SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

From the deck of Alfred’s vessel, the ancestral seat of House Morgain looked less like a home and more like a threat. Black stone climbed out of the white mountains in hard tiers, buried to the shoulders in snow that did nothing to soften its edges, every wall angled to break an army before it reached the gates.

High on the main tower a banner cracked in the gale. Even in this weather, figures moved along the battlements, because the beasts that prowled these peaks kept no schedule, and a wall left unwatched was a wall waiting to be tested. Impenetrable was the word the old builders had chased. Looking at it now, Trafalgar could admit they had caught it.

”Looks like we have finally made it home,” Lysandra said, coming up beside him at the rail.

He studied the fortress a breath longer. ”I would not call that place home, if I am being honest with you. I have yet to find one thing inside it that earns the word.”

Lysandra laughed under her breath. ”You might have a point. We still grew up here, though.”

He let it go. Being raised somewhere and being wanted there were two different things, and this castle had only ever managed the first.

Alfred came out from the pilot’s station, one hand braced against the wind. ”We have arrived. Mind your footing when you step off. The wind is coming in hard across the platform.”

”Relax, Alfred. Neither of us is going to be swept off the edge. Though if your knees give out along the way, I can hold your hand the whole trip.”

”Tch. See if I bother being considerate with you again.” The old captain turned back toward his controls, grumbling into his collar.

The vessel began to drop, and Trafalgar leaned out over the rail to take in what waited below.

Two figures stood against the snow on the landing platform. The first he knew at once: Caelum. The second he had never seen in his life.

Except that was not true. He had never seen the man, but the one who wore this body before him had. It came the way those borrowed memories always did, a feeling with no picture attached, only the cold print the man had pressed into someone else’s nerves.

The memories did not hand him a name so much as a verdict, and the verdict was the old Trafalgar’s own fear. Dangerous. Very strong. Strong enough that the boy who once lived in this skin had never dared measure himself against him.

”Moses,” Trafalgar murmured.

Lysandra followed his attention down to the platform. ”You did not know he was here?” A flicker of surprise crossed her face. ”Though I suppose it fits. He came back about two years ago, once he finished the mission Father sent him on.”

”No, I heard he had returned.” Trafalgar stayed fixed on the figure below. ”I simply did not expect to find him out here waiting to greet us. It has been years since I saw him last.”

The vessel touched down, and the boarding bridge slid out on its own toward the stone, locking into place with a heavy clunk. Beside him, Alfred lowered his voice for a parting word.

”I will be right here waiting to carry you back.”

Trafalgar gave a short nod. Two years had been long enough to forget how this place pressed on him, and one breath of the thin mountain air brought all of it back.

Lysandra went down the bridge first. He followed her down.

They came off the bridge onto one of the great landing platforms at the foot of the castle. The cold found them the instant they left the shelter of the hull, thin and biting at this height, and the wind stung every strip of bare skin it could reach.

The platform ran wide enough to berth three vessels the size of Alfred’s, and every stone of it had been cut for a family that had never once had to ask for anything twice.

Caelum reached them first. He was dusted white from the storm, yet his hair stayed combed flat and back, as though the wind had agreed, in advance, to leave it alone.

”Welcome back to the castle, Young Master.” He inclined his head, and offered the same courtesy to Lysandra. ”And you as well, Lady Lysandra.”

”You do not need to be this formal with me, Caelum,” Lysandra said.

He dipped his head again, which was as close to agreement as Caelum ever came.

Most of the castle would have taken that greeting for ordinary servant’s courtesy and forgotten it by the next breath. They would have been wrong about the servant.

Caelum was Valttair’s right hand and his shadow at once, and in his own quiet fashion, Trafalgar’s as well. He had spent most of his life unseen on purpose, a blade carried up a sleeve rather than worn on the hip.

Beyond the highest seats of House Morgain, almost no one knew his face, and he had always preferred it that way. Ask anyone in the territory who stood at the patriarch’s right hand and they would give you another name without a heartbeat of doubt. They would point across the platform, to the man waiting apart from all of them. To Moses.

Trafalgar kept his own voice low. ”Anything I should know before I walk in and face the family, Caelum?”

”A few small things, Young Master.” Caelum matched the quiet without being asked. ”You may already be aware, but Lady Rivena has not yet arrived at the castle.”

”Lysandra told me on the way in.”

”Beyond that, there is little else. Watch the others as closely as you always have, and you will manage.”

Trafalgar gave the smallest nod. The whole exchange had stayed beneath the wind, pitched so low that Moses, from where he stood, had caught none of it.

A breath later, a voice carried across the platform, close and clear.

”Welcome back, Young Master Trafalgar.”

Moses had closed the distance without a sound, and every warning the old Trafalgar had buried in this body woke at once. Of everyone who might have come out into the cold to meet him, the man now standing in front of him was the one his predecessor had feared above all others.

And Moses had come to greet him in person.