The darkness didn't last long enough.
I came back to consciousness in pieces. First, sound: a low murmur of voices, the crackle of torches. Then smell: cold stone, old smoke, and beneath it, the coppery tang of blood—my blood, from where Lior's fist had split my temple. Last, feeling: the rough texture of stone flags against my cheek, and a deep, chemical heaviness in my limbs that made moving impossible.
I managed to open one eye. The other was swollen shut.
I was in the great hall. Not at the high table where I'd sat for feasts, but on the floor before the dais, like a supplicant or a prisoner. Torches burned in their sconces, throwing long, dancing shadows. It was still night, or maybe just before dawn—the high windows were black.
Figures stood around me in a half-circle. My father, still in his night robe, his face like something carved from the cliff itself. My mother beside him, one hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes huge in a face the color of parchment. Lior, now dressed, his expression a mask of righteous anger. And Elyra, wrapped in a heavy cloak, her face buried in her hands, shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
A performance. Every bit of it.
"He's awake," Lior said, his voice cold.
Father stepped forward. He didn't look at me with anger. He looked at me with… assessment. Like a butcher evaluating a cut of meat. "Can you stand?"
I tried. My arms trembled, pushed. I got to my knees before the drug-weakened muscles gave out and I slumped back to the stone. The movement made my head swim nauseatingly.
"Bring a chair," Father said.
Two guards—men I'd known since childhood, men who'd taught me to hold a practice sword—hauled me up and dumped me into a heavy wooden chair. They didn't meet my eyes.
Father took his seat on the dais. Mother sat beside him, her back rigid. Lior stood at his right shoulder, a sentinel of virtue. Elyra remained slightly apart, the grieving victim.
This was my trial. And it had already been decided.
"Kaelen of House Veal," Father began, his voice echoing in the near-empty hall. "You were found outside the Lady Elyra's chambers in the dead of night, in a state of intoxication, after having forced her door. The lady herself claims you attempted to violate her honor. What do you say?"
My tongue felt thick, woolen. I forced words out. "I didn't… I was drugged. Carried there."
"Drugged by whom?"
"I don't know. The wine…" I looked at Maika, who stood in the shadows near the hall's entrance. His face was pale, stricken. He wouldn't look at me.
"The wine you drank with your brother Maika," Father said, as if reading from a script. "Who reports you were deeply intoxicated and speaking of your… displeasure… regarding the Lady Elyra's upcoming betrothal to Lior."
So that was the story. Drunken jealousy. A sordid, believable little tale.
"I was upset," I said, the words clumsy. "But I wouldn't… I never would have…"
"Yet you were found at her door," Lior cut in, his voice sharp. "Trying to get in. Elyra was terrified."
I looked at her. She peeked through her fingers, and for a heartbeat, our eyes met. In hers, I saw no terror. I saw calculation, and beneath that, a flicker of something harder. Shame, maybe. Or triumph.
"Elyra," I whispered. "Tell them the truth."
She let out a choked sob. "The truth is you scared me! You were drunk, you were raging… you said you wouldn't let Lior have me…"
"I never said that!"
"You did!" Her voice rose, trembling with perfect, practiced fear. "You said… you said if you couldn't have me, no one would!"
A perfect line. The kind of thing a jealous, drunken fool would say. The kind of thing that sealed a man's fate.
Father's face didn't change. "Is there any evidence to support your claim of being drugged and moved against your will?"
I grasped for it. "Maika. He was with me. He knows…"
All eyes turned to Maika. He stepped from the shadows, his face a conflict of misery. "We drank together, Father. Kael was angry. Heartbroken. He said… he said many things. But when I left him, he was in his chamber. Asleep."
A lie. But a lie told with such palpable guilt that it sounded like reluctant truth.
"So you did not see him drugged. Or carried."
"No, my lord."
"But you confirm his state of mind was volatile. That he felt wronged by the change in betrothal."
Maika's throat worked. "Yes, my lord."
That was it. The final nail. My own brother, my shadow, my friend—he'd handed them the motive. Maybe he thought he was helping. Maybe he'd been told what to say. It didn't matter.
Father nodded slowly. He looked at me, and in that look, I saw the verdict. It wasn't about truth. It was about damage control. A scandal involving his sons on the eve of war? Unthinkable. One son would have to be sacrificed. The useful son, the heir, would be protected. The other… the numbers son… was expendable.
"Kaelen of House Veal," he said formally. "You stand accused of dishonor, of breaking guest-right, of the attempted violation of the Lady Elyra of House Avelaine. The evidence and testimony are clear. Do you have anything further to say in your defense?"
I looked around the circle. At my father's stone face. At my mother's silent tears. At Lior's barely concealed triumph. At Elyra's performance. At Maika's guilty avoidance.
They were all strangers.
"No," I said, my voice dead. "I have nothing to say."
"Then judgment is passed." Father rose. "For crimes against honor and household, you are sentenced thus: the hand that sinned will be forfeit. The eye that looked with lust will be burned away. The cheek will bear the mark of the beast forever. And twenty lashes for every year you have drawn breath upon this earth."
The numbers clicked in my head, cold and automatic. Twenty years. Four hundred lashes.
I would be dead long before they finished.
Mother made a small, broken sound. "Aldric, please…"
"Silence," Father said, without looking at her. "Justice is not gentle. It will be carried out at dawn, before the household. Let all see the price of dishonor." He turned to the guards. "Take him to the cellar. Keep him under watch."
The guards hauled me up from the chair. As they dragged me away, I caught one last glimpse of my family. Lior had his arm around Elyra. Maika had turned away, shoulders hunched. Mother was weeping openly now. Father just watched me go, his expression unreadable.
They took me down to the cellars beneath the keep. Not the wine cellar, but the old storage room where ice cut from the mountain lakes was kept in summer. It was bitterly cold, the air sharp enough to hurt my lungs. They chained me to an iron ring in the wall, my back against stone so cold it felt like it was burning.
Then they left me alone in the dark.
***
Time lost meaning. The cold seeped into my bones. The drug's after-effects left me shivering, nauseous. I drifted in and out of a waking nightmare, flashes of memory blending with dread of what was coming.
The hand. They would take my left hand. My sword hand, though I'd never been much of a swordsman. The hand that had held Elyra's when she was scared of thunderstorms. The hand that had carved our initials in the watchtower.
The eye. Which one? Probably the right. So I could still see to serve, but with impaired depth. A permanent reminder.
The brand. The Veal sigil—a winged boar. They would burn it into my cheek. I would carry the mark of my own house like a cattle brand.
The lashes. Four hundred. My back would be hamburger. I'd die of infection, if the shock didn't kill me first.
This was my family's justice.
A sound at the door. A scrape of metal, the groan of hinges. A slice of torchlight cut through the dark, and a small silhouette slipped inside.
Lysenne.
She carried a blanket and a waterskin. Her face was swollen from crying, her eyes red-rimmed and huge.
"Kael," she whispered, rushing to me.
She tried to drape the blanket over my shoulders, but the chains prevented it. She settled for tucking it around my legs. Then she uncorked the waterskin and held it to my lips. The water was so cold it made my teeth ache, but it washed the foul taste from my mouth.
"I'm sorry," she choked out. "I'm so sorry, Kael."
"It's not your fault," I said, my voice raspy.
"I tried to tell Father! I told him I saw Maika put something in your cup! But he wouldn't listen! He said I was confused, that I was trying to protect you…"
So she'd seen. She'd tried. And been dismissed. A child's testimony against the needs of the house.
"You shouldn't be here," I said. "If they catch you…"
"I don't care." She wiped at her face with a trembling hand. "It's not right. None of it is right. Elyra… she's been smiling when no one's looking. I saw her."
Of course she was. She'd won. She'd gotten the heir, the hero, and removed the inconvenient second son who loved her too much for comfort.
"Listen to me, Lys," I said, forcing my voice to be calm. "After tomorrow… I won't be here. You need to be careful. Keep your head down. Don't fight them. Just… survive."
Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. "Where will they send you?"
"I don't know." The frontier, probably. The Meat Pit. A place for broken things.
She hugged me then, awkwardly around the chains, her face pressed against my shoulder. She was shaking. I wished I could hug her back.
"I'll remember you," she whispered fiercely. "I'll never forget you, Kael. Never."
"I know," I said, my throat tight. "Now go. Before they find you."
She squeezed me once more, then gathered her things and slipped out. The darkness felt heavier after she left.
***
Dawn came, marked not by light—the cellar had no windows—but by the sound of the household above stirring. Then footsteps, many of them. The door opened, and guards entered, their faces set and grim.
They unlocked the chains. My muscles screamed in protest after hours of cold immobility. They didn't let me walk; they half-carried, half-dragged me up the stairs, through the lower corridors, and out into the main courtyard.
The entire household was assembled.
Servants, guards, stable hands, cooks. They stood in silent rows along the walls of the courtyard. Their faces were a blur of pity, curiosity, and in some cases, satisfaction. The noble son brought low. A spectacle.
In the center of the courtyard stood the execution block. Old, dark oak, stained with the patina of age and other, darker substances. Beside it, a brazier glowed, heating an iron brand. A whipping post stood nearby, its wood scarred from generations of use.
My family watched from the raised steps of the keep entrance. Father, Mother, Lior, Elyra. Maika stood a little behind them, his face a sickly gray.
They forced me to my knees before the block. The morning air was bitingly cold, but I barely felt it. A strange calm had settled over me. This was happening. There was no escape. All that was left was to endure.
Old Anric, the stable master who'd taught me to ride, stepped forward. In his hands, he carried a hatchet. His eyes were watery, his hands trembling.
"I'm sorry, lad," he murmured, so low only I could hear. "I'm so sorry."
Father's voice rang out, cold and clear. "Let the sentence be carried out. The hand first."
Two guards grabbed my left arm, stretched it out across the block. They strapped it down with leather bonds, tight enough to cut off circulation. My fingers went numb immediately.
I looked at my hand. My own hand. I tried to memorize it. The scar on the knuckle from a childhood fall. The ink stain on the middle finger. The Veal signet ring on my thumb, a heavy thing with the boar sigil.
I thought of all the things this hand had done. Held a book. Held a sword. Held Elyra's hand. Waved to ships.
"Please," I heard myself whisper. "Father, please."
He didn't even blink.
Anric raised the hatchet. He was crying openly now, tears cutting through the grime on his cheeks.
The first blow was not clean.
The blade bit into my wrist with a wet, crunching sound. Pain exploded, white-hot and absolute. A scream tore from my throat, a sound I didn't recognize as my own. Blood fountained, hot and shocking against the cold air.
Anric sobbed, wrenching the blade free. He raised it again.
The second blow finished the job.
There was a soft, wet pop as the hand came free. It fell onto the block, fingers curled, palm up, as if begging. The signet ring glinted stupidly in the morning light.
I stared at the stump. Blood pulsed from it in rhythm with my heartbeat. *Thump. Thump. Thump.* The world tilted, greyed at the edges. Someone poured vinegar over the raw meat of the wound, and new, unimaginable pain brought me back from the brink of unconsciousness.
They didn't give me time to recover.
The blacksmith stepped forward with the brand. It was white-hot, the Veal boar glowing like a captive star. Two guards seized my head, forcing it to the side, exposing my right cheek.
I smelled my own hair singeing. Then the iron touched flesh.
There was a hiss, like meat dropped on a griddle. My right eye erupted in agony. The fluid inside boiled, burst. The world on that side vanished into a cauldron of pain. The smell of my own cooking flesh filled my nostrils.
They held the iron there for a three-count. When they pulled it away, the pain didn't diminish. It settled in, deep and permanent.
I was sobbing now, animal sounds I couldn't control. Snot and tears and blood mingled on my face.
But they weren't done.
They dragged me to the whipping post. Stripped what remained of my tunic. The cold air kissed the hundreds of old scars from practice swords, from childhood. Manacles clamped around my remaining wrist, hauling my arm above my head until my toes barely scraped the stones.
Father himself counted.
"One."
The lash came down. Knotted leather, soaked in brine. It split my skin open like a ripe fruit. I arched against the post, a scream ripping from my raw throat.
"Two."
Another. Overlapping the first.
"Three."
"Four."
By ten, I'd stopped screaming. The world narrowed to the rhythm of the lash and the wet sound of my own blood hitting the flagstones.
By twenty, I was no longer in my body. I floated somewhere above, watching with detached interest as the thing that used to be Kaelen Veal was systematically dismantled.
By forty, my back was a single sheet of fire. I could feel things hanging. Skin. Maybe muscle.
By sixty, I lost count. The world was a red haze of pain. Each breath was a ragged, wet effort.
At one hundred, Father called a pause.
He stepped close. The smell of clove and wintergreen filled my nostrils. He spoke quietly, for me alone.
"This is mercy," he said. "Death would be kinder, but the Frontier Legion will finish what weakness began."
The final twenty lashes were a formality. I didn't feel them. I was gone.
When they cut me down, I collapsed into the pool of my own blood and vomit. The stones were warm.
Father's boots stopped by my head. "You are no longer my son. You are no longer of this house. At dawn tomorrow, you will be given to the levy. If you die there, no one will mourn. If you live…" He paused. "Do not come back."
They dragged me away by my ankles. My flayed back scraped across the stones, leaving a red trail. They threw me into the stables, into a stall reeking of old hay and horse piss.
The door slammed. The bar dropped.
Darkness.
***
I woke to the smell of rot and the scuttling of rats.
My body was a single, screaming monument to pain. The stump of my arm throbbed with a deep, sick ache. My branded cheek felt like it was still on fire. My back… I couldn't feel my back as separate parts anymore. It was just a solid mass of agony.
I was lying in filthy straw. My own blood had soaked it, dried sticky and black. Flies buzzed around the stump.
The stable door creaked open. Old Garvin the huntsman slipped in, his face like cracked leather in the dim light. He carried a waterskin and a heel of hard bread.
He didn't speak. He knelt, lifted my head, and trickled water into my mouth. I choked, swallowed. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever tasted.
He fed me the bread in small pieces, like I was a child or an animal. When I'd eaten, he sat back on his heels.
"I was there when you were born," he said, his voice rough as gravel. "You came out quiet. Never cried. Just looked at the world like you already knew it would hurt you." He touched the brand on my cheek with a calloused finger. "This is wrong. This is evil."
Then he was gone.
Time passed in a haze of pain and fever. I drifted in and out. Sometimes I dreamed of the watchtower. Of Elyra laughing. Of carving our initials. Sometimes I dreamed of the hatchet falling.
The door opened again. Maika.
He stood over me for a long time. He smelled of soap and clean linen. He'd washed away the stink of the cellar, of guilt.
"Kael," he said, and my name in his mouth was a wound.
I didn't answer.
"I didn't want this," he whispered. "You have to believe me. It was only supposed to make you sleep. Lior said… Lior said if you were found outside her door, drunk and helpless, Father would break the betrothal quietly. Send you to a monastery. Not… not this."
He knelt. Reached out as if to touch me, but pulled back when he saw the ruin of my arm.
"I measured the dose myself. It wasn't supposed to hurt you."
I found my voice. It was a rasp, barely human. "They'll kill you if you tell."
He froze. "What?"
"Lior. He'll kill you. Slowly. To protect the story."
Maika's face crumpled. He made a sound like a wounded animal. Then he fled.
I lay in the dark and counted my heartbeats. Each one brought me closer to dawn.
***
Dawn came the color of ashes.
The guards came with chains. They wrapped my torso in a filthy horse blanket, tying it with rough rope that ground into the lashes on my back. Iron manacles clamped around my remaining wrist and both ankles. A chain linked me to five other wretches—poachers, deserters, madmen.
They marched us out through the postern gate, the gate used for refuse and shame.
The household lined the walls to watch.
Servants I'd broken bread with. Stable boys I'd given sweets. They watched in silence. Some wept. Most just stared.
I looked for faces.
Mother stood on the high parapet, wrapped in black, her face a ghost's face. Lysenne clung to her skirts, her mouth open in a soundless scream. She was shouting my name. I could see her lips form the shape. *Kael. Kael. KAEL.*
Lior stood at the gatehouse in full armor, Elyra beside him in pale blue. She didn't look at me. She rested her head on his shoulder.
Maika was nowhere.
Father stood at the center of the gate, wearing his cloak of office. He signed a parchment—my conscription to the Frontier Levy—with a flourish, as if signing a trade agreement.
Ser Darric took the parchment. "Tell the Frontier Legion this one is to serve in the worst trench. No mercy. No ransom. If he dies, burn the body and scatter the ashes. No stone. No name."
The guards shoved us forward.
I stumbled. My chains clanked. My bare feet found sharp stones. I fell, was hauled up, shoved again.
I looked back one last time.
Mother had broken free. She was running along the parapet, her black cloak flying, her arms reaching out as if she could pull me back by will alone.
Lysenne's scream finally reached me, thin and desperate across the distance. "KAEL!"
Then the great gates of Whitecliff slammed shut.
The sound was final. A coffin lid closing.
The journey to the Frontier took nine days.
Nine days in an open wagon, chained to other dying men. Nine days of rain and sun and the stink of our own filth. The guards gave us moldy bread, foul water. My stump festered. Green pus mixed with blood. The brand on my cheek wept yellow fluid. The lashes on my back crusted to the blanket, tore free with every movement.
On the third day, fever took me.
I burned and froze. Hallucinated. Elyra bent over me, whispering, "You should have been stronger." Lior stood behind her, laughing with Maika's mouth. Maika himself tried to pour wine down my throat, weeping, "I measured it wrong, I measured it wrong—"
I spat blood, and he dissolved into flies.
On the seventh day, we reached the edge of the Empire. The road became a rutted track through burned villages and fields gone to weed. Gibbets lined the way, crow-picked corpses swinging in the wind.
On the ninth day, we smelled the Frontier.
It was a stench that defied description. Shit, rot, burned powder, and beneath it all, the sweet-sick smell of decaying flesh.
The wagon crested a ridge.
And there it was.
The war.
Not a battle. A condition. A disease on the land.
Trenches scarred the earth as far as the eye could see, a labyrinth of mud and despair. Smoke rose in thick pillars. The ground between the lines was pocked with craters, littered with the shattered bones of siege engines and the pale, swollen forms of the unburied dead.
The wagon stopped before a wooden arch. It was made of human bones lashed together with wire. Skulls grinned from the crossbeam. Words were painted across them in reddish-brown:
**ABANDON MERCY, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE**
A sergeant stood beneath the arch—a man with a face like burned meat. He would later tell me his name was Voss.
He counted us. Six pieces of meat.
"Welcome to the end of the world, gentlemen," he said, smiling with what was left of his lips. "The Empire thanks you for your service."
He grabbed my chain and pulled.
I stumbled forward, through the arch of bones, into the trench.
The ground was soft. Not with mud. With something else.
It gave under my bare feet, a spongy, yielding texture. I looked down. The floor of the trench wasn't earth. It was a compacted layer of rotting fabric, leather, and things I didn't want to name. This was the Meat Pit. The worst trench in the line. The Empire's garbage chute for men it wanted to forget.
Voss dragged me to the center of the trench, where a giant of a man in black armor waited. Commander Moloch. A necklace of dried human ears hung around his neck.
He read my sentence aloud to the assembled convicts—eight hundred faces, gaunt and hollow, watching with dead eyes.
When he finished, he smiled. "Welcome, little lord. The Pit has been hungry for fresh nobility."
They beat me that first night. Salted my wounds. Burned the brand again to "freshen" it. Carved words into the clay above where I would sleep:
**NEVER AGAIN**
Then they chained me to a corpse's ribcage driven into the mud.
I lay in the filth, every part of me screaming, and stared at those words as the torches were snuffed one by one.
*Never again.*
A promise. A threat.
A lie.
It would happen again. Everything would happen again. The pain, the betrayal, the humiliation. This was my life now. An endless cycle of suffering in a hole at the edge of the world.
I closed my one good eye.
Somewhere far beneath me, deep in the earth where the dead were piled thickest, something stirred. Something old. Something cold. It had been sleeping. Dreaming of betrayal. Of a love turned to ash. Of an island unmade.
It felt a new pain echo through the earth. A fresh, bright agony that resonated with its own.
It opened a eye that was not an eye.
And it began to wake.