The first scream tore through the pre-dawn stillness like a crack in the world's foundation.
Kaelen was already awake, had been for hours, seated at the stark table in his chambers, a map of the Fen borderlands spread before him. He'd been tracing the lines of rivers that became swamps, feeling the wrongness of it in his bones. The scream—a raw, feminine wail of terror—jolted through the stone floor and up the legs of his chair. It came from the King's Wing.
Tyrion.
He was moving before the echo died, barreling through his door into the cold corridor. Guards were stumbling from their posts, confusion on their sleep-soft faces. The earth-sense he kept as a constant, low hum in his blood flared into a piercing alarm. The deep, steady song of the mountain beneath the castle, which yesterday had held that faint, sickly discordance, was now shrieking with a single, silent note of absence. A void where a mighty fire had burned.
He didn't run to his brother's chambers. He knew. Instead, he veered towards the source of the scream—the servant's stairwell. A young scullery maid was crumpled on the steps, a basket of laundry spilled, her face as white as the sheets. She pointed a trembling finger upwards, towards the royal apartments.
"T-the k-king… he's… cold…"
By the time Kaelen reached the ornate doors, they were crowded. The Royal Physician, Lord Varius, emerged, his face ashen. He didn't speak. He just met Kaelen's eyes and gave a slow, hopeless shake of his head.
The world narrowed to a tunnel. Kaelen pushed past, into the room.
The smell hit him first. Not just death, but a cloying, sweet-rot scent, like spoiled fruit and wet leaves, utterly foreign to these dry, stone halls. Tyrion lay in his great bed, looking both peaceful and terribly shrunken. His skin was a waxy grey, his famous fiery hair dull against the pillows. On his lips, a faint blue tinge, like frost on a dying ember.
Poison. The word was a stone in Kaelen's gut.
His eyes swept the room, the strategist overriding the brother. Nothing was out of place. No sign of struggle. A carafe and two goblets sat on a table by the fire. One goblet was empty. The other was half-full.
And on the floor beside the bed, glinting in the grey dawn light, was a single, heavy signet ring. Not Tyrion's. His own.
Kaelen's blood turned to mud. He never took that ring off. Except… Yesterday. In the gardens. He'd been repotting a stubborn frost-rose, plunging his hands into the dense soil. He'd removed his rings to keep them clean, placing them on a bench. He'd been distracted by a messenger, and when he returned…
He'd assumed he'd misplaced it. He'd been searching his chambers for it last night.
Now it lay here, a damning, silent accusation at his brother's deathbed.
"Prince Kaelen."
He turned. Captain Anya, commander of the Dawn Guard, stood in the doorway. Her armor was on, her expression grimly professional, but her eyes held a flicker of pain. Behind her, two guards stood with hands on their sword hilts. Not a threat. A posture.
"Where is the Queen?" Kaelen's voice was rougher than he intended.
"Her chambers are empty, my lord. Her personal effects are gone. The postern gate by the east garden is unbarred." Anya's report was crisp. "A stable boy reports two horses were taken just before moonfall. Ridden hard towards the Fen."
The pieces, jagged and cruel, slammed together in his mind. The poison. The ring. Her flight. The two princes, conveniently away in the Fen. It was a frame so obvious it was audacious. And it was working. He saw it in the averted gazes of the servants clustering in the hall, in the calculating stillness of Lord Varius.
"She did this," Kaelen said, the words final as a tombstone.
"The evidence…" Captain Anya began, her eyes flicking to the ring.
"Is planted," Kaelen snarled, a low rumble that made the dust shiver on the stone sill. "She was in my garden yesterday. She must have taken it." He knelt, but did not touch the ring. He placed his palm flat on the floor. He pushed his earth-sense out, not deep into the mountain, but shallow, across the room's surface, seeking the ghost of footsteps, the pressure of recent presence.
The stone whispered back to him. Tyrion's heavy tread, now cold. The light, scurrying steps of the maid. And another pattern—a familiar, graceful stride that had moved from the door to the bedside, paused, and then… a faint, damp smudge, like a leaf-print, where something small and metallic had been dropped. No struggle. Just placement.
"She stood here," Kaelen murmured, more to himself than anyone. "She dropped it."
"My lord," Lord Varius spoke up, his voice hesitant. "The… the substance in the goblets. I have seen its like before. In my studies of Fenland botany. It is a toxin derived from the Pale Creeper. A Fen poison."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Fen poison. The Queen's homeland. The Queen, fled.
The logic was a prison closing around him.
"She flees to cast blame," Kaelen said, rising, his frame seeming to fill the room. "She will go to her kinsmen and name me the murderer. She will use my nephews as her pawns. She will bring a war of 'vengeance' to our gates."
He looked from Anya's hardened face to Varius's uncertain one, to the sea of frightened, suspicious eyes in the hallway. The kingdom was a pot about to boil over. With no king, no queen, and the heirs held by the enemy, the center was gone. Chaos and civil war beckoned.
The burden settled onto his shoulders, tangible and immense, like a mantle of granite.
He walked to the table, ignoring the poisonous goblets. He picked up the carafe. It was solid crystal, cold. A gift from Tyrion. With a sudden, sharp motion, he hurled it into the fireplace. It exploded in a shower of glittering shards and stale wine that hissed on the coals.
The room jumped at the violence of the sound.
"Listen to me," Kaelen said, his voice no longer a rumble but the clear, commanding crack of splitting rock. "My brother is dead. Poisoned by his wife. She has stolen our future and now moves to conquer our past with lies. The kingdom is headless. The enemy is already riding."
He turned to Captain Anya. "Secure the castle. No one in or out without my direct order. Assemble the High Council in the Stone Hall in one hour."
He looked at the physician. "Lord Varius. Prepare a full report on the poison. Its effects, its origin. Your testimony may be the only truth we can send ahead of her lies."
Finally, he looked at the crowd, meeting the fear head-on. "I am not your king. I am your Prince. Your Warden. And until my nephews, your rightful rulers, are returned to this hall safely, I will be your shield. And your sword."
He bent down, finally, and picked up his signet ring from the floor. He didn't put it on. He closed his fist around it, the metal biting into his palm. A reminder of the vulnerability she had exploited.
"We are a mountain," he said, the words echoing in the death-stilled room. "And today, the floods come. See to your posts."
As they scattered, the first chaotic notes of alarm bells began to ring out from the watchtowers, spreading the news of the king's death across the stone city below. Kaelen walked to the window. To the east, where the land began to dip and soften into the treacherous green of the Fen, the dawn sky was the color of a bruise.
The Strategist's Burden had begun. Not with a coronation, but with a crime scene. Not with a crown, but with a ring of guilt. His first command was not an attack, but a defense. His first duty was not to reign, but to hold.
And deep in the stone beneath his feet, he felt the first, distant tremor of approaching war.