SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The gate closed behind him with a low, final boom, and the roar of the storm dropped to a muffled howl. Trafalgar walked into a corridor long enough to lose its far end in shadow, his boots the only sound on stone worn smooth by generations of Morgain feet.

One wall carried the family. Portraits ran the length of it in heavy gilt frames, patriarchs, heirs, wives, staring down out of the oil with the same cold pride the living ones wore, generation after generation of wolves who had held these mountains by refusing to lose them. He had walked this hall a hundred times as a boy, always fast, always with his head down, because the eyes in those frames had felt like witnesses to everything the family had decided he was.

The other wall was almost fully glass.

Tall windows ran from floor to ceiling, and past them the world fell away into nothing. The cliffs beneath the castle dropped for kilometers, their floors lost in a churn of grey mist, and the snow came down hard and sideways, flung by a wind that hit the panes hard enough to make the glass moan in its lead. Farther out, the mountains stood white and enormous, and along their flanks the wyverns and the other things that hunted those heights crawled like ants, so far off they posed no threat, so many that counting them was pointless.

He was most of the way down the hall before one of the portraits stopped him cold.

It was him.

Black armor, painted with a care no one had ever wasted on him before. The artist had caught him in the middle of the war, the sky behind him split open, the ground at his feet crawling with the ground at his feet littered with the Void Creatures he had cut down during the war.

He wondered whether Valttair had ordered it painted, and disliked that he could not think of anyone else who would have dared.

Four years ago, his name had been used as a warning. Now he hung among them in oil and armor.

Standing there, the last two years came back to him without asking permission.

Selara had kept her word, which had surprised him more than anything else. Selara continued her work at the Academy exactly as she always had, her position as one of its four directors untouched, and the homunculus she had taken in as her own had caused no trouble in all that time.

He could picture the girl the way he had last watched her across Selara’s study, small and quiet in a chair built for someone twice her size, and the word girl was the whole problem. She did not age. She did not grow.

She wore the same face as the day he first laid eyes on her, stopped at whatever instant she had been made. And yet something in her had begun to stir. She was learning to feel, in slow and clumsy pieces, reaching after emotions the way an infant reaches after a sound it likes, and the longer it went on, the more she passed for a real little girl.

He was not convinced. He had never been convinced. Whether that came out of judgment or out of the cold thing now coiled at the center of him, he could not say.

His Primordial nature did not weigh the homunculus and find her lacking. It refused her outright, the way a body refuses a splinter, because whatever moved under her borrowed skin was Void, and the Void and the thing he had become did not share a world in peace.

Esmond was a secret of a different sort. Somewhere no one outside a very short list would ever think to look, the man slept and did not wake. Caelum saw to that in person, holding him under so deep and so completely that he had not surfaced once in two years, a living witness folded away in the dark like a knife wrapped in cloth.

Trafalgar had no intention of spending him early. Esmond was proof, and proof only earned its worth the day you set it on the table in front of the right people. That day would come. He could afford to wait for it.

House Vaelion had spent two years and a fortune trying to drag those same secrets into the open, and walked away with next to nothing.

They had thrown gold and men at the hunt for Esmond and turned up cold trails and closed doors. They had done better with the homunculus, following her at last to Selara’s hands inside the Academy, though knowing where she was and being able to reach her were two entirely different problems.

No house in the world, Vaelion included, was reckless enough to move against the Academy in the open, so all that knowledge bought them was a headache. They had dug into Selara herself and found a headmistress who left no threads worth pulling.

They had even set Alfons on him. For a few months the boy had dogged his every step, watching, waiting for a gap, and no gap ever showed. Trafalgar had handed him nothing. Whether he had abandoned the search or merely learned to hide it better, Trafalgar never discovered.

None of it had slowed Roderic down.

The patriarch of House Vaelion remained as active as ever behind that respectable face of his. Rumors had begun to slip beyond Vaelion territory—unrecorded meetings, movements no one could explain.

Trafalgar pulled his attention away from the painting and continued down the corridor. The tall doors at the far end led to the hall where the family had been summoned, where Valttair would emerge after almost three years of seclusion and remind them all why House Morgain still stood above so many others.

Yet Morgain was only one of the Eight Great Families, and none of them had spent the last two years standing in place.