Saezu’s earliest memories were not of lullabies or lull, but of silence—the heavy, watchful kind. The kind that sat behind closed doors and crouched between shadows. In Thornbend, silence was survival.

  He learned early that words were weapons and that sometimes, the sharpest blade was a quiet tongue.

  The cottage he grew up in creaked with age, its walls thin as bark, but his mother’s rules were thick with purpose. Wake before sunrise. Eat only after training. Speak only when there was something worth saying. Every morning began with motion: sparring in the field behind the house, laps around the broken stone path, strength drills using buckets filled with river stones. Mirelle didn’t go easy. "One day," she’d whisper as he gasped for breath, "you’ll need to outrun death itself."

  He believed her.

  By age nine, Saezu could read and write better than any child in Thornbend—thanks to his mother’s secret stash of royal books. By age ten, he was studying maps of the kingdom, memorizing its rivers, valleys, and watchtower placements. At night, he would trace the spines of these books and whisper the names of cities he might one day see: Goldhearth. Eastwarden. High Vex. Names that felt like challenges.

  He often asked Mirelle about the capital, about the castle.

  "A place where the walls are made of pride and the floor of betrayal," she said once.

  He stopped asking.

  But he still dreamed.

  In the village, Saezu kept to himself. Most boys his age were brawling in the fields or chasing sheep through the woods. Saezu was either practicing or reading. He trained with sticks, stones, and sometimes the old sword buried beneath the cottage floor. It wasn’t fancy—a chipped blade from Mirelle’s past—but it was his.

  His mother warned him never to draw it in public. "You’ll reveal more than steel," she said. "You’ll reveal your name."

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  So he kept it hidden, only bringing it out at dawn, when the world was too tired to watch.

  Saezu’s mind was sharp, but it was his instincts that kept him alive. He could smell lies in a man's tone. He could hear tension in a whisper. And he never trusted a smile that came without reason.

  He learned to move through the woods without snapping a twig, to track animals by broken stems and bent grass. When bandits tried to raid Thornbend one autumn, it was Saezu who noticed their approach before anyone else. He warned the village elder, and the town rallied just in time.

  No one thanked him.

  But they began to respect him. Or fear him. Either way, he preferred it.

  He had one friend—if the word could apply.

  Lorn, the tanner’s son, was an orphan with a bad leg and a worse temper. Most kids avoided him. Saezu didn’t.

  They trained together sometimes. Fought more often. But they always came back to the same clearing behind the blacksmith’s hut, bruised and laughing.

  "You’re gonna be someone," Lorn said once, wiping blood from his lip. "You fight like you’ve got something to prove."

  Saezu didn’t respond. He only tightened the cloth around his hand and stared at the horizon.

  He did have something to prove. He just didn’t know what—yet.

  As the years passed, whispers returned.

  A trader passed through Thornbend with stories of royal unrest. The king had grown distant. The princes were jockeying for favor. And somewhere, someone had seen a woman with green eyes and golden hair buying steel near the border.

  Mirelle heard the rumors. That night, she doubled their training. She taught Saezu how to disarm with a flick, how to spot pressure points, how to kill cleanly and silently.

  "No more games," she said. "If they find us, we don’t run. We finish it."

  He didn’t ask who they were. He already knew.

  On his fifteenth birthday, Mirelle woke him before the sun and took him to the river.

  "Today, we stop hiding," she said.

  She gave him a new cloak—dark grey wool, lined with reinforced leather. And a new sword. A better one. Forged in secret, balanced perfectly for his hands.

  She didn’t say who paid for it. He didn’t ask.

  "What’s the name of this blade?" he asked, admiring the edge.

  "It doesn’t need a name," she replied. "It only needs a purpose."

  That afternoon, he stood on the edge of Thornbend, cloak around his shoulders, sword at his side. The villagers watched him with a mix of fear and awe.

  He wasn’t just the quiet boy from the woods anymore. He was something else.

  A shadow of a prince. A whisper of war.

  And in the sky above, a raven circled.

  They were coming.

  And he was ready.