was sickening, wet and heavy. The blade buried itself deep into the wolf's back. The beast yelped a sound that turned into a gurgle and collapsed, releasing Prim.
The other three wolves whipped around, their hackles raised, snarls rumbling in their chests. They were shocked. Prey didn't usually fight back.
"Get back!" I roared, planting my feet between the wolves and my brother's broken body. I wrenched the axe free from the carcass with a spray of dark blood.
The largest wolf, the alpha, lunged.
It moved faster than anything I had ever seen. I barely had time to react. I couldn't swing the axe in time, so I shoved the haft of the handle forward like a shield.
The wolf's jaws clamped onto the wood, inches from my face. Hot, fetid breath washed over me. The force of the impact knocked me onto one knee, my boots sliding in the mud.
The wolf thrashed, trying to rip the axe away. I grit my teeth, my muscles screaming. I let go of the handle with one hand, balled my fist, and punched the wolf directly in its sensitive snout.
The beast flinched, loosening its grip for a split second.
That was all I needed. I kicked the wolf in the stomach to create space, scrambled to my feet, and swung the axe in a wide, horizontal arc.
The blade caught the wolf in the side of the neck. It wasn't a clean kill, but the force was enough to send the beast spinning away, howling in agony.
I stood panting, covered in blood that wasn't mine, swinging the axe wildly at the empty air. "COME ON! WHO'S NEXT?"
The remaining two wolves looked at their dead packmate, then at the thrashing alpha, and finally at the demon with the axe. Their survival instinct kicked in. They turned tail and vanished into the darkening woods.
I didn't chase them. I dropped the axe and fell to my knees beside Prim.
"Prim? Prim, hey, look at me."
It was bad. Prim's small body was a mangled shape. His legs were twisted at unnatural angles, and his stomach... I choked back bile. The bite marks were deep. Too deep.
Prim's eyes were open, staring at the canopy of leaves above, but the light was already gone. He wasn't breathing.
"Damn it..." I whispered, my voice breaking. "Damn it, Prim."
I pulled my little brother's body into my lap, ignoring the blood soaking into my clothes, and rocked him back and forth as the sun finally set.
When Father and Dax returned with men from the city twenty minutes later, they found me sitting in the dark, surrounded by dead wolves, holding my brother and refusing to let go.
Months passed. The funeral was a blur of black clothes and rain.
No one blamed me. The town called me a hero for saving Dax. But I knew the truth. I hadn't been fast enough.
Dax, however, took it the hardest. The adventurous spark in his eyes died that day, replaced by something harder. He blamed himself for leading Prim into the woods. At the graveside, Dax swore an oath that he would train, that he would become strong enough to kill every monster that dared to threaten his family.
Father, heartbroken and terrified of losing another son to the wild, accelerated his plans.
The next year, he sent me away.
Father had spent years crafting furniture for Duke Vanhall, one of the most influential nobles in the region. The Duke had taken a liking to my father's work, and when Father begged for a favor, the Duke obliged.
I was enrolled in the Royal Academy in the capital city of Etrean.
It was a place of high society, etiquette, and politics. It was a snake pit.
For the first year, I hated every second of it. The noblemen sneered at my callused hands and my commoner accent. They called me "The Carpenter" as an insult. I hated the stiff collars, the pointless debates, and the way they looked down on honest work.
But I didn't break. I couldn't. Not after Prim.
I couldn't match them in poetry or history, so I matched them in the training yard. I channeled every ounce of rage I had left from the forest into the sword. When they swung with elegance, I swung with brutality. I didn't fence; I fought.
By the end of my first year, the insults stopped. They didn't like me, but they respected the fact that I could knock them into the dirt.
In my second year, Dax arrived.
He was different now. Cold. Focused. He joined the Academy not to learn politics, but to master the blade. We watched each other's backs, two commoner brothers holding their own against the elite. We were a unit again, forged in grief.
But my third year changed everything.
That was the year Sylvia transferred in. She was from a neighboring kingdom in the far North, a place of snow and iron.
I was starstruck the moment she walked into the lecture hall. She had chestnut hair that shimmered like gold in the sunlight and eyes that held a quiet strength. She was elegant, poised, and completely out of my league.
So, naturally, I decided to make a fool of myself.
I tried to impress her. I tried to use fancy words and ended up mispronouncing them. I tried to show off my "gentlemanly" walk and tripped over a rug.
But Sylvia didn't sneer. She laughed. It was a bright, musical sound that made the stuffy academy feel alive.
We became unlikely friends. She hated the Academy even more than I did. She despised the arranged marriages, the fake smiles, and the constant maneuvering for power. She saw the callous on my hands not as a sign of low birth, but as a sign of freedom.
By the time I was sixteen an adult in the eyes of the kingdom I was done.
"I'm leaving," I told her one night by the academy gardens. "I can't do this anymore. I'm a carpenter, Sylvia. Like my father. I'm going to build things, not destroy them."
Sylvia looked at me, her blue eyes searching my face. "Take me with you."
I blinked. "What?"
"My father is arranging a marriage for me," she said, her voice trembling with a rare vulnerability. "To a man three times my age. I won't do it, Roxas. I want to live. I want to be free."
She grabbed my hand, her grip surprisingly strong. "Let's go."
And so, we ran.
Years of hard work followed. I finished my apprenticeship, traveling from town to town, building a reputation not on my father's name, nor the Duke's, but on my own.
By the age of twenty-four, I was a master. We moved to the village of Brent, a quiet settlement on the outskirts of the kingdom, nestled near the mountains. It was beautiful, peaceful, and far away from wolves and noblemen.
I built a cottage with my own hands. I married Sylvia under the oak tree in our yard.
Now, at twenty-seven, I stood in the bedroom of that cottage, my heart hammering against my ribs harder than it ever had in a fight.
It was a freezing winter night. The wind howled outside, but inside, the fire roared.
Dantean, the village herbalist, an old man with wild grey hair and a scruffy mustache turned away from the bed, holding a small bundle wrapped in linen.
"It is a boy," Dantean rasped, his voice gruff but kind.
He placed the bundle into Sylvia's arms. She looked exhausted, her hair plastered to her forehead, but her smile was radiant.
I walked over, my legs trembling slightly. I looked down.
The baby was tiny, with a tuft of dirty blonde hair. He looked fragile, yet perfect.
"Great job, Sylvia," I whispered, kissing her forehead. "I'm so proud."
"He needs a name," she murmured.
I looked at my son. "Percival. Let's name him Percival."
"Percival," she tested the word. "Welcome to the Wilder family, little guy."
I reached out a massive, callused finger to stroke the baby's cheek.
Suddenly, the baby's eyes snapped open. They were greyish-blue, sharp and focused.
Percival didn't cry. He didn't squirm. Instead, he slowly lifted his tiny hand up into the air, staring at it with an expression of pure, baffled surprise.
I chuckled, sliding my arm around my wife. "Look at that. He's discovering his hands already. He's going to be a genius, I can tell."
Little did I know just how right I was.