SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The path to the mansion climbed through the mountain in long stone arteries, warmer with every turn, though warmth was a generous word inside Morgain walls. Frost clung where it pleased. The castle had never cared much for comfort, and it had never pretended otherwise.

Caelum walked half a step ahead. Moses kept pace beside him, armor scraping faintly with each stride. He had stopped looking around like a man coming home, and started looking like a captain marking ambush points inside his own house, which, for a Morgain, was close enough to nostalgia.

”Start with Trafalgar,” Moses said.

Caelum did not slow. ”Of every change in this house, you go straight for the largest one.”

”I asked for what I missed, not a tour of dead traditions. And in the last hour his name has crawled into a dozen places it had no business being. So tell me why.”

”His talent was revealed, it is SSS.”

Moses’s steps lost their rhythm. Only for one breath. ”SSS,” he repeated, as if the letters might rearrange into sense. ”I leave for a few years, and the family’s discarded bastard wakes up an SSS talent. Beautiful. Someone should write a study on this house.”

”He was never talentless. It was only dormant. Once it woke, he grew fast. Fast enough to take first in the Academy’s opening year, above Alfons au Vaelion and Zafira du Zar’khael, ahead of everyone who came to watch them win.”

”Of course he did.” Moses clicked his tongue. ”Why settle for surprising when you can be insulting about it as well.”

”There is more. He holds authority over Euclid now.”

Moses frowned at once. ”Euclid. The Gate city. That was Mordrek’s seat.”

”Mordrek is dead.”

Silence fell hard between them. Moses turned his head, slow. ”Dead. How?”

”He died holding Euclid. The Gluttony Dragon came down on the city, and he met it at the wall.”

That one hit harder than the rest. Moses pushed a breath out through his nose and walked on, slower. ”So the city loses its lord, and our ninth little nobody is standing there with the keys in his fist. A Gate seat is not a scrap you toss to a child, Caelum. It is power. Reach. A sentence spoken aloud for the whole family to hear.”

”Maeron was considered. Valttair passed him over.”

”For Trafalgar.” Moses shook his head slowly. ”That is not a reward, it is a warning shot. You do not drop a Gate city in the ninth heir’s lap unless you want every other name in this house lying awake, rethinking where they stand.”

”That is one reading of it.”

”It is the right one. Euclid is not the prize, it is the first step toward a far larger one.” His gaze hardened. ”And the dragon?”

”Valttair killed it. Trafalgar stood with him.”

It was a lie, and Caelum carried it without a flicker. Trafalgar had stood with no one. He had stayed well back in the dark and watched the city burn from a safe distance. Moses had no need of that part.

Moses let the breath leak out of him, eyes thinning. ”So on paper the boy traded blows with a dragon at Valttair’s shoulder. Is that the true version, or the useful one?”

”It is the one that serves.”

”Right.” He let it hang a beat. ”So I am to nod along while the boy stands in a dragon attack, lifts no finger, and walks out with his name on the kill.”

”He survived ground most men would not have walked off.”

”That part I will take. The rest, I have known you too long not to hear the truth getting trimmed.” Moses’s voice dropped, the sarcasm worn thin. ”Mordrek died for the city, though.”

”He did.”

”Good. Then he did not go out a fool or a coward. If a man must die in this house, he could do worse than go down with his teeth in something worth it.” He rolled his shoulders, shaking it off. ”Fine. If Valttair is moving pieces like this, the boy has stopped being a curiosity. He is a problem.”

”Or a solution.”

”In this house?” Moses snorted. ”You say that as if the two are different things.”

They walked on. The corridor narrowed, banners giving way to older work cut into the rock: wolves with blades clamped in their jaws, men driven to their knees, dragons laid open from throat to belly. Subtlety had never once been a Morgain virtue.

The passage forked. Caelum took the upper way, and Moses came with him.

”Sylvar,” Moses said after a beat. ”He carried our blood, he was owed respect, and I meant that at the rites. But Valttair is not here now, so I will say the other half. He was never head material, and we both knew it.”

”No one ever claimed he was.”

”That almost sounded gentle, coming from you.”

”You are not wrong, is all. Maeron, Lysandra, Rivena were always the real names. Maeron has the claim, Lysandra the head, Rivena the teeth. Sylvar had blood and a surname, enough to live well on and nowhere near enough to lead.”

Moses’s jaw tightened. ”And before you reach for it, death does wonders for a man’s reputation. Not with me, it does not.”

”You would know better than most.” Caelum let it pass. ”Rivena, though. Valttair told you to keep eyes on her. What for?”

”I do not know yet.”

”Wonderful. A great comfort, that.”

”It was not offered as one. She has been going where she has no reason to go. Restricted archives. The servant corridors near the records wing. Rooms she never enters unless she wants something out of them.”

Moses’s face hardened. ”And you have no idea what.”

”Not yet. But she is not the only one who noticed.”

”Who else?”

”Lysandra.”

That hit harder than anything before it. Moses slowed his stride. ”Lysandra is watching her as well. So it is worse than you let on.”

”I told you what you needed.”

”You gave me the bones and skipped the blood.” He looked ahead. ”Rivena does not take a single step without a reason, and Valttair wants her watched, not stopped, which means he is letting the thread run to see where it ties off.”

”That is exactly it.”

They crossed into a colder, smoother stretch of hall, the floors polished black, silver threading the walls like frozen lightning.

”I will see the boy myself,” Moses said. ”If he is half what the reports make him, maybe I will understand why you shifted on him.”

”I did not shift. My read of him changed. His results did that, not me.”

”You make a boy outgrowing his own death sentence sound like balancing a ledger.”

”It is not affection. Affection would need a permission I never gave.”

Moses’s mouth twitched. ”Fine. Can he beat me?”

”No.” The answer came fast.

Moses almost smiled. ”Good.”

”Not yet,” Caelum said. ”Give him time.”

The almost-smile died. ”That is the single worst thing you have said all day.”

”Probably. You told me five minutes ago I had not changed.”

”I was being polite.”

”You were not.”

Moses snorted and let it drop. They came out into a gallery above the courtyard, where soldiers moved in tight formations, breath smoking in the cold, the servants pressed to the walls.

”Maeron was always my first pick for the seat,” Moses said. ”Not because he could ever be Valttair, nobody can, but he has the line and the training, and people would fall in behind him.”

”Acceptance is not loyalty.”

”No, but it is a place to start. Rivena came in just behind him for me. Danger is not a flaw in this family, it is a tool, and when it slips, everyone in reach bleeds.” He paused. ”Lysandra would have been the soundest answer of all, by a wide margin. The head, the control, teeth when teeth were needed. A real shame she walked away.”

”She chose to. You talk as if any of this is about to come due.”

”Because it is. People like us do not always die old, Caelum. Look at Thal’zar, their patriarch falls and now a half-grown boy holds the seat. Power does not wait for a convenient moment. Valttair is hard to kill, but if the day comes, we will not get the luxury of thinking it through.”

That was the whole point of the conversation.

They reached another fork. ”I will take the castle,” Moses said. ”Guards, rotations, who has gone soft and who has gotten ambitious while the lord was away. I will start with the men strutting around as though order were already kept.”

”It held together while you were gone.”

”A low bar.”

”It is the only one this house has ever set.” Caelum turned to go.

”Caelum.” The grin Moses wore never reached his eyes. ”Watch your back out there. Be a shame if something happened to you.”

”Here is hoping.”

Caelum gave him nothing more. Moses clicked his tongue and walked off into the dark of the lower hall, and Caelum went the other way, his mind already running ahead, Rivena, Lysandra, Trafalgar, and beneath all of it the Black Basin, waiting like a wound that would not close.

Far from Morgain, House Vaelion stood beneath a different sky. Straight lines. White stone. Marble veined in red. Eight towers ringing a narrow central keep in a perfect circle, every angle of it measured and held under control.

The Eightfold Hold.

A carriage rolled through the gate as the light failed, and the guards stepped aside without a word. The door opened, and Alfons au Vaelion stepped down, Academy uniform under a dark coat, red eyes moving over the courtyard. Nothing about the place had changed in his absence, and that made it worse.

The Academy had signed off on his leave the instant the request arrived. Family affairs. With his father, those two words meant nearly anything except family.

He lifted his gaze to the highest windows.

’Of course it is now.’

Not after the duel. Not after the ranking. Not after Trafalgar climbed over his head in front of the entire year.

A servant bent low. ”Young Master Alfons. Lord Roderic is waiting for you.”

Alfons did not answer at once. His eyes tracked the eight towers, eight unbroken lines of control, no way out that someone had not already planned for him. He drew his gloves straight. ”Take me to him.”

The servant turned, and Alfons followed, certain of one thing before he ever crossed the threshold.

Whatever was waiting in there, it would not be mercy.