The first thing Edmund Pendragon did after the dishes were passed around was look at Lucas.
He always looked at Lucas first.
"Third year now," his father said, leaning back in his chair with the kind of pride that didn't need to announce itself because it had never once been questioned. "How are things at Ironveil?"
Lucas smiled the way he always smiled, easy and unhurried, like the question was a formality they both already knew the answer to. "Good," he said, reaching for the bread. "Professor Aldric moved me up to the advanced combat track last week. Said my resonance with Kael was the cleanest he'd seen from a third year in six years."
His mother made a sound that was not quite a word but carried the full weight of one. She reached across and touched Lucas's arm briefly, the way she touched things she was proud of.
"Six years," Edmund repeated, nodding slowly. "That's not nothing."
"It's not," Lucas agreed, without a trace of embarrassment.
Cent watched his brother pull apart the bread with both hands and thought about how a person could be completely aware of how insufferable they were and simply not care.
The conversation moved the way it always moved. Lucas talked, their parents listened, and the table felt complete in a way it only ever felt when Lucas was the subject. His beast, Kael, a steel tier azure tiger that half of Ironveil's third year had apparently given up trying to match in the training yards. His ranking within the year. The instructor who had apparently told him, unprompted, that he had the makings of a ranked tamer before he was twenty five.
Cent ate.
Eventually his mother turned to him. She did it the way people turned toward something they had been putting off, with a smile that was working slightly harder than it needed to.
"Cent," she said. "The entrance examination is tomorrow."
"I know."
"Are you prepared?"
'No,' he thought. 'I've been prepared for three years. I've been prepared since before you started paying people to tell you I shouldn't bother.'
"Yes," he said.
His father set his fork down. Not dramatically, just the particular way Edmund Pendragon set things down when he was about to say something he had already decided on. "We only want what's best for you," he said. "You know that."
Cent knew that was the opening line of a conversation he had heard four times in the last two months.
"The examination is competitive," his mother said. "Even students with strong temples struggle. The physical demands alone—"
"Eleanor," his father said, and she stopped, and he took over with the patience of a man who had rehearsed. "What your mother is trying to say is that there are other paths. Honorable paths. A forger of your aptitude could build a very comfortable life. The crystal trade needs skilled hands. There are academies for—"
"Forgers," Cent said.
A silence.
His father nodded carefully. "There's no shame in it."
'No shame in it.' Cent turned the phrase over in his head and looked at his plate. He thought about the forgers he had grown up watching. Men and women who worked crystal into weapons and armor and tools, who supplied the tamers, who built the infrastructure that made everything else possible. Skilled people. Necessary people.
Nobody remembered their names.
Nobody wrote histories about the man who forged the sword. They wrote histories about the man who carried it into the rift and came back alone covered in blood with a crystal the size of a fist.
That was the world now. It had been the world since the beasts arrived and reshuffled everything. Power was the only currency that actually mattered. Not gold continent crystals, not Bronze continent old money, not the Pendragon name or the three generations of ranked tamers that came attached to it. Personal power. The kind that lived inside a person's temple and either was or wasn't.
The temple.
Every human being was born with one. Not a physical thing, not something a physician could point to on a diagram, but something perceived in deep meditation, a space inside the self that presented itself as a structure, a stack of glowing rings suspended in darkness. The number of rings, their width, the intensity of their pulse, these things determined everything. How much spirit energy a person could generate. How strong a beast they could bond with. How far they could go.
Temple grades ran from first to seventh. Each grade had three levels, Early, Mid and Peak, before the rings restructured themselves into the next grade entirely. The difference between a first grade temple and a seventh was not a matter of degree. It was a matter of kind. A seventh grade tamer standing in a room changed the air pressure. People felt it in their chests before they saw it with their eyes.
The Pendragons had produced four ranked tamers in three generations. Edmund himself sat at third grade Peak, which was respectable, more than respectable for a man who had spent twenty years clearing rifts on the Bronze Continent before retiring into administration. His grandfather had reached fourth grade, a fact the family mentioned the way other families mentioned old money. Lucas, at nineteen, was already third grade Early and climbing.
And then there was Cent.
Six months ago, on his seventeenth birthday, his parents had sat him down in the study with a man he had never met before, a private examiner with a testing instrument and a fee that would have covered three months of household expenses. Cent had sat across from the man and put his hands on the instrument and breathed the way he had practiced and waited.
The instrument had produced a reading.
First grade. Early.
The examiner had checked it twice without being asked, which told Cent everything about what the number meant to the room. His mother had kept her face very still. His father had thanked the man and walked him out and come back and sat down and said, with the measured tone of someone being careful, that it was early days yet and that some tamers developed late.
Some tamers developed late.
Cent had nodded and gone to his room and sat on the edge of his bed and understood, with a clarity that had no softness in it, that he had just become an afterthought at a table where he had never been the main course to begin with.
A single dim ring. Narrow, faint, pulsing at the frequency of something that had not yet decided whether it wanted to exist. That was what lived inside him. That was the sum total of what the instrument had found after seventeen years.
It was not illegal to test privately. It had never been illegal, not as long as you had the means. The Pendragons had the means. They had used those means three times since Cent turned sixteen, each time with a different examiner, each time arriving at the same answer with the same quiet devastation dressed up as concern.
First grade Early.
The lowest documented starting point in the entire temple grade system. Not unheard of. Just functionally, statistically, historically, a dead end.
"Cent." His father's voice pulled him back to the table. "We are asking you to consider, seriously consider, whether Ironveil is the right choice for you."
Cent looked at his plate.
He thought about the forgers again. He thought about the crystal traders and the administrative clerks and the support staff that kept the tamer guilds running. Good lives. Quiet lives. Lives where nobody looked twice at your temple grade because your temple grade was not the point.
Lives where nobody looked twice at you at all.
"There's no shame in choosing a different path," his mother said softly.
"Your mother's right," Lucas said.
Cent looked at his brother.
Lucas had the expression he always had when he was being helpful, open, steady, the portrait of an older sibling with the younger one's best interests arranged carefully across his face. "Listen to mom and dad," he said. "They know best. And trust your elder brother on this one." He paused, letting the weight of the pause do its work. "Ironveil isn't all that. People romanticize it. The reality is brutal and the washout rate in the first year alone—"
'Stop talking,' Cent thought. 'Just stop talking.'
Because Lucas was in his third year at Ironveil. Lucas, who Kael the steel tier azure tiger had made famous in the training yards before the second year was half finished. Lucas, whose name the instructors apparently said in the advanced track with the particular tone reserved for students they expected to remember. Lucas, who had walked into that academy two years ago and made it his in the way he made every room his, effortlessly, without appearing to try.
Ironveil wasn't all that.
The lie was so comfortable in his brother's mouth that Cent almost admired it.
He looked back at his plate. He picked up his fork.
"Please," his mother said. "Just consider it. That's all we're asking."
The table waited.
Cent chewed. Swallowed. Set his fork down with the same measured patience his father had taught him without meaning to.
"No," he said.
The word landed in the silence and stayed there. Nobody picked it up.
They finished the meal without returning to it. His mother talked about a neighbor's daughter who had just been accepted to a forging apprenticeship on the Gold Continent. His father refilled his glass. Lucas ate and said nothing further, which was somehow worse than when he spoke.
When the plates were cleared his mother told them both to get some sleep. Cent had an early start. Lucas had morning drills.
Cent pushed his chair back and carried his plate to the kitchen and walked down the corridor toward his room.
He heard Lucas behind him before he reached the door.
"Cent."
He stopped. Did not turn around.
Lucas's footsteps slowed and stopped just behind him. When he spoke his voice was low, the kind of low that was not gentle but wanted to sound like it was. "I tried to put it nicely in there," he said. "I want you to know that. I genuinely tried."
Cent said nothing.
"My reputation is not a small thing," Lucas continued. "I have spent two years building something at that academy. Two years. And you walking in there with a first grade temple, my brother, the Pendragon who couldn't make it past the instrument check." He let that sit for a moment. "That follows me. You understand that, right? That follows me everywhere."
The corridor was quiet. Somewhere down the hall a window had been left open and the cold night air was finding its way in.
"I discussed it with mom and dad," Lucas said. "We all agreed. If you insist on going through with this, it would be better for everyone if you used a different name for the registration. Not Pendragon." A pause. "Just while you're there. Just until things become clearer."
Cent put his hand on the door handle.
"It's not personal," Lucas said.
Cent opened the door and walked into his room and closed it behind him.
He stood in the dark for a moment without moving. Then he crossed to the window and looked out at the street below, quiet and amber lit, the houses on the other side exactly where they always were.
This world, the one the beasts and the war had built together out of the wreckage of the old one, had one operating principle underneath all the crystal markets and the continent names and the watchtowers and the tamer guilds. One principle that everything else was arranged around.
Power was the point. It was the only point. The weak were tolerated. The poor were invisible. And the ones who sat at the bottom of the temple grade system were neither pitied nor hated. They were simply not considered. They occupied space that more useful people could have filled and the world moved around them with the indifference of water around a stone.
He had understood this on his birthday, sitting across from the examiner with his hands on that instrument, watching the man check the reading twice. He had understood it in the study afterward, watching his mother keep her face very still. He had understood it every time his father said the words some tamers develop late with the tone of a man who did not believe what he was saying but needed to say it anyway.
First grade Early. One dim ring. The basement of the entire system, sitting inside him like a bad joke.
It did not matter.
He was going to Ironveil tomorrow. He was going to sit the entrance examination and he was going to pass it and he was going to become a tamer. Not because the odds suggested it. Not because his temple made it reasonable. Not because anyone at this address believed it was possible.
Because it was the only thing in his life that was entirely his own decision.
And because somewhere across the corridor, behind a door that was probably already closed, his brother was sleeping with the easy conscience of a person who had never once had to fight for anything, and Cent intended, with every dim pulse of that single narrow ring inside him, to make that comfort temporary.
He did not need the Pendragon name to do it.
He did not need the name at all.
_____
Author's Note: Thank you for reading. It genuinely means a lot.
The start will feel slow, I won't lie to you. But this story picks up faster than you think and where it goes is worth the patience. Stick with Cent.
If you're enjoying it so far, please drop a power stone, leave a comment and add the book to your library. Every bit of support helps more than you know and lets me know you want more.
See you in the next chapter.