SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar held his tongue and waited for Maeron to speak.

This was the ideal chance to lay one’s accomplishments on the table and climb a little higher in Valttair’s estimation while the whole family watched. Every heir in the room knew it, and every heir would use it.

’Though I could not care less about that,’ Trafalgar thought. ’The man already holds me in high enough regard. I have no need to recite two years of my life to earn a nod from him. That said, hearing what the rest of them dredge up should be entertaining enough.’

Maeron went first, as ordered. He spoke of the power he had gained, the people he had brought under his banner, a private life running smoothly, the alliances his branch had tied off across the two years. He laid it all out with the polish of a man who had rehearsed it in the mirror, hitting each point in turn, every figure chosen to sound larger than it was. None of it was worth the breath it cost. Trafalgar let most of it wash straight past him, and what he did keep only hardened the impression that the first heir had spent two years tending what he already held rather than reaching for anything new.

What did catch his attention was Valttair’s face. The patriarch heard his eldest out and handed him almost nothing back, a flat, clipped acknowledgment carrying the unmistakable flavor of disappointment, as though he had gone in expecting a great deal from two years and come away with far less. For the man meant to inherit the whole of House Morgain one day, it was not a promising note to open on. Maeron caught it as plainly as anyone, though he kept his expression flat and stepped back into place without a word.

Trafalgar swallowed a laugh. He had no wish to watch the whole table turn on him again, tearing in like carrion birds squabbling over what a predator had left behind.

Valttair looked to Lysandra, seated at Trafalgar’s side now. ”Your turn.”

”Honestly, Father, I carried out the missions you handed me,” Lysandra said. ”Beyond that, I kept an eye on our dear sister Rivena. Little else worth reporting.”

”I know.” Valttair’s voice gave nothing away. ”That is something I will take up with her myself. Do not trouble yourself over it. Well done.”

That was more warmth than Maeron had pulled out of him, and no one at the table missed it.

Helgar came next, and unlike his brother, Helgar had a great deal to say. Trafalgar went quiet and weighed every word of it, because the list was not a short one. The man had thrown himself at real work these two years, commanding on the borders, drilling soldiers, running down the beasts that came out of the mountains, and he had the gains to show for it. Power, allies, standing among the family’s fighting men, all of it stacked up at a rate that put Maeron to shame, easily three times what the first heir had managed over the same stretch of time.

’Set that beside what he did in the war against the Thal’Zar and the Void Creatures,’ Trafalgar thought, ’and Helgar is turning into someone with real weight behind his name. Not a mind to worry about, but a blade, and a heavy one.’

Valttair heard him out, and there was something nearer to approval in the set of his face than anything he had shown Maeron. When Helgar finished, the patriarch stepped straight over the one whose turn came next. He wanted nothing from Rivena today, seated at the foot of the table or not.

”I will hear from you later, Rivena,” was all he gave her.

Rivena inclined her head and let it go.

Nym had little to offer when her moment came. She had done next to nothing since the thing that had hollowed her out, and she said as much in a voice that barely cleared the table’s edge, her attention pinned to the wood in front of her the whole time. Valttair did not appear to hold it against her.

There was no blame in his face, only a quiet, heavy disappointment, and Trafalgar understood the gap between the two. Whatever the family told the world about how Sylvar had died, the truth of it was that Nym had been the one to put an end to her own brother.

A father could hardly fault the girl for building little in the two years that followed something like that. Trafalgar felt no pity for her, only a cold flicker of recognition. This house broke the ones who could not carry what it laid on them, and it had broken Nym as thoroughly as anything he had seen.

The two youngest after Trafalgar, Darion and Elira, gave their own accounting when it came round to them, modest work, the output of a branch with far more caution than reach. Neither had done anything to shift where they stood, and neither had tried to.

At last it was Trafalgar’s turn.

He kept it short. ”I finished the Academy, as you instructed. At the top of it.”

Nothing more. What was there to say to a man like Valttair that the man did not already know? Trafalgar saw no reason to unfold two years of his life for a table that would only pick the pieces apart and hunt for a seam to work a knife into. He had half expected the patriarch to bristle at being handed so little, to read the brevity as arrogance or contempt and make him pay for it in front of everyone. What he got was the opposite of the thing he had braced for.

”Well done.” Valttair let his attention slide off his youngest son and out across the whole family. ”Now, with all of this out of the way, let us finally speak of what has been happening beyond these walls.”