The past, the present.

The first time I saw the king, I was seven.

I remember that because I had spent the entire morning trying to decide whether I was going to starve or freeze first.

The field around me had burned three days earlier. Nothing remained of the wheat except blackened stalks and patches of ash that clung to my boots whenever I moved. Smoke still lingered somewhere beyond the hills, drifting through the air even though the flames were long gone.

I had stopped noticing the smell.

After a while, everything smelled the same.

Smoke.

Wet earth.

Death.

I stood where my house had been and tried to remember what it looked like. I couldn't.

Not completely.

I remembered the doorway. My mother used to stand there every morning with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, calling me inside before the bread and oat went cold. My sister would sit on the steps and braid grass into her hair, insisting that they were flowers. I had spent three days searching through the ruins for something worth keeping.

I found a broken knife, half of a blue ceramic cup and a spoon.

I don't know why I chose the spoon.

It was bent along the handle and blackened on one side, but it was mine. The last fragment of the life I had.

I was sitting among the ruins when I heard them.

Six riders approaching through the smoke. The man at the front wore a dark cloak fastened with the royal crest.

I knew that crest. Everyone did. The king.

He looked younger than I expected.

That was the first thing I remember thinking about him. He looked around the ruins before turning his attention toward me.

"What happened here?" A knight spoke. The king stood tall with perfect posture, one that had been practiced.

"What is your name?" The knight asked.

Still, I said nothing. My name had belonged to my family. My family was dead. I wasn't going to give it to anyone else.

The king finally spoke. He looked toward the ruins, then back at me.

"If you won't give me one, I'll give you one."

I frowned.

He seemed almost amused.

"Emris." I stared at him.

"That isn't my name."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

He smiled, then spoke once more. "Come along, Emris." I should have refused.

I didn't, I followed him. It was either that, or starve in the beginning of a war.

I learned later, that the king had found more than a starving boy in those ruins. He had found a problem.

No one knew what to call what was happening to children like me. Some called it a curse. Others called it a blessing.

The scholars, called it an imbalance. I was too young to understand and I didn't care to. I knew what it felt like.

Something inside me had changed.

Something had been tampered with. Someone had reached into the balance and pulled.

And something had pulled back. Magic began appearing in children, across the world I had heard a researcher say.

We were the consequence. My family never blamed me at first. They were afraid.

I saw it in my mother's eyes when things moved without me touching them. In my father's distance. In the way I was kept away from the animals.

It didn't end with fire.

It ended with light.

A pressure behind my ribs, like something vast trying to fit inside something too small. My breath caught. My skin burned—not heat, but something deeper, like my bones were becoming glass filled with sunlight.

I was something opening. The air around me tightened. The world went silent in a way that hurt.

My mother reached for me. Light tore free from my chest like something had been locked inside and finally broke its cage.

It wasn't fire at first. It was brightness so absolute it erased shape, erased distance, erased thought. The room became white, then gold, then something unbearable.

I remember my sister's face in that instant—eyes wide, reflecting a light that didn't belong in any human world.

She didn't even have time to finish screaming.

The flames followed.

Not rising from wood or hearth or spark. The fire moved like it was alive, but not like any fire I had ever seen. It didn't consume—it erased. It rolled through the house in a single breath, and everything it touched simply stopped existing as it had been.

I remember my mother trying to reach the door.

I remember her silhouette breaking apart at the edges, like she was being written out of reality.

The world became heatless light and silent destruction. And I tried—God, I tried—to pull it back in.

I screamed without sound.

I reached for something inside me and found only rupture, only overflow, only something too vast to hold.

It ended the way storms end. It snapped out of existence like a broken thread.

There was no wood left to smolder. No bodies left to mourn. Only scorched earth where a home had been, and silence so complete it felt like punishment.

The king never asked what happened.

He gave me food, shelter, a place among soldiers. He never used the name I refused to give him. Emris was enough.

At first, I thought he had forgotten. Later, I realized he hadn't.

He simply never forced the truth. That was the first reason I trusted him. The second was simpler: he never looked at me like I was broken.

The scholars wanted to study me. The soldiers feared me. The nobles measured my usefulness.

The king did none of that.

He watched. He waited. Eventually, he taught me control. I believed he understood what happens when frightened children are treated like weapons.

He knew what I could become.

Or perhaps what he had once been. I never asked. Some questions are better left alone. I resent the king, for not disposing of me.

Now, I'm in his debt. Kept as a pawn. Or a little more than that. I'll never be sure. Sometimes a pawn— a means to an end, other times I'm a friend of the king.

I've never made a decision on which is worse. Some days, I'm both. The king has never treated me as though I belong to him, but he has never let me forget that I owe him my life. He gave me a place when I had nowhere to go. He taught me how to control the thing that killed my family. He put a sword in my hand and gave me something else to be besides a frightened child.

Gratitude is a strange thing when it is built from a debt you can never repay. So I stayed, and I followed orders.

I became useful.

And eventually, I became someone the king trusted with things he trusted no one else to know.

Secrets have a way of becoming chains. Heavy and rusted, with the weight of a king— a god amongst men.

The first time I saw Ave, I felt it again. The weight and guilt. It was radiating off her. She looked exhausted.

Angry at nearly everything around her. Familiarity bubbled in my chest, like seeing a stranger for the second time and you can't quite place where the first time was.

I saw myself, in the edges of her face, I saw the field in the light scars along her hands. I watched her carefully, waiting for the feeling to disappear.

It didn't.

The air around her felt wrong. I remembered what I found along the borders of our land, the journal that sat on the desk with a name in it. I decided to try it and look for a reaction.

It was my duty to find the woman from the journal, and it would be astronomical luck if this girl happened to be her.

My hunch was right. I took her to the outpost, where I'd lived when I was a rebellious young man. Angry at my savior, my king.

I wanted to be certain.

I watched her, after compelling her to sleep.

The way she reacted to certain things. The way she noticed changes in the air before anyone else did. The strange moments when the world seemed to hold its breath around her. I saw it, beneath the surface, in an ocean of light.

When we'd arrived to our destination, I knew there was a particular kind of cruelty in discovering that hatred was handed to you before you were old enough to question it.

I watched her walk through those white stone halls and wondered how long I'd watch the lies unfold.

For a moment, I am seven again.

Standing in the ashes.

A king looking down at me.

A name being given to a boy who had refused to give his own.

I wonder if he knew then what I would become.

I wonder if he had already known what was happening to children like me.

The truth overwhelmed her, like it would anyone. Now in a hallway I've known for most of my life, I sit across an auburn stranger.

The air tastes like stone and old grief.

I should leave.

That would be the sensible thing. The obedient thing. The thing Emris, the king's pet would do. The hall is lit deliberately. Not dark—never dark in a place like this—but muted, as though even the light is careful not to disturb what has just happened here.

Her shoulders are rigid, locked in a way I recognize too well. The kind of stillness that comes after something inside you has shattered but your body has not yet been told it is allowed to fall apart.

She talks senselessly about buildings and mother figures, and orphanages. After she's done, silence and heartbreak settle back in her fraying eyes. I'm compelled to comfort.

"I was a mistake once," I say. Her expression softens—just a fraction. "That can't be true." She says, I almost laugh, it comes out as more of a breath than anything.

it is different now, between us, less like a wall.

More like a bridge that has not yet decided whether it will hold. "I don't trust him," she says finally.

The king.

I nod. "I wouldn't ask you to." I think of the ashes.

The spoon I kept because I had nothing else. The boy I was. The man I became.

The king who did not let me die. The king who may have known more than he ever admitted. This time, it feels heavier.

"I won't let them use you," I say instead.

Her eyes narrow slightly.

"That's a dangerous promise to make."

"I know." After the declaration, I stand. And beckon her. She stands silently.

I take her to a room, for rest and a shower. Then I walk to my own respite. I cannot rest, but sleep comes anyway. Like it always does.